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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This English guitarist's first full-length is just as impressive as last year's excellent Brown Bear EP, but displays quite a significant and somewhat unexpected evolution.  Rather than playing up the psychedelic touches and constant sense of motion that made his earlier work immediately gratifying, Dean has taken the more difficult and distinctive road of shifting his emphasis more strongly towards space and decay.  Thankfully, his melodies are usually strong enough to support that potentially perilous decision.  As a result, Son of the Black Peace is as much a bold artistic statement as it is a great album.
The one thing that most fascinates me about Dean McPhee is that his style is so difficult to deconstruct: he isn't doing anything ostentatious or overtly experimental, but there is no clear chain of influences leading to his sound.  There are definitely some subtle nods to Takoma Records, jazz, and contemporary pedal-stomping experimentalists, but Dean seems to built upon their tactics rather than their content.These four songs sound like traditional folk-inspired steel-string instrumentals that have been electrified, softened, slowed down, blurred, and improvised into something new.
McPhee is quite adept at weaving strong melodic motifs, as he proves with both the opening harmonic reverie in "Power of Nines" and the Eastern-inspired central riff of "Golden Bridge," but the true depth of his artistry is a bit deeper and less immediately apparent.  Dean wields his battery of pedals in a remarkably nuanced and ingenious way, using delay and chorusing to keep notes hanging and shimmering in the air like a fog.  That nimbus of gently quivering decay holds the pieces together (kind of like drone music) and eliminates the need to stay busy or play a lot of notes just to keep the songs' momentum going: Dean is clearly trying to bring as much sensitivity and feeling to his notes as possible.  He wants them to matter.
Well, perhaps not quite all the time, as another great facet of this album is that almost everything McPhee does is essentially a fantasia on a theme.  The basic framework of these pieces is often merely a jumping-off point for endless variations and improvisations.  That tendency could be quite tedious in the wrong hands, but Dean has a knack for deftly and unexpectedly locking back into the melody in a tight and oft-striking way.  At times, I wish he would stick a bit closer to the song's core (particularly when there is an especially likable melody), but I still enjoyed the low-level tension of wondering how he is going to pull things back together.  He even managed to surprise me a bit near the end of "Cloud Forest," as he wields feedback in a way that weirdly approximates a singing saw (while still maintaining a skeletal chord progression, no less).
Notably, this album was recorded in single takes with absolutely no overdubbing (apparently in a single afternoon, even), yet it sounds like the end result of a lengthy and painstaking process of distillation.  In fact, Son of the Black Peace feels like such a product of restless and exacting perfectionism that it seems like it only could have been recorded in this fashion–it needs  that organic, spontaneous feel as a counterbalance to make it all work (which it certainly does).  Some of McPhee's artistic decisions (increasingly abstract divergences, fewer attention-grabbing "set pieces," etc.) make this album a bit less immediately accessible than its predecessor, but it is worth the effort to get past that.  I'm admittedly a little concerned about how dangerously close Dean is to crossing the line between "refreshingly reflective and understated" and "languidly meandering," but he is staying on the right side pretty damn consistently at the moment (it helps that he keeps his releases somewhat brief though).  If it finds its way to enough ears, this masterful and subtly mesmerizing effort should quietly ensconce McPhee in the upper echelon of contemporary solo guitarists (which is exactly where he belongs).
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It seems that I badly underestimated William Basinski, as I stopped following his career several years ago out of frustration with his apparent creative stagnation.  His methods and conceptual underpinnings have certainly evolved steadily, but it seemed like the end result was always something murky, free-floatingly melancholy, and endlessly repeating, regardless of how he got there.  Then I heard this 2009 album and was unexpectedly floored.  Basinski seems to have found whatever it was that he was missing.
