20 October 2013

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Albums and Singles

For their second collaboration, Steven Stapleton and Graham Bowers take the elements that worked so well on Rupture and push them outwards into something more bewildering, but equally as compelling. Pomp, ceremony, showbiz and a cryptic approach to musical arrangements, this is a powerfully odd and oddly powerful work by the duo. As much as I enjoyed Rupture, its heavy subject matter prevents it from being a regular addition to my listening schedule but Parade fills that gap perfectly.

Red Wharf

Given the name of the album, it is perhaps no surprise that the music largely has a touch of fanfare and a strong beat to it. Synthesised brass and strings bring to mind The Residents circa Freak Show (their last great one in my opinion) but sound far less rigid. Divided into eight movements, Parade does truly sound like I am surrounded by marching bands. Granted these marching bands are a far cry from the usual mobile orchestras seen at the St. Patrick’s Day parade or at a New Orleans Mardi Gras but the different segments fade in and out like the sound is being made by musicians in transit. The fact that the different segments also tend to be jarringly different is also reminiscent of the parades I would go to as a child; an American high school band followed by traditional Irish musicians followed by dancers dancing to pop music would not have been out of the ordinary. A psychotic brass band followed by frenetic electronic beats followed by eerie noises from the outer dark would not have been normal for sure.

Such otherworldly sounds permeate the album with pieces such as "Apes and Peacocks" and "The Bells of Hell Go Ting A'Ling A'Ling" sounding like they are celebration music from another dimension and one that might or might not be friendly. On "The Bells of Hell…" first appears one of the album’s leading motifs: amidst the clanking industrial rhythms is a scratchy recording of "Thanks for the Memory." The song appears in various stages of decay throughout the rest of the album, its presence mysterious and made all the more strange considering it keeps popping up among a slew of other oldies and showtunes. Only a sizeable chunk of Gilbert and Sullivan’s "I Am the Very Model of Modern Major General" on "Beyond the Palisade" rivals it for playtime.

Yet, Stapleton and Bowers do not rely on the music of others to propel Parade forward. Each section is a dense and intricate layering of different rhythms, melodies (some tonal, some atonal) and typically Nurse-y scrapes and clangs. "A Tissue of Deceit" stands out as being particularly good, combining hammy horror soundtrack with actually unnerving mood all on top of an upbeat but wobbly beat. It manages to be funny, terrifying and catchy all at the same time. It reaches its peak when, about three minutes in, insistent rhythms and a cacophonous range of sounds come together in a trippy climax.

The bonus disc, Diploid, is listed as an epilogue to the main event and with good reason. The single 20 minute piece feels like Parade in redux as the different themes and sounds explored during the album are regurgitated, re-assimilated and reformed into something new. Additions of creepy acoustic guitar and discordant piano add further drama to the sounds, whatever feelings of excitement present in Parade become soured and unwelcoming as if the parade has turned back on itself and was marching into the underworld. It seems almost a crime that this is not part of the standard Parade album because it is a solid way to finish off such a head-scratcher of a release.

samples:

• A Tissue of Deceit
• The Bitter End
• Diploid (Parade ~ Epilogue)

 

20 October 2013

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Albums and Singles

Following a visit to the Tate Gallery and seeing JMW Turner’s paintings, Burkhard Stangl began working on a way to represent these painted landscapes as musical soundscapes. Focusing on Turner’s unfinished works, Stengl never truly gets into the same sphere as Turner. The resulting album is a collection of superficially nice music that has little below the surface, in opposition to the elegance and depth of Turner’s masterful compositions.

Touch

Every New Year in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, a room is set aside to show a selection of Turner’s watercolors. Left by Henry Vaughan, he requested that they only be shown in January when the light was softest to do as little damage as possible to the delicate paintings. To this day, despite advances in artificial lighting, the gallery continues this tradition. This creates a sense of occasion and ceremony to the annual exhibition, the room feeling like a chapel dedicated to Turner where the works are viewed in a hushed atmosphere.

Stangl approaches Turner with a similar reverence and the music seems to be a soundtrack for such rapt and inward-facing contemplation. Using his guitar to create spacious and slowly evolving pieces, the music here is not unlike the approach that Dylan Carlson is employing in his drcarlsonalbion project. However, as with Carlson’s most recent work, Stangl’s playing does not really connect with me in any deep way. It sounds pretty but for the most part, the pieces (long pauses interspersed with small melodic units) feel contrived and lacking in emotion, as if the idea for the composition trumps the listening of the piece. Based on Stangl’s comments about the album, I am certain he is sincere in this tribute to Turner but his words seem at odds with the final form of the album.

