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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As far as I am concerned, any new release from Roly Porter is a noteworthy event, as he is absolutely not an artist who does anything by half measures. From his bold conceptual themes right down to every single aspect of sound design, each Porter full-length is a masterfully crafted and viscerally heavy statement unlike anything else. For this latest opus, Porter drew inspiration from the ancient burial tombs scattered across the moorlands of southwestern England, envisioning them as a sort of "mirror, or gate in time." In keeping with that fluid vision of time, Kistvaen achieves a distinctive marriage of timeless folk music traditions and cutting-edge production wizardry. While Porter occasionally errs too much on the side of portentous ambient gloom for my liking, Kistvaen reaches some rapturously sublime heights when he focuses on chopping and manipulating the vocals of his talented collaborators.
First thing first: Kistvaen is very much a headphone album for a number of reasons.The main one, of course, lies in the vivid clarity of Porter's sound design: this album is a feast of wonderful sounds and it is very easy to miss all the best moments without sustained, focused attention.Almost as significant, however, is Porter's unusual approach to composition.With casual listening, only the climactic swells of chords stand out as significant, which is a shame because so much fascinating activity takes places in Kistvaen's depths and periphery.I am tempted to say that crafting strong melodies and rich harmonies is not where Porter's strengths lie, but it would be more accurate to say that he simply has other interests that tend to take precedence over that aspect of his work.When he puts his mind to it, he is capable of creating some absolutely gorgeous melodic passages, such as the swooning crescendo of vocal loops and warm pads at the heart of "An Open Door" or the smeared and churning string motif that opens the epic "Passage."While I am not sure how much of Porter’s subversion of traditional compositional structures is by design, it definitely seems like he is devoted primarily to conjuring up immersive and evocative scenes: sometimes those scenes closely resemble music and sometimes less so, yet Porter's vision is always a compelling one.The more musical pieces like "An Open Door" are admittedly the ones that make the strongest first impression, but they are not necessarily always the best pieces (though "An Open Door" is unquestionably an album highlight).
For the most part, however, Kistvaen feels a series of well-produced field recordings from an imagined past that is extremely prone to cataclysmic events.In the opening "Assembly," for example, vocalist Mary-Anne Roberts gives an anguished and sometimes ululating performance over a sparse backdrop of seismic cracks, scraping metal, and rumbling waves of sub bass.Eventually Porter allows some lush, droning chords to creep in, but the overall effect is akin to a devastated widow howling a lament as her burning village collapses around her.In fact, the entire album feels like a series of haunted and bleak vignettes capturing the aftermath of some disaster in an enigmatic, ancient dream world.There are also some glimpses of transcendent beauty lurking within that nightmare though, as the seething, grinding horror of the following "Burial" eventually gives way to a lovely coda of warm strings.Elsewhere, "An Open Door" is the strongest example of Porter's more nakedly beautiful side, as its mournful piano theme blossoms into a deliriously beautiful swirl of warm chord swells and fluttering vocal loops…before erupting into a crushing and intense final crescendo that sounds like the entire world is being ripped apart.Porter follows that feat by approximating a heaving and violent disturbance in the very fabric of reality ("Inflation Field"), then dives wholeheartedly into yet another apocalypse, as "Passage" calls to mind an ancient city being absolutely leveled by an erupting volcano.Curiously, there is a brief interlude in that piece that features an anachronistic, stumbling, and out-of-sync synth motif that resembles deconstructed techno.Even though Porter is now working on an incredibly vast and timeless scale, lingering vestiges of his rave past still find their way into his vision.