Or maybe he had it and lost it.  It is difficult to say, as the first three pieces here were all recorded way back in 1982.  All on the same night, actually, which is where the album derives its seemingly cryptic title (the fourth piece is a recent composition using the same source material).  Curiously, the nearly-as-excellent Vivian & Ondine (also from 2009) similarly cannibalized old compositions to great success.  At the very least, William definitely seems to be extremely adept at choosing what to revisit and release these days.  Obviously, such tactics are nothing new for Basinski (artfully re-purposing his past work is arguably the basis for his entire career), but 92982 differs from his other "recent" work in some very subtle, yet very important ways.  Naturally, the closest touchstone for these lengthy, slow-moving ambient washes of distressed and damaged tape loops is William's career-defining Disintegration Loops series.  At the risk of sounding heretical, I would say that he easily surpasses that high-water mark here.  In any case, he has certainly found a way to make his work in that vein more engaging.
Being a William Basinski album, 92982 is characteristically still pretty blurry and suffused with sadness, but the loops have a bit more of a distorted physicality than usual.  That seems like such a minor difference, but it gives the pieces a heightened presence–there's some definite heft and grittiness here that I usually find lacking in William's work.  The other, more unexpected, innovation is that Basinki recorded the original tapes with the windows open in his studio.  I can't possibly overstate how vital that seemingly trivial quirk is to the success of these pieces: it changes everything.
In the most obvious sense, the ambient Brooklyn sounds (sirens, helicopters, fireworks,etc.) that subtly drift in and out of the fog make everything seem a bit more unpredictable, mysterious, and dynamically satisfying.  The pieces are no longer mere haunting loops that glacially wax and wane for twenty minutes, but instead feel like thoughtful compositions with unconventional crescendos ("Shhhh...here comes the ambulance–this is my favorite part!").  Less obviously, allowing the sounds of the world outside to seep into the music also makes it seem much more organic and alive.  Most important of all, however, is this: on a deeper level, having such a sense of place and time makes 92982 feel like an extended love song/elegy for both a city and an entire era of Basinski's life.  They don't just sound good–these pieces have some serious emotional resonance of the "bittersweetly heartbreaking" variety.
In a way, 92982 is a perfectly realized collision between The Disintegration Loops and John Cage's "4'33"."  It narrowly misses being a perfect album though, as it arguably would have been better if it had ended after the achingly beautiful and gently swaying first half.  The argument: I'm a bit conflicted by the third piece, "92982.4," simply because it doesn't feel like it relates thematically to the pieces that precede it.  Taken by itself, however, it is quite good (if a bit overlong): a fragile, dark, and tirelessly repeating piano loop unfolds for 20 minutes as the accumulated overtones oscillate and clash uncomfortably below it.  It sounds like either a sun-warped Morton Feldman record or one of Erik Satie's nightmares.  The closing "new" piece is deeply exasperating though, as it is essentially just a sterilized version of the opening piece with all the hiss, grit, and life removed.  It's still a fine composition, but the fact that Basinki made an ill-advised cosmetic "improvement" upon something that was already perfect makes me wonder if he fully understands and appreciates what a stellar album his brilliant 1982 self made.
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Craig Tattersall and Andrew Hargreaves are The Boats, a UK duo that have an exceptional ability to mix abstract electronics, shoegaze drones, and jazz-influenced acoustic drumming into a singular work that sounds like no one else. The small symphonies and genre hopping on here are simply brilliant and unique.
On the four 10+ minute ballads that make up this album, the duo is joined by cellist Danny Norbury, which is often the one sonic constant throughout.While piano, guitar, and drums are used on almost every track, they’re often so heavily treated or modified that they bear little resemblance to their source.
What makes this all the more impressive is that The Boats mostly avoid complex DSP plug-ins and other studio processing tricks and instead use more physical strategies:well worn analog tape gives a beautiful sonic haze that the most complex MAX/MSP patch would have problems modeling.The analog cloud that covers the entire album is one of its greatest assets.
Opener "The Ballad for Achievement" begins with fuzzed out waves of sound, ebbing and flowing atop obscured melodies, resulting in a warm, inviting dissonance.Eventually the melodies break through heavy vinyl surface noise and transform into rich cello and piano passages, bringing in bells and drums in the later moments.
The cello and piano duets form the foundation of "The Ballad for the Girl on the Moon," augmented with some subtle electronics that come and go, but eventually yield for drums.In the second half, the drums and melody goes from organic to synthetic, stripped away and replaced with Casio-like synth tones and brittle drum programming.