During the first movement of "#1 Unfinished - Mellow; Waiting; Longing," the lightly strummed guitar is joined by a recording of what seems to be children playing in the rain. Deliberately obscured, the field recording fades into the murk much like the landscape fades into the canvas in Turner’s work and is a nice nod to the painter’s style. However, by leaving the opening movement unresolved like the unfinished paintings that Stangl became enamoured with, it instead makes the music feel throwaway and unwanted. An unfinished painting has a mystery and a longing to it that is completely absent in "Mellow." Especially given that it runs for about 15 minutes, about 12 minutes longer than it really should have.

Luckily, there is more to say about the second movement, "Waiting," which also goes nowhere but in a beautiful, hazy way. The guitar sounds terrific, a pulsing tremolo and slight reverb bringing to mind Stangl’s work on Fennesz’s Venice combined with what sounds like an electric organ being played ever so softly. Here Stangl’s music comes closest to achieving the goal of approaching Turner’s style from a musical perspective. The final movement, "Longing," follows the lead of "Waiting" yet never fully engages in the same way. Equally, "#2 Unfinished – Sailing" begins with a nice bit of playing but ends up going in circles for about quarter of an hour, leaving the air heavy with tedium. There is the momentary instance of a nice lick or resonance here and there though that is the best that can be said of the piece.

As if to highlight how unnecessarily long these pieces are, "#3 Unfinished – Ending" clocks in at just under three minutes and does everything that Stangl set out to do. Granted it is a lot busier than the previous pieces which might be contradictory to some notions of Turner’s work but here the guitar has both a soft, foggy presence with elements of sharp detail sticking out like gondolas on a misty Venetian canal. If Stangl had explored more in this direction, Unfinished. For William Turner, Painter would have been a much different, more effective album.

samples:

• #2 Unfinished ‚Äì Sailing
• #3 Unfinished ‚Äì Ending

 

20 October 2013

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Albums and Singles

For some reason, my favorite albums always seem to be those that come from unexpected places, a trend that delightfully continues with this third effort by Belgium's Bram Bosteels.  I was vaguely familiar with Bosteels already, but only because I had previously heard 2011's Barra Barra and casually dismissed it as "a bunch of murky soundscapes for obscure theater productions."  After hearing this latest effort, however, I found myself desperately rummaging around my house in vain hope of finding and revisiting my long-forgotten copy of its predecessor.  Hokus Fokus is absolutely deranged in the best possible way, resembling nothing less than an extremely disturbing carnival-themed nightmare.  This is easily one of the strangest albums in recent memory.

Miasmah

This is one of those rare albums that inadvertently opened up exciting new vistas of weirdness and lunacy for me, as I was completely unfamiliar with most of the artists that I have seen referenced as Bram's current kindred spirits (Gultskra Artikler and Anworth Kirk, for example).  Calling anyone a kindred spirit to Bosteels at this point is a bit of a stretch though, as Hokus Fokus finds him (mostly) abandoning his gloom-shrouded ambient past to plunge gleefully into sounding like a clown's bad acid trip.  Or a zombie Django Reinhardt performing at the cantina on Tatooine.  Or singing puppet show in hell.  Or something else equally playfully perverse that no one else has ever considered pursuing.

Despite all that, Hokus Fokus is a surprisingly musical effort, in its own gloriously wrong way.  The best pieces, such as "The A Theme," combine jaunty, jazzy guitar hooks with oddly lurching or clunky rhythms and a wonderfully wrong-footing periphery of inhuman gibbering and ghostly dissonance.  That winning formula repeats itself again somewhat with "KipKap," which sounds a boatful of demonic Oompa-Loompas singing a work song as they drift along an underground river.  The rest of the album does not quite replicate those levels of bizarrism (how could it?), but the "haunted carnival" feel of Hokus Fokus continually finds new and unexpected ways to surface as the album unfolds (noir-ish sax motifs, chattering incomprehensible voices, random honking, comically lumbering kitchen-sink percussion, etc.).