The album closes on a unexpectedly radiant note with the lush, elegiac chords of the title piece, though they are bit buffeted by snarls of harsher textures.Nevertheless, "Kistvaen" feels like a poetic ascension at the end of a very disturbing, sad, and bloody story.As with the occasional rave/sound system touches lurking through the album, the heavenly chords of "Kistvaen" feel like a poignant nod to actual moments from Porter's own life, as his daughter currently sings in a church choir.While I cannot say that Porter is especially seamless or subtle in incorporating such disparate influences into his vision, I definitely like that they are there, as they reveal some soul and heart at the core of what could otherwise be a hollow exercise in technical brilliance and pure imagination.Still, the latter are a huge part of Porter's appeal and Kistvaen captures him at the absolute peak of his powers: any imperfections or flashes of bombast seem irrelevant in the face of such a crushing and vivid tour de force.To use a deeply uncharacteristic sports metaphor, Roly Porter swings for the fences every goddamn time and it is absolutely glorious when he connects.
Notably, these pieces were originally created as part of a multimedia performance featuring accompanying images from artist Marcel Weber and that seems like the logical culmination of Porter’s vision: I have often thought that directors should be falling all over themselves to enlist him for soundtrack work, as he seems like he would be uniquely suited for unleashing a climactic sensory overload that would leave filmgoers reeling in their seats as the final credits rolled.I still believe that, of course, but I am delighted that Porter has decided to expand his own vision and apply his formidable firepower to that instead.I hope I someday manage to catch the full majesty of the Kistvaen experience live, but the decontextualized music is quite a memorably intense statement in its own right.
In 2010, after some lengthy debates about the role of the machine-generated pulse in the development of music, legendary composer and improvisor Bob Ostertag sent me a collection of recordings made with his Buchla 200E modular analog system and asked: "Would people dance to this? Could this be considered techno?" "Not really," I said. "But I could probably turn it into techno with a little work." It was only after completing the remixes and sending them to the Sandwell District label that I realized this was the birth of a new project, and gave it the name Rrose. Since then, I have completed 18 additional remixes spanning over 90 minutes, which I have assembled here as both a compilation and a continuous mix. These include two additional remixes of Bob Ostertag (using his 1977 piece "The Surgeon General" as source material) and two upcoming remixes (available in mixed form only), one for the French artist Electric Rescue, and the other for an upcoming release on Eaux by the Brooklyn-based artist Lori Napoleon aka Antenes.
Ulla's recordings of phone conversations and wildlife diffuse into the most vaporous and unsettling ambient dub textures on the third in our Documenting Sound series, recorded over the last few weeks in Philadelphia and recalling Sam Kidel's Disruptive Muzak, DJ Lostboi’s ambient hymnals and Vladislav Delay’s Chain Reaction pearls.
Pieced together from airspun recordings made in Philadelphia during spring 2020, Inside Means Inside Me holds a subtle mirror to the new world's psychic ambiance of existential, slowburn dread. Prizing the sensitively insightful, lower case manner that made Ulla’s recent Tumbling Towards A Wall album so memorable, here the sound is more poignant, the dissociative flux used to perhaps more therapeutic effect for an ephemeral reading of the times.
In the first half, Ulla makes a subtly heartbreaking use of crackling phone calls and dub stabs, but embedded in the music's weft they take on an unsettling resolution that’s hard to place. On the flip, more entwined conversations snag in the breeze with location recordings and scudding hypnagogic washes with a signature low key movement that keep you feeling swaddled but uneasy until the end.
The Letdown from multi-instrumentalist William Ryan Fritch kicks off Lost Tribe Sound's new label series "Built Upon A Fearful Void." The series introduces fifteen new albums to the label's roster over the next year, five of which will come courtesy of Fritch, including a new release as his alter ego, Vieo Abiungo.
The Letdown is a record better identified by the vibe it creates rather than a particular genre or style. It's dirty, unapologetically loud and charmingly haphazard. It's the sort of self-educated, non-jazz record that critics of Moondog would have written off as impure. Frankly, we're good with that. The strength of the record lies not with any collegiate-level classification, but in its ability conjure moods that just feel good, are instantly familiar and invite a certain nostalgia. The gritty, noir side of it, brings to mind the old black and white detective stories. The jovial, 1920's romanticism, lends a bit of class and gives the sense that even though everything is falling to shit, we are going to power through it with a bit of song and dance.
