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The stars have aligned and given us Episode 808 on 8/08!
We celebrate the TR-808 today by playing songs that prominently feature the classic 808: 808 State, Bauhaus, Miss Kittin & The Hacker, The Egyptian Lover, Bowery Electric, Dr. Derelict, Pan Sonic, HTRK, Chicks On Speed, GusGus (feat. Emiliana Torrini), Kid606, and Cocteau Twins.
Photo is of Jon's very own 808.
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This is the first major release by this Belgian composer under his given name, as Jolan normally records as ‘t Geruis. He did previously self-release a digital album (#7) as himself back in 2024, but that was followed by another 't Geruis release. Consequently, I am not sure if this counts as a name change or if Jolan has some kind of personal stylistic delineation that determines which name feels right for which albums, but Sublime Lenteur (“The Amazing Slowness”) still sounds a hell of a lot like ‘t Geruis to me. While that is a perfectly welcome state of affairs, this album does have its own distinctive character which may possibly be related to its inclusion in Lost Tribe Sound’s seasonal mood-driven "Moss & Melee" series. Then again, maybe not. Mystery abounds. In any case, this is an impressively strong album, as Jolan’s usual bleary and smudged ambient vision is beautifully enhanced with hypnotically looping melodies on degraded tapes that place his work a bit closer to minimalist auteurs like Celer and William Basinski than usual. The shadowy and dreamlike moods, however, are still distinctly Jolan’s own.
According to Jolan, this album first began to take shape in October 2024 during “long and solitary walks in the woods” through fog, snow, and rain. Frequently, he would return from those walks feeling inspired and he soon noticed that his music began to feel like a “direct translation” of the thoughts and impressions that emerged while immersing himself in nature, seasonal transformation, and solitude. To be fair, he could have plausibly said that exact same thing about any of his previous albums, yet Sublime Lenteur does feel like an improved and enhanced distillation of the simplicity and meditative, quiet beauty of earlier ‘t Geruis albums. In fact, the opening “Ressac I” probably represents my Platonic ideal for great ambient music, as it is essentially just a sensuously looping chord swell that eternally dissolves into a reverberating fragment of melody. While that may sound quite simple on its face, Jolan’s artistry lies in the way the entire piece feels flickering, frayed, and unstable, which makes the loop feel mesmerizingly cyclic yet eternally changing. Instead of sounding like a mere well-crafted loop, “Ressac I” instead feels like a precarious and ephemeral bit of heaven that I wish would extend into infinity.
This latest opus from INA GRM director François Bonnet’s Kassel Jaeger alias is a characteristically enigmatic and conceptual affair, as its Latin title means “under the thing, under the substance, under the matter.” However, it apparently also doubles as a reference to a chapter in Victor Hugo’s 1866 novel Toilers of the Sea which recounts a man’s struggle for survival in the aftermath of a shipwreck. While the deeper significance of the latter association admittedly eludes me, it was clearly an inspiration for Bonnet, as the album’s arc gradually evolves from more cavernous, subterranean sounds towards the ambiance of a deserted island. Unsurprisingly, the journey between those two points is a beguiling and hallucinatory rabbit hole of shadowy mystery, as Bonnet’s talent for conjuring vivid, immersive, and otherworldly soundscapes has few peers in the realm of production and sound design and his visions are always unique and imaginative.
I have been a fairly devoted fan of Kassel Jaeger’s eerie and abstract dreamscapes for a while now, but it took me a bit longer than usual to warm to this one, as its early moments have the feel of a noise-gnawed dark ambient album recorded in the Paris Catacombs. Thankfully, Bonnet soon transcends those gloomy beginnings, but they are certainly a thematically appropriate place to start, as he describes his vision for this album as “the concrete beneath the concrete...the immanence of sounds…their becoming…a driving force, like a tide.”
With a debut EP and four albums released since their inception 15 years ago, Chicago supergroup Anatomy of Habit have not stopped evolving and mutating, and Paired Sentinels demonstrates this continued evolution in occasionally drastic ways. Fronted by Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded, Intrinsic Action, The Fortieth Day) on vocals and synths, the five-piece band’s meshing of almost all forms of "heavy" music continues to take a turn to almost conventional music forms, but never at the cost of their intensity.
