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Episode 784 features all new music by The Veldt, Noveller (feat. Iggy Pop), Lea Bertucci, Mi And L'Au, Mammo, Kikù Hibino & Merzbow, Bergsonist, Meitei, Hoavi, Black Flower, Tristan Allen, and Aaron Shaw.
Sunset in Costa Rica photo by Jonny.
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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.”
In keeping with that theme, my favorite pieces tend to be the more trumpet-centric ones like “Reels in 360” and “Travelling in BCC,” which feel like two separate dub variations of the same motif. On the former, a smoky trumpet melody floats across a slow, bass-heavy groove with periodic intrusions from a recurring vocal motif. It’s a strong melody, but the magic of the piece lies more on the production side, as Miniawy’s trumpet leaves hazy ghost trails in its wake and unexpectedly morphs into a shrilly distorted and pitch-shifted variation of itself at one point. Elsewhere, on “Travelling in BCC,” Miniawy’s melody is reshaped into a considerably more simmering, throbbing, and abstract context featuring insectoid hum, blown-out industrial textures, and visceral percussion. It has a smoldering and serpentine feel that suggests a dubbed-out guest performance by Jon Hassell at an intense early Tangerine Dream show in which an earthquake has caused the equipment to catch fire.
The vocal pieces are a bit more of a mixed bag for me, as the big, auto-tuned hooks often feel like they would not be out of place at an Arabic EDM festival for spring breakers, but a few pieces head in more of a stripped-down and menacing Brazilian Funk-style direction instead. The most striking example of the latter is the thudding and maniacal opener “I See The Stadium” in which auto-tuned chant-like vocals collide with Arabic rapping and feral-sounding rasps and gurgles from guest Lord Spikeheart, but it eventually settles into a more rolling mutant dembow groove.
While that one is a bit too over-the-top for my taste, I found a lot to love about “The Dala Effect” and “Living Emojis.” In “The Dala Effect,” Miniawy’s vocal hook obsessively repeats over a raucous shapeshifting groove that vibrantly squelches and thumps through a hallucinatory landscape of swooning psychotropic bird songs and explosive bursts of static. Elsewhere, “Living Emojis” combines a spatially active clapping rhythm with gnarly, strangled-sounding bass and a deconstructed chord progression to impressively visceral and kaleidoscopic effect. I especially liked how the last stretch was reduced to just a throbbing kick drum pulse.
While I suspect that it will mostly be the more dub-centric/instrumental pieces that I return to in the future rather than the “blow up the club”-style fare, Dying Is The Internet is nevertheless an impressively intense, inventive, and boldly original album. How much these songs resonate with fans will definitely be a matter of personal taste (and probably age as well), yet absolutely anyone interested in the art of electronic music production will probably have their mind repeatedly blown by Simo Cell’s virtuosic production techniques, as this album is a veritable explosion of cool ideas masterfully executed.
Listen here.
This is the debut release from the duo of Brian Foote (Kranky/Peak Oil/False Aralia) and Paul Dickow (Strategy), 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.”
The opening “Volcano Snail” is the piece that best captures Foote and Dickow at the height of their powers, which makes sense given that it was also the album’s first single. To my ears, it is a bit more austere and ambient dub-inspired than High Cube’s other pieces, but it is otherwise quite a solid representation of the various threads that run throughout the entire album. For example, the music is about as hyper-minimal as it gets, as the piece is essentially just a gently percolating vamp with a head-bobbing groove, bleary synth pads, and some subtle effects. The execution is everything, however, as “Volcano Snail” coheres into an absolutely killer groove once the bubbling bass line hits and its sublimely understated pleasures only multiply further with the aid of headphones or a suitably banging sound system (subtly panning percussion, psychotropic laser squiggles, spacy flanging, etc.). While there are no real hooks or any overt build up to a compositional crescendo or cool transformation, there is definitely a sustained and immersive mood and the details lurking within that mood are compellingly vivid, unpredictable, and endlessly evolving.
