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Say goodbye to the Nashoba Valley
The final 3 episodes recorded at the Solar Lodge are done.
Episode 793 features new music from Anadol & Marie Klock, Mick Harris & Martyn Bates, Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, Anthony Rother, Olivier Alary, and Gellért Szabó's Ideal Orchestra, plus classics by Gary Numan, Diamanda Galás, Fovea Hex, and jesu.
Episode 794 features new tunes from Sir Richard Bishop, David Vélez & Bruno Duplant, Félicia Atkinson, Imaginary Softwoods, Andreas Tschopp, CM von Hausswolff & Chandra Shukla, and Carla dal Forno, plus music from the vaults from His Name Is Alive, F/i, and Dustin O'Halloran.
Episode 795 has new stuff from Object Hours, Christine Ott & Mathieu Gabry, Lili Holland-Fricke, Cabaret Voltaire, Mere of Light, Lawrence English, and Noveller, plus older stuff by Panasonic, Om, and Arthur Russell.
Hopefully we will be transmitting from the new studio shortly! Stay tuned
Sunset at Dexter Drumlin photo by Jon.
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This latest full-length from guitar visionary Sarah Lipstate is a bit of an inspired outlier, as she has expanded Noveller’s usual guitar-centric palette to include a baby grand piano, percussion instruments, and an impressively Lynchian guest vocal performance from her occasional bandmate Iggy Pop. I suspect that such evolution was inevitable, however, as Lipstate now has a new studio and has been landing some relatively high-profile soundtrack work since moving from Brooklyn to LA in 2020. Naturally, the demands of commissioned work would certainly influence her working methods and inspire some new techniques and textures. In another way, however, I Am The Weather can be seen as a return to Lipstate’s roots as well, as she spent years learning classical piano before she reinvented herself as a self-taught guitarist at age 17. As is often the case with bold creative evolutions, there are admittedly a few growing pains and missteps lurking among these nine pieces, but the bigger story is that such moments are interspersed with a few of the most beautiful pieces that Lipstate has ever recorded.
The most immediately striking piece on the album is unsurprisingly the lead single “The Girl Who Was Death,” as Iggy Pop’s unsettling and gravel-voiced monologue unfolds over a shapeshifting and increasingly howling, fragmented, and nightmarish backdrop. While this is the first time that the two artists have worked together on a Noveller piece, their collaborative relationship first began back in 2019 with a spoken word performance of Dylan Thomas’s "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" that landed on Pop’s Free album. Unsurprisingly, there is a cool riff at the heart of the piece and Pop has some great lines, but the more impressive achievement is that “The Girl Who Was Death” feels plucked from an imagined/non-existent episode of Twin Peaks. While it is undeniably cool and attention-grabbing, that outlier is a bit too brief and Iggy Pop-centered to quite capture Lipstate at the full height of her powers. Fortunately, there is quite an impressive run of mid-album pieces that swing the balance in the other direction.
Previously a digital-only release as part of Francisco López's Two-Headed Snake series of collaborations, this split release between him and equally legendary composer Éric La Casa features the two working independently, but from shared source material. What exactly that source material is never becomes entirely clear, but it gives a consistency between two very different, amazing works.
The source material specified is just 11 years of "objects and spaces," so any clear identification beyond what occasionally sounds like field recordings is pretty much impossible. Certain characteristics of sound appear clearly throughout both artists' compositions but utilized in noticeably different ways.
This latest album from Sublime Frequencies co-founder and Cairo-based expat Alan Bishop’s long-running and eclectic solo project is a bit of a pleasant surprise, as he enlisted an absolute murderers’ row of talented collaborators to record a collection of mostly original new instrumental pieces. Notably, the album is billed as “drifting closer” to late-period Sun City Girls albums like Funeral Mariachi, but that kinship is mostly true in a general sense rather than a stylistic one, as Malarial Dream is unusually lean on covers and often feels like the work of a formidable full band. It also mirrors Funeral Mariachi in its comparative listenability, as both Bishop’s solo career and Sun City Girls have their share of prickly indulgences and eccentricities. Obviously, Bishop remains the same idiosyncratic chaos element as always, but Malarial Dream places him at the center of a collection of Middle Eastern-inspired desert-psych jams recorded with an incredible international cast of killer improvisors.
