Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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The Oystercatcher is the first collaborative LP from Cucina Povera (Maria Rossi) and ELS (Edward Simpson) Recorded in London over two days, hours of improvisations have been edited down to form these six tracks. A fragile interplay is at work between Maria's drifting vocals and the ominous churn of Edward's modular synth. Each sonic element takes a turn at leading the way.
The opening track "Mantle" is formed from sparse, monolithic electronics, woven gently with a thread of vocals. In the closing track "Eon," Maria's voice shepherds spontaneous bursts of sounds, almost rave-like if order were imposed, through 15 minutes of turmoil and resplendent until the end.
Maria's vocals make their own trails amongst the noise, bringing to mind the the exploratory language from Ursula K. Le Guin's album Music and Poetry from the Kesh, recalling the same understated mystery.
The overall effect of this collaboration is a completely unique creation albeit within a recognizable lineage of predecessors. The artwork reflects the vision of these two artists, collaged together. Both images are from a trip to Helsinki. Edward's photograph of tulips caught after dark are revealed by a flash. Maria's seemingly abstract drawing is a graphite rubbing taken from a granite slab of a pavement somewhere in Kallio. Together the two images represent two different methods for capturing a city's haptic landscape.
The album moves with a feeling of transience, which is no surprise given that the idea to collaborate was formed in Helsinki, realized in London and edited together in Rotterdam.
The Oystercatcher tells a fragile tale, one that spins out into the unknown. A cold union of voice and machine, still tentative and probing, learning to co-exist. A kind of fundamental shift whereby shared moments have been turned to sound.
The oystercatcher is a bird that can freely travel between the earth, sea and sky. The motif is taken from a Tove Jansson short story. A dead bird washes ashore, two different versions of events are presented to how the bird came to die. The album feels like two different stories being presented on top of one another but ultimately coming to the same tragic conclusion.
I wish I was more familiar with Tom James Scott's work, as he is an artist that has an uncanny knack for unexpectedly turning up in my life again and again. I believe I first encountered him during Bo'Weavil's heyday and then again as an erstwhile member of Liberez, but I know him best as a semi-regular Andrew Chalk collaborator. And—much like Chalk—Scott tends to keep a very low profile, quietly releasing his last several solo albums on his own Skire imprint. Consequently, this latest release is a noteworthy event, as it marks his stateside debut on Students of Decay. Given both SOD's aesthetic and Scott's past, it is no surprise that Mine is the Heron hews very close to Chalk's own understated minimalism (they do have a shared vision, after all). Nevertheless, Scott's solo aesthetic is still quite a distinctive one, as Heron is a gorgeous and melodic suite of elegant piano miniatures and blurrily sublime meditations. It is also a very intimate and diaristic-sounding album, as it feels like a collection of spontaneously improvised flashes of inspiration edited by someone with absolutely unerring instincts for capturing simple, fleeting moments of beauty.
Notably, this album borrows its title from a poetic line in Virginia Woolf's Waves, but it feels could just as easily be Scott's response to someone asking him about his spirit animal (a theory that is certainly bolstered by the cover art).Herons, of course, are famous for silently standing motionless in or around bodies of water as they await their prey.I suspect Scott departs from his carnivorous ornithological inspiration in the latter regard, yet Heron definitely sounds like an album made by someone who has spent significant time quietly contemplating nature.Herons are also known for being quite graceful, which is something that Scott seems to have internalized as well.While the instrumentation varies a bit from song to song, the overarching aesthetic is an extremely consistent one, as Scott has crafted fourteen simple and elegant vignettes of gently rippling, meditative beauty.In lesser hands, such a vision would almost certainly creep dangerously close to toothlessly pastoral New Age territory, but Scott proves to be eerily adept at translating the serene play of light across a gently lapping pond into something poignant, thoughtful, and dream-like.I am especially struck by the degree of minimalism that Scott adheres to on most of these pieces, as he largely eschews additional layers of drones or chords to keep the focus squarely on his melodic themes and his nuanced textural manipulations.Given that approach, most pieces on Heron are fairly brief, yet they all tend to feel like complete statements rather than mere promising fragments that were never given the chance to expand or evolve.Grasping exactly when and how a simple, unadorned melody should organically end is a truly underappreciated skill and Scott has clearly mastered it.   