That word, "intensity" has been an appropriate descriptor for AoH's work since their debut LP in 2011. Given the noise/power electronics/hardcore adjacent personnel, that comes as no surprise. Besides Solotroff, the band features Isidro Reyes (a member of all three of the aforementioned Solotroff projects) on metal percussion, guitarist Alex Latus (Still), Sam Wagster (Mute Duo) on bass guitar and lap steel, and drummer Skyler Rowe (Mute Duo, Still). For all the pummeling heaviness, a greater amount of subtly and nuance started to creep in on 2021’s Even if it Takes a Lifetime and 2023’s Black Openings, which becomes even more notable here.
First issued back in 2009 as the inaugural release from Berlin’s short-lived Humming Conch label, Capri is one of the more polarizing highlights from the project’s early years, as it is a bit of a stylistic outlier. While released the same year as Danielle Baquet-Long’s untimely passing, these pieces feel like a ghostly and gently psychotropic transmission from a much happier time, as Will and Dani recorded this album in a single room over a series of summer nights during a residency on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Assembled using a modest yet eclectic palette of organetto, piano, strings, horns, acoustic guitar, and Dani’s field recordings from the island, the album is billed as a concept album/”idyllic imagining” collaged from “fragmented vignettes, brief moments, and suspended shimmers” and it certainly delivers on that promise, as it primarily resembles a series of brief and hallucinatory mirages. Given that, Capri feels very much like a languorous and impressionistic haze of shifting moods and scenes rather than a batch of substantial compositions, but these pieces cumulatively cast quite a mesmerizing and unique spell.
This expanded edition of Capri is its first physical reissue since its initial release, but I believe most of the added pieces previously surfaced digitally back in 2012 after Stephan Mathieu remastered the album for an intended triple LP release that was reluctantly abandoned due to high production costs. After a decade-plus delay, however, those triple LP dreams have finally been realized (along with a double CD format) and this new incarnation includes seven pieces that had to be cut from the original CD due to time restrictions.
This wonderfully spacey new guitar duo is an offshoot of prolific New London, CT psych-rock collective Slyne and The Family Stoned (not to be confused with the UK’s Sly and The Family Drone, of course). Appropriately, that ensemble is centered around pun-loving guitarist Michael Slyne, but Bent Light finds him in a much more ambient/drone mood than usual. Slyne’s co-conspirator in this project is occasional Family Stoned member and pedal steel guitarist Russell Linder, who was amusingly immortalized in the title of The Family Stoned’s Russ Never Sleeps album. Aside from their usual instruments, the two artists employ an array of tape loops, pedals, and shortwave radio transmissions to conjure the sort of twinkling and gently psychotropic reverie that is absolutely begging to be played in a planetarium (though the album description’s helpfully notes that a deserted drive-in movie theater during a snowstorm would be an appropriate setting as well).
The album is divided into two side-long pieces that were apparently recorded in a cold and damp basement last spring during a bout of severe allergy symptoms (“nose dripping, mouth breathing, eyes itching, blurred vision”), which goes to show that sublime beauty can blossom in the most unlikely and unexpected places. In the opening “Gain,” Linder’s languorous and meditative pedal steel casts a spell of dreamlike tropical exotica over a subtly trippy backdrop of warped and murmuring tapes and snatches of distorted voices plucked from radio waves. Slyne’s guitar is similarly understated, as he enhances the “moonlit lagoon” vibe of Linder’s pedal steel with a host of quietly melodic improvisations and echoing scrapes and string noises. While that may not sound like radical new psychedelic territory on paper, the magic lies in the duo’s perfect balance of elements, as the piece has the feel of a floating, sensuous, and undulating sound collage with a wonderfully hallucinatory and unpredictable undercurrent of mysterious submerged voices, tape hiss, and animal-like howls that beautifully fray, smear, and quaver in the piece’s final minutes.