The final twist is that some parts of the album sound far more like dissonant modern classical than maniacal outsider art.  This tendency is most prominent (and effective) in the opening "Kolik," as Bram creates a wonderfully nuanced and disquieting bed of string swells and woodwinds beneath a  creepily squealing, exhaling, and echoing haze of non-musical sounds.  Remarkably, Bram handled the bulk or the instrumentation himself this time around (Barra Barra was more of a collective effort), though  a guest trumpet player turns up for one song. The fact that there is a crazy Belgian out there who can play just about anything, compose in wide-ranging and disparate styles, blend them all together into a unique and hallucinatory whole, and then happily sabotage it all with funny voices, kazoos, and an anarchic sense of humor makes me very, very happy.

My sole (minor) grievance with Hokus Fokus is that Bosteels' former dark ambient tendencies still sometimes tend to get the better of him, causing occasional lulls in the action.  Those same tendencies also make even the most cheery passages sound delightfully warped, but the balance could be a bit more optimal.  It seems silly to complain that such a massive, unexpected leap into bold new musical terrain falls short of being perfect though: I am now very much an enthusiastic fan of Bosteels and his deeply unsettling vision.

• Kolik
• KipKap
• The A Theme

 

20 October 2013

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Albums and Singles

Ba Da Bing have officially blown my mind yet again, following their 4LP reissues of the epic Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches and The Snowbringer Cult trilogy with an even more ambitious project: reissuing 2009's incredibly rare and overwhelming Daughter of Darkness cassette series as a massive 8LP box set with hand-painted album art (which took months to complete).  While it is not the best Natural Snow Buildings album by any means (no band can make a uniformly great 8-hour album), it is still quite a good one and it is unquestionably their longest, which offers a unique appeal all its own.  There are probably are not too many people who find the prospect of plunging into a seemingly endless rabbit hole of roiling, hallucinatory, quasi-ritualistic drone very appealing, but those who do have probably just found their Holy Grail.

Ba Da Bing

Daughter of Darkness is a curious anomaly within the Natural Snow Buildings catalog for many reasons, its staggering scope being just one piece of the puzzle.  For example, many of its longer pieces seem quite primitive and monolithic by the duo's standards, sounding like rather lo-fi and improvisatory experiments in oceanic, multi-layered guitar noise allowed to unfold until the tape ran out.  While that is not a bad thing at all, it feels like the formative work of a band who had not yet reined in their more indulgent impulses or turned their attentions towards structure and songcraft.

It is not, however, as Solange and Mehdi had already recorded and released at least two of their most beloved and fully realized albums by that point (the aforementioned Snowbringer and 2006's The Dance of the Moon and Sun).  Also, Daughter of Darkness was recorded in 2008, a year of utterly stupefying activity, yielding two separate triple-albums, 6 CD-Rs, and two cassettes.  Given that the duo were already near the top of their game and immersed in a bewildering melange of other projects, Darkness is not a noisy, chaotic, and sprawling monster by accident, inexperience, or youthful over-exuberance.

Consequently, the best way to view Daughter of Darkness is as a conscious attempt to push drone to its furthest possible extreme: this album is far more of an immersive, trance-inducing experience than a mere collection of songs.  In fact, there is nothing resembling a "song" at all, though some of the shorter pieces (particularly the rippling, eerie "The Source") sound very meticulously composed.  Actually, I suspect the entire album was meticulously composed on a grand scale, but that is not readily apparent when I am enveloped in the midst of it, as there are long stretches where it feels like the duo are basically treading water for ten or twenty minutes.

In reality, however, they are just working on a very different time scale than I am used to, as such stretches almost invariably give way to something wonderful that makes the whole journey seem both worthwhile and necessary (like the heartbreakingly lyrical feedback interlude lurking within the often harsh, 45-minute "Devil's Fork").  Also, Mehdi and Solange were just as ambitious with their textures, layering, and detail as they were with Daughter's duration, as they regularly make such an unearthly and apocalyptic racket that it is almost impossible to believe that it is coming from two people rather than some of sort of occultist, extra-dimensional army on the march or a horde of demons clawing their way out of the underworld through an incompetently drawn pentagram.

As awesome as that sounds, Daughter actually evokes quite a few other moods as well, which was a very good move listenability-wise.  In fact, a few interludes can reasonably be described as warm or beautiful, like the gently quavering outro of "Black Pastures" (intrusions of strangled-sounding guitar noise aside) or the lush swells of the surprisingly innocent-sounding "Will You Die For Me?"