"The Ballad of Failure" differs in its inclusion of vocals, and when combined with the guitar and percussion (initially insinuated rhythms, then actual drums) starts to resemble an extremely abstract ambient take on shoegaze.The gauzy sounds and weather-worn surface convey a clear warmth throughout, even when the more conventional moments take a backseat to electro-acoustic experimentations midway through.
Album closer, "The Ballad of Indecision," also features vocals, this time female and Japanese by Cuushe, and thus rather different from the male voice of Chris Stewart from before.Her delicate, frail vocals are accompanied by electronic sounds at first, which evolve into an organic, cello-led passage that eventually transforms again.With the addition of microscopic electronic beats, it goes back into electronica realms.
This is the first I have heard from The Boats, and I came away feeling quite impressed.The way they shape fuzzy, textural abstractions into actual songs is wonderful, bouncing from convention to experimentation with nary a hesitation.I have heard many an album that has fascinating noises and tactile textures, but few manage to use them in actual songs, which is what I found so superlative about this record.
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In their third collaboration, Christian Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto go for a more conceptual approach: Sakamoto recorded 24 piano improvisations to open concerts during a Japanese tour, each within a different key. These 24 pieces were then handed over to Fennesz, who added his touch to them. The result is a compelling, if sprawling, work of gentle improvisation.
The 24 pieces, and roughly 2 hours of music, follow similar blueprints:Sakamoto’s piano playing usually appears unmasked, or only slightly processed, up front, while Fennesz adds additional layers of guitar, electronics, or further abstractions of the piano.Like 2007's Cendre, the piano is the focus, although here that seems even more so.
This does vary somewhat throughout the individual tracks, however."0318" is clear piano notes creating ripples in a shimmering pool of sound initially, but as the piece evolves, the more abstract electronic instrumentation takes hold.Dissonant sounds, including the unmistakable buzz of a guitar cable, vie for attention on "0328," even if the piano often wins out.
While the piano tracks tend to be untreated, there are moments where digital processing commands even more attention.On "0319" and "0409," Fennesz transforms the piano sounds drastically, reshaping it into a thin, digital voice on the former and an almost xylophone like resonance on the latter.The result is more memorable and distinct tracks, and I personally wish there would have been a bit more of this strategy employed.
Fennesz's penchant for tangible atmospheres shows on "0320," which has all of the trappings of a late-summer lakeside sunset, a mood he is unparalleled at creating.He also reiterates a bit of his glitch-tinged past on "0325" and "0401," where the piano is enshrouded by noticeable, but tasteful layers of sonic grime.
I found myself actually drawn more towards the primarily acoustic pieces that are here, such as "0411," in which the synthetic parts are almost imperceptible, replaced by untreated guitar and strings that have a lot of breathing room around them, allowing a greater amount of subtlety to come through.
This album's greatest weakness is its length, however.The previous collaborations were an EP and a tidy album, respectively, so being spread across two discs, the pieces tend to blend together.Taken as individual albums, or a few tracks at a time, the rewards are much more significant.Fennesz's recent Seven Stars EP was an evolution to a more "song" oriented place, while here his work is more fragmented and oblique. It works but it doesn’t grab me as strongly.
Flumina fits nicely in with the prior two collaborations of the duo, blending Sakamoto's subtle piano improvisations with Fennesz's careful additions.While I personally prefer the more song-oriented direction Fennesz has been toying with, his abstractions work well here, balancing the organic piano notes well.Taken in small doses, this is a great disc, but in a marathon listening session, the impact is lessened.
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This archival release, captured live in Philadelphia, is a valuable companion piece to the previous Bardo Pond and Tom Carter session, 4/23/03, which was originally released on CD nine years ago, and is receiving a vinyl reissue this week. It is a joy to hear another side of Carter and Bardo Pond playing together, this time in a live setting.