Whatever one happens to take away from this album, The Letdown is meant to be fun, help the whisky burn just a bit less, and keep the blood flowing. Read into it too much and you might spoil it. Guaranteed it is unlike any Fritch record to date.
Noveller is guitarist and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate, and with this, her ninth studio album, I humbly bestow on her the title "Brian Eno on six strings." Recorded and mixed in her Moon Canyon studio with the rolling expanse of Los Angeles canyons as her vista, her latest marks a shift in mood and sound from her prior release, A Pink Sunset for No One, which was crafted amidst the bustling urban landscape of Brooklyn, New York. Her relocation from east to west coast and new environment have impacted her musical experiments. Pink offered majestic, shimmering, psychedelic landscapes coated in drone and dark synth-wave. Arrow commands an ethereal, awe-inspiring, and expansive terrain awash in swells of cinematic guitar effects that function as mini symphonies. The darkness of her prior work is still apparent, but more evenly blended throughout.
Frequently sought as a collaborator, Lipstate has most recently co-wrote and toured with Iggy Pop for his latest album Free after opening for him on his Post Pop Depression tour three years earlier. Other notables have included Lee Renaldo (Sonic Youth), Glenn Branca, and JG Thirlwell (Foetus incarnations). Noveller is only her, armed with a guitar brought to life by way of impressive skill on a wide array of effects pedals. Curious as to how she created her magic, I was led down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos, full of gear talk and technology demonstrations. Hearing a demo of one of the pedals she uses, the Meris Polymoon, made me truly wish I’d learned to play guitar; seeing her mastery of it sealed my utmost respect for those who have gone beyond merely "playing" guitar, showcasing a dizzying talent for experimentation, a practiced hand, and ear for sound.
Such mastery provides the listener with a broad interpretation of guitar on Arrow. Lead-off track "Rune" builds out of an orchestral opening, sounding like a string section backing a clarinet soloist and haunted by an echoing timpani, yet no such orchestra exists. "Effektology" and "Canyons" sound as if most of the guitar is foregone altogether, instead preferring synthesized ambience. "Pre-fabled" takes the listener on a glorious journey into outer space, traveling a dreamy and mystical Tangerine Dream-esqe path, while "Thorns" loses the musical traveler in dark, foreboding woods, the atmosphere prickling with fear. When the guitar does appear, as on "Pattern Recognition" and "Remainder," the sound is recognizable but exists outside of what normally constitutes traditional guitar.
I first discovered Noveller through her partnership with thisquietarmy, and further investigation reminded me of my favorite experimental guitarist, Roy Montgomery. She rightly takes her place alongside them, along with legends such as Robert Fripp and Vini Reilly. With an already solid catalog of work to her name, Lipstate deserves to be a household name, taking her place in an experimental guitar pantheon that warrants a more feminine presence.
As a former electronics specialist aboard a naval submarine and currently an audio engineer at his own Laminal Audio studio, AF Jones is clearly well versed in the world of sound design and audio processing. This becomes abundantly clear on A Jurist For Nothing given its nuance and production. Various electronic sounds and heavily processed field recordings are of course no surprise given the genre, but the subtle way in which Jones blends in conventional instrumentation, culminating in a Townes Van Zandt cover, is what makes this record most unique.
Ambience and not fully identifiable field recordings form the foundation of pieces such as "Anna Politkovskaya," named for an assassinated Russian journalist.Here Jones keeps a largely subtle backdrop, blending together rhythmic swirls and other layers of synthetic sound, tone and texture.The result is rather tense, but also captivating."Landover is Not the Same" has a similarly collaged feel to it.Jones uses the hollow spaciousness as the setting for incidental, distant conversations and heavy electronic undercurrents.To this he blends in some surging tones, never allowing the mix to become too sparse but never hitting the point of overload either.
The other pieces on the album start from a similar framework, but it is Jones's inclusion of acoustic guitar that brings a more conventional musicality to them."Renouncer" begins from a clearly electro-acoustic basis with the sound of water going from a light drip into heavy, torrential surges, paired with a harsh buzzing industrial drone.Amidst a blend of lower and higher frequencies and a mysterious thumping sound, he introduces a passage of clear, strummed guitar that adds an entirely different character of sound.
