26 October 2014

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Albums and Singles

I was completely floored by last year's blackened drone/doom metal epic You've Always Meant So Much To Me, so I was very eager to hear how J.R. Robinson could possibly follow such an out-of-nowhere tour de force. As it turns out, he chose to follow it by essentially doing much the same thing…again. I was initially a bit disappointed by that, as Then It All Came Down is not as immediately striking as its predecessor, nor did it ambush me with any real unexpected twists. Once I listened to it enough for everything to fully sink in, however, it gradually dawned on me that this latest effort is just as spectacular in its own right: Robinson may have revisited his previous formula, but he also found several new and crushingly heavy ways to improve upon it.

Thrill Jockey

As he did with his previous opus, Robinson again assembled a murderer's row of Chicago's finest noise and metal luminaries to ensure that Then It All Came would be as mesmerizing and scarily heavy as possible.Much like David Tibet, J.R. seems to have a distinct knack for drawing an eclectic array of personalities and talents into his orbit.There are a couple of ambitious changes and unexpected guests this time around though, as well as a compelling overarching concept: the piece is based upon a Truman Capote essay about underground musician/Manson-associate/convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil, mirroring his gradual descent from a talented, hedonistic youth into beaches, girls, and motorcycles into much darker and more occult waters.The pre-fall part of Beausoleil's story is conveyed through lushly beautiful drones mingled with chimes, Siren-esque chanting from a trio of female vocalists, and wonderfully roiling acoustic guitar from Ryley Walker. All of that is rich with intended meaning and relation to moments from Bobby's life, of course, but the more important thing is that it sounds amazing– particularly when Walker's intricate, cascading guitar work churns with increasing aggression beneath the drone haze as the piece builds in intensity.

Around the 10-minute mark, however, the piece wobbles a bit, as Leviathan's Wrest turns up for an croaking Black Metal-style invocation that seems a bit too cartoonish and heavy-handed for me as a non-Black Metal fan. However, Robinson quickly rights the ship with the appearance of a melancholy string quartet riding an ominous, throbbing drone. While the actual music is quite beautiful, the real magic is how the piece seems to organically flow like a bleary, ritualistic dreamscape. Nothing ever feels completely real, as there is always something billowing, pulsing, or swelling around the periphery to disorient me. Eventually, the piece predictably erupts into a doom metal crescendo, which is (again) not my favorite thing in the world, but it is executed brilliantly once it fully coheres. In fact, it eventually rivals Walker's playing as one of my favorite parts of the album, as the drums lock into a stumbling slow-motion groove and all hell breaks loose, as the sludgy down-tuned chords are enhanced with all kinds of processed howls and smoldering electronic wreckage.

There is some falling action after the apocalyptic metal crescendo, but the meat of the album is essentially the gradual transition from sublime drone heaven to charred metal ruin.The album's flaws exist only in a completely subjective sense, as extreme metal croaking and howling vocals are just not for me anymore.Even so, however, I suspect that those moments were absolutely devastating and spine-chilling in the piece's original context, as it debuted with a moonlight performance in Chicago's Bohemia National Cemetery last year (presumably the perfect place for blood-curdling, inhuman howls to make a startling impact).Ultimately, I think I still prefer You've Always Meant So Much to Me, but Then It All Came Down inarguably boasts similarly brilliant vision and execution.Although some parts did not resonate as strongly with me this time around, Robinson went much bigger, much deeper, and much darker, compensating for the rare weak moments with some alternately rapturous and brutal high points.

Samples:

• Excerpt One
• Excerpt Two
• Excerpt Three

 

19 October 2014

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Albums and Singles

Chilean by way of Brooklyn artist Joao Da Silva has been quietly building an impressive discography of droning guitar electronics that can vacillate significantly between dark terrors and bright, shimmering expanses of sound. These two new limited tapes (one a split release with La Mancha Del Pecado) provide an exceptional overview of his widely varying, yet consistently excellent music.