Bardo Pond's mile-wide discography is a fan's dream (or a bit of a nightmare—depending on prices and availability), overflowing with live recordings, side projects, one-offs, compilation tracks, and other miscellanea. As such, the band has never shied away from collaboration. Their history with experimental guitarist Tom Carter can be traced back to 1997's Harmony of the Spheres, an essential document of '90s psychedelia, which aligned the Bardos with a handful of like-minded explorers, including Carter's primary musical outlet, Charalambides. A few years down the line, Carter—who was then living in Austin, Texas, but in the midst of a string of Philadelphia shows—stopped by the Bardos' studio space, the Lemur House, where he and the band proceeded to grind out an album's worth of improvisational psych-rock, released as 4/23/03 the following year.
Recorded two days after the Lemur House studio sessions (hence the title), 4/25/03 is just now seeing the light of day. While not a 100% essential purchase for casual fans of either Bardo Pond or Carter's work with Charalambides, this disc functions as a fine supplement to its elder cousin. Carter's chemistry with the five-piece band is apparent; in fact, he gels so perfectly that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish his playing from that of the Bardos' guitarists, John and Michael Gibbons—both a compliment and a curse. The closest parallel in the Bardos' discography is their mid-'90s collaborative work with Roy Montgomery, which resulted in two albums under the name Hash Jar Tempo. Which lineup you prefer is most likely a matter of whether you enjoy Carter or Montgomery's guitar style more. (Really, though, there's no need to take sides—I'll enjoy both, thanks.)
4/25/03 was recorded live by psych/drone/metal connoisseur Scott Slimm at Philadelphia's Tritone Bar. Both pieces—the main set, and the encore performance—are untitled. The first stretches well over 40 minutes, and takes its time finding a groove. This is by no means a bad thing, as both the Bardos and Tom Carter are adept at pacing in their improvised work, allowing the music to ebb and flow, evolving slowly without rushed changes in mood. With Carter present, the mix is a lot thicker with guitars than the marvelous Bardo live document 4.3.06, put to tape by Slimm three years later for his now-defunct (and sorely missed) Archive label.
The main set begins with Carter's sparse guitar lines, then carefully folds in two more guitars as well as bass, electronics, and drums, building to a miniature crescendo by 12 minutes. Then, just as naturally, the layers of noise peel away, and the heady jam devolves into drone and muted feedback by its halfway point. Bardo vocalist Isobel Sollenberger's wispy, stoned vocals make an appearance as the music subsides; when she begins her flute incantations at the 30-minute mark, the band takes it as a cue to pick up steam (and volume). Carter's guitar stylings blur into a mess of swirling, frenzied strumming, with the band around him locked in a rhythmic groove, blanketed with distortion. After a few minutes in top gear, the musicians downshift and allow the music to fade back again. As the volume drops, a couple premature shouts and cheers sneak out from the crowd—"WOO!"—their enthusiasm palpable.
The encore performance is distinctly more laid-back and peaceful, forgoing the monstrous peaks and valleys of its predecessor. It also clocks in at a more manageable 20 minutes. This is a smart combination of mood and length—an effective chaser to the roller-coaster the crowd just endured, which sounds exhilarating, but was likely a bit exhausting in a live setting. For the encore, the Bardos and Carter maintain a steady, relaxed tempo and allow Sollenberger's flute séance to take center stage, weaving through the empty spaces like a snake in the grass. The tonal variety between the two pieces is distinct, and accentuates one of the great things about Bardo Pond and Tom Carter: their masterful range of sounds, both apart and together, is among the widest in modern psychedelic music.
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NURSE WITH WOUND • GRAHAM BOWERS: Rupture
DPROMCD93
This CD is the first collaboration of Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound and composer/sculptor Graham Bowers. It is, without doubt, one of the best things we have ever released. It's an extremely unnerving, but also hauntingly moving listening experience.
The work is an attempt to create a musical illustration of the "goings-on" in the brain during the last hour and three minutes of a life after suffering a major stroke. It is multi-layered and is primarily concerned with the internal chaos caused by the loss of control of thought processes, responses and consequential actions, with all types of incoherent disjointed memories and present real time events - as well as moments of lucidity, panic and fear - clashing, merging and evolving.