For "Miserere Mei" he introduces the guitar earlier in the piece, casting over hushed noises and elongated tonal passages.The electronics surge in dramatically and retreat just as quickly, with Jones punctuating the unending flow of sound with his guitar."Implicate Order" features a muted, but buzzing electronic passage at the onset, but it soon becomes a guitar-centric song.There is a bluesy repetition to his playing on "Lamps Are Stars," but the plodding electronics and subtle noise textures give it anything but a traditional feel.
Pure acoustic tone also opens the title piece, but accompanied by a slowly swelling magma crunch.With some bizarre outbursts, controlled feedback, and jerky pseudo-rhythms, the non-guitar parts call to mind some of Cabaret Voltaire’s earliest experiments while still sounding completely unique.The closing song, "Rake," differs significantly from the remainder of the record.Not just because is a cover of fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt’s work, but because of its faithfulness to the source material.Pared down to just Jones’s guitar and voice, with cello accompaniment from Judith Hamann and Lori Goldston, it is an intentionally sparse, emotional, and extremely human note to close the record on.
On paper, I would be suspicious of electro-acoustic collage experimentation that features prominent acoustic guitar given the stark, drastic contrast between those sounds, but Jones makes it work beautifully.The abstract, occasionally frightening, and consistently inhuman sounding electronics end up grounded perfectly by the guitar.Like a guiding hand helping to navigate through bleak darkness, it results in A Jurist For Nothing having a distinct, inimitable character that comes together perfectly.
Alva Noto returns to his much-awaited Xerrox project with Vol. 4, the fourth installment of the five-piece intended series based on the concept of digital replication of source material.
Using the process of copying as a basis, the Xerrox series deals with the manipulation of data by means of endless reproduction. Due to the inherent fallacy of the procedure involving the making of copies made from other copies, everyday’s sounds become so altered that they can be hardly associated with the source material. As a result, entirely new sounds are created: copies of originals become originals themselves.
Following Xerrox Vol. 1 (2007), Vol. 2 (2009), Vol. 3 (2015), Carsten Nicolai continues the pentalogy eluding the accuracy and precise sound design for which he's renowned, and turning to a more harmony-driven composition technique.
Unlike the previous Xerrox albums, whose starting point is a set of samples extracted from external sources and fragments of recordings, Vol. 4 compounds under a unified cinematic soundscape, warm chords, thrumming digital ambiences, liquified electronics, drones, and noise sustained by floods of strings. The tension between the organic warmth and static curves, broads tones into distant roars and electronic cascade of sounds.
While Alva Noto's oeuvre is predominantly affiliated with pristine sound design, Xerrox holds more intimate gestures and emotional sensibility. This fourth volume shuns further from the conceptualism and orderliness of prior musical outputs, ranging from heart-warming elegies to mind-bending sci-fi projections in extrasolar territories.
Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek needs no introduction - a hugely prolific electronic experimenter who has recorded for labels such as Type, Digitalis, Dekorder, Western Vinyl, and many many more, Where To Now Records are truly humbled to handle his latest collaborative work Oehoe. Produced in collaboration with viola/violinist Anne Bakker, a classically trained solo artist in her own right, and currently performing strings as part of Agnes Obel's band, Machinefabriek here has sown a landscape of Anna's raw violin, viola, and vocal improvisations into a stirring body of work which merges tradition, experimentation, and whimsical curiosity to create a distinctively unique album which is both deeply moving and playfully dissonant in equal measure.
Given that Anne's improvised vocals are wordless throughout, it is to Rutger's absolute credit that he has assembled and transcended these intonations to often devastating emotional effect. Anna's vocal experiments exude classical polyphonic antiquity, they lushly hover above her own Reichian minimalist string arrangements, and Machinefabriek's deeply brooding, cacophonic synthesized soundscapes. Across these 10 pieces we delve into a world which seamlessly moves between a state of harmonious contentment; or a very murky calm, to moments of lively ecstasy, and deep deep down to a vast and brooding melancholy.