In another context, some parts of the album ("Body Double," for example) could probably even be seen as "pretty," but not in this one: Daughter's rare oases of calm are made deliciously tense and uneasy by the fact that they are surrounded by gnarled plunges into the void with names like "A Thousand Demons Invocation" or ancient-sounding funeral processions like "Her Face Is Not Her Real Face."  While many aberrations occur all over the album's brain-frying duration, the balance of the material definitely veers between roiling, wall-of-guitars drone; quasi-occult death marches; and buzzing Eastern strings and discordant flutes.  All of those threads appear on other Natural Snow Buildings albums (and are often better executed there), but the cumulative effect is quite a staggering one nonetheless.

As with most of Natural Snow Buildings' oeuvre, Daughter of Darkness successfully maintains an unbroken and otherworldly illusion of being field recordings of some arcane ritual by a forgotten and vaguely sinister culture in the very distant past. While it is not nearly as clear, sophisticated, and nuanced as their best albums (possibly because the nuance and sophistication is obscured by the smeary, distorted production), it succeeds despite that, as the sheer scope, immensity, and extremity easily eclipse all details of the execution.  The best analogy that I can come up with is this: Daughter of Darkness is less like great, brilliantly realized art than it is like being trapped in a museum that is on fire (while an earthquake simultaneously rages).  There would certainly be beauty, vision, and genius all around me, but that definitely would not be what I remembered about the experience, which would be a lot more lasting, deep, and unique than simply seeing a lot of nice things.

(Note: the CD version of this set includes two very long bonus tracks from the Daughter of Darkness V cassette (2009, Recollections of Knulp), which are very much in the vein of the main album.  I do not think that their inclusion particularly enhances or detracts from the album in any way, but I will say that it is much more convenient to listen to an 8-hour album when you do not need to keep flipping records over. The vinyl set includes only the songs from the original Daughter of Darkness (2009, Blackest Rainbow), so that might be a better bet for feeble types who can only handle 7 hours of heavy drone in one sitting).

• The Source
• Slaves for the Afterlife
• Devil's Fork

 

20 October 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

For the longest time, I could not understand why people were so excited about this act, but last year's Carter Tutti Void album re-ignited my curiosity enough for me to give it another chance.  While it still remains a mystery to me how Factory Floor became so quickly revered, their first real full-length is intermittently wonderful and dramatically better than much of their earlier work.  Obvious Chris & Cosey comparisons aside, this trio is definitely onto something uniquely their own, stripping their thumping, retro-dance formula down to little more than a beat, a simple modular synth pattern, and Nikki Colk Void's appealingly languorous sexy-android-on-heroin vocals.  As it turns out, that is all they need.

DFA

The power of minimalism is a remarkable thing, as the only substantial difference between earlier, somewhat generic-sounding Factory Floor songs and their more recent (and superior) work is that the trio have purged themselves of all unnecessary drama, density, manic energy, and ornamentation to leave behind only sharply realized, precision-executed doses of the things that are absolutely indispensable: an insistent, unrelenting groove and (occasionally) some kind of vocal presence.  In this sense, they actually share a lot more common ground with a band like ESG than they do with Chris & Cosey.  While Void certainly sounds a bit like Cosey sometimes (and tends to also play a guitar unconventionally), Factory Floor's so-basic-it-almost-seems-naive palette of a simple beat and a few synth bleeps and blurts bears only passing resemblance to anything Chris Carter-esque (aside from perhaps sounding like it involves cutting-edge dance technology from 25 years ago).

When the formula works, it works beautifully, as Factory Floor's endless repetition and robotic blankness make for hypnotic listening (and a perversely distinct sound as well).  The most extreme example is the opening "Turn It Up," which features almost nothing but Gabriel Gurnsey's muscular, constantly shifting beat and a few creepy, heavily processed mutterings from Void.  The rest of the album is a bit more ambitious musically, but not too much: the band's resident knob-twiddler (Dominic Butler) walks a tight rope, offering up just enough of a bloopy synth hook to give each of the songs some semblance of structure, character, and catchiness, but never enough to grab the spotlight (and never anything that consists of multiple parts).  In fact, most of Butler's "riffs" have so few notes that they can be counted on my fingers and the idea of throwing in a chord change for a chorus or something seems to be utterly unthinkable (or possibly just impossible, given the gear used).

Butler's finest moment comes with the rapidly stuttering chord that makes up the entirely of the music for "How You Say" (the album's clear highlight for me), but he almost always manages to leave enough space for Void's breathy vocals, echo-ey guitar noises, and subtle samples to make their full impact.  Few bands are as adept at staying out of each other's way as Factory Floor.  As deceptively simple and regressive as some of this music might seem at first listen, it is hard to imagine many other artists handling similar territory this effectively.  It would only take the slightest misstep or bit of clutter to wreck or hopelessly blunt the impact of these songs.  It may have taken them several years to reach this degree of craftsmanship (Factory Floor have been around in some form or other since 2005), but it is not a plateau where they have much company.