Scott does allow himself to expand into somewhat longform territory once, however, as "Redwoods" unfolds for nearly eight minutes as a shifting fog of bleary and smeared feedback-like tones.If I had to guess, I would say it was composed on an electric piano, but both the attack and the actual notes being played are largely subsumed by the lazily oscillating and shimmering vapor trail that they leave in their wake.It is a lovely piece, but most of Heron's highlights are significantly more concise and melodic.I am tempted to say that the other pieces are less experimental as well, but it would be more accurate to say that the nature of Scott's experimentation varies significantly from piece to piece.On "In Tangled Water," for example, delicate piano arpeggios lazily cascade with an appealingly erratic tempo as repeating single notes ring out and a soft-focus swirl of hazy ascending tones unfolds in the periphery.Naturally, the central piano motif is the heart of the piece, but closer listening reveals an incredible degree of intricacy and nuance, as all the various parts seem to move together and intertwine like a single living entity (and I also loved how sneakily the quivering higher pitched tones slipped into the scene).Later, on extremely brief "The Trail Curls," Scott pulls off the inversion of that feat, as its tender, unadorned piano melody leaves so much space between notes that the attack and decay become every bit as important as the notes themselves.Elsewhere, "Hapax" revisits the languorously tumbling melodies of "In Tangled Water" on an acoustic guitar, resulting in one of the album's warmest and most rhythmically fluid pieces. 
Given the slow-moving and piano-centric aesthetic of Heron, it is very easy to forget that Scott is a classically trained guitarist, but the casual virtuosity on display in "Hapax" makes for quite an impressive reminder.For the most part, however, Scott's technical prowess is more of a behind-the-scenes asset on this album, primarily manifesting itself in his effortlessly organic approach to rhythm.While he certainly has a talent for crafting strong melodies, his greater gift unquestionably lies in how he makes those melodies dance, tumble, and hesitate in a way that feels completely liberated from rigid time signatures.Aside from that, Scott exhibits a deep appreciation for the more nuanced aspects of sound and wields that sensitivity in varied and effective ways, endlessly experimenting with backwards melodies, blurring techniques, effects, decay times, and overtones.In fact, I am legitimately amazed at what Scott is able to achieve with such a constrained palette and minimum of augmentation.Given how understated and quietly tender these pieces are, Heron was not an album that immediately blindsided me with its brilliance, yet its unusual intimacy and spare beauty stealthily burrowed deeper and deeper into my consciousness with each fresh listen and I am now fully convinced that it is a near-perfect album.If Scott has a stronger album than Heron lurking in his discography, I certainly have not heard it.
Inventions is the project of Eluvium's Matthew Robert Cooper and Explosions in the Sky's Mark T. Smith, however these instrumentals on Continuous Portrait are less dramatic than either project. This is music that would be appropriate filling a sun kissed atrium, like Grand Central Station at dawn. It ticks along at a brisk pace, with some structure borrowed from rock music, and embellishments of vocal and bird samples, strings, reeds, xylophone, and the pleasantly unidentifiable.
The album opens with a jam in "Hints and Omens," with a melody running up and down the keyboard while the other instrument sections hammer out the underlying progression. Together, Cooper and Smith incorporate synth, piano, horns, strings, ambiance, percussion, and various adorning samples while constructing a makeshift orchestra to take turns spinning light, floating melodies over all these sounds.
The large hall filter is what makes the music sound large and expansive. The bright, ebullient character is why it sounds like daybreak. It feels as if all of the songs are similar pieces of the same story, with a seamless hand-off between each song for a contiguous album experience. There isn't always a clear melody, but it still rollicks along with regular chord changes and a rhythm section to keep it pinioned in rock, or rather, post-rock territory, with atypical instrumentation.
While Continuous Portrait is not quite what I would call dense, it does shuffle along with many small parts combining together to make a balanced whole. Some samples are a perfect example of radio segue music, which is not to say that it is boring in the least. There's a playfulness here that is both fun and captivating, with an emotional lift to it.
Continuous Portrait is a simple pleasure to listen to: immaculately constructed finger snapping songs, with beautiful instrumentation and a clear idea conveyed by each one.
I have been a Severed Heads fan for more than twenty years now, yet I somehow never got around to investigating this early album until it was reissued earlier this year. I would like to blame poor distribution, as this album has essentially only been self-released up until now, but I definitely snapped up several other rare albums when Tom Ellard started reissuing them as self-released CD-Rs in the early 2000s. I suspect I was just insufficiently skeptical of the widespread belief that Ellard's golden age began with 1983's Since the Accident. I should have known better, as Clean was the last album to involve founding member Richard Fielding at all (Fielding later went on to found the similarly wonderful The Loop Orchestra). For the most part, however, Clean was almost entirely Ellard's show and it illustrates that he was already in his prime as a gleefully mischievous and eccentric loop-mangler as far back as 1980 or 1981. Admittedly, Ellard did not start indulging his poppier instincts in earnest for a few more years, but Clean is playful, fun, and idiosyncratic enough to hold up just fine without them.