Music for Violin Alone was recorded in a makeshift studio in an empty house in Le Poujol sur Orb during the first two weeks of the French lockdown. Recorded both as a response to all loss of work due to COVID-19 and a way to be heard again. The pieces on the album are the pieces I've come to discover and learn during the two years of maternity leave. Two years of maternity leave have also been two years of creative silence, a search for new approaches, repertoire and ways of playing.
Only after finishing the recording process I realised the connection between the works - they have all been written by or dedicated to violinists-composers (with Oliver Leith being an exception) - J.S.Bach, Angharad Davies, Nicola Matteis Jr., Malcolm Goldstein (dedicatee of Cage's "Eight Whiskus" and Tenney's "Koan").
The album opens with "Circular Bowing Study" by Angharad Davies - an extended exploration of a technique no matter how limited, it continues back through the ages with works that are filled with silence (Bach, Cage and Leith) and works with almost total absence of it (Tenney, Matteis), and closes with my own composition - broken harmonics of a string trapped inside a ring.
It's like a map of invisible violin sounds where past and present pathways are being drawn and redrawn over and over again until they are confined to a single technique or a broken sound or disappear into a total silence.
Kaloli is the debut full-length LP from Kampala’s darkest electro-percussion group Nihiloxica. The album marries the propulsive Ugandan percussion of the Nilotika Cultural Ensemble with technoid analog synth lines and hybrid kit playing from the UK’s pq and Spooky-J. The result is something otherworldly. Kaloli journeys through the uncharted space between two cultures of dance music, where the expression of traditional elements mutates into something more sinister and nihilistic.
The album takes its name from the Luganda word for the Marabou stork. Kaloli are carrion birds that can be seen amassing in areas of festering waste around the country, particularly in Kampala, with its heightened levels of urban pollution. Freakishly large in size and riddled with amorphous boils, growths and tufts, these toxic creatures thrive on detritus. Rising skyward on huge air currents, however, their wretchedness is softened as they effortlessly glide above the city. Nihiloxica tread a similar path to the kaloli: a dissonant, polyrhythmic assault on the senses holds a transcendental beauty.
Since 2017 the band have honed their sound in residence at Nyege Nyege’s Boutiq Studio in Kampala, one of the most vital cultural melting pots on the continent. Their debut self-titled EP for the acclaimed Ugandan label was an immediate success. An auspicious project between two UK musicians and a Kampala-based percussion troupe, Nilotika Cultural Ensemble, sparked a musical dialogue across continents with the aim to fuse two distanced cultures of dance music into one aural entity. The synergy between the group was instantaneous. The EP was composed, rehearsed and recorded with a minimal studio setup in the space of a month, giving Nihiloxica a rawness and brutality that pushed it into best-of-year lists across the world. However, this proved to be only a snapshot of what Nihiloxica were capable of. After a year of jamming together and road-testing material live on stage across the world, the second EP, Biiri, showed the band communicating with each other more freely. Their musical vocabulary was becoming ever more intricate. Now, after three successful European tours, this cross-continental conversation has brought us Kaloli.
Recorded with Ross Halden at Hohm Studios directly after a concert supporting Aphex Twin, Kaloli captures the vitality of Nihiloxica’s show-stopping live performances and magnifies it with pq’s honest, powerful production. For five days in September 2019 in Bradford, Nihiloxica laid down the bulk of the album: eight synthetic abstractions of the traditional folk-rhythms of Uganda. At the heart of every song is a groove, a drum pattern to be explored and developed. Each takes us through a different rhythmic territory: Busoga from the east of Uganda, Bwola from the north, Gunjula from the central region, Buganda.
