20 August 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

It is immediately clear from the opening piece "Preludio" that this is music composed with an unusually clear sense of structure and direction. As a classically trained pianist, Francesco Gennari has a solid grounding in music theory and he applies this knowledge to modular synths, with an authentic desire for experimentation and some serious chops; he can play. What elevates this debut recording even further is his ability to develop complex pieces from simple themes, while injecting energy and a sense of aggression and dynamics into his music.

Important

Having grown up during the prog rock heyday of the early 1970s, knee deep as we were in the truly awful and the absolutely bloody magnificent, I hesitated to refer to Gennari as "classically trained." Back then, and particularly when applied to guitarists or keyboard players, this phrase became almost a code word for impressive speed and an elite technique almost inevitably leading to impressive dullness and top notch overcomplexity. No such pitfalls with Frammenti, though, and there is not a dull moment on this entire album. It smacks of a brilliant sci-fi soundtrack. In fact if I were Ridley Scott I'd redo Blade Runner, keeping the best bits of Vangelis, erasing all traces of the white dove, and liberally applying some Frammenti. (Then I'd also demand that Dennis Villeneuve recall and destroy all copies of Blade Runner 2049 but that's another story).

Among the many highlights I hear an abrasive delicacy in "Ardere" with its shockingly brilliant expanding and splintering crescendo. "Mimosa" exemplifies how Gennari can hone in on sleek repetition and then stick to his guns, by all means deviating simple patterns but never losing the plot by doing so too wildly. "Rifugio" is mind blowing good—as if crystalline drips of hyper sound are bouncing off the skin of an alien surface stretched tighter than a drum. The piece has amazing textures and a lush, aching, sonorous quality.

There is an algebraic quality to all these compositions, as Gennari uses counterpoint and harmonic development to extrapolate his fairly simple chosen melodic and rhythmic themes. There are also emotional elements too. Frammenti has a near-perfect balance of winning restraint, with experimentation and textural distortion enjoyed but not allowed to obliterate or even obscure these rather thrilling and affecting tunes.

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23 July 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

These two singular artists have been fitfully playing together for roughly a decade now and they have released a number of albums documenting their incredible duo performances. Notably, their most recent union was for 2021's absolutely killer Made Out of Sound album, but that one was a bit of an aberration for the duo, as it was a studio creation crafted remotely. Happily, Play at Duke captures the pair back together on stage where they belong. The stage in question was unsurprisingly at Duke University, but the album's prosaic title omits a rather significant detail: the performance in question closed out Three Lobed Recording's 21st anniversary festival in appropriately riveting fashion. While both artists rank among my favorite musicians and have truly incredible chemistry as an improv unit, some performances are undeniably better than others and Play at Duke feels like an especially inspired night to me. Moreover, Orcutt and Corsano make a virtue of brevity as well, as there is not a single wasted note or even a hint of a lull in this 25-minute tour de force.

Palilalia

The performance feels like an unusually joyous one right from its first rolling toms and major chords, which makes sense given that the performance was the culmination of a three-day festival in which Orcutt and Corsano were surrounded by great music, a host of their peers, and a sizable audience of receptive fans waiting to be properly blown away. It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment in which I was blown away myself upon hearing the album, but I am confident that it occurred some time during first of the performance's three sections, as the duo quickly strain toward the transcendent and ecstatic (Orcutt's wordless vocal howls tend to be a fairly reliable indicator that a particularly incendiary performance is underway). Naturally, there are plenty of killer licks and technically dazzling drum fills throughout the album, but the true beauty lies less in what Corsano and Orcutt play than it does in how they play it, how they interact with each other, and how they feed off the volatile spontaneity of live improvisation.