Fabrica

The split release has Da Silva making an intentional tribute to the earliest forms of industrial music.Packaged in a cardboard box with artwork inspired by Throbbing Gristle's 7" singles, both he and La Mancha Del Pecado (Miguel Perez) look back to when industrial meant a chaotic, beatless expanse of terrifying sound.

Luciernaga's stays in a darker place on "Cuartel Terranova" for its duration, mixing deep subterranean rumble with a shuddering vibrato.It retains that dark, rumbling ambience that early Throbbing Gristle worked with.The piece slowly expands, with Da Silva later introducing a noisy crackling to offset the otherwise low end drone, but the piece stays entrenched in sinister, oppressive territory.

On the flip side, Perez first goes for a metallic din reminiscent of Test Department or SPK on "La Gata."Loud banging noises form a rhythmic framework, buried in echo chamber hell.It is less subtle than the Luciernaga side, and has a lo-fi clipping, microphone in a windstorm overdriven sound to it.The banging noise eventually relents for buzzing synth expanses, then into a harsh power electronics crunch.Perez keeps the piece solidly rooted mostly in noise, but retains a nice rhythmic surge with it.

Tile, an extremely limited cassette that is also available digitally, is surprisingly well documented given its ambiguous nature, with instrumentation spelled out explicitly in the packaging.Rapidly recorded and produced, the result has far more depth than its intentionally unedited and impulsive creation would lead me to believe.

The first side of the tape is the more complex one.Built from variously configured guitars, bowed metal, and a Tibetan prayer bowl, Da Silva opens the piece blending deep swells of blackened dungeon noise with pristine silence.Focusing more on the higher frequencies, the metal scrapes are appropriately creepy and ghostly.He then introduces in the guitar, a blurry haze of notes that do not hide the instrumentation.

He slowly fills the mix in more from here, first with a noisier passage of guitar that adds in a perfect amount of crunch and distortion.Eventually the guitar is replaced with the feedback like tones of the prayer bowl and mournful guitar noise.The other half of Tile is a bit less accessible, consisting of a single second and a half loop of shruti box repeated for over 22 minutes, recorded with the stated purpose of aiding in meditation.It has a flowing, sad melodic flow to sound that helps make its repetitive nature feel more varied than it is.

These two tapes make a wonderful pair to showcase the diversity of sound Joao Da Silva works with as Luciernaga.Sad, menacing, aggressive, and even sometimes light and ambient, his diverse array of talent is clearly on display.The half provided by La Mancha Del Pecado is no slouch either, making for a noise driven counterpoint to Luciernaga's creeping menace.

samples:

• Cuartel Terranova
• La Gata
• Tile (Side A)
• Tile (Side B)

 

19 October 2014

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Albums and Singles

A double-CD release that collates material from the period 2008 – 2011.  Including for the first time digitally The Bacteria Magnet and Rushkoff Coercion E.P.s, previously unreleased remixes and exclusive tracks.  Comes in deluxe 6 panel digipac with art from Babs Santini.

Copies ordered from Dirter arrive as a three-disc edition, with a bonus CD in a full-color printed sleeve.  The bonus disc is (for the first time in digital form) the vinyl mix of Huffin' Rag Blues.

More information can be found here.

19 October 2014

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Albums and Singles

I am not sure which is more amazing: that the Dots are now up to 18 (sort of) of these weird, free-wheeling, catch-all releases or that they are still occasionally both excellent and surprising.  In any case, this double release is quite a fine and rather substantial effort.  Like most (if not) all Chemical Playschool entries, this is not the place to come for hooks and tight editing, but Ka-Spel and company's abstract psychedelia nevertheless blossoms into some very beautiful, strange, and haunting interludes.  Anyone looking to completely detach from mundane reality for 90 minutes without the aid of pharmaceuticals would be hard-pressed to find a better option than this one.