It's essentially one long piece, but is presented in three parts:
1. "...a life as it now is,
2. ...is not what it was,
3. . ...and will never be again"
It arrives packaged in a beautiful 6 panel gloss laminated digipak, featuring artwork from both Babs Santini and Graham Bowers. The edition is limited to just 1000 copies in this format.
More information here.
Earlier this year, Lovely Music reissued Robert Ashley’s 1978 landmark Private Parts album and now along comes its follow-up: 1979's similarly groundbreaking and idiosyncratic Automatic Writing. On its surface, this album remains a haunting and uneasily dreamlike affair, as it anticipated both ASMR and the evolution of ambient music by several decades and still sounds improbably contemporary today (or perhaps just too singular to feel like it belongs to any era at all). Beneath the surface, however, lies something far more fascinating and deeply conceptual than mere ambient music (or most late 20th century modern composition, for that matter): Automatic Writing is the culmination of Ashley's experiments in using his mild form of Tourette's Syndrome as a compositional tool. Unsurprisingly, making such a quixotic endeavor work proved to be quite a challenging and oft-exasperating undertaking, but Ashley's five years of trial and error ultimately resulted in one hell of a strange and memorable album.
This reissue restores Automatic Writing to its original vinyl form, excising the two additional pieces that were added for 1996's CD reissue.Part of me is a bit disappointed by that, as I quite like both of those shorter works, but vinyl can only hold so much and something had to go.Aside from that practical reason, however, "Automatic Writing" benefits greatly from being presented as a stand-alone piece, as it is a deliberately meandering and understated mélange of mumbles, whispers, and barely-there organ melodies.As such, the spell it casts is a very delicate and precarious one, making it extremely susceptible to being overpowered by any more focused and intense accompanying material (a category that definitely applies to previous bonus track "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon").
Obviously, there is a lot of music in the world that can reasonably be categorized as "dreamlike," but almost none of it takes that challenge quite as literally as Ashley did with "Automatic Writing."It is not an exaggeration to say that this album evokes the uneasily intimate feeling of eavesdropping on Ashley as he talks in his sleep, but there is also a bit more to the experience as well.For example, there is also a whispering French woman in the room.Notably, that woman (Mimi Johnson) was Ashley's real-life wife and, moreover, her words are a newly sensuous translation of Ashley’s own murmured stream-of-subconsciousness.Also of note: Ashley viewed the piece as a wildly unconventional opera of sorts with a cast of four characters (the other two "characters" being a wandering church organ melody and "Moog synthesizer articulations" that resemble tin cans being scraped in a way that loosely mimics speech).A curious fifth element exists as well, as a buried rock groove lazily wanders in and out of the piece, mimicking the intrusion of distant party sounds from a neighboring apartment.
The piece never evolves into anything more than that, but it does not need to, as it is a pleasantly absorbing and enigmatic listening experience as long as it lasts.For those looking for a deeper meaning, however, there is an accompanying lyric sheet that arguably provides a Rosetta Stone for Ashley's mostly unintelligible murmurings.For the most part, it is a fragmented and impressionistic flow of words that approaches poetry at times and makes repeated references to sadness, falling, sensory overload, drowning, floating, and varispeed (a recording feature used to manipulate time and pitch).In his original liner notes, Ashley notes that he was in a deep depression at the time due to the world's indifference to his work and that mental state certainly seems to tenaciously bleed into his unconscious monologue again and again.In hindsight, some of Ashley's woes as a young composer are grimly funny ones, as his attempts to replicate involuntary speech in his live performances were apparently met with legal actions from promoters accusing him of drunkenness.It sounds like Ashley was also alienated from his peers though, which must have been quite hard–he makes references to "rumors" and ruefully describes himself as "the person you would cross the street to avoid."That feeling is what ultimately drove Ashley to present his involuntary speech as the core of this "opera," as wanted to portray such a person as one who deserves sympathy.Whoever transcribed that speech deserves sympathy as well, as the involuntary speech on Automatic Writing is the real deal rather than an imitation (Ashley finally managed to capture some authentic recordings of that state over a summer break in a Mills College recording studio).