Stylistically, the terrain on Plays at Duke will be quite familiar to Bill Orcutt fans: a freewheeling blend best described as sort of virtuosic No Wave blues, though there are occasionally some Hendrix-y touches that feel like a fresh development. I was far more struck by the sheer visceral ferocity of Orcutt's playing, however, as he frequently unleashes fiery frenzies of wild bends, violent twangs, snapping open strings, convulsive riff deconstructions, and rapidly scrabbling fretboard runs. Notably, however, those expected firestorms are beautifully (and seamlessly) balanced with more tender and melodic passages where Orcutt will linger on a single note or chord. While I tend to prefer the more intense passages as a whole, those more feral passages are able to make a deep impact over and over again primarily because Orcutt and Corsano share a virtuosic intuition for effectively manipulating dynamics: intensity waxes and wanes, attacks and decays vary, and a soulful array of other moods are touched upon far beyond "ecstatic volcano." Both Orcutt and Corsano are in peak form on Play at Duke, as it feels like I am hearing two incredible solos at once that are organically intertwined, thrillingly spontaneous, and much, much more than the sum of their parts.

Listen here.

23 July 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

The Heartwood Institute creates memorable hauntological radiophonic doom-synth library folk music wherein traditional instruments from autoharp to zither are warped beyond identification, and blended into a barrage of synths and samplers, with film dialogue and nature sounds sprinkled in. Witchcraft is the subject matter of Pendle, and the album has a suitably spellbinding atmosphere, albeit one with the sense to emphasize grime and poverty. That's not to say there are not layers of sound which suggest cloudy pseudo-romantic myth, misty obscurity, and even smoke billowing up from a hexastein into some corridor of eternal purgatorial uncertainty where no one can hear your appeals for help, your moans or wails.

self-released

Mist Over Pendle is music inspired by the book of that name by Robert Neill and both are depictions of the events around the Pendle witch trials of 1622; amongst the most infamous such trials in English history. The album has an appropriately eerie density. We hear crows cawing, muffled human cries, incantations, repetitive electronic thuds, the occasional eye scratching curse and air cracking screech, foreboding synths, brooks not so much babbling as blabbing confessions during a water boarding session, and snippets of dialogue in archaic dialects lifted from an obscure 1976 television drama The Witches of Pendle.

Of the ten witches from Pendle who were eventually hanged, six came from just two families, so it is fitting that two tunes here are titled after the two octogenarian matriarchs of those—Demdike and Chattox—families. "Mother Demdike" is absolutely great, in particular the heavily distressed flute sample. The piece hits a bitter sweet spot, as does "Lancaster Assizes" named for the location of the trial (or assizes). "The Two Familiars" has a dark tone with submerged sounding piano and slurred sludge-like synchronized bass. The term "familiars" by the way refers to the devil himself or to evil spirit helpers of witches, often in animal form as a black or brown dog.

I believe that the opening piece "The Curse of Pendle" alludes in part to the religious and political backdrop to the Pendle case; including the fact that nine year-old Jennet Device was a key witness for the prosecution (something that would not have been permitted in many other 17th-century criminal trials had King James not argued for suspending the normal rules of evidence for witchcraft trials in his Daemonologie). Jennet's testimony sent her mother, sister and brother to their death, and years later she herself would be accused of witchcraft and imprisoned. Another song refers to the first victim, John Law, allegedly made lame for refusing to sell or give pins to Alison Device of the Demdike family. "Alice Nutter" also shows up, in a relatively humdrum piece (I would have liked even more sampled dialogue from the TV drama on this piece and throughout the entire album). To some extent the mists of time will always shroud this episode from English social history, but a picture has emerged of two families clashing, both desperate to make a living from begging, healing, extortion, and superstition; both willing and eager to accuse the other of witchcraft, and dooming themselves in the process. Back then there was money to be made by posing as a witch and also by threatening to expose witches. Both these families played with fire and got burned and even worse they unwittingly brought into being the accursed witchcraft- related tourism trade hundred of years later. There is even a statue of Alice Nutter now.

The Heartwood Institute is Jonathan Sharp, a prolific artist who lives in the Lake District and has clearly taken to heart the maxim "write about your own backyard." His previous works include "Calder Hall: Atomic Power Station" an album length musical ode to the world's first atomic power station, and the brilliant Hedges - inspired in part by the Ladybird book series. The cover art for Mist Over Pendle shows actress Cathryn Harrison as Alizon Device in the 1976 television program.