Abduction
The album opens with the short and punchy “Rock N’ Roll,” which is evidently one of the album’s two “obscure covers,” as Bishop’s Dwarfs of East Agouza bandmate Sam Shalabi is credited as the composer. He also happens to be the one rockin’ the oud in the thorny and droning central riff, but the album’s strongest moments tend to be the less muscular and rock-inspired pieces that follow. In “The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin - Part 2,” for example, Bishop and Huda Asfour trade acoustic guitar and lap harp motifs over a pleasantly rolling percussion rhythm and a gently flanging synth drone. Amusingly, Part 2 bears little resemblance at all to the version that appeared on Sun City Girls’ Bright Surroundings, anyone who has been feverishly waiting three decades for its sequel to appear will likely experience some rough cognitive dissonance.
This first meeting between NYC-based composer/conceptual artist Branciforte and Belgian jazz pianist Dumoulin is an impressively ambitious and mindbending “musical dialogue” recorded over the span of two days. Both artists played separate Fender Rhodes electric pianos with their “own array of processing and effects” while Branciforte further spiced up their interaction with “a custom live editing system designed to process both musicians' outputs in real time.” The physical album is similarly unusual, as Branciforte describes it as a “multi-disc object” that divides these eight pieces into four 3” CDs that can be played in varying sequences (along with one normal-sized disc that contains the full 70-minute album in its entirety). I can certainly understand why Branciforte decided to go big with the packaging, as ITERAE is an absolutely mesmerizing and landmark release that beautifully blurs the lines between classic Oval-style glitchery, psychotropic Bitches Brew-style dark magic, and the lingering otherworldly dissonances of a great Morton Feldman piece.
As Branciforte describes it, ITERAE’s “eight modular sections hover between form and abstraction, precise sonic architecture and dream-like flow,” but a more reductionist and concise term like “ambient-adjacent” would probably suffice as well, as there are a lot of flickering and dreamlike drones at that heart of this release. That said, these pieces are considerably more harmonically complex and subtly dissonant than actual ambient music.
This long-running solo project from Posh Isolation co-founder Christian Stadsgaard has gradually evolved from its modest minimal techno beginnings into a vision that inventively blurs the lines between harsh noise, ambient, and contemporary classical. While he has certainly kept one foot firmly rooted in the noise scene with collaborative releases with Merzbow, Evil Moisture, and Government Alpha, the overall arc of the project has mostly been towards striking the perfect balance between beauty and violence. His most notable success in that regard before now was probably the static-gnawed ambiance of 2024’s The Night Has Passed Already, but The Vanity Project feels like another big creative breakthrough, as the more beautiful elements have a more timeless/sacred feel this time around that puts some significant distance between Stadsgaard and his peers in the contemporary ambient milieu. Also, both Merzbow and Government Alpha turn up to help ensure that Vanity Productions’ sharper edges remain every bit as visceral and snarling as ever.
The opening “Hoarfrost” provides an especially haunting and sublime introduction to the album, as a brief haze of whines and brittle piano fragments unexpectedly blossoms into lush organ drones that subtly warble and shimmer in pleasantly trippy ways. It gets even better from there, however, as a looping two-note “dial tone” melody fades in to provide a haunting, unconventional, and short-lived melodic hook before the piece evolves into a killer final stretch that sounds like a warmly beautiful organ mass with a seething and enigmatic undercurrent of tape loop noise squall.
Constructed from field recordings and found sounds and mutated into collages further refined via live performances, Andrew Anderson’s latest album is a final construction of these elements that have gone through multiple stages of processing and abstraction. Although most (but not all) of the building blocks that make up Thresholds have been modified into something completely different, it is the times in which these identifiable sounds bleed through that make the record even more unsettling but continually engaging.
