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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In August of 1982, Mute released the 7" single for "Life on the Line," one month ahead of the forthcoming album. It was a stark contrast to the previous single, "Saturday Night Special," released only in February that year. This too was a catchy melody, but it was unashamedly supplied by a beefy synth and almost purely electric rhythm. Frank had decided to strip the producing and engineering team leaving only John Fryer and himself at the controls. The result is arguably the favorite amongst the fans.
For me, along with a number of other contemporary listeners, Under the Flag was the entry point for many Fad Gadget fans. The popularity of Depeche Mode and Yazoo in 1981 and 1982 gained Mute widespread attention, allowing for a warmer reception from press, radio, and retail. Licensing into other countries began to take place too, and imports of the Mute's UK pressings were finding their ways overseas.
With Under the Flag, Tovey scaled back his usage of conventional rock instruments to a degree, and even in the absence of Miller and Radcliffe, it was still a Mute family affair, with Alison Moyet on guest vocals (and saxophone!) and photography and painting by Anton Corbijn. At the time, Frank's first child was born and the Brits were involved in that whole Falkland Islands mess. Frank Tovey was eager to make personal political statements and the album has a lot of reflections on conflict and loss. Tovey didn't seem to be basking in the joy of fatherhood, but commenting on the bleak world which he was born into. For me,however, the music commands the most attention.
The album's opener and closer is a bit of a cliche story of man in hard times, finds work in the government as "a civil service tool," but it's the hypnotizing pulse of the sequencer that makes "Under the Flag I" a sheer audio delight. Without a moment's rest, the punchy and playful "Scapegoat" is already in motion. Tovey is joined on vocal duties both by a chorus and a female delivering a Dutch nursery rhyme, and two songs later, "Plainsong," features almost no instruments: mainly a chorus and Tovey.
The highlights of the album actually do correspond with the singles pulled from the record this time. In addition to the lovely (and of course, completely bleak) aforementioned "Life on the Line" is "Love Parasite," which became a popular favorite due to its fat syth bass hook and simple lyrical refrains. It's easily a musical blueprint for Depeche Mode's "Two Minute Warning," from Construction Time Again, a year later. It wasn't an A side, however, but its A side was the flooringly brilliant "For Whom the Bells Toll." It is one's another sad story of loss set to a undeniably fantastic groove, but this time with yelps coming from the chorus. (The yelps were unsurprisingly removed for the truncated single version, however.)
"Under the Flag II" closes the album and it almost seems like Frank, himself, is also getting tired of the political statement: "now the story's become a bore / I don't want to hear it anymore." I actually enjoy the more caustic approach in this version, as lines like "and now the masses have been fed / suck the offal from the dead / now the joker's here to pick the sores" are entertaining to hear.
Fad Gadget played live in support of the album through 1983 but only made it half-way through the tour. Frank returned home from the Netherlands with both legs in casts following a stage dive that landed him on some steps. Other war wounds for him from the tour included, as described in the liner notes, a broken nose, two black eyes, and numerous lacerations and contusions.
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Erik Skodvin is having quite an atypically prolific year, following up a stellar B/B/S/ album and the much-anticipated reissue of Deaf Center's debut with the return of his Svarte Greiner guise.  As with all Skodvin projects, Moss Garden is quite a dark and quietly heavy affair, but it is a bit more abstract, mysterious, and longform than much of his other output.  While Skodvin's eerie Ebow work is sometimes recognizable amidst the brooding murk and seismic shudders, Moss Garden works best when it is just a billowing black cloud of seething menace.
Moss Garden is divided into two side-long pieces, "The Marble" and "Garden."  "The Marble" opens the album in fine fashion with some distant and sinister swooping noises over a simmering bed of crackle and hiss.  Gradually, the piece starts to cohere as a forlorn and subtly quavering drone fades in along with some murky, glacially unfolding bass swells. That is where the piece more or less settles for a while, content to just hang in the air as an organically undulating fog, though Skodvin stealthily keeps it unpredictable with occasional buried snarls of distorted guitar and subtly shifting harmonies.  The true beauty of "The Marble," however, lies far more in how it flows and feels than in its notes, harmonies, and textures.  Skodvin is a brilliant illusionist, artfully erasing or concealing his own presence so effectively that the piece feels like a spontaneous (super)natural event.  In fact, the edges are so blurred here that previously apt terms like "neo-classical" or "cinematic" no longer seem relevant at all, as this music feels more like a creepy dream or perhaps an apparition seeping up from the floorboards than an earthbound composition.  Actually, maybe "cinematic" is not that far off the mark after all, albeit with the caveat that "The Marble" sounds like a fully formed and very arty aural horror film rather than a mere soundtrack to someone else's images.
