Being thankful for an earful.
Brand new music by Marie Davidson, Niecy Blues (feat. Joy Guidry), CEL, Marisa Anderson and Luke Schneider, Stina Stjern, Carmen Villain, Murcof, A Lily, and Far Golden Pavilions, with music from the vaults by Tomaga, Ozzobia, Jan Jelinek.
Sushi photo by Lindsay.
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Hollywood Dream Trip, Would You Like to Know More?
It was a dark and starry night. Under Texas skies, Christoph Heemann and Will Long (Celer) met and exchanged the first loop that would form the bed for the swirling stream of Hollywood Dream Trip's first trip...
Limpe Fuchs/Christoph Heemann/Timo van Luijk, Macchia Forest
An organic audio forest of analogue electronics, electro-acoustic sounds, sound-sculpture instruments plus singing and piano, even (outrageous!).
"they discover how landscape changes, the forest thickens....new creatures, shapes and colours appear..."
More information can be found here.
CD version of the 2009 Mississippi Records release. Highly recommended to followers of the Blackshaw/Wissem line of acoustic instrumental composition that runs through the Imprec catalog.
From the original notes:
"Portland guitar wizard Marisa Anderson's long awaited solo guitar record. Marisa has been a fixture on many a music scene for years & years playing w/ everyone from the Evolutionary Jass Band to Tara Jane O'Neil to The Dolly Ranchers. In any context, she can't escape her rag/blues/folk roots no matter how hard she tries. This LP featuring only guitar, no vocals, no overdubs, we are treated to a very intimate sounding home recording filled w/ delicate grace. Comparisons to John Fahey & his ilk are bound to occur, but won't be the last words"
CD version of the 2013 Mississippi Records LP.
From the original notes:
"Portland guitar virtuoso Marisa Anderson is back with a new set of home recorded instrumentals. This time around we find Marisa exploring structures more based on the Appalachian folk tradition. The bluesy cadences of Marisa's other previous release -The Golden Hour - are still there but more in an emotional sense than a structural. It's rare to find a record that has just one instrument with no vocals that can achieve real emotional communication - but here 'tis. Marisa thoughtfully composed & recorded this LP over the course of the last two years. It was worth the wait."
More information here.
Developed over a four-year period, and entirely funded by a part-time job working as a SAT university entrance exam mathematics tutor, No2 was composed using synthesizers and a variety of unidentified samples that were manipulated beyond recognition.
Christina Vantzou then collaborated with Minna Choi of the San Francisco based Magik*Magik Orchestra. Vantzou and Choi worked on the notation and arrangements and recorded the compositions with a 15-piece ensemble at Tiny Telephone studios in San Francisco. The chamber layer on No2 follows a similar pattern as her first record with the addition of bassoon, oboe, and an enhanced string section.
Vantzou spent four months premixing the album before Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie (Stars of the Lid / A Winged Victory for the Sullen) engineered the final mixes, as well as added some of his signature sound texture, at his studio in Brussels, Belgium.
Perhaps a better title for the album would be "Symphony No2" as it was composed as a cohesive whole, much like her first album No1. Dense layers of strings are augmented by angelic voices, piano, woodwinds, & various synthesizers. Instrumental music, especially that which is scored with strings & horns, is invariably described as "filmic". This is even more likely when the composer is a filmmaker such as Christina Vantzou.
Welcome to the future, which luckily for us is filled by a woman's voice with a beautiful narrative. A recording that is a meeting of personalities is like the contact of chemical substances: if there is any reaction, all are transformed.
More information here.
With 13 years having passed since its initial release, The Visitors is now available again on Phantomcode.
This double CD and LP edition comes with new artwork by Alex Rose and Fred Tomaselli, as well as a specially recorded piece by Cyclobe, "Son of Sons of Light."
"The poets of the sulphur baths in seven crystal tiers star shaped, with the laughter of ghosts in its water" Derek Jarman
More information available here.