For me, the album’s other big highlights are “Ofid+wor” and “Mother of Thousands.” In the former, a wonderfully trebly, off-kilter, and breakin’-friendly drum machine groove winds through a tripped-out fantasia of urbane, jazzy sophistication mingled with weird gurgles and trills that evoke a hallucinatory jungle. Elsewhere, in “Mother of Thousands,” warm ambient pads and subtly streaking “falling star” effects are anchored by a seismically deep bass line and a characteristically wonky and unstable beat. The real beauty of the piece lies in the way the beat is spatially active and deconstructed, however, as the way the shivering cymbal patterns flicker and flutter around my head is impressively hypnotic.
In fact, the beats are truly the heart and soul of High Cube as far as I am concerned, as they are invariably weird, off-kilter, visceral, and inventively processed in gently hallucinatory ways. These beats feel like they are fucking alive, as they endlessly shiver, lurch, stumble, skitter, and stammer rather than simply falling rigidly into a predictable pattern. The music was admittedly a bit more of an acquired taste for me, but I believe that I have now mostly acquired it. While there are not any strong melodic hooks to be found and I usually have a deep aversion to hazed-out, impressionistic, and vaporwave-esque strains of ‘80s electro-funk and jazz-pop, Foote and Dickow have elevated those vibes into an elegantly smeared and curdled retro-mindfuck that provides the perfect state of disorienting unreality for their mesmerizing and endlessly mutating percussion workouts to work their full magic.
Listen here.
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.
Throughout many there is a digital sheen, either via the use of reverb or other forms of modern processing. This overall sound, intentional or not, gives a sense of parallel with his earlier works on Sky and Discos Esplendor Geometrico and the recontextualizing of contemporary electronic sounds into something entirely unique.
The metallic echoes and near-percussion of "German Angst" exemplify this, with ghostly electronic spaces and scraping/rattling sounds, peppered with unsettling volume shifts, almost feels like a direct nod to classic industrial music, which the title further seems to indicate. "Imperial Logistics" is one of the more open pieces, with sci-fi soundscapes interrupted by occasional menacing thuds and other banging noises that are not so much rhythmic as chaotic.
Another theme Tietchens returns to throughout the album is contrasting open space and the aforementioned jarring outbursts. Opening with loud, aggressive interference and immediately followed with wide, reverberated spaces, "Die Schwere der Leere" balances these two, with spacious hums and sharp stabs appearing throughout. "Idyll Im Obszän" may begin with hissing white noise that transition to droning tones, but again with this almost unintentional (but surely not) sounding loud digital glitching throughout it keeps things unsettling.
Some of the other pieces feature almost melodic elements that Tietchens employs, intentional or naturally occurring, that also give a unique quality to Conclusio. With "Organischer Restbestand" there is a lot of open space, but he blends in some loud metal clanging that sound like massive metal cables being plucked, but beneath this is a series of swirling tones that become melodic in their own way.
"Raudi Agil an der Bahntrasse" is arguably one of the most distinct pieces on the album given Tietchens's variation of sound and techniques utilized. Shimmering, time-stretched drifts of sound become the basis for structured pulses and swells, and repeated loops give a greater sense of song-like structure to the piece. Violent robotic squeals and what could be best described as deconstructed sinister carnival music results in a complex, but uncomfortable piece. The concluding title work is a bit more static than the rest of the album, with blasting, ghostly winds hiding melodies exhibiting subtle variations throughout. The structure stays consistent, but the sounds used make for a focused conclusion.
Given the title and the length of his career, I am hoping that this is not indicating any sort of finality to Tietchens's body of work, given the consistency he has maintained throughout his career while never seeming to settle on any one style. I find his collaborations engaging, of course, but I find his solo works especially engaging, and the juxtapositions he utilized throughout this album exemplify his work perfectly.
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).