The soundscape is dominated by the ancestral Bugandan drum set, consisting of Alimansi Wanzu Aineomugisha and Jamiru Mwanje on the engalabi (long drums - a tall Ugandan sister to the djembe), Henry Kasoma on the namunjoloba (a set of four small, high pitched drums) and Henry Isabirye on the empuunyi (a set of three low pitched bass drums). Wanzu also plays the ensaasi (shakers). One of the major additions to the sonic palette of Kaloli are the electronic drum sounds used more increasingly by Jacob Maskell-Key (Spooky J), providing an additional link between worlds, evident as electro-percussive punctuation on Salongo and Gunjula. The patterns beaten out by the ensemble are then explored harmonically and spectrally by the synths of Peter Jones (pq), stretching and searching for hooks and sounds among the rhythmic mayhem like kaloli picking and poking through decaying matter.
For their forthcoming release on Crammed Discs, Nihiloxica's dialogue reaches ever further into new areas. "Busoga" is dreamy and melodious, while "Bwola" plunges straight into armageddon. "Tewali Sukali" embraces the band's furtive heavy metal influences much more closely. With more running time, the band have been able to sculpt their most personal, revealing work to date: one that stands up as a true home listening experience. Giving listeners a further glimpse into Nihiloxica's musical process are snippets from rehearsal sessions that took place ahead of the recording in Jinja, near to where Nyege Nyege festival takes place. In the third and final of these interlude we witness Jally drop his engalabi in favour of a hand-made flute to lend the album a tranquil ad-libbed outro, accompanied by an evening chorus of Jinja’s plentiful crickets.
Once described by Gareth Main in the Quietus as "the best band on Earth right now," it's no surprise that Nihiloxica have plaudits from an esteemed list of sources. Notably by publications such as Pitchfork, the Guardian and Les Inrockuptibles, the group's sound has been widely described as eerie, hypnotic, floor shaking and body moving. With an extensive touring schedule ahead of them, including dates confirmed at Sonar and Dekmantel, Nihiloxica's Kaloli looks set to spread its wings in 2020.
Ellen Fullman's drones are as massive as the custom instruments that she creates this tremendous music on. She is known for her 70-foot Long String instrument, tuned in just intonation and played with rosin-coated fingers. At first listen, it's a monolithic block of sound, stretching out into seeming infinity. But on closer inspection, there are many subtleties of pitch, dynamics, and surround sound that captivate and maintain interest.
In the Sea was originally self-released by Fullman on cassette in 1987, both sides have been significantly shortened for this double LP issue. Side A, the title track, folds and unfolds just like a body of water, with dissonances in its depths and joyful sunshine striking its crests. It ebbs and flows, crashing against its shoreline with a new pause, a new phrase, a new sweep of sound as big as the ocean. In "Staggered Stasis," side B of the original cassette and this LP, there is a wall of sound with features as varied and beautiful as an abstract painting, never ending but always changing in tiny ways. It evokes a space as dense and warm as the womb, or as large and striking as the grand canyon. There are beating notes neighboring each other even as there are high harmonics atop deep bass strings. It roils and bubbles in the midtones like a boiling pot of water, and for all its "stasis" it manages to somersault along briskly.
Sides C and D on the album are from other sources and, as such, are both very distinct from the first half of the album. "Work For Four Players And 90 Strings" was a cassette release of its own in 1987 while "Work For Two" is a previously unreleased recording from 1988. Both are presented in edited excerpts. Each sweep the senses with washes of sound, strokes across the musical spectrum like streaks of watercolor. Whereas In the Sea (the first record) is about movement in stasis, these two pieces are busy with huge evolutions of sound and broad ranges of changing palettes. Consider this as chamber music superimposed on a drone instrument, and it has all the dynamism of such. The beauty of these two concluding pieces is that of dappled light moving and shifting while peeking through tree branches on a bright sunny day.
This is drone music that is easy to listen to, a direct descendant of Terry Riley's cult of the beautiful. With its one of a kind instrumentation, it is unlike anything else in recorded music. It is pleasant, lulling, and rich enough to spark emotion. It is a lovely document from a well known luminary in the field.