"Garden" is quite a bit harsher, opening with a loud and reverberant crash of cymbals that dissolves into slowly fading afterimage of grinding metal.  That crash is repeated many more times over the course of the piece, with Skodvin mischievously allowing each eruption to fade into near-silence before jarring me yet again with the next.  Between those violent outbursts, an erratically throbbing and dissonantly harmonizing drone piece begins to emerge, as does an unpredictable layer that sounds like a field recording of a pond or meadow on a summer night.  Structurally, it is quite an interesting and unusual piece, as I am wrong-footed by the violent and perplexingly timed crashes of metal again and again.  It is definitely a willfully uncomfortable listening experience.  That is not exactly a flaw though, as the lingering after-effects of the crashes make it feel like the more melodic aspects of the piece are being slowly devoured by giant rusted metal teeth.  I can certainly appreciate that.  Occasionally, some snatches of twisted strings stick around long enough to provide a glimpse of curdled beauty to appreciate as well, but the piece's true essence is primarily the strange tug-of-war between form and entropy.
If Moss Garden has a legitimate flaw, it is the one common to a lot of vinyl releases:  the album seems to exist primarily as a delivery device for "The Marble," while the B-side feels like a lesser experiment that was stretched to a similar length.  The other arguable flaws are quite a bit more subjective, as this amorphous "dark ambient" strain is not my favorite of Skodvin’s many sides and he seems to be purposely avoiding anything resembling a strong hook or immediately gratifying theme.  That said, he also manages to avoid anything remotely conventional or lazy.  As a result, Moss Garden occupies a unique and fascinating gray area: it is too bizarre, purposeful, complex, and unpredictable to work as drone or ambient music, but too "unmusical" and experimentally structured to feel like a composition.  In short, it is quite an ambitious and transcendent release, even if the second half does not quite capture Skodvin at the peak of his powers–that Skodvin can be found on the B/B/S/ album.  Moss Garden is a comparatively minor album, but there is a lot to like for those of us interested in hearing Erik stretch his disquieting vision into blackened new vistas.
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I am not sure if I am very late to the party on Croatian Amor or unintentionally getting in at exactly the right time, but Loke Rahbek's latest album has sneakily become one of my favorite releases of the year.  I suspect I would have missed Love Means Taking Action entirely had it not been co-released on Luke Younger's largely unerring Alter imprint, as Rahbek seems to have built a career out of being a shape-shifting enigma, leaving a large and varied discography of noise, power electronics, black metal, and dark wave behind him, most of which has surfaced on his own excellent Copenhagen-based Posh Isolation label (though he has also turned up in few Sacred Bones acts as well).  Also significant: Croatian Amor releases generally tend to have some kind of half-pornographic/half-conceptual motif suggestive of more harsh quasi-industrial fare.  As a result, I was quite surprised to discover that Love Means Taking Action most closely resembles the genre-fluid and dreamy Romanticism of prime This Mortal Coil.  It is anything but a nostalgic pastiche though, as Rahbek manages to capture the elusive feel of those albums while still doing something quite unusual and unique.
Posh Isolation/Alter
It is probably impossible to discuss this album without mentioning that the last significant Croatian Amor release was conceptually quite a provocative one, as 2014's The Wild Palms cassette was only available in exchange for a full-frontal nude photo of yourself.  Unsurprisingly, I do not have that release.  I hesitate to say that Rahbek has mellowed at all since then, but the conceptual side of Love Means Taking Action is a bit more accessible (if less erotic): he is freely sharing the raw material of the album in hopes that others will transform it into something of their own (a challenge that has at least been taken up by Drew McDowall and Felicia Atkinson thus far). It is admittedly a very good idea, especially since Love Means Taking Action has a very strong, instantly recognizable, and extremely malleable theme in the opening "An Angel Gets His Winged Clipped" courtesy of an unnamed female vocalist.  The same beautiful refrain explicitly appears again in more chopped and distorted form in "Like Angel," but it is entirely possible that it is unrecognizably strewn all over the whole album in various mutated incarnations, as a lot of heavy lifting is done with warped, layered, pitch-shifted, and cut-up vocals.  Stylistically, Rahbek has dabbled in very similar fare on past Croatian Amor albums, but Love Means Taking Action explores that thread in a much more cohesive and sustained way.  Also, Rahbek has largely jettisoned most of the recognizably contemporary synth and noise textures normally found on Croatian Amor releases to give Love a more timeless and "vintage 4AD" feel.