For those just catching up with the story, Tin Iso and the Dawn told the story of two puppets who ventured into a shadow realm through a hole in the sky to “bring forth a rising sun and the creation of a world.” In this second installment, a puppet named Osni finds embers in the belly of a dragon and unwittingly ignites the apple tree that she was trying to protect from the winter chill. Desperate to save the tree, Osni summons returning star Iso (now the god of the sea), but things quickly go from bad to worse when Iso’s efforts drown both Osni and the garden. Bummer ending, right? Not so fast! In a surprise twist, Osni crosses into the beyond with “her spirit alight with flame” and becomes the god of fire.
While certainly an eventful and drama-filled day for all involved, Allen tells that story in an impressively sensual and dreamlike way. There are certainly some well-earned crescendos of smoldering intensity, but dark whimsy and bittersweet beauty are considerably more rampant and Allen displays a real talent for making motifs drift in and out of focus like an elusive and mysterious mirage. They also have a wonderfully organic and subtly playful approach to composition, as melodies languorously intertwine, dance, blossom, and ignite into smoldering distortion and the instrumentation ranges from proper classical gear like pianos and organs to toys, puppet sounds, field recordings, and old-timey pump organs. Somehow, however, it all sounds like it belongs together—as if a Pandora’s Box of delicate music box melodies, dreamy flutes, churning strings, and ramshackle puppet orchestras suddenly opened up when Allen sat down at the piano and then slammed shut again with the final notes of “Osni Closing.”
For me, the stone-cold stunner at the heart of the album is “Act III: Rite,” as an achingly gorgeous music box melody gradually transforms into a churning haze of strings, curdled brass, and gnarled distortion without ever losing the twinkling beauty of its soul. I especially loved how it sounds like there is an entire submerged brass band in the final stretch. In fact, you should probably stop reading and listen to it right now, as the day I don’t find it incredibly moving will be the day that I start mourning the sad death of my sense of wonder.
I have also fallen in a bit in love with “Act II: Pyre,” as blearily disjointed patterns gradually cohere into a haunting organ reverie, a flanged and hallucinatory dance, a beautifully bittersweet xylophone motif, and a hissing coda that dissolves into something resembling a glimpse of ghostly outsider R&B heard through a veil of static. Notably, that last bit also surfaces in another excellent piece (“Act II: Dragon”), but this whole fucking album is a mesmerizing rabbit hole worth plunging down again and again, as each fresh immersion brings out more cool details and textures. In short, this is another great Tristan Allen album, but the big twist this time around is that there were also a series of videos waiting to dazzle me anew with similarly haunting and evocative manipulations of light and shadow. I love absolutely everything about this project.
Listen here.
This latest opus from the eternally evolving Cécile Schott continues her recent fascination with synth-centric compositions, but the resemblance to any previous Colleen releases begins and ends there, as these five pieces feel like a bold leap into challenging and surprising new territory. The album’s title (“Free before the ending”) alludes to Schott’s 2024 decision to learn to swim again after three decades of water phobia, which is an exceptionally rich metaphor about navigating an “unstable environment…its discomfort, the doubts about your abilities and the reality of facing your own limitations.” In keeping with that theme, the sea is itself an excellent metaphor for this album, as Schott casts aside familiar melodies and patterns to plunge into a vision that is churning, alive, unpredictable, and uncharacteristically visceral.
It is not surprising that Schott’s uneasy relationship with water loomed large in her life in recent years, as she moved to Barcelona in 2019 and notes that “the sight of the Mediterranean Sea made me feel this limitation more and more acutely with each passing year.” Alert readers may note that the world as a whole started to go to shit in greatly accelerated fashion soon after that, so Schott’s dread of the seemingly infinite, unknown, and unpredictable expanse eternally lurking on her horizon mirrored an increasingly threatening and unpredictable era for humans in general. The trigger for Schott’s transformational life event came during a performance in the Azores (her 250th live show, coincidentally), as she was struck by the dolphin-filled natural beauty of her surroundings and realized that she needed to “stop making excuses” and get in the fucking water. Unsurprisingly, her triumphant return to the sea proved to be a revelatory experience that “catapulted” her into a more physical and active life and she considers the album “an ode to movement, to the body, to water, to urgency; to repairing old wounds, overcoming personal blocks and starting all over again.”