The few critiques that I can make are basically ones that can be made for almost all dance albums: there are only a handful of strong "singles" amidst these ten songs and listening to a full album of such similar-sounding material tends to be become increasingly draining as it unfolds–there is a very good reason why 12" singles are the preferred format in underground dance.  Also, three pieces are basically just brief interludes rather than songs and some of the actual songs are a bit too self-consciously, kitschily "retro" for my taste ("Work Out" sounds like a mid-'80s break-dancing jam, for example).  That said, almost all of the other potential singles are stellar (a category that also includes "Here Again" and the previously released "Fall Back" and "Two Different Ways") and it is very convenient to have them all in one place, as endlessly buying singles is annoying.  In fact, Factory Floor comes damn close to being a debut album that doubles as a greatest hits album–there are certainly a few other wonderful Factory Floor songs out there (Optimo's remix of "R E A L L O V E" springs to mind), but not many are quite as good as these.

• Fall Back
• How You Say
• Two Different Ways

 

14 October 2013

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Albums and Singles

Lee Stokoe has been active for two decades but has maintained a relatively low profile with limited and self released recordings, with his biggest claim to fame having spent time with the legendary Skullflower. Like that band’s head Matthew Bower, Stokoe works heavily with guitars and a legion of guitar pedals, but the result is less raw and aggressive, and more hypnotic and minimalist. Across these two side-long pieces are repeated, meditative drones that seem to lurk just out of view, in a distant fog or mist.

Fabrica

The A side of this LP, "How She Cut Herself," is all deep muffled guitar noise.Surging, slow paced rhythms are there, but out of reach.Via filtering and reverb, he places the source of this racket somewhere in the distance, almost perfectly emulating the sound of a black metal guitar noise squall coming from a garage just down the street.Elements of harsh noise are definitely here in its singular, wall-like approach to sound, but it is never that jarring or oppressive.Throughout its 17-minute duration it hardly changes, and when it does it is mostly due to variations in frequency or equalizer settings being shifted.

On the other side, "An Oath" retains that distant, obscured effect to the sound, but has more variation and diversity throughout.Slowly rising swells of guitar begin the piece, and a wider sonic spectrum is present.Throughout the muffled recording, a multitude of harmonics become prominent amongst the unrelenting walls of noise.Harsher, forceful stabs of feedback pierce through here and there, only to pull away again, as minor variations push the composition toward a tenser, bass heavy conclusion.

Gateshead Graves is definitely not a recording everyone could appreciate.Its staunch minimalism and intentionally repetitive nature are an acquired taste, as is its idiosyncratic production style.However, the change and variation that is underlying makes for fascinating walls of sound that are closer in approach to Vomir or The Rita than a guitar-based project, but even compared to those projects the sound is more dynamic and nuanced, resulting in a difficult, but powerful record.

samples:

• How She Cut Herself
• An Oath (Excerpt 1)
• An Oath (Excerpt 2)

 

14 October 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

In a spate of recent releases, Room40 label head Lawrence English has produced three very different works on the always beautiful Winds Measure label, with some recorded as far back as a decade. While he utilizes field recordings from Japan and Australia on all three, each one sounds nothing like the other but all are indicative of the Australian artist’s ability at capturing and manipulating familiar sounds into something else entirely.

Winds Measure Recordings

Boombana Echoes, a collaboration with Japanese artist Akio Suzuki recorded in 2005, the emphasis is definitely more on instrumentation, both traditional and electronic.Suzuki performs on the Analapos, an instrument of his own creation that consists of two metal cylinders connected with a coil spring."Manorina Melanophrys" showcases this instrument immediately with its scraping, resonating metallic sound, initially jarring and violent, but then becomingmuch more calm, with almost rhythms and light, ethereal electronics finishing the work out.

"Ficus Watkinsiana" stays a bit more dissonant, with a disconcerting voice echoing around immediately setting a darker sensibility.Soon an oddly bent/shaped melody, which almost sounds like a sampled cat meow constructs some semblance of a melody amidst the heavy use of reverb and echo, before ending with a thin percussive blast from English.

