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We made it to 800 (and beyond)
Episode 800 is a retrospective: Brainwashed was founded in 1996 and Jon became a DJ on air first in 1986. This episode squeezes 20 tunes exclusively from 1986 by Perennial Divide, Diamanda Galás, Prince Jammy, Cabaret Voltaire, Lustmord, Bruce Gilbert, Arthur Russell, Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, Chrystal Belle Scrodd, Robert Haigh, Squirrel Bait, Swans, Frank Tovey, :Zoviet*France:, 23 Skidoo, Muslimgauze, Coil, Jandek, Throwing Muses, and The Tear Garden.
Episode 801 is back to all new music from ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ (Kieran Hebden), The Bug / Dis Fig, Frenk Dublin, Klara Lewis, Vanishing Twin, Andrew Chalk, Bardo Pond, RIBS, Alia, Lusine, The Field, plus a classic from Severed Heads.
Thank you Jennifer for a picture of your son in the moonlight at City Island, the Bronx (NYC).
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This ambitious and aptly titled new album from upstate NY synth wizard M. Geddes Gengras is something akin to a wild and eccentric game of the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse, as Gengras handed off his raw synth recordings to a wide and varied array of collaborators and offered them “creative carte blanche” for their additions (albeit with minimal instructions). The idea is a playful and somewhat ingenious expansion upon how Gengras’ beloved modular synthesizers work, as “each new element added to the chain affects the whole, which can produce unexpected results.” As evidenced by this album, the same is definitely true of collaborators as well, yet Gengras also took inspiration from other chance-based composition strategies such as John Cage’s I-Ching experiments or Autechre’s complex algorithmic mutations. As far as I know, however, no indeterminacy-inspired composers ever recorded an album quite like this one, as Guest List is a charmingly playful and freewheeling fun house of wild and audacious aesthetic collisions and juxtapositions.
In a way, Guest List seems like an album that Gengras was always destined to make, as his entire career has been eclectic, freewheeling, and collaboration-filled, as I first encountered him through his seemingly ubiquitous presence on every good Not Not Fun project in the early 2000s and he has since blown me away at least once with both his outsider techno alias (Personable) and his collected Moog works. He has also taken quite a deep dive into Jamaican dub production techniques with Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones, as the two launched the dancehall imprint Duppy Gun after collaborating with The Congos in 2011. In short, Gengras is a guy who has seemingly tried his hand at damn near every possible strain of arty underground music at this point.
This ambitious new release from Florida-based sound artist Josh Mason is the third installment in Greyfade’s FOLIO series (“a full-length music edition in hardcover book form”). The book, billed as "a nonlinear travelogue of the states of Florida," is a collection of impressionistic, elliptical, and poetic ruminations on Mason’s oft-surreal environs that are “intended to be experienced simultaneously” with the music. That is quite a cool and unique idea, as it gives the album’s nine hallucinatory modular synth soundscapes a loose narrative arc and a dreamlike (and humid) sense of place. Mason’s vision is also a fresh twist on both modular synth albums and ambient music, as he sets out to capture the very specific and Lychian ambiance of brutalist concrete, decaying billboards, humming air conditioners, omnipresent mosquitoes, gas station churches, dimly lit showers, and flickering motel signs.
Greyfade
According to Mason, Kicking A Dark Horse “was built around a modular synthesizer framework that operates on streams of binary data” that “resists intuitive control” and “made no immediate sense to him.” That was a deliberate choice, of course, as Mason views that constraint as “a way of forcing outcomes that surprise even their maker.” In that regard, Mason shares some common ground with artists like Merzbow and Nurse With Wound, as he essentially creates a living modular system of “spinning plates” that he manipulates live, then starts recording only when “he feels them arrive at the right momentum simultaneously.” Similarly, Mason also purposely misuses and abuses his gear to yield strange and unusual sounds, patterns, and textures, with “oscillators clocked far below their operational thresholds, bit-depth data routed through mismatched converters, and delay lines treated as percussive instruments.”
This latest collaboration between Irisarri and Guido Zen’s Abul Mogard alias is billed as the duo’s second album, which admittedly makes sense from a “new material” standpoint, but gets a bit murky given that the duo’s previous releases were a hybrid live/studio album and a live album that featured two previously unreleased pieces. Much like 2024’s Impossibly distant, impossibly close, Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is again something of a hybrid release, as the raw material was recorded live over a three-day residency at Berlin’s Morphine Raum. Some additional recordings were later made by Irisarri back at his studio in New York, but the more captivating bit is what emerged after Zen layered, subtracted, and reassembled the final recordings at his own studio back in Rome. The result is not what I would have expected, as Irisarri and Zen’s individual styles largely dissolve into a series of unusually minimal and understated mood pieces.