Much like a good This Mortal Coil album, these twelve pieces work best as a languorously flowing and gently hallucinatory whole.  It is hard to pick out a strong single, but that is not for lack of strong material.  Rather, Love Means Taking Action feels like beautifully lush reverie that periodically blossoms into more structured and memorable hooks.  In a perverse way, this is a brilliantly crafted and darkly sensual pop album that has been collaged, blurred, and stretched into fuzzy narcotic abstraction.  The closest Rahbek comes to a would-be hit is probably the understated and sexy "Any Life You Want," which marries a stark kick-drum pulse to clipped, decontextualized, and soulful female vocals and an erratically warbling and fluttering synth motif.  Rahbek displays pitch-perfect instincts and impressive lightness of touch throughout the piece, maintaining a deliciously enigmatic and erotic unresolved tension that never overstays its welcome or breaks its bleary nocturnal spell.  My favorite piece is a bit less immediately gratifying, however, as "Like Angel" takes a few minutes to fully catch fire.  Initially, it feels like a bit of hissing and meandering drone piece with some odd symphonic flourishes, but it improbably breaks into an especially tender and striking reprise of the album’s opening vocal theme around the two-minute mark.  Then, it remarkably gets even better, as Rahbek twists and layers that theme into beautiful new shapes.  Admittedly, it ends far too soon for my liking, but I am happy enough that it simply exists.  Elsewhere, the closing title piece is yet another wonderful surprise, unleashing a poignantly melodic synthesizer motif that feels like the climactic scene of a perfect and imaginary ‘80s John Hughes film.
This is the rare album where I have absolutely nothing to critical to say at all, as Rahbek does not make a single false move anywhere, displaying both a distinct knack for crafting great hooks and the vision to apply them to a sensuous and shadowy collage experiment that is all his own.  While a few of the shorter interludes are not particularly memorable, that seems to be entirely by design, as Love Means Taking Action is a masterfully sequenced whole that sustains a precariously dreamlike illusion for its duration while still finding seductive new shades of mood for each fresh piece.  I like every single goddamn song here–I think that only happens once a year, at best.  Love Means Taking Action is everything I could want in an album seamlessly blurred together into a sexy, sad, flickering, experimental, and warmly hallucinatory tour de force.
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Folklore Tapes has quietly been one of the most singular and fascinating labels around for the last several years, a secret that they have managed to keep fairly well-concealed with their hyper-limited, hand-made and elaborate editions that tend to disappear quite quickly.  A handful of them eventually surface on Bandcamp, but most do not: Folklore Tapes releases are nothing if not elusive and ephemeral.  Thankfully, some of the more classic releases gradually get reissued, such as this one (which had an initial run of just 30).  This considerably larger (and newly vinyl-ized) reissue has an interesting twist, however, as the lengthy Children of Alice piece from the original has been replaced by three atypical new pieces from guitarist Dean McPhee.  Given that Children of Alice is comprised of the surviving members of Broadcast, that news will likely break a few hearts, but the two playfully hallucinatory soundscapes from the mysterious Mary Arches scratch quite a similar itch.