I am relieved and heartened that Automatic Writing ultimately found an audience and that Ashley went on to be a deservedly influential figure, as he went through absolute hell to make this album and got quite a dose of the crushing loneliness that comes with being too far ahead of one's time (see Julius Eastman's career for an example of a considerably darker ending).As much as I like Automatic Writing, however, it is not nearly as strong as Private Parts (though I do prefer it to all of the more polished work that followed).Taken as a pure listening experience, "Automatic Writing" is appealingly immersive and unique, but it is primarily the backstory and the process that make it so compelling.Aside from straining to plumb the depths of his subconscious mind to harness its creative power, Ashley also made very inventive and radical use of both electronics and language, employing "reactive computer circuitry" and purposely modulating his voice into incomprehensibility.His hypothesis was that "rhythm and inflection could convey meaning" even if the words themselves did not make sense.He was probably right about that, but the finished piece would not work nearly as well if he had not had the additional stroke of genius to mirror his inscrutable murmurs with a woman's voice breathily echoing him in articulate French.Moreover, when all of Ashley's bold decisions are added together, it is not hyperbole to say that he willfully abandoned almost the entire accumulated wisdom of the Western musical tradition: he made muddled human speech his focus and boldly relegated melody, structure, and rhythm to distracted supporting players that wander in and out of the scene without consequence.Even if this album were not successful, I would very much admire Ashley's iconoclastic vision.Fortunately, the experiment went remarkably well.While Ashley's extreme constraints prevent this album from quite reaching the same heights as Private Parts, he undeniably transcended his self-imposed hurdles far more impressively than anyone could have ever predicted.
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Natural Snow Buildings seem to be currently locked in a rhythm in which they release one truly monster album each year and Solange Gularte's latest solo effort seems to have possibly secured that honor for 2012 right out of the gate.  More remarkable than the album's quality, however, is how restless and adventurous Solange has been in tweaking her sound.  This sounds almost nothing at all like her last album (2010's Modlitewnik) and makes some bold and somewhat surprising changes to her expected aesthetic.
In the past, I have mentioned how Natural Snow Buildings' lengthy "dream-drone" pieces were beginning to yield diminishing returns for me due to the sheer volume of them that I have absorbed over the last few years.Perhaps Solange was experiencing a similar effect herself, as she limits herself to just a few such pieces here and two of them are absolutely amazing.  "Lost Girls" and "Spine of the Night" essentially bookend the album (there is a brief coda following the latter) and they easily rank among the best drone pieces that Gularte has composed.
"Spine of the Night" is the more mesmerizing of the two, as it is a billowing, shimmering, hallucinatory cloud of bliss with just enough metallic buzz, clatter, buried snarl, and unpredictability to imbue it with serious heft and depth.  Also, it undulates and changes so constantly and so organically that it feels almost alive.  "Lost Girls,"on the other hand, is a bit more dark, earthbound, and intimate due to Solange's hazy vocals and steadily strummed acoustic guitar, but either piece alone is enough to make the entire album essential.
Nevertheless, it is the pieces in the middle of the album that make Night of Raining Fire such a unique and fascinating album in Gularte's discography.  On a basic, immediately obvious level, the disquietingly ritualistic/pagan atmosphere of Modlitewnik has been largely replaced by a more medieval feel...or, in some cases, a surreal fairy tale one.  The fragile, discordant plucking of "Horselberg," for example, sounds like the perfect soundtrack for nightmare that takes place in a snow globe.  Most of the other pieces are less dissonant and unsettling though.  The bulk of them sound like instrumental medieval ballads warped into something dreamlike and otherworldly by buzzing Indian instrumentation and forlorn, slightly-off flutes and whistles.