I suppose just about any long-running project goes through a series of distinct eras as the artist (or artists) evolve, learn new skills, and assimilate new influences, yet Severed Heads has always felt like a uniquely bizarre entity due to the vast gulf separating the two sides of Tom Ellard's artistry.The skewed synthpop of Ellard’s late '80s Nettwerk albums came as quite a surprise to me after my early exposure to Since The Accident and City Slab Horror, as it sounded like the work of a completely different band (which is especially amusing given that Fielding had already declared the band "too rock 'n roll" in the era documented here).While I am fitfully quite fond of both poles of the Sevs' aesthetic (1991's Cuisine remains an eternal favorite), it is Ellard's more primitive and experimental early work that has always been closest to my heart.The difference between a polished pop single like 1985's "Petrol" and an album like Clean is mostly one of balance though: there are certainly some hooks and melodic synth motifs strewn throughout this album, but the weirder, artier aspects tend to be front and center.On later albums, those hooks merely became the focus while the noisier, more eccentric touches were relegated to the periphery.Obviously, Ellard has hit that precarious balance better on some albums than others, but the misses simply tend to be more uniformly fascinating on Severed Heads' more rough and eclectic early work.As far as more catchy fare is concerned, Clean’s only real stabs at "pop" are: 1.) the opening "Food City," which combines a bouncy Kraftwerk-esque groove with buried tape loops, gnarled guitar squall, and a very low-in-the-mix vocal melody, and 2.) the insistently burbling "Charivari."
My favorite moments on Clean, however, tend to be the ones where Ellard takes a strong melodic or rhythmic theme and gleefully deconstructs, destroys, or mutates it into something surreal, broken, and unfamiliar.The closing "Violins and Moonlight" is probably the strongest example of this, as it opens with an obsessively looping vocal snippet, densely sputtering synth bass, and a delicate minor key arpeggio, then coalesces into a pulsing, skeletal, and mumbled approximation of hypnagogic pop that moves relentlessly forward through a cacophony of disjointed movie and TV dialogue samples.Elsewhere, "Nightsong" strips away everything except for a stomping beat, then ravages it with a dissonant repeating guitar figure and a flanging, heaving mass of churning sludge."Tiny Fingers" twists the formula yet again, resembling two completely different pieces awkwardly mashed together.It is a tactic that should not work, but the second half turns a looping radio snippet and some gurgling, distorted vocals into something weirdly hypnotic and haunting. If I had to guess, I would say the radio snippet is from a jingle for an electronics store and that is a perfect illustration of why I am so drawn to Ellard's early work: he had a real genius for recontextualizing seemingly random snatches of cultural detritus into poignant or subversive art.Obviously, there is an element of mischief and willful absurdity to the eclectic selection of samples that find their way into his work, but it would be a reductive mistake to view his aesthetic as "taking the piss" or even "transforming trash into treasure."Instead, it would be more apt to say that Ellard simply found soul and beauty in unlikely places and did his best to bring out those traits (while also amusing himself in the process, of course).
While I am understandably still annoyed with myself for sleeping on this album for so long, there is nevertheless a silver lining to waiting until now to finally hear it: a strong case can be made that this latest reissue is the definitive version.As with all Severed Heads albums from the '80s, Clean has seen several different incarnations over the years and a bunch of them omitted "Food City."Happily, that perplexing wrong has now been righted.Of course, the presence or absence of that particular piece is not exactly a deal-breaker on its own (though it is a good song), yet this latest version has also been remastered and expanded to include thirteen additional rare and unreleased songs.Some were culled from the Side Three cassette (previously included on the Adenoids compilation), but the rest are demo and live recordings that have thus far remained unheard.Historically, I have not been an enthusiastic advocate of diluting already solid and complete albums with vault scrapings. Clean, however, is a notable exception to that viewpoint, as a number of the new songs are remarkably fine tape loop collages ("You Will," "Floopness," "Somehow Pain," and the lengthy "Clean Loops" are all standouts).In fact, I prefer several of them to the songs that made it onto the original album.Granted, all of best loop-based pieces lack Ellard's vocal or synth contributions, so I suppose they represent an earlier vision of the project (and a very non-rock ‘n roll one at that), but there are also some less abstract "songs" included in the extra material and I like them too.It is crazy that it took forty years for all that material to finally surface.Naturally, my initial thought was that Ellard was responsible for some of the most warped, adventurous, and original electronic music on earth in the early '80s and that humanity should have paid far more attention to him.However, the bigger surprise is probably how well much of this material still holds up in 2020 though: Clean might not be well-produced, sophisticated, or pretty by current standards, but it remains an endearingly rough-edged, playful, and satisfying outlier: the ensuring four decades have done nothing to diminish its charm and character.While Ellard himself eventually moved on to catchier territory, no one else has yet emerged who could better early Severed Heads at their own game and it is likely that no one ever will.