The field recording elements of Anderson’s work are apparent from the very opening of "Until My Blood Contains All" with squealing brakes cutting through open spaces, all surrounded by rain drenched in reverb. He blends in reversed shimmers, with the various sounds drifting between what sounds like environment, and what sounds like music. The overall looping structure enforces the latter, and a clear intensity increases throughout. Again, as a balance, Anderson joins fuzzy, crunching noise with some stretched, almost musical sounds slipping through. The piece clearly transitions from being environmentally focused to a structured, musical one. A gentle melody is extended under sputtering, collapsing sounds and fuzz drenched broken radio layers.
This is the first time that Oberland (Oiseaux-Tempête) and Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) have recorded together as a duo, but the two politically minded artists are long-time friends who have been collaborating in various forms for years. The pair initially began working on pieces together in Montreal back in the summer of 2023, but the project got understandably derailed by the Palestinian genocide, which left Moumneh with “a complete artistic block and the inability to articulate what people are living through.” In the summer of 2024, Oberland invited his friend to Paris in the hopes of reawakening his creative spirit and the two worked around the clock to shape a new vision together. Notably, Oberland often “took the lead” in steering the album, which was a bit of a pattern-breaking role-reversal for Moumneh (who co-runs the Hotel2Tango studio with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in addition to his central role in JIMH). The resultant album is quite a freewheeling creative explosion that pushes each artist into compelling and unexpected new terrain.
The most surprising pieces are definitely the first two, as Moumneh’s lead vocals are digitally harmonized in a way that arguably resembles a melancholy robot. While I tend to loathe anything resembling auto-tuned vocals, that bold decision actually serves both pieces quite well, as their melodic vocal hooks provide a nice counterbalance to their more dirge-y/doom-y elements (roiling tremolo-picked guitars, slow-motion drums, distorted bass). Notably, both two pieces are arguably also the most stylistically indebted to Oberland’s Oiseaux-Tempête work, but “Dagger Eyes” in particular blows up that template with a killer mutating synth motif and a structure that blossoms into something resembling futuristic synth-driven Arabic emo. Elsewhere, “The Serpent” is a completely different left-field bombshell, as a buzzing bass throb propels a driving techno groove that unrelentingly snowballs in intensity beneath Moumneh’s digitized and chant-like vocal laments.
This latest opus from the Brooklyn-based composer/puppeteer is the second part of a planned trilogy that began with 2023’s Tin Iso and the Dawn. Notably, that last album absolutely floored me and was easily one of my favorite releases of the year, so my expectations for this next installment were quite high indeed. Happily, Osni the Flare is yet another stunner, but it feels like a bit more like a score to a larger work than it does a stand-alone album. That makes sense, as it is exactly that, yet the same was true of its predecessor as well—the music and visual elements just seem to be more intimately intertwined this time around. That is perfectly fine by me, as Allen’s concise self-description of their art as “building a world with music & puppets” is a literal (if understated) fact that wildly undersells the sheer magic and wonder of this expanding mythology brought to life through a virtuosic ballet of music, marionettes, and light.
It is fair to say that I am not normally the target demographic for either puppetry or self-created mythologies unless they are coming from an endearingly unhinged outsider art direction. However, I am eternally drawn towards artists with a bold and singular vision like a moth to a dragon’s ember and Allen certainly fits the bill in that regard. Unsurprisingly, the execution of that vision is yet another crucial consideration, as everyone knows someone who can make the most mundane anecdote seem absolutely mesmerizing and someone else who can make even the most dramatic events seem punishingly dull. Allen is very much one of the former rare souls who can seemingly make anything seem beautiful and poetic. Moreover, telling this particular story has consumed the last decade of Allen's life and it absolutely shows. This project feels like both a life’s work and a genuine labor of love painstakingly chiseled to perfection. In fact, I was genuinely amazed that this album only took three years to make given that Allen played every instrument while simultaneously crafting the hauntingly surreal puppet world that the album inhabits (and there was plenty of sound design involved as well).