Suikinkutsu No Katawara Ni is a collection of traditional field recordings from English.Recorded between 2003 and 2011, he captures various locations in both Japan and Australia extremely effectively, at times being easily identifiable sources, and other times not at all.A consistent sound that appears throughout a number of the pieces here, especially "Taima Bells" and "Slowly Turns Blue" is a wet, metallic pinging sound likely of dripping water.The former has a rapid, almost frenetic pace to it, while the latter has a calmer, more meditative pacing to it.

The plinking sound appears as a more subtle counterpoint on other pieces, such as the winds and distant birdsongs of "Bamboo Shinjuku" and the dense cicada calls and organic sounds that punctuate "Minor Lori Swings".The resonating metallic hollowness that is "Chamber" is perhaps the most different piece here: the endless reverberations of what sounds like a recording from a metal tank dominating the sound while birds can be heard far in the distance.

Studies for Stradbroke sees English recording material closer to home, namely via hydrophone on Stradbroke Island in both January and August of 2007, reflecting the two seasonal extremes.The opening and closing versions of "Slide" are the most boisterous of these eight recordings, sounding like wide expanses of silence interrupted by what could be a sped up and slowed down tape of white noise, but most likely not.

Between these two conceptual bookends are a variety of hushed, slight recordings that capture the various textures from under the water."Reeds of Brown Lake," for example, uses the subtle vibrations captured, likely ripples and waves in the water, to build an almost heartbeat like thump that adds a great sense of tension to an otherwise understated piece.

The strongest works here are the ones that present fascinating, but unidentifiable textures and natural rhythms.This is at its most obvious on the quiet clattering that almost sounds like wooden objects on "Intercepted Communications" and the brittle, yet submerged crackles of "Rock Walls," which is occasionally punctuated with a bird call or other natural interruption.In other moments they are used infrequently and amidst long passages of silence, such as on the occasional sloshing of "Slipping Grains."

All three of these releases stand strongly on their own, but I must say my personal preference leans towards Studies for Stradbroke.Even amidst its limited source material, Lawrence English captures a sonic microcosm of low frequency pulses and wet, crackling sounds that are far from being easily identified.Boombana Echoes is also notable for its significantly different approach, using more traditional techniques to create a very unique, almost musical EP of sound art.Suikinkutsu No Katawara Ni is not bad by any means, but its traditionalist approach to field recordings causes it to stand out less next to these other two very diverse works.

samples:

 

• Manorina Melanophrys
• Ficus Watkinsiana
• Taima Bells
• Chamber
• Slide (Open)
• Rock Walls

 

14 October 2013

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Albums and Singles

Gilbert has not been a prolific solo artist even after departing from Wire, but whenever he has released new material, it has been of the utmost quality, and this record is no different. A concept album on global warming and floods in collaboration with Beaconsfield Art Works (David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin) is no different. Mixing treated field recordings and electronic instrumentation, Diluvial is another high water mark in his impressive discography.

Touch

On pieces such as "The Void," the field recordings are either processed beyond recognition or are entirely absent, as the focus is on melodic drones that have a distinctly mournful mood them.Bits of static and interference come through but on the whole it is a subtle composition of understated melody and beauty."Lights" has a similarly electronic approach, mixing dark low frequency tones with ring modulated noises and crackling static.Even when the more dissonant elements take over in the second half, it always shows admirable restraint.In Esse this most certainly is not.

The natural recordings do appear clearly on "The Expanse," in the form of hollow, metallic rainfall that follows aquatic sounding oscillator passages.The closing half of the 12 minute composition is especially gentle, capturing just the most subtle sounds of water that are almost inaudible.The exact opposite atmosphereis drawn on "Dry Land," in which what could be arid desert winds are paired with subtle clicks and vibrations, and perfectly matching the imagery of the title.

"Beasts of the Earth" also goes for the literal interpretation of its name, with both recorded nature and synth derived insects swarming, as is the use of actual and virtual bird calls on "Creatures of Sea and Air."Like "The Void," "Rest/Reflection" also drops the field recordings to focus on depressive, echoing electronics that perfectly channel darkness and disaster without succumbing to cliché tactics.