Boston-based string maestro Joseph Allred quietly releases, on average, around three or four albums a year, a catalog consisting of mostly instrumental works with vocals on an occasional song. This set of instrumentals consists of five examples of technical fingerpick showmanship that surrounds listeners with an outpouring of emotive musical warmth, wordless stories that communicate straight to the soul.
Boston-based string maestro Joseph Allred quietly releases, on average, around three or four albums a year, a catalog consisting of mostly instrumental works with vocals on an occasional song. This set of instrumentals consists of five examples of technical fingerpick showmanship that surrounds listeners with an outpouring of emotive musical warmth, wordless stories that communicate straight to the soul.
It would be quite easy to define Allred as a fingerpick guitarist, or group Allred into the Guitar Soli category, a solo acoustic guitar movement that flourished between 1966 and 1981 and bridged a gap between American Primitivism (John Fahey, Robbie Basho) and California Modernism (Michael Hedges, William Ackerman). Yet, this barely scratches the surface of the broad work and mind of Allred.
Joseph started releasing work as a solo artist in 2013, and became a practicing artist around the same time. The cover of The True Llight displays an obvious jumble of information in the form of magazine words and headlines (the most visible word being "chatter") and a warm-colored fiery light that seems to emanate from the center of it all, almost as if it were burning its way through the chaos. The title itself seems to stem from biblical reference in John 1:9: "The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world." With pieces like "Who Will Heal Your Wounds," "Bethsaida," and "A Wreath for the Head," Allred quite clearly embraces religious imagery on this album. Although there are no words at all, the passion by which the songs are executed make the topic of conversation quite clear; regardless of the listener’s religious affiliations, the evocative musical flow work to take the listener on a transcendental journey of heartful proportions, a seamless weave of sounds joyful and sad, soft and intense.
Since starting a musical journey in 2000 playing electric guitar in rock bands, Allred has created various incarnations, each one serving as a persona through which to craft musical stories that revolve around innate truths. A previous incarnation was Poor Faulkner, a lonely middle-aged man dealing with deep, inner sadness and haunted by ghosts, some of his own making, and embarking on a journey to transcend the trappings of humanity.
Allred began composing music for acoustic guitar as a way to deal with personal demons — demons that nearly lead to death. Between music as an outlet and weaving the practice of mindfulness into that art, thankfully Allred has continued to not only produce a catalog of deeply meaningful and genuine human expression through music for personal benefit, but one that extends to others as a musical panacea for the troubled soul.
Boston-based string maestro Joseph Allred quietly releases, on average, around 3 or 4 albums a year, a catalog consisting of mostly instrumental works with vocals on an occasional song. This set of instrumentals consists of 5 tracks of technical fingerpick showmanship that surrounds the listener with an outpouring of emotive musical warmth, wordless stories that communicate straight to the soul. One of the most talented guitarists today, Allred is recommended if you recognize the names Fahey, Basho, Jansch, or Kottke -- Allred is all of those mentioned, and much more. If you're new to Allred's catalog, this is a gorgeous entry point to get introduced.
Composed, performed & mixed by Heather Leigh "at home with the window open” in Glasgow, the fifth release in our Documenting Sound series is a shocking half hour of music; a 13 track opus that is, by any measure, nothing short of a modernist folk masterpiece. Recorded quickly and instinctively in April this year and described by David Keenan as sounding like "a cross between Meredith Monk, DOME and A Guy Called Gerald," it continues to reveal new dimensions with every listen.
Heather Leigh is a musical polymath in the truest sense of the word; primarily known as an influential practitioner of pedal steel guitar, her work is impossible to pigeonhole - all-over-the-place in the best way, from collaborations with Peter Brötzmann and Shackleton to a properly mind-bending duo of albums for Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ and Editions Mego - hers is a sound that’s both highly sensual and aesthetically aggressive, beautiful and fearless, always exploratory.