Despite all the buzzing and subtle dissonance, there is considerably more warmth and light here than there has ever been on previous albums.  Gularte certainly isn't softening (one glance at the album artwork should prove that), but has instead found a way to effectively assimilate a broader spectrum of emotion into her work.  That makes a lot of sense within the context of her body of work, as Solange's aesthetic trajectory has always seemed based in a fascination with ancient cultures and the more primal aspects of humanity.  Sadness, horror, and pain have always been balanced with joy, ecstasy, and other positive emotions (probably much more so before the grinding mundanity, isolation, and pervasive detachment of the modern world set in).  In fact, the presence of more heavenly and hopeful pieces like "Ascending" makes this feel unusually affecting and "human" for an Isengrind record (as well as perversely "complete").  Also, the occasional shafts of light bring welcome contrast and heighten the impact of the album's darker moments, which Solange still does extremely well.
There is some deeper and less instantly apparent evolution at work here as well.  The big changes are that Solange seems to be stepping away from density and working towards making specific textures seem more alive and meaningful.  As a result, Night of Raining Fire is filled with a dynamic array of well-placed moans, plinks, buzzes and dissonant metallic shimmers that crisply cut through the drugged, dreamy haze.  Also, she continues to get better and better at subtly shifting the emphasis from one motif to another as a piece unfolds.
I probably sound like a locked-groove because I have loved just about every recent album that Solange and Mehdi have made, but, hell–they keep making great albums.  This is simply a very vibrant, imaginative, and unique batch of songs without a single misfire to speak of.  There are certainly other Natural Snow Buildings-related releases that are more staggering, visceral, enveloping, and/or disturbing than this one, but such a comparative divergence in mood and structure from their (massive) existing body of work is quite a welcome one for me (especially when it is pulled off so beautifully).  Solange has absolutely nothing to prove at this stage in her career, so it is enormously heartening to hear that she is still tirelessly straining to increase the depth and scope of her work.
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I basically enjoyed Williams' acclaimed 2009 dark ambient opus Perdition Hill Radio, but did not find it especially revelatory or unique.  This follow-up is an entirely different story though: The Resurrections Unseen marks a huge compositional leap forward.  As expected, the mood is similarly blackened and ominous, but this effort is significantly more focused, artfully structured, visceral, and slow-burning than its predecessor: this is a rumbling, album-length plunge into the void rather than a mere series of crackling and brooding soundscapes. Fowler Collins has delivered an instant genre classic.
I basically enjoyed Williams' acclaimed 2009 dark ambient opus Perdition Hill Radio, but did not find it especially revelatory or unique.  This follow-up is an entirely different story though: The Resurrections Unseen marks a huge compositional leap forward.  As expected, the mood is similarly blackened and ominous, but this effort is significantly more focused, artfully structured, visceral, and slow-burning than its predecessor: this is a rumbling, album-length plunge into the void rather than a mere series of crackling and brooding soundscapes. Fowler Collins has delivered an instant genre classic.
Trying to pin down the difference between "good" and "bad" dark/black ambient has always been a very difficult task, as pretty much anybody with a good laptop can throw together a passable soundscape of cold, deep drones and distantly echoing crackles and scrapes.  The tricky part is making the leap from an endless, forlorn-sounding cavernous throb into something a bit deeper and more chilling.
Fowler Collins seems to have figured out the mysterious variables necessary for that evolution and employs his new-found wisdom to great success here.  I'm especially fond of his tactic of combining a deep and gradually intensify rumble with grinding, subtly pitch-shifting dissonance, which he does with "Premonitions at Dusk."  The album's best moments, however, come when William weaves layered soundscapes of blurry, ghostly-sounding synthesizers that queasily undulate and clash with each other.  The closing "Ghost Choir" is probably the most impressive and unsettling example of this, but "Warm Transport" is pretty spectacular as well.
The Resurrections Unseen wouldn't work nearly as well as it does, however, if Fowler Collins hadn't paid such close attention to the big picture: this is a beautifully coherent, thoughtfully paced, and well-sequenced album.  A few pieces, like "The Light In The Barn," and sections of the two-part "Embracing Our Annihilation" contain lengthy lulls that could be dull or momentum-killing in the wrong context.  Here, however, they are uneasy oases in a masterful album-length ebb and flow of tension and disquiet.  No passage ever overstays its welcome and William is careful to vary his dynamic attack to make each new section seem meaningful and fresh.  That emphasis on shifting dynamics is particularly effective near the end of the album, as the second half of "Embracing Our Annihilation" jacks up the low frequencies to a speaker-shuddering crescendo before giving way to the haunting, album-closing shimmer of "Ghost Choir."