The aforementioned "Rest/Reflection" ends Diluvial on a perfect note, as that final composition has the ideal balance of tension and pensiveness.Gilbert, Crawforth and Siderfin manage to capture a significant number of themes, both historic and modern, throughout this album. Creation myths and social advocacy aside, the music contained here stands on its own and serves as a reminder just how brilliant Bruce Gilbert is as an artist, and that his genius has shown no signs of reduction as time passes.

samples:

• The Void
• Dry Land
• Rest/Reflection

 

14 October 2013

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Albums and Singles

Much of Daniel Lopatin's work has been characterized by uncertainty. Even in his best moments, there was a hesitance, an aversion to commitment which staggered the fluidity of his material. In his initial presentations of synth arpeggios, there was the voice of a burgeoning artist struggling to move past process, to bridge the gap between idea and execution, to make a full measure. On R Plus Seven, Lopatin has fully realized this goal. Filled with a stupefying sureness, this record once again finds Daniel reinventing his style from the ground up, combining the dated provinces of new age music, soundtracks, and corporate ambience into something tremendous.

Warp

There are plenty of critical approaches to Oneohtrix Point Never's music, but they are rarely as interesting as the music itself. I might find a keen satire of zealous consumerism in his use of stock choir pads and chintzy muzak pianos, a laughing mockup of music from the soulless recesses of the dot-com bubble. Or, barring that exhausted approach, I could argue for an embrace of the kind of surreal futurism new age music had promised, a genuine appreciation for the art of unfettered idealism. But R Plus Seven really ought to be examined for the music alone—the innate beauty of the record upon first listen. I am instantaneously able to understand the order and chaos in the universe Lopatin has built with R Plus Seven. It is an experimental release by most standards but it is also strangely, undeniably pop.

In speaking on his creative process, Daniel Lopatin seems to entertain ideas of irreverence and simultaneously a strict working order. In minutiae, it is the former; R Plus Seven lives as a series of variables, finicky and fleeting, a compendium of far-flung, seemingly irrelevant detritus. Sudden bursts of inspiration jut in and out, and the best melodies never last long enough. There is a very direct attempt at reworking each song on this album into a frail and fractured thing; each time an order seems to be established, there will be a transition into choral drone or a sudden glottal stop that cuts it short of its inevitable crescendo, breaking it apart into fragments. But in a larger picture these pieces are the most structured work he has ever done. It is a difficult effort to find commonality between disparate pieces, but each song on this release shares a (sometimes subconscious) fraternity. The piecemeal construction makes a huge logical leap in what normally comprises a song, but in taking that leap it opens up a whole new approach to Lopatin's craft. I find myself listening to the record over and over again, bent on discovering those patterns and links with giddy bemusement. It is a triumph of function over form, and as a result the form becomes the new normal.

"Boring Angel" opens the album with a solemn drone, a jittery triplet of voices, a sudden dropout into silence, and a nonsequitur church organ. The sampled choir, a defining instrument of the album, is the most accessible entry point to this album but eventually becomes the most alienating. I have not heard something so deeply nestled in the uncanny valley in a long while, nor as purely fun. Following that is the spectacular "Americans," with its smeared microsamples and anxious clutter giving way to jubilant polyrhythmic percussion and a major key gear shift in the final minute. "Zebra" is possibly my favorite song off the record, an electrifying upbeat staccato synth pulse rolling along in conjunction with a human choir made android by granular time stretching. It then collapses, as if following the unwritten motions of a choreographed dance, before settling into a quiet peace in its latter half.

There are too many perfect bits to mention in this review, despite my want to include all of them. Among the best small wonders: the "wait" signifying the slowing of "Problem Areas'" clanging metal loops, the swung shaker beat on "Cryo" that I just cannot quite pin down, and the completely phantasmagorical climax of "Still Life," made all the more unnerving by its accompanying video, a Jon Rafman-directed spectacle of fetish horror and gratuitous digital flesh. There is a moment in "Chrome Country" where all other noise drops out and a solitary choir voice freezes in place, and I am stuck in time with it. It is at once coldly mechanical, like a program running out of memory, and warmly cathartic, human as a strained voice pushed past its physical limits. In essence, this is R Plus Seven's modus operandi: the natural/unnatural dichotomy, finding human qualities in mechanical sounds, and how well Daniel Lopatin manages to accomplish that feat.

I think the strongest praise to be said for R Plus Seven is that for all its cuts and edits, all its obtuse conceptual ambling and strangeness, it is a fully realized piece of music. In Replica, I could spot the moments where a stronger choice might have been made or a punch had been pulled. Likewise, Lopatin's early work on Rifts and thereabout was very much a fluid, improvise-then-edit kind of gradual product. R Plus Seven is immaculate; I cannot spot a piece that can be moved without ruining the puzzle. Lopatin has found an inspired path, happier and braver, run amok with grand ideas, and imbued with explosive potency. Outstanding, fantastic stuff.