Self-Released

Although they almost certainly derive from lots of jamming and improvisation, Chemical Playschool 16's three lengthy pieces make a very convincing show of seeming deliberate and well-composed.  Someone clearly spent an enormous amount of time editing all of these disparate ideas and motifs into a coherent, satisfying arc and it shows.  That is not to say that it is tightly structured or economically assembled, as such considerations are beside the point in such a free-floating phantasmagoric dreamscape.  What matters instead, in this case, is how seamlessly Ka-Spel and his colleagues flow through their various lysergic synthesizer reveries, brooding ambient passages, quirky grooves, surreal sound collages, and unsettling spoken-word passages.  While parts of Volume 16 definitely seem to be treading water creatively at times, it is packed with enough compelling set pieces and wonderful transitions to justify the more static bits.  The band has quite a bag of tricks at their disposal, imaginatively interspersing their more standard fare with crackling radio transmissions, mutant sambas, horror-movie organs, and snatches of The Silverman’s musique concrète.  My favorite part (as always), however, is Ka-Spel's macabre poetry, which ephemerally approaches his best work with Part Two's "The Monsters Take the Fun Away" section.

Appropriately, Volume 18 is no less amorphous and kaleidoscopic, though it differs from Volume 16 by being presented as a single 39-minute piece.  Initially, it starts off a bit weaker, however, opening with a druggy, neo-tropical-sounding dirge before morphing into a vista of sputtering, space-y psychedelia and a very trebly, ranting Edward Ka-Spel.  Given time though, Ka-Spel and his bandmates successfully plunge deep into the rabbit hole of brain-bending, hallucinatory abstraction once again and never look back (I felt like I was in an alien aviary at one point).  In fact, I think it may be even better than Volume 16 at making me feel like I am actually having aural hallucinations and that Edward Ka-Spel has creepily infiltrated my head somehow, even though the individual motifs do not seem quite as strong.  Maybe that is the secret though–the more shifting, warped, and vaporous the music, the more unreal it all seems.  Almost nothing from this half of the album ever sticks around long enough to be remembered, as it becomes essentially a stream of feverish ideas either whooshing by or bubbling to the surface only to be quickly consumed again by the background entropy.  Much like Volume 16, however, it fleetingly coheres for yet another mesmerizing and disturbing Ka-Spel monologue masterpiece, this one entitled "The Only Living Doll in the Doll House."  It is a classic.

While this sprawling effort is not exactly flawless, it was never intended to be, as the Chemical Playschool albums are always far more concerned with experimentalism than songcraft.  I am perfectly fine with that state of affairs, as I generally prefer their more unhinged and abstract forays to their actual songs.  More importantly, the flaws are extremely minor this time around–occasionally a section will be somewhat weak or overstay its welcome a bit, but there is nothing shrill, clumsy, jarring, or jammy to be found.  The Dots were certainly not lacking for ideas and do a beautiful job of sequencing and avoiding clichés, repeating themselves, or relying too heavily on their own tropes.  For anyone already indoctrinated into LPD fandom and amenable to their occasional indulgences, this is nearly an hour-and-a-half of imaginative, top-shelf psychedelia and my current lead contender for best LPD release of the year.

• Chemical Playschool 16 (Part One)
• Chemical Playschool 16 (Part Three)
• Chemical Playschool 18

 

19 October 2014

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Albums and Singles

I am not an especially devout Scott Walker fan, as I tend to admire his vision and fearlessness far more than I actually enjoy listening to his albums, but I was definitely very curious to hear how this completely unexpected collaboration would turn out: such a union seemed certain to be both unpredictable and unique at the very least.  Upon finally hearing Soused, however, I am a bit surprised by the early wave of stellar reviews it has received thus far, as it seems like Sunn O)))'s presence is often unnecessary or squandered (or both).  Walker, for his part, certainly provides more of the quavering, deranged catharsis that I have grown to expect from him, but the underlying music is sometimes less than compelling. Although not a failure by any means (it gets much better near the end), much of this effort feels like less than the sum of its parts (though it is still an absolute monster by non-"Scott Walker" standards).