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23 July 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Electronic Designs was originally released in 1977 and it retains a weird and wonderful retro-futuristic atmosphere. By turns bizarre and swinging, wild and smooth, these recordings have a depth and an edge not always achieved in so-called library music. Younger glitch merchants can only hope to get close to the swing that Italian master Gianni Safred effortlessly knocks off on "Elastic Points." Then again, he did play with Django Reinhardt. This is a killer release with calculated, almost architectural, quality oozing out of every track. The cosmic melancholy of "Spheres'' is not unlike some of Basil Kirchin's more poignant compositions, such as "I Start Counting" while the frankly stunning "Planetarium" has Safred gradually unleashing an array of textural flourishes, as if imitating meteors or shooting stars amid a galaxy of stars and planets.

Four Flies

I was attracted to this album because of Larry Manteca's "Ufo Bossa/Intergalactic Porno Scene" (released in March on the Four Flies label) from the previous recording Mutant Virgins From Pluto. That breezy ultra-lounge electro-cocktail 7" sent me scurrying through the Four Flies catalog and landed me here. The cover art of Electronic Designs - with interlocked squares, parallel lines, images from maps or pseudo-astronomy, and oblongs which resemble circuit boards - gives away some of the compositional structure and feel which Safred coaxes from his Polymoog and ARP Odyssey. It's all about functional experimentation, relaxed and catchy, hypnotic space-age swathes of melody floating over well-grounded grooves.

Not that Electronic Designs is a dry intellectual affair in the slightest (remember the swing background) but Safred really knows where he is going with this music. As well as a clear sense of navigation, the album has a geometric logic. It fits together as well as if it had been composed by someone with logarithmic superpowers. Or perhaps as if Safred were a reincarnation of John Napier: the Scottish mathematician who developed a forerunner of the slide rule (a set of rods called Napier's Bones) and in 1614 published his discovery of logarithms. Truth be told I could have been reading about such concepts since 1614 and be absolutely none the wiser, yet just listening to the snakelike top melody and easy beats which Gianni Safred puts into "Poe's Clock", or the slow spiraling descent and echoing electro-swirl of "Sacred Interlude" somehow makes me feel much smarter, not to mention a good deal looser in the region of my hip bones.

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16 July 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

While I am a fan of both DJ Python (Brian Piñeyro) and Ana Roxanne, a collaboration between the two is not something that I would have ever foreseen happening due to the substantial gulf between their styles. Unusual circumstances can lead to unexpected places, however, and the two mutual admirers found themselves both adrift and living in NYC in 2020 ("well-loved albums aside, no one was playing shows, and a general listlessness and disconnection prevailed"). As a result, the two finally met in person and soon began working on new music together ("studio experimentation was the instinctive extension of a friendship finding its feet"). Before they could finish an album, however, circumstances changed again and Piñeyro returned to the European club scene, while Roxanne toured the world and moved back to California.

Mexican Summer

Fortunately, the pair were still able to meet up occasionally and eventually had enough material to convene in Los Angeles and Brooklyn to finish an album. Given the pedigree of those involved, it is no surprise that Natural Wonder Beauty Concept is a compelling project, but it takes some unexpected directions: while Piñeyro's recent collaboration with Ela Minus resulted in a poppier strain of DJ Python's "deep reggaeton," Roxanne's influence often steers Piñeyro's beats in a more vaporous and ambient-inspired direction.

This was an unusual album to wrap my head around, as it feels like Piñeyro and Roxanne's shared vision organically changed directions quite frequently. While the duo's varied influences (HTRK, Portishead, Bjork, Seefeel, Boards of Canada) offer some insight into the elusive character of that vision, the actual roots run a bit deeper than music, as both artists have spent a lot of time "reflecting on feeling too much and feeling nothing at all." That makes a lot of sense given the life of a touring solo artist ("You hurtle across the sky to spend a few hours in a dark club, behind the decks or on stage at the microphone. A brief grasp at transcendence, then the lights are on."). Fittingly, the shapeshifting tone of the album's ten pieces seems to mirror those two emotional extremes quite effectively.