Looking over his discography, Conclusio marks the first solo work from Asmus Tietchens since 2022’s Schatten Ohne Licht, which is quite a significant stretch for him. He has been consistent with his collaborations, but solo material has been less frequent in recent years. Compared to the previous album, Conclusio is less sparse in its construction, and instead is rather dense, focused, and quite intense, while consistently displaying Tietchens’s careful crafting of sound.
One consistent thing on the 12 individual pieces that make up the album, all of which are traditional song length, is Tietchens's employment of drastic shifts in volume and dynamics, with occasionally shocking results.
This is the debut release from the duo of Brian Foote (Nudge/Kranky/Peak Oil/False Aralia) and Paul Dickow (Strategy/Community Library), but the two artists have been collaborating off and on for roughly a quarter century now. Notably, however, there is absolutely no stylistic carryover from the duo’s previous projects together (Nudge and Fontanelle), as High Cube is the musical equivalent of an ‘80s Trapper Keeper featuring a bitchin’ camaro, palm trees, and the word “California” in bright pink neon letters. I suppose the same could be said of any number of forgettable vaporwave artists, but Foote and Dickow also bring serious production chops and some more eclectic influences to their bleary and simmering post-modern dance party as well. My best attempt at describing their shared vision is “it sounds like contemporary dubplates of ‘80s Japanese ‘city pop’ infected with subtle strains of early techno and hip-hop,” but the vibe is what truly matters here and High Cube beautifully evokes nothing less than an imagined and hypnagogic late-night drive through ‘80s Los Angeles with the top down and the breeze in my hair.
The hazy, neon-soaked, and vaguely retro-futurist world of High Cube was apparently a deliberately chosen “narrative mood,” which is quite an unusual wavelength for two artists to share, but I have no idea how often Foote and Dickow improvised together before they ultimately found this direction. I bring that up because the duo specifically note that the album’s direction was not defined by their gear choices. Despite that claim, however, the pair’s gear and working methods did loom large in this album’s conception in other ways, as they worked with strict, self-imposed constraints: “five machines, a one-hour timer, and a total ban on overthinking.” While Foote and Dickow do note that High Cube takes a “drier, sparser, and decidedly chunkier” approach than their previous work as a result of those decisions, the most significant impact from their newly constrained working method was that it forced them out of familiar patterns and allowed something new to organically grow as “an accident of chemistry.”
This wild second collaboration between French producer Simon Aussel and Egypt-based singer/poet/trumpeter Abdullah Miniawy is the latest installment in Dekmantel’s UFO series championing “ranky darkwave funk and industrial textures, jagged body music and overall destructive energy from the world’s most talented and tenebrous souls.” Notably, very few of those descriptors overtly apply for most of this particular album, as Dying Is The Internet feels like a bit of Trojan horse in which auto-tuned vocals, accessible songcraft, and big hooks transform subversion into a series of Arabic club-friendly bangers. That curious approach seems to fit the album’s philosophical intent appropriately, however, as the two artists envision the album as “reflection on the nature of club culture and digital fatigue” in which the internet has become “less about sharing ideas and more about surviving in a digital business ecosystem." While I unsurprisingly have absolutely no idea what Miniawy is singing about as a functionally monolingual American, he certainly brings a visceral intensity to Simo Cell’s endlessly inventive and cutting edge techno visions.
The press release for this album describes Simo Cell as “a leading light in contemporary leftfield club music, twisting up adventurous rhythms and flamboyant production in pursuit of a perpetual freshness for the floor,” which feels accurate to me as a casual fan of his shapeshifting “bass-heavy minimalism” over the last few years, as the only real constants seem to be continually reinvention and a talent for razor sharp sound design. Abdullah Miniawy, on the other hand, is a bit of an enigmatic chaos element for me, as he is known as a singer, poet, trumpeter, author, and actor and his musical output has largely been a varied series of freewheeling and eclectic collaborations that blur the lines between techno, jazz, and Arabic music. On Dying Is The Internet, he is most prominently a vocalist, lyricist, and trumpeter, but he is also credited with composing the beatless, hallucinatory, and hazed out instrumental “Tear Chime.”