There are three ways of interpreting Volume X, the title of the new album by Trans Am. The first is obvious – it is the band’s tenth studio release, comprised of ten songs that display ten unique sides of Phil Manley, Nathan Means, and Sebastian Thomson. You can also imagine a volume knob being cranked all the way up, the amplification level for an ideal Trans Am listening session. But it can also be read as a representation of the band’s remarkable ability to express, and even embody, unknown capacities, adopting bold stylistic and aesthetic shifts as a defining tenet of their quarter-century long career. Trans Am refuse to rely on their legacy as innovators, opting instead to continue to break down established modes of songwriting, even if they established those modes themselves. Volume X continues in this gloriously contrarian tradition, presenting fans with strange and familiar sounds in new contexts, from kosmische rock to futuristic speed metal to robo-balladry to variants on classic rock that are so warped as to be rendered completely unrecognizable.
“Anthropocene” opens the album with 30 seconds of serene synthesizer ambience before obliterating the stillness with a massive, fuzzy riff anchored by Thomson’s relentless, pounding groove, recorded live in the studio for maximum impact. Volume X is full of these types of disarming moments. Halfway through the sweeping, Kraftwerkian “Night Shift” the song’s syncopated shuffle suddenly becomes a throbbing motorik pulse as two drum takes are overlaid. “Backlash” creeps in with a massive synthesized low-end drone before breaking into a Kill ‘Em All inspired thrash riff that is one of the most aggressive passages the band has laid to tape. And the band saves their most poignant melody for the stripped down slow jam “I’ll Never,” with a vocoded Nathan Means intoning, “Its true, I’ll never get over you.”
Volume X was recorded in spurts over three years, mostly at LCR Studios in San Francisco, where Phil Manley has recorded many other bands as a professional engineer. He also plays in Life Coach with Jon Theodore of Queens of the Stone Age, and Thomson spends his time away from Trans Am playing drums for Baroness. The band is continues to live in separate cities, although all three have settled within the continental US for now. Trans Am will be playing shows throughout North America in support of Volume X.
Nao Sugimoto's Spekk label had been doing an excellent job of establishing itself as an excellent source of abstract hybrids of organic and synthetic sounds that were sometimes challenging, sometimes beautiful, but always captivating. Because of that, the label’s disappearance after 2011's Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns album by Janek Schaefer was disheartening. When these two new releases appeared, I was hoping that they would be a return to form, and that they are.
Opitope, the duo of Chihei Hatakeyama and Tomoyoshi Date are responsible for the first of these two new releases, the beautifully organic Physis.Given the wide array of styles both artists work in individually, it was somewhat surprising that throughout the four long pieces the music retains a rather specific, singular focus in approach.While their backgrounds include work in hardcore metal and techno projects, calm organic soundscapes are the predominant theme here.
On "An White Drop of Morning Dew" Hatakeyama and Date do pair two differing styles to one another.Shimmering bits of digital noises trade off with piano and plucked string jazz melodies that, on their own, would be too close to easy listening for my tastes.Thankfully the synthetic sounds provide a strong counterpoint that contrasts, but does not clash with the conventional instrumentation.
The remaining songs use the traditional instrumentation more sparingly, such as the chimes and guitar that do not show up until the latter half of "Light Blue Mist and Ripple", following an expanse of fascinating, but indistinct organic sounds and gentle tones.While "Warmth of Winter Woods" first focuses on overt piano and what sounds like a slowly flowing river, the other layers and passages that appear build to an almost disorienting, complex mix of noises that differ nicely from the peaceful introduction.
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The second release is from the increasingly less prolific Celer is the single piece Zigzag that has a different, developed approach to Will Long's penchant for ambient space.The most overt difference that is immediately noticeable is that rather than expansive drones, he instead works in the context of a rhythmic bounce dynamic, leading me to believe that the title could possibly be a reference to the waveform view of the piece or the amplification used in the final mix.
Beyond that, the other striking difference is a heavier use of layering and differing tones and textures throughout the 48 minute duration.The shifting tonal qualities and rhythmic feel adds to this, and even though the dynamics keep things pretty quiet, it never drifts off into the background like similarly sparse, minimalist recordings often do.
Even after its three-year hiatus, the Spekk label still impresses me, and hopefully heralds a return to a consistent release schedule.The only measurable difference is the change in packaging:the distinct, DVD case proportion die cut cardboard sleeves have been replaced with somewhat more conventional cardboard folders.Mildly disappointing, but the music retains the same quality as before, which is the most important part, even if it makes my CD shelves look a bit inconsistent.