The duo’s palette for these recordings were the expected modular synths and bowed guitars, but there were some unexpected twists this time around as well. The biggest one is that cellist Martina Bertoni and violinist Andrea Burelli share composing credit for a couple of pieces, but I was also a bit surprised to discover that Irisarri’s characteristic veil of frayed and corroded textures is mostly absent. The duo also note that rotary speakers played a central role, as did Morphine Raum’s 1970s mixing console and an array of microphones stationed throughout the room. According to Irisarri, “At moments I genuinely couldn’t tell if a sound was coming from me or from Abul. It stopped feeling like two people making decisions and began to feel like we were inside a system moving on its own." While I have absolutely no idea how much Abul/Zen later reshaped those performances, I certainly share Irisarri’s sentiment, as the lines between the duo’s synth sounds and processed guitar sounds has never been blurrier. Also, I could have sworn that there was a saxophone in “Blue Descent,” so I may also actually be losing my mind altogether.
Furafauna is the culmination of three years of work by Thorsten Soltau (who sometimes works under the name Femurl, with both names attributed to this album). Consisting of four pieces and two remixes, one by Troum and one by Sewicide, he dabbles in a wide variety of mostly (but not exclusively) electronic structures. Elements of abstract noise, glitching digital, and traditional composition all are present at various points, culminating in a dense and at times challenging but engaging album.
"Astafel" opens the disc with a spoken word passage that relents to spacious tones and an underlying bit of noise. Here, he meshes higher pitched tones mesh with a low synth pulse while including spoken passages met with far off clattering. Soltau mixes in some plucked strings to counter the more inorganic sounds that dominate the piece. "Lullaby for the Extinct" features some similar components, such as deep pulses, processed voices, and dramatic swells of synthesizers. Again, he implements the sound of strings, but this time plucked and bowed, with subtle processing to give an organic sensibility to the piece. Both of these pieces feature the legendary Ralf Wehowsky (RLW) on "virtual instruments," which may explain some of the continuity.
Robert Poss’s post-Band of Susans work has covered a significant number of styles, however what remains consistent is his omnipresent guitar. Having worked in traditional song-like structures, music for dance performances, and pure abstraction, I have always been impressed by his solo work. Kepler’s Choice is a collaboration with E-Clark (Edward) Cornell, making for Poss’s first collaboration in a number of years. As a lengthy CD split into eight pieces (the shortest clocking in at close to six minutes), there is a lot to digest here, with a sound heavily steeped in modern classical composition.
The title piece opens the disc and features the two playing with dynamics, with frequent swells of sound rising and then being pulled back. This provides a sort of stuttering structure that—coupled with the hard panning of the segments—makes for a pleasant sense of disorientation. Layers build and rich tones underscore, which a provide a solid foundation on which the two stack. Comparably, the following “the ripple effect from an emotional error” (preserving the capitalization structure of the song list) is more grounded. Acoustic guitar from Poss blends with rising, delicate sections of what could be synths conjuring a sense of drama, punctuated by rich piano passages. Throughout its 11-and-a-half-minute duration the two push the work into a multitude of spaces: first electronics and cavernous tones into glitching and a guitar-centric sound.
This deeply unconventional Montreal-based duo of poet Deanna Radford and sound artist Jeremy Young have been fitfully recording together since 2017, but this is their proper full-length debut. While I have been a fan of Young’s solo work and other projects for a while now, Cloud Circuit is a different animal altogether, as the duo seek to craft music inspired by “communication glitches and lost connections.” In more concrete terms, the pair’s aesthetic is centered around the processing and deconstruction of Radford’s spoken word performances while Young weaves surreal and textured backdrops from oscillators, radio transmissions, tapes, found sounds, and the occasional piano or organ. A number of eclectic Montreal luminaries (Sam Shalabi, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, etc.) turn up to party as well, as does Sun Ra via his writings, but Radford and Young make quite a compelling team in their own, as this album hypnotically blurs the lines between spoken word, sound collage, and field recording in such innovative fashion that many of these pieces feel like actual songs with hooks despite lacking nearly all of the usual elements of traditional songcraft.