Fowler Collins never makes a false, clumsy, or unnecessary move for The Resurrections Unseen's entire duration and the cumulative power of its simmering build-up is pretty amazing.  This is about as perfect, absorbing, and immersive as an ambient drone album can be.  Efforts like this and Xela's The Sublime make a strong case that an unlikely second golden age of dark ambient may be upon us.
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Ben Chasny, the sole creative force behind the scorched-earth folk music of Six Organs of Admittance, and Elisa Ambrogio, the snarling frontwoman of Magik Markers, have come together to form 200 Years. Their debut record is ten songs of hushed, pretty, and occasionally lackluster voice and acoustic guitar.
Chasny and Ambrogio's first collaborative project was Basalt Fingers, a trio that also included Brian Sullivan of anti-rockers Mouthus. Their lone album, 2007's Basalt Fingers, skewed closest to the raw aesthetic of Sullivan's band, stirring up a vicious amount of slow-building, abstract noise on its two, side-long pieces. The same year, Ambrogio contributed vocals to three tracks on Six Organs' majestic Shelter from the Ash. In 2008, Chasny co-produced, and contributed to, Magik Markers' Gucci Rapidshare Download, a cut-and-paste album built out of recontextualized pieces of Markers CD-R material and live recordings. While I acknowledge the versatility of these projects, there was nothing much to suggest that Chasny and Ambrogio, who have also toured together a few times, would record an album of back-porch, singer-songwriter tunes a few years down the road.
Still, when I spoke with Chasny back in February last year, he insisted 200 Years was his and Ambrogio's most subtle work to date: "200 Years is really quiet. It's the quietest thing I've ever done, and pretty sure it's the quietest thing Elisa's ever done, too [...] super structured, super quiet. Most of it's just her singing with acoustic guitar, really structured acoustic guitar." To his credit, Chasny was on point: this is a stripped-down, intimately recorded album where Ambrogio sings, Chasny plays acoustic guitar, and—well, honestly, that's about it. The production hides nothing, with Ambrogio sounding like she's singing from arm's length away with a Sunday morning hangover, no reverb or studio trickery within earshot. Meanwhile, Chasny's fingers squeak across his guitar strings imperfectly, like on Six Organs' lower-key recordings.
This sort of two-dimensional aesthetic is occasionally a weakness: Chasny limiting himself to all-acoustic doesn't necessarily mean he needs to set aside the psychedelic and Middle Eastern influences in his guitar playing (see 2011's excellent Asleep on the Floodplain), but on 200 Years, he does just that. His playing is gentle, often soothing, but also at its least distinctive in recent memory. There are a few subtle touches in post-production, like the wobbly guitar squeal that opens "City Streets" and sneaks into the mix between Ambrogio's verses. More notably, "Thread" adds a subtle, warm background hum of guitar feedback and occasional soft drum rolls to the album's lone abstract piece. Two thirds into the album, it's a relief to hear Chasny and Ambrogio set aside the monochromatic, singer-songwriter structure of the album for a moody, extended drone piece that nonchalantly buries Ambrogio's lyrics—not a strong selling point for 200 Years, by the way.
As for those songs following the verse-chorus blueprint, the best of the bunch is "West Hartford," which pairs the album's most memorable chorus melody with Chasny's background vocals complimenting Ambrogio's singing. It's a potent combination, warm and sunny, that makes me wish Chasny would sing more frequently on 200 Years, if only to accent Ambrogio's tuneful, but otherwise indistinctive, vocals. And while "West Hartford" is pleasant enough while it's playing, it never comes close to the transcendence of, say, Six Organs of Admittance's "Strangled Road" (from 2007's Shelter from the Ash), which stands as Ambrogio and Chasny's best duet to date. If 200 Years is a 18-18 collaborative effort, then perhaps it's time for Chasny and Ambrogio to buckle into their respective driver's seats in Six Organs and Magik Markers, where the magic truly happens.
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