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Suzuki Junzo has spent much of his career shifting between gentle, almost jazz influenced guitar playing and full on unhinged distortion, both as a solo artist and with projects such as Astral Traveling Unity. That hopping between extremities remains solidly in place on Portrait of Madeleine Elster, which is almost evenly split between gentle, jazz influenced playing and maximum, room clearing distortion. Its best moments, however, are when the two worlds overlap with one another and create an entirely different beast.
It is only on the title song that Junzo's playing stays muted and calm throughout.Gently strummed electric guitar is the only major element, occasionally drifting into jazz improvisation at times and then pulling to subtle strums.On "La Notte," Junzo's guitar becomes more distorted and raw in its sound, but staying under his control.The whole song ends up enshrouded by a lo-fi rehearsal room ambience, and guest Ikuro Takahashi's (LSD March) drumming has an erratic, extremely unique quality to both the sound and the rhythms.
Takahashi also appears on "When the Grey Skies Turn Blood Red," but his playing is obscured somewhat by Junzo's decidedly unsubtle, balls out guitar noise.Squealing, shrieking, buzzing feedback is the name of the game, and it does not relent for the nearly 16 minute piece.The drums have the same odd tuning to them, and when they can be heard the hybrid of free jazz improvisation and grindcore style blastbeats supplement the guitar squall wonderfully.
The closing composition, "Dance of the Inhabitants of the Invisible Tower in the Ring of Holy Mountain," makes for an ideal centerpiece of the album, and also perfectly encapsulates Junzo's sound and style.Beginning with a slightly ragged strummed guitar motif, layers are piled atop it at the perfect pace.Distorted harmonica, what sounds to be bowed guitar and possibly electronics all slowly enter the mix, resulting in an intense, dramatic crescendo that began with the simplicity of a single electric guitar strum.
Even though Portrait of Madeleine Elster is heavily built upon these opposing approaches of gentle and harsh, it is the overlap that leads it shine most.During its noisiest passages there remains, sometimes deeply buried, a sense of true beauty.At the same time, the gentle strums and deliberate notes have a distorted, raw coating to them that keeps the playing from becoming too placid, accenting it with just the right amount of grime.It is this tension between the two that give this album the strength and power it has, and it is a sound like no other.
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It has been a very long time since a formal Diane Cluck album has surfaced, as even the collages/odds-and-ends collection Monarcana dates from nearly a decade ago.  However, she has been far from idle during her "hiatus," touring regularly and releasing an irregular trickle of excellent new work through both a tour CDr and her ongoing (and ambitiously mis-named) "Song-of-the-Week" project.  Of course, the downside to that piecemeal approach is that the bulk of these new pieces (and their arrangements) will already be quite familiar to devoted fans, but those who have not been closely monitoring Diane's recent activity have a couple of her finest songs ever awaiting them.
Diane's work has undergone quite a significant evolution since her last major statement (2005's Countless Times), which is certainly to be expected–people can change a lot in 9 years and Diane is no exception.  For the most part, however, the transformation from Countless Times-era Cluck to Boneset-era Cluck is entirely a positive one, though I admittedly miss her early intensity, vocal layering, and playful sense of experimentation.  In their place, however, is a much stronger emphasis on songcraft and consistency: there are no spontaneous one-take performances or sketches to be found on this latest effort, just 8 complete, well-crafted songs that have been gradually distilled into their current states through months and months of touring.  Diane has always been an amazing songwriter and performer, but now it seems like she is quite a bit more comfortable with those roles.
While some of Cluck's earlier fire, ragged off-the-cuff charm, and chills-down-my-spine rawness may be gone, the more organic and earthy aesthetic embodied by Boneset is not entirely a softening of Cluck's edges, as her lyrics are just as personal, poetic, idiosyncratic, articulate, wise, tender, and moving as ever.  The most disquieting of the batch is one of the earlier pieces, "Content to Reform," where she addresses the EP's primary theme of cyclical death and rebirth in particularly unflinching sharp-focus ("I die and I die, sloughing off cells....everything spends out its day and then its content will reform until it breaks again.").  As bleak as that sounds (it is bleak), it ultimately comes across as a perversely joyous and eerily beautiful piece, owing largely to its moaning cello accompaniment and lilting vocal melody.