I certainly do not envy Dean McPhee, as stepping in as the replacement for the sole and rarely heard recording of James Cargill's post-Broadcast project is quite a tall order.  Fortunately, that departed piece is slated to be included in the group's formal debut, so it has not permanently disappeared and all is well.  More importantly, McPhee is a rather unique artist in his own right, so I am always eager to hear new work from him.  In this case, the new work is a three-song suite entitled Avian Dream Songs ("The Robin," "The Nightingale," and "The Blackbird").  I do not have the accompanying book, unfortunately, so I remain regrettably ignorant about each bird's significance in Devonshire lore.  However, I do know that crows are shapeshifters, magpie calls are an ill-omen, and that jackdaw cackles "betray runes of rut so unseemly a libertine would blush."  I would love to someday hear a jackdaw-themed Dean McPhee album, but he opted more for a serene and meditative feel with these pieces rather than going for raw, full-on sex this time around.  In any case, all three pieces are languorous, lovely, and unhurried improvisations over chirping and cooing field recordings of birds.  Of the three, "The Nightingale" is probably my favorite and the most substantial departure from McPhee's usual fare, unfolding as a gorgeously subdued and melancholy flow of volume swells.  I also quite enjoyed the tranquil and sun-dappled "The Blackbird," as it feels the most like an organic interplay with McPhee's unwitting avian collaborators.
I have absolutely no idea who is behind the "Mary Arches" guise, but I definitely know that I like them.  Stylistically, both halves of "The White Bird of the Oxenhams" strike a beautiful balance between collage, kitsch, and hauntology.  Naturally, there are plenty of birds involved here as well, though the specific type of bird that kept turning up to foretell premature deaths in the hapless Oxenham clan is up for debate.  "The Room" initially seems like a rather dark piece, opening with some wonderfully dense and eerie drones and evolving into a dissonant music box motif, but it eventually takes a rather cartoonish turn with some loud snoring and plinking percussion.  It is quite a hard piece to get a handle on, covering some quite strange and varied ground over its twelve minutes.  "The Reverie" is a bit more consistently strong and immediately gratifying, as it is built upon a beautifully wobbly and swooping synth melody over a lazily jaunty groove.  There are also plenty of squelching and crunching field recordings in the periphery to make it even more evocative.  At some point, however, that all fades away and the piece sounds like a crackling old recording of a vampire blasting away on a pipe organ in his lonely castle.  Anything resembling genuine darkness is mischievously undercut with plenty of random boinging noises though, along with some weirdly hollow yet festive percussion that sounds like the missing link between Einstürzende Neubauten and Les Baxter.  Then, bizarrely, it all winds to a close with a rippling and dreamy coda of almost tropical-sounding guitars.
Needless to say, the deranged and kaleidoscopic B-movie kitsch of Mary Arches makes for a very counterintuitive pairing with the understated beauty of Dean McPhee’s trio of avian dreamscapes, but it somehow perversely works as a whole.  While the quiet simplicity and understated melodicism of McPhee's songs admittedly took a few listens to fully seep into my consciousness, they eventually became my favorite part of the album and provide a very necessary, sincere, and earthy counterbalance to the carnival of absurdity that follows.  Of course, I enjoy that aspect of the album too, as there is plenty of fun and an occasional brush with genius amidst all the gleefully wonky madness, even if the "Oxenham" pieces are a bit too long, erratic, and uneven to quite work on their own.  Ultimately, it is McPhee's subtly haunting "The Nightingale" that stealthily dominates the album and comes closest to evoking the eerie witchery and timelessness of the stories that inspired this release, but there is plenty of strange, sublime, and mindwarping terrain to explore around it.
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Functioning nicely as a teaser for the upcoming Half Blood full length on Relapse, this two track 7" sees Jenks Miller further indulging in the traditional minimalist sound that has underscored much of his previous work, but also a more overt embracing of his southern rock roots.
Miller also performs in alt-country band Mount Moriah, and that bit of southern twang bleeds over into "On The Eclipse".Meshing straight ahead southern rock with acoustic guitar pop and traditional keyboard sounds, the song musically feels far more conventional than I had expected, with the exception of Miller's growly demon vocals.The appearance of an extended guitar solo and spacey keyboards pushes the piece into a krautrock dimension in the latter half.However, the track never loses the mantra-like repetition that Horseback has always done so well, coming out in a tightly disciplined structure.
On the flip side, "Broken Orb" more fully embraces that classically minimalist sound, mixing ambient keyboards with slow, repetitive guitar layers.Other than the distant, gunshot like percussion, the track stays in a meditative, calm place throughout its seven minute duration.