Played on pedal steel guitar, synthesizer and cuatro, and featuring Heather Leigh's voice throughout, the songs here capture a sense of physical longing wrapped up in a boundless creative energy. What started out as hours of diaristic recordings quickly became honed and crafted into powerful and highly memorable songs - vast in scope and depth of feeling. It’s hard to fathom that these 13 songs were made on the hoof, they capture that most elusive of artistic qualities - a compulsion to evolve.
Working on this series has been a real eye-opener for us, a thought experiment turned real - what happens when an established artist is asked to produce material quickly and without much pre-planning or afterthought? The answer, so often, has been an immense pleasure to behold. But this one, this one’s unreal.
Longform Editions 14 presents four new immersive listening experiences, featuring Carmen Villain’s atmospheric fourth-world expansions, two ambient masters in Japan’s Chihei Hatakeyama and Will Long’s Celer project, as well as piano minimalism from New York composer Michael Vincent Waller. These artists’ works investigate sound, listening and environment to engage you in a space for a period that reminds you there is a present beyond the clutter of our everyday.
Carmen Villain Affection in a Time of Crisis LE053 Norway's Carmen Villain creates a cosmic atmosphere with a narcotic pull, offering an enveloping space where emotive resonance rules over experimentation. "Listening to something for a long time reveals new layers and details and tones, for me, it engages and relaxes the mind in the best possible way."
Chihei Hatakeyama Blue Goat LE054 Japan's Chihei Hatakeyama has been long known for gorgeous, drifting ambience that uncurls like smoke to reveal slowly changing shapes and textures weaving through each piece. He says Blue Goat is "influenced by the melody of Angelo Badalamenti, who I listened to when writing this piece."
Celer For The Meantime LE055 Recently cited in Resident Advisor by influential writer Simon Reynolds as producing some of the modern era's best ambient and new age music, Celer's Will Long is no stranger to massive works playing on temporality through sound. "The idea of change is ever-present… for the meantime, let's pretend we can keep this moment forever."
Michael Vincent Waller A Song LE056 The understated work of Michael Vincent Waller becomes a thing of minimalist beauty on his solo piano composition, "A Song." This lyrical, impressionistic work explores the subtle gravity of harmonies with an inward gaze. "Deep listening can be understood as a state of mind, that facilitates a deeper awareness of sound, as with one's experiential involvement with musical listening."
I have always appreciated in all of Gauntletier's projects how he brings in just the right amount of grime to his otherwise intricate productions, making for an amazing sense of depth while never becoming too polished or unnatural.That was true for Ars Phoenix, for Pass/Ages, and certainly here.Right from the onset of opener "Pure Horror" this is true:ghostly, decrepit loops are paired with bass passages to give a raw, slightly noise tinged sensibility, before he carefully fleshes the song out with a rigid drum machine, ghostly synths, and heavily echoed vocals.
He works from a similar template on "No Exit," initially a blend of nuanced synth sequences peppered with distorted, buzzing surges of sound to disrupt everything effortlessly.It builds into a slow lurch, with up front vocals and a mix that balances the noisy with the poppy, before eventually solidifying into a more straight ahead synth pop approach.On "The Grimmest Dawn" he continues that slow trudge approach, melded with droning foghorn electronics and bleak, shimmering layers.His clean, up front Bass VI playing is what keeps everything on a pleasantly melodic track that is only enhanced by the darker moments.
At times on Horrorpop, some influences (either directly or indirectly) begin to emerge.I felt some definite hints of early period Skinny Puppy throughout "Cloak and Dagger" via the percolating synths, snappy drum programming, and the heavy reverb and processing on Gauntetier's vocals just solidified this.The pulsating acid synths and 4/4 thump of "Limber For the End Times" molded into a catchy pop song on the surface but dark and dense below clearly called to mind some 1980s EBM works.For "Ghosts in the Drum Machine," the synth pop elements are at the forefront, complete with stiff drum machines and the DX7 Tubular Bell preset.Add in some catchy leads and lyrics about surveillance and (reasonable) paranoia, and there are clearly traces of Virgin era Cabaret Voltaire to be heard.
With both Ars Phoenix and Pass/Ages, Jonn Gauntletier has proven himself to expertly weave memorable pop songs out of bleak electronics and morose guitar work, and that continues to be the case on this tape.The horror part of Horrorpop is what gives this work a distinct quality in comparison, and that sinister sheen throughout is worked in skillfully.Stripped of the sequences, beats, and guitar work, there is a hell of a dark ambient record to be had, but by adding in the pop half of the album’s title, he ends up responsible for a perfect balance of bleak and catchy from start to finish.