The album's other centerpiece is a relatively new song, "Heartloose" (the pieces are arranged in rough chronological order).  Again, Cluck is joined by cellist Isabel Castellvi, but "Heartloose" is considerably more propulsive and Romantic in theme than "Content."  To my ears, it easily stands among Cluck's best work, offering up great melody and lyrics that are absolutely heart-melting in their guilelessness, particularly the final verse ("And I have so much for you!  Do you know how I get shy to show you?").  Yet another fine piece is Boneset's darkly exotic closer, "Sara," which features an unusual stuttering melody; references to Hindu and Mesopotamian goddesses of destruction and the underworld, and lyrics like "her dirt rain dark down, my falling skin stripped so lonely."
If Boneset has a flaw, it is that there is too little of it.  Aside from containing only two truly new songs (the piano-based "Why Feel Alone" and the largely a capella "Not Afraid to Be Kind"), half of the songs hover around the 2-minute mark.  That latter trait inadvertently amuses me quite a bit, as it almost seems like Diane was hell-bent on perfectly adhering to Wire's famous 1977 Rules of Negative Self-Definition (no decoration; no chorusing out; keep to the point; when the words run out, it stops; etc.).  Though I am sure that Cluck crafted these pieces completely independently of advice from any aging post-punk luminaries, that aesthetic works just as well for her as it did for Pink Flag–Boneset is direct, distinctive, and powerful despite ostensibly treading genre territory that has been well-covered.  While it does not necessarily eclipse any of Diane's past triumphs (such as Oh Vanille), Boneset is most certainly still on the same level as them.  More importantly, it is a hugely welcome return for a singular artist that has been far too quiet for far too long.
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Eamon Sprod records music in the field, but don't mistake the product of his labor for a field recording. In some hands microphones and tapes are used to capture the buzz of insects or the sound of rain pelting the land—whatever the subject might be—with the intent of faithfully reproducing those sounds later in a living room or in a pair of headphones. Replication is the documentarian's craft. Sprod's is magnification. He singles out particular noises, brushes them off and, like a geologist or an archaeologist, excavates them from the sediment of ordinary commotion. His efforts yield an enlarged world of microscopic rhythms and porous surfaces, small remnants that point to the unbroken environments from which they were culled. But Sprod re-purposes those extractions as musical vehicles too, for both re-hearing and re-imagining the world.
Strata is a telling title. Maybe the perfect title for this album, because, in order to get what he wants, Sprod has to dig into the dirt. He trains his microphones on the gritty crunch of busted concrete and loose gravel, buries them in the ground to pick up the vibrations of subway trains, and lets them loose over a wide surface where dogs bark and the hum of cars, planes, and other machines mingle chaotically. Most public spaces are filled with sounds like these, but they pass by unnoticed for a variety of reasons: visual distractions pull our attention away from them or other sounds roar rudely into our ears masking the quieter noises that smolder in the dark. Some sounds require special equipment to hear and other times there is simply too much happening to catch it all at once. Whatever the case, our senses fail to report the entire scene. Sprod's method of recording and composing brings those silenced sounds back to consciousness, with a twist.
They arrive incrementally and without context, fragments of the vacant lots Sprod recorded near Macaulay Station and Moonee Ponds Creek in North Melbourne, Australia. From the piston-pumping whoosh of car engines on a raised highway to the sibilant hiss of old pipes; from birds chirping to creaking boards, to tape distortion and the harmonic ring of metal on metal, each scene appears out of the blue, placed shoulder to shoulder with its neighbors by means of sudden cuts, quick fades, and clever mixing. Rhythm and pace take precedent over the sounds themselves as Sprod turns his attention from subject to subject. A barrage of noise is followed by an expectant stillness. Dogs bark. Someone kicks a pile of rubble over with their boots and subtle effects creep surreptitiously into their midst. In places the recordings are slowed down or sped up, or are manipulated in some way to add variety.
Strategies like these might have come about as Strata took shape, or they could have been planned out in advance. The blueprint suggested by the title shows through in the way Sprod organizes his sources, but nothing like a composition can be gleaned from that organization. In absence of an outline, it’s very likely that each sequence and edit was decided by the material itself and by Sprod’s ear. There is a peak here and valley there not because of any guiding principle or master plan, but because that sequence seemed appropriate at the time and made for good music. Thoroughness might also have contributed to the album's build, as Strata uses much of its time to focus our attention on overlooked (or under-heard) phenomena. Events move through the frame only after they've been treated meticulously and no sooner. What counts as meticulous depends entirely on interest, and since this is Sprod's record, it's his interests that matters.