This newest album from French Alps-based composer Andy Cartwright is billed as “Seabuckthorn's most rhythmic effort to date,” as he inventively transforms simple hand percussion and kitchen pans into hallucinatory and ritualistic rhythms with a host of time-stretching, pitch-shifting, and fragmenting production techniques. The album’s title is, of course, a reference to the timeless adage “no one ever steps in the same river twice, for they are not the same person, and it is not the same river," as Cartright found himself noticing how the landscape of his daily mountain walk subtly changed from day to day. It is certainly an apt title, as the obvious parallel here is that this iteration of the Seabuckthorn’s vision still features all of the same wonderfully haunted rustic folk dreamscapes as other recent Seabuckthorn albums, but they now feel very different due to their unusual percussion elements. The same could be said of the percussion itself, as Cartwright’s modest array of toms, woodblocks, and chimes are psychotropically reshaped into something akin to the “sci-fi tribal” aesthetic of Rapoon and Zoviet France.
In hindsight, last year’s A Path Within A Path album offered a teasing glimpse into this project’s imminent evolution, as the slow-motion, ritualistic percussion of the Dean McPhee-featuring highlight “Shadow of the Land” would feel right at home on Never the Same River. In keeping with that theme, this album’s big guest (William Ryan Fritch) lends his talents to a similarly great piece, as “Things We Cannot See” blossoms into a ghostly, slow-motion waltz with a languorously sad and sensuous violin/viola melody.
This ambitious and aptly titled new album from upstate NY synth wizard M. Geddes Gengras is something akin to a wild and eccentric game of the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse, as Gengras handed off his raw synth recordings to a wide and varied array of collaborators and offered them “creative carte blanche” for their additions (albeit with minimal instructions). The idea is a playful and somewhat ingenious expansion upon how Gengras’ beloved modular synthesizers work, as “each new element added to the chain affects the whole, which can produce unexpected results.” As evidenced by this album, the same is definitely true of collaborators as well, yet Gengras also took inspiration from other chance-based composition strategies such as John Cage’s I-Ching experiments or Autechre’s complex algorithmic mutations. As far as I know, however, no indeterminacy-inspired composers ever recorded an album quite like this one, as Guest List is a charmingly playful and freewheeling fun house of wild and audacious aesthetic collisions and juxtapositions.
In a way, Guest List seems like an album that Gengras was always destined to make, as his entire career has been eclectic, freewheeling, and collaboration-filled, as I first encountered him through his seemingly ubiquitous presence on every good Not Not Fun project in the early 2000s and he has since blown me away at least once with both his outsider techno alias (Personable) and his collected Moog works. He has also taken quite a deep dive into Jamaican dub production techniques with Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones, as the two launched the dancehall imprint Duppy Gun after collaborating with The Congos in 2011. In short, Gengras is a guy who has seemingly tried his hand at damn near every possible strain of arty underground music at this point.
This boldly unconventional new release from Florida-based sound artist Josh Mason is the third installment in Greyfade’s FOLIO series (“a full-length music edition in hardcover book form”). The book, billed as "a nonlinear travelogue of the states of Florida," is a collection of impressionistic, elliptical, and poetic ruminations on Mason’s oft-surreal environs that are “intended to be experienced simultaneously” with the music. That is quite a cool and unique idea, as it gives the album’s nine hallucinatory modular synth soundscapes a loose narrative arc and a dreamlike (and humid) sense of place. Mason’s vision is also a fresh twist on both modular synth albums and ambient music, as he sets out to capture the very specific and Lychian ambiance of brutalist concrete, decaying billboards, humming air conditioners, omnipresent mosquitoes, gas station churches, dimly lit showers, and flickering motel signs.
Greyfade
According to Mason, Kicking A Dark Horse “was built around a modular synthesizer framework that operates on streams of binary data” that “resists intuitive control” and “made no immediate sense to him.” That was a deliberate choice, of course, as Mason views that constraint as “a way of forcing outcomes that surprise even their maker.” In that regard, Mason shares some common ground with artists like Merzbow and Nurse With Wound, as he essentially creates a living modular system of “spinning plates” that he manipulates live, then starts recording only when “he feels them arrive at the right momentum simultaneously.” Similarly, Mason also purposely misuses and abuses his gear to yield strange and unusual sounds, patterns, and textures, with “oscillators clocked far below their operational thresholds, bit-depth data routed through mismatched converters, and delay lines treated as percussive instruments.”