Samples:

• Americans
• Zebra
• Problem Areas

13 October 2013

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This Chicago band’s career trajectory has been a singularly impressive and curious one, as they have somehow managed to continually reinvent their sound while still getting exponentially better with each new album.  Era makes that trend seem even more remarkable, as Disappears have made yet another huge leap forward despite tampering with what was arguably their best feature (Brian Case's dissolute-sounding, deadpan vocals) and losing drummer Steve Shelley to Lee Ranaldo's new band. As it turns out, neither are missed, as the band more than compensate by paring their aesthetic down to pummeling, machine-like precision mingled with great hooks and well-placed eruptions of chaos.

Kranky

The first time I put this album on, the opening "Girl" made me nearly jump out of my skin, as its transition from a clean, unadorned bass riff to full-on rock fury could not have been more abrupt or unexpected. As far as songcraft goes, it is far from the album's best moment, but its collision of drum solo, guitar squall, and obsessively repeating, heavily processed vocals achieves quite an impressive amount of brute force while staying grounded enough by its bass line to feel like a groove.  It is no small feat to sound explosive for the entire duration of a four-minute song, but Disappears somehow did it.  Presumably exhausted afterward, the band settles down noticeably for next six songs, but a few core motifs from "Girl" stick around for the duration, namely the use of guitars as a textural tool (rather than a melodic one) and Brian Case's surprisingly effective tendency to endlessly repeat brief phrases (and slather his vocals with effects).

The following "Power" is a bit of a mixed bag, as it finds Case regressing a bit into his former GVSB/Mark E. Smith-esque vocal affectations, but he certainly sounds cool doing it and it is probably the album's strongest choice for a single, mixing a darkly sexy groove, subtly snarling wah-wah, and quite a bit of laconic, syllabically enhanced charisma.  The album's other two stabs at fairly straightforward rock ("Era" and "Weird House") do not quite hit the same heights, but "Weird House" does offer some appealing unhinged vocals and some neat guitar sounds.  Fortunately, the remaining songs are all great enough to compensate for any comparative lulls the album might have.  The least of them, "Elite Typical," is a bit of a throwback to early Gang of Four/Pop Group-style post-punk (which I am the target demographic for), but the other two are a bit more unique (and both are also inarguable career highlights).

Due to both its length (9:30) and sheer greatness, it is hard to see "Ultra" as anything other than the album's centerpiece and crowning achievement.  It certainly has a lot going for it, as it combines an alternately stomping and stuttering beat with some kind of machine sample, loads of elegantly restrained guitar abuse, and some of Case's most cryptically menacing vocals (centered around an echo-heavy deadpan mantra of "If you go, I'll go").  Of course, it is the execution that matters most and that is where Disappears shine brightest, particularly the rhythm section: the groove is insistent, yet constantly shifting, maintaining a strong tension without ever quite offering any kind of relief or catharsis.  Also, in a broader sense, "Ultra" could only be a Disappears song, a significant achievement for such a historically chameleonic band, particularly since they manage to sound unique through restraint and understatement (no real choruses, no real melodies, no real riffs).

That said, my favorite song of all is the closing "New House," which has stayed stuck in my head for weeks now.  Much like "Ultra," it is built upon little more than a subdued drum part (just toms and a high-hat) and a looping bit of machine-noise, but it is even more sparse this time around and Case's vocals are even more brilliantly creepy and echoing.  I cannot think of many people besides Brian Case who can endlessly repeat a phrase like "a new house in a new town" until it sounds like nothing less than the ghoulish musings of a man with a backyard filled with dead prostitutes (I also happen to be target demographic for ghoulish musings).

Era is truly a landmark album for this formidable foursome–everything has finally come together.  While it is not quite perfect from start to finish, it may as well be.  It is hard imagine any way that its best parts could have been any better: it is basically a master class in how to sound amazing, as Disappears prove that all you need is a strong rhythm section, some good ideas, enough space for those ideas to make an impact, and enough time to strip away anything that detracts at all from overall badassness.  Equally importantly, Era is both the first Disappears album that I can happily listen to in its entirety and the first album where there are some brilliant songs that sound distinctly like Disappears and not like Disappears skillfully channeling one of their many influences (I am almost certain that I will be dismissing new bands as "too derivative of Disappears" within the next couple of years).  This is going to be all over "best of 2013" lists in a couple months.

• Power
• Ultra
• New House