By intuition or by whim, Strata takes shape. And from that shape both music a deepened field materialize. All the nooks and crannies usually obscured by the bigger picture come to the fore, as if blown up under a microscope, and they bring two of North Melbourne's deserted locales back to life with them. Not just by virtue of their sounds; the music reaches further than that. It travels through the audible frequencies and into the brain where it teases the imagination to work. An awareness of how these places must have felt emerges. It's a subjective report, filtered through Eamon Sprod's subjective lense, but it captures the lay of the land in a way that few documentary recordings could.
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One of the many things that still keeps me excited about Current 93 more than 30 years into their career is that each new incarnation has the potential to be a stunning or reinvigorating reinvention of David Tibet's vision.  This latest line-up offers up an especially divergent and unexpected aesthetic, primarily due to the contributions of Dutch classical pianist Reinier Van Houdt and saxophone titan John Zorn. Although large parts of Field definitely fall a bit short for me, they are happily balanced by some truly wonderful and boldly original moments as well.
I am insistent that the opening "The Invisible Church" is a work of pure genius from start to finish, though absolutely no one seems to agree with me thus far.  It begins with some cascading and dissonant minor key chords from Van Houdt before cohering into a simple, melancholy chord progression that inexorably unfolds at a snail's pace, providing the sole constant in a song that seems constantly on the verge of unraveling.
Despite their eclectic backgrounds, every member of the group seems to organically and intuitively understand the "hallucinatory prog rock on the verge of collapse" aesthetic of "Church" perfectly, particularly former Cancer drummer Carl Stokes, whose slow-motion fills always sound like they might just abruptly stop or trail off into nowhere.  Another stand-out is Groundhogs' guitarist Tony McPhee, who contributes a host of very broken-sounding blues licks amidst the increasingly mournful oboe swells and twinkling piano divergences.  Naturally, Tibet himself is in fine form as well, purring apocalyptic poetry like a prophet in the midst of a fever dream.
That wonderful momentum thankfully extends into "Those Flowers Grew," which gradually takes Reinier's minor key arpeggios into increasingly propulsive and wild territory as Zorn's playing evolves from lyrical melodicism into something approaching free-jazz caterwauling amidst harsh snarls of wah-wah guitar.  By the time it reaches the end, it sounds positively unhinged.  Also, the sound itself is spectacular, as all of the various threads weave together with both presence and perfect clarity.  I was also struck by how comparatively loose and organic it felt, as it is rare for Current 93 to sound remotely like an actual band playing together in a room.
Unfortunately, the album then hits a prolonged lull with "Kings and Things."  Of course, the word "lull" is quite relative in the case, as Tibet himself remains magnetic and there is no dearth of great ideas–it is just that the band is never quite firing on all cylinders at once ever again.  Also, Tibet's consistent aesthetic vision of Field is a bit of an inherent liability, as I have never found a piano to be the ideal foil for his vocals and 11 piano-centric songs in a row definitely yields diminishing returns.
That lack of variety was made still more exasperating when I realized that James Blackshaw was relegated to bass and that Cyclobe's Ossian Brown was mostly just around to play hurdy-gurdy on a song or two.  Any respite from the piano at all would have been welcome, but–for better or worse–Rainier Van Houdt seems to be the primary non-David Tibet architect of this release.  Sometimes his playing is absolutely beautiful or virtuousic, particularly his runs into the higher octaves, but he can also seem weirdly leaden or straight-forward as well.  Those latter moments are quite confounding.
One such moment is the late-album nadir,"I Remember the Berlin Boys," a jaunty, lurching piece that would sound uncomfortably like it belongs in a community theater production of a popular musical were it not for David Tibet's ranting about invoking picnic demons into his loins (I certainly hope he succeeds).  Thankfully, the album unexpectedly surges to quite a strong finish after that, as "Spring Sand Desert Larks" offers up an invigorating dose of rapidly rippling, Lubomyr Melnyk-style arpeggios over a muscular waltz beat that almost sounds punk at times.  Also, it helps that Zorn turns up for some strangled saxophone flame-throwing near the end as well.  Field then draws to sublime conclusion with the tender Nick Cave- and Antony Hegarty-sung "I Could Not Shift The Shadows," which resembles a cross between a music box and an old, curiously worded spiritual.