This latest collaboration between Irisarri and Guido Zen’s Abul Mogard alias is billed as the duo’s second album, which admittedly makes sense from a “new material” standpoint, but gets a bit murky given that the duo’s previous releases were a hybrid live/studio album and a live album that featured two previously unreleased pieces. Much like 2024’s Impossibly distant, impossibly close, Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is again something of a hybrid release, as the raw material was recorded live over a three-day residency at Berlin’s Morphine Raum. Some additional recordings were later made by Irisarri back at his studio in New York, but the more captivating bit is what emerged after Zen layered, subtracted, and reassembled the final recordings at his own studio back in Rome. The result is not what I would have expected, as Irisarri and Zen’s individual styles largely dissolve into a series of unusually minimal and understated mood pieces.
The duo’s palette for these recordings were the expected modular synths and bowed guitars, but there were some unexpected twists this time around as well. The biggest one is that cellist Martina Bertoni and violinist Andrea Burelli share composing credit for a couple of pieces, but I was also a bit surprised to discover that Irisarri’s characteristic veil of frayed and corroded textures is mostly absent. The duo also note that rotary speakers played a central role, as did Morphine Raum’s 1970s mixing console and an array of microphones stationed throughout the room. According to Irisarri, “At moments I genuinely couldn’t tell if a sound was coming from me or from Abul. It stopped feeling like two people making decisions and began to feel like we were inside a system moving on its own." While I have absolutely no idea how much Abul/Zen later reshaped those performances, I certainly share Irisarri’s sentiment, as the lines between the duo’s synth sounds and processed guitar sounds has never been blurrier. Also, I could have sworn that there was a saxophone in “Blue Descent,” so I may also actually be losing my mind altogether.
Furafauna is the culmination of three years of work by Thorsten Soltau (who sometimes works under the name Femurl, with both names attributed to this album). Consisting of four pieces and two remixes, one by Troum and one by Sewicide, he dabbles in a wide variety of mostly (but not exclusively) electronic structures. Elements of abstract noise, glitching digital, and traditional composition all are present at various points, culminating in a dense and at times challenging but engaging album.
"Astafel" opens the disc with a spoken word passage that relents to spacious tones and an underlying bit of noise. Here, he meshes higher pitched tones mesh with a low synth pulse while including spoken passages met with far off clattering. Soltau mixes in some plucked strings to counter the more inorganic sounds that dominate the piece. "Lullaby for the Extinct" features some similar components, such as deep pulses, processed voices, and dramatic swells of synthesizers. Again, he implements the sound of strings, but this time plucked and bowed, with subtle processing to give an organic sensibility to the piece. Both of these pieces feature the legendary Ralf Wehowsky (RLW) on "virtual instruments," which may explain some of the continuity.
Robert Poss’s post-Band of Susans work has covered a significant number of styles, however what remains consistent is his omnipresent guitar. Having worked in traditional song-like structures, music for dance performances, and pure abstraction, I have always been impressed by his solo work. Kepler’s Choice is a collaboration with E-Clark (Edward) Cornell, making for Poss’s first collaboration in a number of years. As a lengthy CD split into eight pieces (the shortest clocking in at close to six minutes), there is a lot to digest here, with a sound heavily steeped in modern classical composition.
The title piece opens the disc and features the two playing with dynamics, with frequent swells of sound rising and then being pulled back. This provides a sort of stuttering structure that—coupled with the hard panning of the segments—makes for a pleasant sense of disorientation. Layers build and rich tones underscore, which a provide a solid foundation on which the two stack. Comparably, the following “the ripple effect from an emotional error” (preserving the capitalization structure of the song list) is more grounded. Acoustic guitar from Poss blends with rising, delicate sections of what could be synths conjuring a sense of drama, punctuated by rich piano passages. Throughout its 11-and-a-half-minute duration the two push the work into a multitude of spaces: first electronics and cavernous tones into glitching and a guitar-centric sound.