I'm feeling the more rock (as opposed to metal) sound Horseback has been working with recently.Not that there's anything wrong with metal, but that combination of traditional rock instrumentation with the minimalism that’s more Charlemagne Palestine than Sunn O))) becomes a more unique beast when everything comes together.If this is a preface for Half Blood, it's going to be an awesome one.Plus, this single comes with a Horseback branded vinyl cleaning cloth, which is an odd bonus.
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Two new side-projects from Locrian guitarist Andre Foisy, the former with David Reed (Envenomist) on keyboards, and the latter a live improvisation trio with Mike Weis (Zelienople) on percussion and Neil Jendon on synths. While the two are distinct projects and releases, there is a certain shared tense bleakness that exists between the two cassettes.
Brave Mysteries, Accidental Guest
Foisy and Reed’s collaboration is perhaps the one that sounds the most like Foisy's other work, though it stands on its own.The clear, morose keyboard tone atop distant guitar feedback on "Sootfall and Fallout" reminded me a lot of the Apocalypse Now soundtrack, in the best possible way, and Foisy's disembodied screaming adds to that feeling of madness and confusion.
"Ordovician" is not all that dissimilar, but the trumpeting synths and dark, jagged guitar playing gives the entire work a dark majesty that is hard to deny.Even when the closing moments of acoustic guitar seem to drift into brighter territories, there’s still enough squealing feedback and inhuman growls that keep things evil.
The final and longest piece, "Seven Before the Throne," clocks in at over 20 minutes, spreads itself out over the duration while bringing in a slow, malignant feel.The chaos ebbs and flows, like a wave of darkness that covers everything, only rescinding slowly to come back once again.Foisy's guitar eventually comes in, initially as clear individual notes rather than his usual dense distorted clusters.Slowly but surely the track becomes more and more dissonant until finally exploding into a full on singing wall of noise.
In contrast, the trio of Kwaidan's live improvisation feels less focused, but not in a bad way.Opening with sampled strings, there's an erratic, but still structured quality to them, with shrieking feedback like an collapsing metal foundry.Sporadic percussion appears here and there, propelling the performance along with a messy shamble.
At times the mix verges on chaotic and formless, before opening up to allow in more space, allowing in pure guitar to balance out the swelling synths.The performance cycles between ambient space and ambiguous chaos a few more times before coming to its conclusion.
While both of these releases are strong in their own right, I would have to give the edge to Eolomea's tighter structure and composition.The three tracks on that tape feel more fleshed out and fully realized, while at times Kwaidan occasionally drifts into a directionless space, even though those moments are few and far between.
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With scores of releases both solo & in collaboration that stretch back for more than 20 years, Richard Youngs perhaps needs the least amount of introduction of any of the artists Root Strata has worked with. We're extremely excited to help Richard add another singular entry into his discography. Core To The Brave hits with a shock and never lets up. Composed of what appears to be blown out bass & spastic drum rhythms, these tracks cascade into shimmering loops of distortion, their weight reaching a critical mass that often feels likes it's on the verge of ecstatic collapse. Everything is elevated further in & up by that one and only voice, floating over top like a lush wind come down from the mountains.
More information here.
Ohio-based noise veteran Mike Shiflet’s decomposed visions were put into crystal clear focus on 2011's Sufferers, and Merciless is that record’s seismic companion piece. Shiflet's expertise in the field of experimental noise music has been shown on a whole host of albums, collaborations and hyper-limited releases but has rarely been framed so succinctly as on this duo of records.
Continuing Sufferers’ exploration into grim, teeth-chattering tape manipulation and drone we are introduced to the landscape of Merciless with the hospital-room grind of "Feeble Breaths," a dense slab of guitar plucks, compressed air coughs and dentists drill squeals. These sounds are crafted into grit, drone and white noise to create a slowly shifting dense wall of oddly familiar sound. It isn't all doom and gloom however, as Shiflet manages to show his tender side on the meltingly epic "Exodus and Exile" which might be his most beautiful composition to date. A cascade of synthesizer tones that echo the most haunting moments of Ligeti or even Arvo Part, this is somehow all underpinned by a sense of imminent dread. A dread which Shiflet cashes in on the album's title track, an extended collaboration with noise superstar C Spencer Yeh, who matches his signature violin abuse with Shiflet's shimmering electro-acoustic treatments.
Merciless is an unrelenting piece of work, and all the better for it. Let it sink in and prepare to have your mind prized open, you won’t regret it.