Watch That Ends The Night Records
The opening “An Introduction to Cloud Genera” provides an appropriately surreal and representative introduction to the Cloud Circuit vision, as Radford dispassionately muses on an array of cloud-related themes over a shuddering and undulating percussion loop and a shimmering haze of drones. As Radford notes, clouds are always evolving and the same is true of Cloud Circuit, as her voice gradually splits off into two channels that move about spatially and her words are umpredictably broken up into decontextualized sound fragments. On Young’s end, the underlying rumble gradually becomes more intense, crackling, and textured, which roughly mirrors the trajectory of Radford’s voice.
Newly issued on vinyl for the first time ever, Interstate was arguably both Monolake’s full-length debut and the only fully collaborative release from the original duo of Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles. While it has not yet become as revered as some of Monolake’s other early albums, the reasons for that are primarily due to context rather than quality, as its predecessor Hong Kong was a collection of the project’s killer run of singles of the iconic Chain Reaction label, which would be quite a tough act to follow under any circumstances (and this was definitely not the follow up that any Chain Reaction fans were expecting).
Field/Monolake
Interstate was also followed by quite a hot streak from the more conventionally beat-driven and Henke-centric iteration of the project, yet this album remains a very cool and unique outlier that lands quite a bit closer to cutting-edge sound design than it does to classic dub techno fare. In an oblique way, however, this short-lived incarnation of Monolake turned out to be even more influential than their beloved former label, as Henke and Behles spent much of the ‘90s co-creating the Ableton Live software together and Interstate is an eclectic (and electric) showcase of all of the wild and boldly futuristic new Max/MSP sound processing techniques that were about to rewire the electronic music world forever.
The latest solo album from this NY-based avant-crooner is an impressively wild evolution from his previous work, as Romance Wake Naming feels like a heartfelt yet feral homage to “the experimental and even hip-hop roots of industrial music.” Embracing “mangled breakbeats” and “cassette cut up experiments,” Trecka’s latest vision lands in fascinating and novel new terrain that lies somewhere between harrowing late-period Scott Walker and snarling and chaotic interpretations of New Romantic pop hits by a gaggle of insalubrious Wax Trax! miscreants like Revolting Cocks. Fittingly, one of those Cocks (Ministry’s Paul Barker) even makes a guest appearance, as does Meat Beat Manifesto (albeit in sampled form only). These songs can admittedly be quite a cacophonous and unstable concoction at times, but the best moments beautifully channel the raw and chaotic “anything goes” intensity of a great bygone era in underground music.
The opening “Rumors of Survival” provides a wonderfully churning and blown-out introduction to the album, as Trecka repurposes a mbira sample from the late Jamie Branch into a clattering, pulsing, and rhythmic ball of noise. That said, Trecka’s Scott Walker-esque vocals were admittedly a bit more of an acquired taste for me, as I have seen them previously described as “David Bowie at his most untamed,” which can be a somewhat jarring element in this particular context. I would personally go with “New Romantic vocalist with the intensity dialed up way too high to feel like pop anymore,” but I am mostly a fan, as the wailing and primal catharsis of those vocals are the heart of the album and they are also the thing that transforms these pieces into a raw, direct, and unique artistic statement rather than just a mere homage to some cool ‘80s industrial artists. Also, I would be remiss if I did not mention that Trecka is generally quite a cool and adventurous vocal artist, as his frayed and howling melodies are ingeniously enhanced with a vibrant host of cut-up and swooping samples and layers.
This latest release from NY-based saxophonist/composer Bertucci continues her bold expansion into improbable and adventurous new territory, as it is a commissioned collaboration with German flutist Norbert Rodenkirchen. The two artists first met back in 2019 after a performance by Rodenkirchen’s early music ensemble Sequentia and Bertucci was immediately fascinated by both Rodenkirchen’s collection of ancient flutes and all of the folklore and tuning/notation challenges inherent in recreating Medieval music. When Bertucci landed the opportunity to record at The ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe back in 2023, the stars were finally in perfect alignment for the two artists to collaborate on something special and unique that inventively blurs the lines between past and future. The resultant work is something of a shapeshifting beast that has morphed from an eight channel spatialized live performance to an infinite durational installation to a 34-minute stereo album. To my ears, there is probably nothing else on earth quite like it, but it falls in roughly the same avant-garde ballpark as Maryanne Amacher, Phill Niblock, and Catherine Christer Hennix.