This latest release from the seemingly endless Muslimgauze archive is a bit of an enigma and a surprise, as it was apparently “assembled posthumously” from “previously unreleased material.” Admittedly, that half-true claim could reasonably be made about A LOT of archival Muslimgauze album releases that have surfaced in the years since Bryn Jones’ untimely passing in 1999, but the difference is that this album was assembled by Staalplaat rather than being one of the many “finished” albums that had previously only surfaced in a limited edition or simply got shelved and forgotten about due to the staggering pace with which Jones churned out albums in his lifetime.
In the world of Muslimgauze, however, normal distinctions between albums and eras are blurred into meaninglessness, as at least three of these pieces have previously been released in relatively similar form elsewhere. If normal rules applied, such obvious recycling would definitely annoy the hell out of me, but these eight pieces feel right together and capture some of the more killer grooves of Muslimgauze’s mid-’90s Indian/Bhangra-inspired work.
Seemingly a post-script to David Jackman's subscription series of CDs that were conceptualized as a single piece, these two 7" records both continue the themes of the eight albums that preceded them. With one as Organum Electronics and the other under his own name, one of the singles is an extension of what had come before, but the other seems to venture into new spaces, which I suppose may or may not be indicative of a future direction in Jackman’s work.
Available individually to the public, or in a colored vinyl double 7" old school gatefold package for the subscribers, the construction of these two singles is aligned with Jackman's history of presenting two slightly different variations on the same sound. "Fiire," as Organum Electronics, is the one that is most representative of the discs that made up the subscription set. Taking that almost-but-not-quite harsh noise blast sound that has been consistent with his use of that name, the relative brevity adds to the intensity. Over the two sides, I can almost detect some of the elements of his non-electronic work (bells, ravens, etc.) bleeding through the jet engine blast, but that could be entirely a figment of my imagination. Like the long form works, however, the endings of the pieces are just as jarring as the openings.
Back in 2022, Bill Orcutt released his excellent Music for Four Guitars album, which led to the formation of a killer touring quartet featuring fellow avant-guitar luminaries Shane Parish, Wendy Eisenberg, and Ava Mendoza. Orcutt clearly found that experience inspiring, as he later started a similarly formidable trio with Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller. In keeping with that theme, Music in Continuous Motion is yet another album composed for a quartet of guitars, but this one “pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism” and “discrete, mechanistic precision” of its predecessor to embrace a more melodic, human, and performance-driven aesthetic. While Orcutt himself impishly summarizes this latest direction as “a bridge pickup record more than a neck pickup record,” my own take is that it feels like a spiritual descendant of the best bits of Glenn Branca, Gang of Four, Built to Spill, and Archers of Loaf with a distinctly Orcutt spin. Unsurprisingly, it also feels like yet another great album from one of the most reliably compelling and singular guitarists around.
To my ears, the opening “Giving unknown origin” is the piece that best captures Orcutt at the height of his powers, as it features a bright and memorable melody, an incredibly cool and intricate central motif, and plenty of snarl, bite, and obsessive repetition. He also makes incredibly effective and dynamic use of the stereo field, which makes it possible to discern how all of its masterfully interwoven moving parts are evolving and interacting. While I certainly dig the various riffs and melodies and the shifting dynamics, “Giving unknown origin” is also an excellent showcase for some of the more general aspects of Orcutt’s vision that I love, such as the way he balances machine-like pattern repetition with more viscerally slashing elements. The best bits feel like a duel in both a literal sense (staccato rhythmic interplay) and a more profound and abstract sense (beauty vs. violence, order vs. chaos, etc.). Also, I would be remiss if I did not also note that I was surprised to discover that Orcutt can unleash taut, angular, and urgent-sounding riffage as well as any ripping post-hardcore band, which is not something I would have guessed from his previous work.