More information here.
As Julia Holter's second full-length in less than 8 months, Ekstasis has a good deal of anticipation on its shoulders. Last year's Tragedy was her big splash into the experimental music pond, packed with high-brow conceptualism that made perfect sense given her academic background in electronic composition. On Ekstasis, Holter steps into the spotlight with an entirely different take on her sound.
As Julia Holter's second full-length in less than 8 months, Ekstasis has a good deal of anticipation on its shoulders. Last year's Tragedy was her big splash into the experimental music pond, packed with high-brow conceptualism that made perfect sense given her academic background in electronic composition. On Ekstasis, Holter steps into the spotlight with an entirely different take on her sound.
In the same way Tragedy was Julia Holter's big artistic statement, Ekstasis is her big pop statement—a sprightly collection of ten crystalline, melodic, easily approachable songs. One listen to both albums back-to-back, and the differences are stark: with Ekstasis, Holter sands off the rough edges from Tragedy's labyrinthine song structures, obtuse drone and instrumental passages, and near-complete lack of earworm hooks. Given that I consider Art and Pop to be complimentary facets of the same gem ("Art Pop"), Ekstasis sounds like a natural extension of Holter's talents, if a surprising left turn given how difficult a listen Tragedy could be at times.
Ekstasis is centered on Holter's layered vocals and fluid, melodic keyboard playing. Nearly every song has a passage that is catchy, immediately hummable. Ambient sounds are now folded into traditional song structures, rather than featured in equal or greater measure to pop moments. Instruments that were prominently featured on Tragedy, like saxophone, are pared back to emphasize Holter's keyboard and vocal prowess, which is accentuated by her current three-piece live setup. (NPR recently streamed her debut NYC performance live from Le Poisson Rouge; I'll admit to tuning in from Texas and being utterly transfixed.) In short, Ekstasis is easy to love from the first spin; there is no steep listening curve. For anyone new to Holter's music, this is an obvious entry point into her sound-world.
Sequencing is key; Holter kicks off the album with three of its strongest melodies. "Marienbad" opens with her voice layered onto itself in a deceptively simple melodic sequence, as delicate as tiptoeing in fresh snow. When the full melody unfolds at the two-minute mark, it feels like watching a time-lapse video of a flower blooming in third grade science class—a cycle of beauty coming and going with each day's sun. Trumpets accent the song's stately charm. "Our Sorrows" lives up to its name, with its central melody more resigned, sorrowful, like a sigh transmitted onto sheet music. "In the Same Room" is one of the album's most lovable pieces, segueing into the mostly instrumental "Boy in the Moon" and vaguely Eastern-tinged "Für Felix" to close out the album's first half.
Side two begins with an initial reprise of Tragedy's great centerpiece, "Goddess Eyes," reframed in a choral music context, as if sung by a small choir comprised entirely of Holters. After floating through two more ambient pop gems, including the glimmering, underneath-the-stars glow of "Moni Mon Amie," "Goddess Eyes" is again reprised, this time sounding more like the vocoder-ized version from Tragedy. In its two appearances on Ekstasis, however, its context among other straightforward songs on a pop-leaning album makes it less of a focal point than on Tragedy. While "Goddess Eyes" is essentially one catchy refrain played out to lovely effect, there are stronger songs on Ekstasis. By my judgment, "Four Gardens" and "In the Same Room" are knockouts by comparison; if they don't contain quite as memorable a single lyric ("I can see you, but my eyes are not allowed to cry"), they make up for it in sheer melodic content and overwhelming emotional pull.
There are no ambitious underpinnings like on Tragedy, which based its song cycle on Euripedes' ancient Greek play Hippolytus—a bit overly conceptual for my tastes. Because of its sequencing, which leans toward melody at the start, then intersperses key passages of ambience within the songs' melodic centers (and vice versa), Ekstasis feels like it has a natural start, middle, and end, like the narrative arc of a novel. It's not terribly difficult to find reference points for what Holter is doing with her music, yet it feels utterly fresh, like she's combined elements of so much music that I love—Kate Bush's most abstract work, Cocteau Twins, Broadcast (R.I.P.), Stars of the Lid, Grouper's rare sun-kissed moments, Julianna Barwick, Mark Hollis' one perfect solo album—and fashioned them into her own distinct sound. (I'm sure Holter would cite entirely different reference points if pressed, but that's my two cents.) Ekstasis is a major step for Holter—perhaps not a step forward or backward, but a sidestep, a bold change in direction; an impressive move in today's fickle musical landscape.