The album borrows its title from a quote by a former Carthusian monk explaining why the monastery’s Chartreuse production was decreased (despite high demand) during the pandemic to allow the monks more time for their spiritual concerns. It is a perfect title, as one of Rodenkirchen’s flutes is a replica of a vulture bone flute that dates from as far back as 37,000 years ago and the duo’s Pythagorean tunings date back to Ancient Mesopotamia circa 600 BC and are based on the mathematics of the natural world. Much like the monks, Bertucci and Rodenkirchen see the current age of “scorched earth capitalism” as an ephemeral chapter in a story that spans millenia and predates America, Christianity, capitalism, electricity, and Western turning systems. Then again, maybe it won’t be ephemeral in the way that I hope, as Bertucci seems particularly fascinated with the more apocalyptically inspired strains of early music and notes that experiencing a total solar eclipse made her feel “connected to the experience of my ancestors from ages ago, of a primeval confusion, sense of humility and wonderment at the awesome power of the skies.” It is probably safe to say that this album is her valiant attempt to re-capture that singular feeling.
This is the second full-length that Carla Dal Forno has released since returning to her native Australia and those sunnier environs continue to have a welcome warming effect on her songwriting. She has also grown considerably more eclectic and inspired in both her instrumentation and her assimilation of fresh influences over the last few years while her songwriting talents have sharpened significantly, as this “album of quiet upheaval” is a hook-packed, intimate, and refreshingly sincere collection of would-be indie pop hits about heartache, yearning, desire, and every other deep human emotion that matters. In that regard, Confession is a significant leap forward, but Dal Forno is otherwise still the same bass-wielding post-punk chanteuse as ever.
Amusingly, I noticed the other day that Dal Forno self-described her early Berlin work as “lone kosmische misanthropy,” which is quite a far cry from her current stripped-down and bass-driven Young Marble Giants-style indie pop vision. The interesting bit is that Dal Forno’s radical stylistic transformation happened without her making any major foundational changes to the essence of her sound: ten years after “Fast Moving Cars,” she is still essentially making bedroom pop magic from little more than a bass, a drum machine, and some honest and introspective musings about life, heartache, and relationships. The only thing that truly changed is that she gradually cleared away all the murk, gloom, reverb, and rigidity to let in some welcome light, space, warmth, fun, and leftfield inspiration. In short, she focused entirely on being real, human, and direct and jettisoned everything that diluted or blunted those aspects. There is one semi-throwback to Dal Forno’s Blackest Ever Black past, however, as the rubbery slow-motion stomp of “Nighttime” feels like it should have been THE shadowy, bloodless Berlin party anthem of 2016.
As evidenced by the many intimate and autobiographical passages about self-doubt, numbness, and creative frustration it contains, this latest album from James was “forged from the fire of internal struggles.” Fortunately, all that inner turmoil ultimately resulted in an absolutely killer album that feels like a massive artistic breakthrough, so I guess it was all worth it (though James herself may strongly feel otherwise). The catalyst for James’ reinvention unexpectedly came from her work producing Anysia Kym’s Confession EP, which “gave her the experience of a more 'pop' setting and the tools and insight to work her instrumentals into more conventional shapes.” The ingenious bit is that James’ new embrace of pop-inspired song structures provides an accessible shape to some very ambitious, radical, and non-pop enhancements in her production techniques and beat crafting skills. The final piece of the puzzle is that James tagged in a host of eclectic guest vocalists who seemed to know exactly what was needed to transform her stuttering, blurred, and shapeshifting instrumental tracks into sensuous, hook-packed left-field pop magic.
The most unexpected of the many guest vocal performances is unquestionably Low’s Alan Sparhawk, who urges everyone to make love (rather than war) over a backdrop of gently rolling rock drums and bleary electric piano. To his credit, Sparhawk makes a surprisingly credible soul vocalist in this unfamiliar context, but “Peak Again” is definitely an outlier for a whole host of reasons. On the considerably more outré side of the spectrum is the Miho Hatori-featuring “Flatline,” as Hatari sensuously sings in both Japanese and English over pitch-bent synth chords and a skittering, convulsive, and glitch-ravaged groove. The straight-up hip-hop of “Ending Us All” is another wild detour, as Le3 bLACK raps over lo-fi smeary synths and some killer live drumming from Fyn Dobson. Elsewhere, Anysia Kym takes the mic for the album’s hottest would-be single, as “Score” is a perfect marriage of intimately underproduced vocals, jazzy electric piano chords, gently trippy flutes, and squelchy futuristic percussion. Tirzah contributes a simmering and seductive gem as well, as “Habits and Patterns,” beautifully blends hushed and melancholy heartache with invasively destabilizing and jackhammering loop spasms.