4AD

Amusingly, my disappointment with Soused crests very quickly–within the first minute, to be precise.  To my ears, "Brando" opens the album in supremely cringe-worthy fashion, with Walker belting out lines "O, the wide Missouri!" like the most over-the-top Broadway singer in the world while Stephen O'Malley unleashes some lead guitar that sounds like it was ripped straight from a Toto or Styx album.  That is the album's (playfully intentional?) nadir, but after some nicely jarring, stuttering guitar stabs, Sunn O))) then settle into sustaining a single, distorted power chord like the world's laziest Sunn O))) tribute band.  Thankfully, the piece gradually acquires whip cracks, menacingly dissonant synths, crackling and sputtering industrial textures, eerie whines, and a howling tortured saxophone.  Also, Scott starts creepily intoning that a beating would do him a world of good and the piece successfully transforms from near-camp theatricality and rote doom metal to a beautifully executed nightmare by its end.  It was definitely a rocky start though.

However, that first minute illustrates Soused's primary shortcoming quite succinctly: Sunn O))) are basically around to sound like the Sunn O))) from 15 years ago rather than the more adventurous and forward-thinking band that made Monoliths & Dimensions.  That unfortunate trend returns again in the 12-minute "Harrod 2014," but thankfully sans any cloying Toto-isms or show tune theatrics.  Again, it is another fine piece, but would probably be just as haunting if O'Malley and Greg Anderson had stayed home that day, as all the best parts occur when the doom-drone guitars are drowned out or pushed away by dissonant synth or grinding industrial noise (or..uh…horns mimicking elephants).  I should note that this situation is not entirely Sunn O)))'s fault, as Walker and engineer Peter Walsh sent them a demo with the album more or less entirely composed and their role was primarily to transform the synthesizer parts into Sunn O))) parts.  Since Scott wanted to make a droning anti-epic, that necessarily translated into a lot of Greg and Stephen sustaining sludgy chords in front of their wall of amps.

Fortunately, Soused is not entirely Sunn-by-numbers, as the duo get to unleash some surprises in "Fetish," one of the album's most varied and gripping pieces.  Opening with no accompaniment at all other an array of ominous machine noises, it unexpectedly erupts into a weird groove featuring chorus-heavy bass and some shakers before exploding into an even more unexpected bludgeoning doom metal freak-out.  Then there is some jarringly out-of-tune strumming in the aftermath to boot.  The equally compelling "Lullaby" closes the album with almost no recognizable Sunn-style guitar at all, aside from some buried bass throb.  I think O'Malley keeps himself busy with creaking, clunking atmospherics and swells though.  In any case, it is one of the album's most striking and enigmatic pieces, as it simultaneously features tormented horn howls, Elizabethan nursery rhyme-isms ("hey nonny nonny!" and "lullaby-la-la!"), and a characteristically unsettling and impenetrable narrative ("tonight my assistant will pass among you…his cap will be empty").  Notably, "Lullaby" was composed much earlier than the rest of the album, as Walker wrote it for Ute Lemper's Punishing Kiss album (2000).  Both versions are scary.

My only real problem with Soused, I suppose, is that it failed to meet my expectations, which I suppose it my own fault for having them in the first place.  And that might even be perversely intentional on Walker's part, as he has stated that these songs are all about frustration and failure, which certainly informed his song structures.  Still, I would love to someday hear a legitimate collaboration between these two artists, even though it that seems truly unlikely given Scott's perfectionism (though he was almost involved in Monoliths & Dimensions).  Sunn O))) just seem woefully underutilized here, as even their elemental power seems muted.  I would also love to hear the Sunn O)))-less demo for this album someday, as I think Walker's twisted gallery of horror (lepers, imperiled babies, beatings, quilts of corpses, etc.) would be even more disturbing without the anachronistic grounding of a rock band playing standard rock chords beneath it.  In any case, however, Walker remains a mad genius.  Soused is not easy listening by any means, but it delivers roughly the same caliber of unhinged, Bosch-ian gut punch as either The Drift or Bish Bosch, so those looking to blacken their days by plunging themselves into another man's obsessive nightmare world will find themselves amply rewarded yet again.