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Julia Holter's debut is finally in prime position to reach a wider audience; given the broad appeal of her 2012 album, Ekstasis, to the NPR listening set, Tragedy has been graciously granted a CD pressing. If anything, the pop leanings of Ekstasis reinforce the otherworldliness of Tragedy, which remains a world all its own, conceptually daunting, rich in texture but a difficult entry point into Holter's music.
Night School (CD) / Leaving (LP/digital)
Tragedy opens with "Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art," which incorporates gently oscillating electronics, mournful strings, and static ambience that rises and falls like an ocean tide. There are occasional swells of guitar drone and Julia Holter's wordless vocals float in and out of the mix like a specter, sometimes indistinguishable from the machines fluttering around it. Halfway into the song, an insistent pulse draws a melodic frame for Holter's words, quoting from Euripedes' Greek play Hippolytus: "Try to make yourself a work of art like me / you can't / see? / only me." Clattering percussion rises up around her voice: "What your mind, so sound and safe, cannot know / this was my plot." In its final minute, the song fades back to gentle ambience, then silence.
If this sounds conceptually ambitious, even a bit overwrought, well, it is. Tragedy is a collection of songs that are such an artistic stretch for Holter, especially for her first full-length LP, that the album is simultaneously charming, captivating, and overreaching. Upon its release last August, the album generated so much hype in underground music circles that it topped Boomkat's end-of-year list, selling out its initial 500-count LP pressing in mere days. (A second pressing this year sold out even faster.) Holter has now released her second album—this year's pop-oriented Ekstasis—and I doubt she will venture back to the grandiose, left-field drama of Tragedy in future years, given her newer album's steps toward melodic accessibility.
As the album continues, "The Falling Age" begins with light-as-air vocals that sound nicked from Julianna Barwick's The Magic Place (one of last year's great overlooked albums) before dissolving into a long stretch of processed strings and Type Records-worthy drone. "Goddess Eyes" is Tragedy's lone pop moment, filtering its most memorable lyric ("I can see you, but my eyes are not allowed to cry") through a Daft Punk-style vocoder, looping it in the background while Holter intones another line from the scene of Hippolytus' fall over and over: "But in your dying you are dear to me." As a doorway into Holter's world, "Goddess Eyes" is flawless, so much so that she reprises it—twice!—on Ekstasis, where it sits well among that album's more conventional songs, but is not quite as perfectly framed as on Tragedy. In a sense, "Goddess Eyes" is Holter doing her best Kate Bush, next to the album's broader Laurie Anderson brushstrokes.
After "Goddess Eyes," Tragedy dives headlong into texture and mood pieces, offering no respite from Holter's artiness, but widening her instrumental palette. "Celebration" adds what sounds like harp (harpsichord?) and some of the most heavenly piano textures I've ever heard, folded into a 12-minute song that remains as much ambience as songcraft. "So Lillies" sees Holter twisting her vocals into loops and layers over a bed of field samples (birdsong, running water, and sampled speech) before a gentle techno pulse and harpsichord take over. "Finale" begins with rich pipe-organ chords before Holter builds up a massive chorus of looped, angelic vocals bit by bit, like an aural Tower of Babel stretching ever heavenward. It's a beautiful ending to a difficult album, incorporating melody and texture through familiar instruments like piano, saxophone, and Holter's fluttering voice.
Music this meticulously crafted and planned out, backed by a concept based around a Greek drama, is tailor-made for listeners to draw lines in the sand. In a behind-the-scenes discussion between Brainwashed writers, one person commented that Tragedy offers "enough seemingly deranged and self-sabotaging artistic decisions to keep [him] entertained." Another disagreed: "No one thinks Holter sounds suspiciously like Enya? A lot of music tows the New Age line but Holter is ridiculous. She should just cover "Sail Away" and be done with it." Either way, given the LP pressing's initial scarcity, I'm willing to bet that Tragedy was talked about more than listened to in 2011. Given its new CD pressing, it deserves listening from the broader audience now discovering her music—love it or hate it.
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