This “ambient transsexual” homage to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (“his dark night of the soul with red text on a black background”) was inspired by the eleven months spent in Iowa after “avowed club rat, alt pop star aspirant, and sophisticated film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli hauled herself and her two parakeets there from Bushwick unto the relative quiet and spaciousness of the plains.” Unsurprisingly, that move was a bit of a culture shock, as OHYUNG traded raves and Brooklyn nightlife for “prairie sunsets, transgender care bans, all-ages hardcore shows, screaming hog farms, corn reaching for the heavens, tornado sirens, big beautiful skies, the world’s largest truckstop, and a brutal winter,” but she also notes that Iowa gave us Arthur Russell, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Transcendental Meditation as well. Fittingly, the album mirrors that unique mixture of beauty and menace and shares Springsteen’s own pared-to-the-bone starkness, which is quite an unexpected and haunting reinvention in the wake of 2025’s stellar pop-minded opus You Are Always On My Mind yet remains every bit as compelling (if not more so).
Self-Released
In a roundabout way, it seems like OHYUNG could not have made Iowa without making a “pop” album first, as it got her thinking about what remains “when she removes the scaffolding” and “grinds up the bones of the song.” Notably, she did not treat that as a purely rhetorical question and concluded that the answer was “ghostly echoes, mouth sounds, simulated tape hiss, and late-night gloom.” To my ears, it seems like OHYUNG used that as the starting point of Iowa, then built upwards from there using a palette of “mangled chorales, lo-res rips of devotional music, surreptitious field recordings, and assorted synth pads.”
The premise of this quixotic tour de force admittedly sounds like a joke that went waaay too far, which certainly explains why Bill Orcutt agreed to release it on Palilalia before ever hearing a single note, as his own A Mechanical Joey occupies similarly improbable and seemingly deranged terrain. As Philip Sherburne sagely observes in his album notes, "This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all." In reality, however, Autechre Guitar is the end result of a multi-decade labor of love for Parish, as he has made a career out of challenging and unexpected covers and his wife is quite a big fan of Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s singularly inscrutable, obtuse, and time-bending techno mutations. Consequently, making an album like this one has probably always been Parish’s inexorable destiny.
Palilalia
Before the album was released, I was predictably quite curious about how the hell Parish was going to pull off such a feat, yet I was also mystified about why he would even want to attempt such a thing in the first place (aside from the sheer challenge of it). Notably, Parish has covered electronic artists before, but Repertoire’s cover of Aphex Twin's “Avril 14th” notably singled out one of the most nakedly beautiful and melodic pieces in Richard James’ oeuvre and Autechre are definitely not an act that I associate with timeless melodies. Parish would certainly beg to differ, however, as Autechre’s melodies are the heart of this album (though few will be surprised that he chose to focus primarily on their comparatively accessible early ’90s work like Incunabula, Amber, and Tri-Repetae).
This latest transmission from the Opalio brothers is the result of a major creative breakthrough of sorts, as they recently had the epiphany that their signature “spontaneous composition” process could also work in reverse as well. Always metaphysically minded, the Opalios realized that infinity itself was passing through their compositions, as the revelation that they could now play with time in either direction was both creatively liberating and also kind of heavy in a Zen/cosmic sense (“a flux with no beginning and no end, apparently always the same yet always different, that flows in an eternal becoming”). In less mind-expanding terms, that means that this album’s two longform pieces were created by subtracting layers from a spontaneous composition that had already reached “the apogee of the real-time creation.” The effect of that temporal sorcery is impressively dramatic, however, as IN∞FI∞NI∞TO captures MCIAA at their most hypnotically minimal and hallucinatory peak.
The heart of this album is essentially just two deceptively simple motifs: a murmuring backwards pulse and and a sliding and fluttering tone that leaves smeared and pulsing after-images in its wake. The combined effect is quite an evocative one, however, as it feels like I am sitting on a desolate alien beach watching a swirl of psychotropic seagulls swooping and diving as waves rhythmically roll in from the sea.
