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Out like a lamb
Finishing up March, we're catching up with three new episodes.
Episode 783 features new music from Miki Berenyi Trio, Dead Can Dance, Tujiko Noriko, The SPKtR, Kristin Hersh, Ak’chamel, The Givers of Illness, Lee "Scratch" Perry & Mouse on Mars, Terrence Dixon, and Magic Tuber Stringband, plus music from the vaults by Annea Lockwood, dagmar zuniga, and Jonas Braasch / Pauline Oliveros / Doug Van Nort.
Episode 784 has new tunes from Dead Pioneers, Analog Tara, Cole Berliner, Carl Stone & Asuna, Paula Kelley, The NRG, BIG|BRAVE, Guided By Voices, and Dobrawa Czocher, plus not so new tunes from Banda 20 De Julio De Repelon, Christina Kubisch, Raglani,
Episde 785 features new stuff by Espen Reinertsen, Will Gardner, Margareth Kammerer, Juli Deák, David Newlyn, Tegh & Adel Poursamadi, and Marc Almond & The Gaslight Troubadours, plus less than new stuff by Huggy Bear, Pauline Oliveros / Issui Minegishi / Miya Masaoka, Le Simandou De Beyla, Fugazi, and June of 44.
Kitten in a hammock photo by Eve.
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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.
I had admittedly become a bit numb to this prolific Kenyan producer’s steady stream of ambient releases in the years since he first burst onto the scene with 2020’s Peel, but this second Editions Mego album is one hell of a stunner. Fittingly, Kin first began to take shape in 2021 when KMRU discussed his vision for Peel’s sequel with label head Peter Rehberg, but that particular vision was unsurprisingly put on ice with Rehberg’s untimely passing. After about a year, however, KMRU gradually returned to that material and a rather different and noisier vision began to take shape instead. Partially inspired by distorted guitar sounds of KMRU’s youth, the viscerally snarling and smoldering Kin sounds like one of his stronger ambient albums was doused with gas and set ablaze. Fittingly, that vision is reminiscent of some of the best bits of Pita’s Get Out and Rehberg’s former bandmate Christian Fennesz turns up to the party as well, which makes Kin feel like both KMRU’s finest album to date and an improbable late-period return to Editions Mego’s golden age.
The opening “With Trees Where We Can See” provides a fairly representative (if condensed) introduction to Kin’s pleasures, as a thick and viscous-sounding synth motif languorously loops while a crackling and sizzling veil of distortion steadily intensifies. While that is hardly groundbreaking territory in the “power ambient” realm, KMRU’s approach is a bit more layered and mysterious than most, as a whistling and howling melody gradually starts to emerge from the sea of noise. While that particular piece clocks in at a mere three minutes in length, the overall trend throughout the album is that the longer pieces tend to undergo the most magical and sublime transformations (though the 20-minute closer “By Absence” is a more improvisatory and bird song-enhanced exception to that rule).
This latest album from Christian Schoppik feels like a bit of a curious outlier or comparatively modest release in the wake of last year’s stellar Unterhaltungen Mit Larven Und Überresten, but it is a characteristically fascinating one nonetheless. Schoppik’s collaborator this time around is Matthias Kremsreiter, who debuts his new Roudi Vagou alias but normally records as alibikonkret. While the two artists certainly share a fondness for dark psychedelia and haunted atmospheres, Taghelle Nacht (Daylight Night) feels like a completely new vision that suggests a Bavarian twist on Grey Gardens experienced from the perspective of a ghost and DJed by The Caretaker’s haunted Victrola: a slow-motion drift through the moldering, dust-covered ruins of a once-opulent seaside mansion in which vivid memories of the past continually bleed into the present in subtly unsettling and hallucinatory fashion.
As befits an album with such a mysterious and elusive vision, Taghelle Nacht is divided into two halves (like a split release) with Roudi Vagou credited with the first eight pieces and Läuten der Seele with the rest, but the differences between the two artists are so blurry that they are largely irrelevant. The reason for that is two-fold, as the album feels like a series of impressionistic vignettes shaped from the same small palette of samples and instruments and the more melodic bits tend to flicker and vanish like phantoms (“snatches of song drift by like dreamlike fragments, and achingly tender flourishes fleetingly appear and retreat”).
This mesmerizing opus from NYC-based composer Irisarri first began its life with a chance meeting at MUTEK in Mexico City, as a conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp regarding how technology shapes perception led to an invitation to a collaborative residency at Uncloud (located in a former psychiatric prison in Utrecht). Appropriately, that original topic relates closely to the album’s overarching concept, as Points of Inaccessibility reflects the pervasive isolation and alienation that has resulted from living illusory digital lives (“we inhabit spaces saturated with signals, yet the possibility of genuine contact becomes increasingly remote”). Schilp’s visual research also played a significant role in the album’s shape, as Irisarri’s sounds were processed through “custom point-cloud software patch that produced images in continuous flux” in which “visuals flickered, dissolved and reformed like memories that resist coherence, functioning as a digital Rorschach that reflected the observer’s own perception.” The music achieves a very similar end, as warm and beautiful forms endlessly blossom and dissolve in a roiling ocean of static.
Notably, Schilp’s own process required “a continuous stream of sound in real time,” so Irisarri’s initial recordings at Uncloud were mostly of bowed guitar drones processed through various pedals and looping systems. Admittedly, that approach sounds like business-as-usual for Irisarri, but the album continued to evolve further once he returned to his home studio, as he fleshed out the original recordings with synth, Moog bass, and strings while remaining as faithful as possible to the original performances.
Infrasound, or frequencies of sound that exist beyond the range of human hearing, are omnipresent but cannot be heard, nor recorded using traditional equipment. Captured over a period of 24 hours in Amherst, Massachusetts (coincidentally, a town adjacent to mine, and that I drive through multiple times per week), Brian House captured infrasound via custom built macrophones, speeding the recordings up 60 times to render them into the range of human hearing. The outcome is an expansive, at times terrifying, pair of compositions that are as sonically enjoyable as they are scientifically fascinating.
With the sides split between day and night, the differences are audible dependent on the time of recording. The day side (6AM through 6PM) leads in with silence that is soon blended with distant, heavy rumbling and other low frequency, submerged like sounds. Slow passages of sound whiff over like clouds, offsetting unconventional echoing sounds. Through the 24 minutes of the piece, House captures higher frequency tones, indistinct rattling, and guttural textures. The overall structure is a consistent one, however, even with all of these disparate layers mixed with a strong compositional structure.