• Brando
• Fetish
• Lullaby

 

19 October 2014

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Albums and Singles

Minnesota's Grant Richardson may be a relatively new player in the American harsh electronics scene, but his expanding discography of tapes and low-run releases have honed his ability and skill at making ugly noise. With Gnawed taking cues equally from the European Cold Meat Industries sound and the contemporary US noise scene, Feign and Cloak is a heavy, yet diverse record that certainly brings power and force, but a lot more as well.

Malignant

Most of the eight pieces are enshrouded in a constant metallic clang or a dungeon-like reverb, giving some consistently from song to song without ever becoming stagnant.Vocals appear on most of the songs, but not only extremely low in the mix, but heavily buried in a dense flanging, not unlike Con-Dom or The Grey Wolves.The effect is so heavy that the words are all but unintelligible, and given the titling and artwork, I am going to guess they are not about anything pleasant.

Like a good power electronics record, Richardson keeps some semblance of rhythm present throughout many of these pieces.On "Burning the Hive", what sounds like a loosely strung bass guitar sets the rhythmic bed on which a droning, harsh synth expanse is placed.Similarly, on "Feign and Cloak" he uses what sounds to be reverb heavy, filthy synth stabs to give some structure to the piece, while noise grows and cranks up the intensity.

Most overtly song-like is "Pestilence Beholden," beginning with a stammering, distorted drum machine and sustained buzzing synth.The employing of actual, discernible rhythms adds a lot, and as a whole Richardson uses layering to excellent effect.The result is a structured, developing song that sounds like far more than just a blast of white noise.

The final few pieces on Feign and Cloak have Richardson stepping a bit into cleaner, purer sounds beyond just the harsh walls of heavy sound."The Wings and the Carrion" is an echoing expanse, more singed, scorched earth ambience than straight electronics. "The Drowning Fire" begins initially as a bass heavy synth rumble, but soon evolves into scraping noise and distorted voice, transitioning from oppressive ambience into pure oppression, building brilliantly every step of the way.

Richardson's strongest asset on Feign and Cloak is restraint.Even with the massive walls of noise and harsh vocals that appear throughout, he always seems to be holding back, keeping the sound tenser and heavy than it would be if he just unleashed into pure explosive noise.It is that tension and ambiguity that makes the album such a captivating one.

samples:

• Burning the Hive
• Pestilence Beholden
• The Wings and the Carrion

 

10 October 2014

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Albums and Singles

M. Geddes Gengras returns with the anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Collected Works Vol. 1 The Moog Years (Umor Rex 2013). The music on New Process Music constitutes his first recordings of purely modular composition; while the album was recorded between 2011 and 2012 it has never been released before and we are pleased to present it for the first time as the Vol. 2 of his Collected Works series.

New Process Music represents a major aesthetic shift for M. Geddes Gengras, fusing the long-form modular compositions he had been exploring on a bevy of small-run cassette releases with a new obsession with post-production editing to create a deeply tuned aural environment, lush in analog electronics that are gritty along the edges, with rich textures and melodies materializing and wafting away like smoke. For New Process Music, Gengras used only a small eurorack synth and magnavox tape echo for the tracking process; the pieces that emerge act as documents of an artist exploring the limits of his chosen instruments. Most of the patches here were originally written for performance and recorded live. Sequences are twisted and bent, turned in on themselves or combined with random information. Longer tracks like "Slider" and "The Last Time We Were Here" zigzag across scales, the latter emulating the endless keyboard technique that was highlighted on Collected Works Vol. 1: The Moog Years, while the former takes the form of a bubbling kosmiche workout that collapses under its own momentum. Shorter pieces like "Glass Dance" and "Relation" offer fractured sequences that refuse to resolve over wavering beds of drone and shade. The overall effect is that of a richly detailed sound world that envelops the listener in a deeply personal space.

Out November 18th.

More information here.