This project first began to take shape a decade ago, as Onda spent several days at Seoul's Nam June Paik Art Center back in 2010 for a series of performances.One night, while scanning through South Korean radio stations in his hotel room, Onda "stumbled upon what sounded like a submerged voice" and "began to record it in fascination."That first recording is the heart of this album, as the opening "Seoul" stretches out for over 20 minutes, while the remaining three pieces are considerably more modest in scope.According to Onda, all four pieces were recorded from the same radio "with almost no editing, save for some minimal slicing and mastering."If that is indeed true, "Seoul" captures quite a fascinating and otherworldly confluence of overlapping and distorted transmissions.Initially, there is indeed a voice speaking over a sputtering miasma of crackle, hiss, and buried saxophone melody, but the more abstract churning weirdness that follows is far more compelling than the opening.The meat of "Seoul" essentially feels like a manic and obsessively repeating loop that passes through various stages of corrosion and interference as it relentlessly surges forward.In fact, it arguably has the same dynamics as a live noise performance, as its structure is enveloped in climactic cascades of static at various points.While such moments imbue the piece with the illusion of a deliberate arc and an enticing sense that the whole thing could go off the rails at any second, the real beauty of the piece lies in the alien character of the sounds themselves: a rhythmic collision of frog-like chirping, shuffling pulses, and an ascending melodic fragment that seems damned to eternal repetition.Sometimes the veil of static pulls back to fleetingly make one sound especially prominent, but it never stops being an unstoppable juggernaut of submerged bloops and wobbly phantasms.
Onda's next channeling occurred two years later in Germany, documented here by the modestly brief "Köln."Unlike its mercilessly propulsive predecessor, "Köln" feels like seething electromagnetic storm that unexpectedly dissipates to reveal a charismatic Frenchman speaking over a tinkling piano motif.That interlude is very short-lived, however, as it soon gets subsumed by sputtering snatches of a news broadcast before ultimately resolving into a rhythmic outro of scrape-like sounds and hissing static.The following "Lewisberg," recorded two years later, opens with a news broadcast about medical marijuana over an insistent beep.Once the voice disappears, it feels very looping and mechanized, but there is a wonderful fleeting glimpse of something resembling a bittersweet xylophone melody.Overall, however, it mostly feels like a malfunctioning industrial machine that keeps alternately faltering and roaring back to life.Its final minute is especially vivid, as all of the static and the sputtering disruptions unexpectedly vanish to allow the shuddering machine rhythm to unfold in perfect clarity.The album's final piece ("Wroclaw" (2013)) departs from the linear chronological arc of the previous pieces, but it makes for an excellent closing statement.Much like "Lewisberg," it locks into a very machine-like rhythm, but this time the rhythm is centered upon a repeating screech.It is a very cool motif that again recalls a noise performance, as the pitch of the screech sometimes changes and a buzzing bass tone erratically manipulates the intensity.It also evokes the very '80s "fever dream" sensation of drifting off as the final TV broadcast of the night gives way to formless static, but enhances it with the feeling that some kind of demonic entity is tenaciously trying to emerge from the hissing blizzard of flickering pixels.
There is a throwaway line from an interview that has weirdly stuck with me for the last few months: a person mentioned that their first thought upon seeing the view from a mountain was "painting is bullshit."It was obviously meant to be snarky, but there is a kernel of truth to that sentiment, as it reminded me that beauty and mystery organically exist all around us and that it is futile to try to reproduce them in any kind of straightforward way (I have no beef at all with stylized interpretations, mind you).I may be able to artfully express my own emotions or thoughts, but it is safe to say that I will never manage to paint a sunset or an ocean scene that is as impressive as the real thing.That brings me to the beauty of both Onda's work and "Seoul" in particular, as he creates great art simply by egolessly framing and amplifying what already exists.The confluence of transmissions that Onda captured that night in Seoul was certainly strange and fascinating, but so is the fact that we are completely immersed in a chaos of soundless invisible waves that seamlessly carry complex information from a transmitter to their intended destination. That is, of course, something that I never otherwise think about, yet "Seoul" captures a rare moment in which those invisible forces fleetingly coalesced into a static phantom that felt almost physical and alive.Naturally, both chance and technology played a crucial role in that event, but it took an attentive listener (and a gifted editor) to recognize its inherent beauty and present it in a way that others could hear as well.