Sadly, three or four fine songs do not quite add up to a great album or even a shadow of the band's Stapleton/Cashmore prime, but Field is at least a strange, bold, and improbable experiment that often works far better than I would have expected it to.  Tibet definitely stepped outside his comfort zone and enlisted a line-up that is bizarre even for a band that previously contained Sasha Grey, as I imagine no one ever expected a guitarist from a '70s British blues band (McPhee) and a controversial religious painter (Norbert Kox) to turn up on the same album.
Also, for lack of better wording, Field employs some very uncool elements in mostly cool ways: it is very hard to play a saxophone melodically in a rock context without sounding like you are celebrating the end of another successful episode of Saturday Night Live, for example.  I definitely appreciated that when it worked.  Consequently, Field's greatest appeal lies in its uniqueness and eccentricity rather than its quality, though I still maintain that at least "The Invisible Church" stands among Tibet's best work.  Also, it should go without saying that even a merely decent Current 93 album is more fascinating than the vast majority of the contemporary music landscape, but I will say it anyway.
 
 
 
As a genre or style, neofolk has always been more miss than hit for me. I am a huge fan of the early through mid period Death in June, Sol Invictus, and a few others, but too often it comes across like low rent Leonard Cohen with a questionable sense of nationalism. The debut from Barren Harvest, featuring members of Worm Ouroboros and Atriarch, does not fall into this trap by any means. With balanced implementation male and female vocals and a tasteful use of keyboards with the acoustic instruments, the album is somewhere between Nada! era DIJ and the stronger moments of mid-period Swans, while still retaining its own identity.
The Swans reference is most apparent when it comes to the vocals, with Lenny Smith (Atriarch) and Jessica Way (Worm Ouroboros) bearing a passing resemblance to Gira and Jarboe's work at the White Light From the Mouth of Infinity/Love of Life era of the band.While I realize this is a contentious time in that band's history, the high points on those albums were no less powerful than their other work.Like those records, both Smith and Way have that macabre, morbid quality to their voices that fits the music perfectly.
The bulk of the songs on Subtle Cruelties mesh low end synth strings with passages of gentle acoustic guitar, such as on the opener "The Bleeding."On "Claw and Feather," the sound slowly builds from these two components into a richer, more complicated mix that hits just the right level of dramatic without going over the edge.On songs like "Heavens Age," the duo emphasize guitar, with Smith's vocals channeling Nick Cave and Peter Murphy equally to give a wonderfully morose early death rock feel before Way’s somber voice kicks in to give a different feel.
"Memoriam II" is a case in which the electronic elements become the focus, with the electronics conjuring wonderfully bleak moods, and with the dramatic swells and vocals. It sounds as if it could have been recorded in 1981 at the height of post-punk."Memoriam VI" is also built more on the electronic atmosphere, with the lighter synths offsetting the darker, more desolate singing.
The greatest moments are where the two are nicely balanced, such as on "Coil Uncoil" where gentle acoustic guitar is first paired with Smith’s graven vocals, then lightened up by Way’s while everything retains just the right amount of rough hewn sound and dissonance.The album’s centerpiece is the long "Reveal," in which the duo initially emphasizes atmospheric electronics and echoing autoharp, mixed with rich, multitracked vocals from both.Slowly piano and electronics are introduced to the mix, building in depth and complexity to become the most complex and powerful piece here.
These dualities are what define Subtle Cruelties:male versus female vocals, organic guitar and synthetic keyboards, and a clashing sense of light and dark.The sound of the record conveys this as well, being both vintage in feel but modern in its approach.Even in the titling of the project and record captures the dichotomy of nature: cruel but indifferent.The album's vinyl release also deserves special mention, because in addition to the more conventional black and gold versions, a limited clear vinyl pressing is also available, with actual autumnal leaves encased in the record itself, something I have never seen done before personally.It makes for a unique presentation for an extremely singular, albeit bleak piece of music that has already made my short list for top records of 2014.
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