04 October 2014

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Albums and Singles

After the Rain is the latest offering from Mark Van Hoen and Louis Sherman's Locust project. Following up the 2013 release You'll Be Safe Forever, this new album sees Locust stepping away from the abstracted forms of previous works presenting a more melodic/harmonic proposition. Bathed in a warm nostalgic memory, After the Rain draws on Mark's formative influences, primarily '70s electronic music.

Unlike previous Locust and Mark Van Hoen releases, which relied on programming and sequencing much of this new record was played live, creating a space where innovation is secondary to the suggestive power of time, space, mood and melody. Rich in melancholia and a yearning for a world once suggested After the Rain explores a crack in the historical framework, one embracing female identity and astute observations of melodic atmosphere. After the Rain is a melodic electronic mood record which presents itself as a triumph of historical revisionism.

More information can be found here.

04 October 2014

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Albums and Singles

After releasing a first glimpse in the form of the Atomos VII EP earlier this year, A Winged Victory For The Sullen reveal their second full-length album entitled Atomos which sees the duo introduce flurries of electronics, harp and modular synthesizers to their sound in the follow-up to the 2011 self- titled album.

In 2013 AWVFTS caught the ear of Wayne McGregor, founder of Random Dance Company and resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet, who is perhaps best known for his choreography work on the Radiohead video "Lotus Flower" as well as "Ingenue" by Atoms For Peace.  McGregor used the debut album as the warm-up music during practice sessions for Random, and after noticing the group's reaction with the music, he contacted Adam and Dustin to see if they would write the score for his new work.

Given complete artistic freedom, the duo treated the score with the same care and attention as their debut full-length by recording more than sixty minutes of music over a four-month period across studios in Brussels, Berlin and Reykjavik with the help of their long time collaborative sound engineer Francesco Donadello. During the process they came to the realization that this would become their official second studio album. McGregor provided them with the inspiration to expand their sound palette into more electronic territory, whilst keeping their signature chamber sound, resulting in a very unique release.

More information is available here.

28 September 2014

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Albums and Singles

Working with the themes of memory and forgetting, as well as the role of attention in listening, Cluett's latest work is highly conceptual.  Forms of Forgetting is a lengthy droning work where Cluett toys with these themes from a sonic perspective, sometimes hypnotic and sometimes drifting off into silence.  Passages are quiet and hushed enough to be ignored, just to come back with an undeniable force and intensity that cannot be forgotten.

LINE

Consisting of a single, nearly 56-minute piece, Forms of Forgetting is constructed from two years of live experimentation, art installations, and mobile compositions that blend together into a calming, yet simultaneously heavy work.  The beginning is not forceful, but stays sustained in tone with only the most minor changes, scaling back after about the first 10 minutes.  From there it builds to a subsonic vibration and higher pitched warbling, almost like a bell ringing, and the tones reach a leaden density.

At this point, Cluett's composition becomes a monolith, consuming and absorbing all sound around it.  The sheer sustained tone does a superb job of erasing memory of the subtleties that preceded it.  The dense tones have a layered, metallic quality to them that just adds to their intensity, like an entire universe of vibrating bells.  As the music seems to reach its critical mass of force, Cluett dials things back somewhat.

From here the piece becomes more bleak and introspective.  Like depressing memories from the past, the tones drone less, and the space around them becomes more open and hollow.  Cleaner tones and heavier low end moments characterize the final portion, building to a vaguely abrasive crescendo before retreating to a more stereotypical early electronic music modular type sound.  The ending moments conclude the work with a long, quiet fade out.

As surely his intent, moments of Forms of Forgetting are heavy, forceful, and anything but easily ignored or forgotten.  Other segments, however, Cluett delves more into a hypnotizing, understated world of sound that trails off into the background, at times being easily drowned out by any ambient sound that might be around.  The whole piece works best due to the sum of these parts, the mundane and the gripping, much like memory and experience in the real world, powerfully succeeding with the concept Cluett intended.

samples:

• Excerpt 1
• Excerpt 2
• Excerpt 3