For example, the opening "Fallen Angel" is a ghostly, flickering, and wordless fantasia of cooing vocals, distended beats, and subtle psychedelia, while Roxanne's untreated vocals on the closing "World Freehand Circle Drawing" feel soulful and direct (though the inherent poppiness of that directness is undercut by the vaporous and eerily nocturnal vibe of the underlying music). That balance between "ambient" and "pop" sides unpredictably seesaws back and forth throughout the album. In fact, only the title piece lands somewhere that might be considered a seamless blend of both, as Roxanne's hazily sensuous vocals are beautifully enhanced by a hyperkinetic jungle breakbeat.

That said, exploring different directions is not a crime (especially when you have plenty of good ideas), so there are a number of other fine pieces to enjoy throughout the album. On the more pop end of the spectrum lie "Sword," "Drive" and "III." "Sword" is the most dissolved and deconstructed of the trio, but Roxanne's swooping vocal hook is gorgeous and Piñeyro continually removes parts of the beat in interesting ways. Roxanne also takes lead vocals in the more brooding "Driving," which features a lovely wordless hook and a wonderfully shuffling, stuttering, and potentially woodpecker-inspired groove. Elsewhere, Piñeyro makes his vocal debut in the moody duet "III," which might be the album's biggest outlier, as it sounds like whatever the R&B equivalent of cloud rap would be called (somewhere between melancholy, anthemic, and stoned).

Notably, Roxanne and Piñeyro screened much of their "in-progress" material while driving around the LA hills at night and that seems like exactly the right context for this album, as the best moments perfectly evoke that elusive sense of feeling wonderfully alive in a hazy unreality of ambient melancholy and brooding shadows. I definitely need more of that in my own life, so maybe this will finally be the album that unintentionally makes my world collapse by awakening simmering longings and long-buried frustrations. We'll see, I guess. There are also a couple of more avant-garde inspired pieces on the album that veer into more overtly hallucinatory territory, as "Young Adult Fiction" suggests a digitized ghost haunting a slowed-down DJ Python beat, while "Veil II" resembles a gently psychotropic kalimba piece assembled from overlapping, out-of-sync loops.

While I have yet to fully warm to the first part of "Veil," just about every other piece would be a fine template for an entire album. Given the busy schedules and geographic distance now separating Roxanne and Piñeyro, I would be hesitant to bet on a follow up ever materializing, but the consolation prize for now is that this debut provides enough teasingly divergent glimpses of future possibilities that resourceful fans can simply let their imaginations do the rest of the work.

Listen here.

16 July 2023

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

One of the reasons I had to investigate this latest album from the always prolific Masami Akita is that I was surprised it took him this long to make a cat themed album. A staunch animal rights activists and composer of many animal themed albums (Chickens! Bears! Dolphins! A whole bunch of other birds!), it took well over 40 years into his career to produce something in respect of the venerable house feline. How much this applies beyond the title and beautiful photography used as packaging is of course questionable, but musically it is Akita at his most diverse.

Elevator Bath

It has been ages since I have listened to new Merzbow material, but I found myself rather surprised at the diversity of sounds on CATalysis. My interest started to wane once he went full laptop, and I always preferred his earlier tape/loop based works, so the fact that this in many ways feels like a hybrid of the two is a wonderful thing. Right from the opening "CATalysis No. 1," this combination is notable: metallic chain rattles over an electronic windstorm as everything is swept into an intense, collapsing overdrive. Harsh loops and shrill feedback make for some multifaceted pairings, and some great stereo effects add further depth.

"CATalysis No. 2" is similar, with a hollow banging and revving engine type noise relenting to wet synth pulsations. There are lots of electronic stabs paired with junk-like banging, with the noise almost becoming rhythmic at times. Akita shifts things around with "CATalysis No. 3," which is far less of a sustained roar than anything else on the album, but instead blends the metal banging and thumping with sparser electronic bleeps and bloops. The result is more collage-like and harkens back to his early 80s tape work from a structural standpoint, but still sounds like contemporary Merzbow.

"CATalysis No. 4," on the other hand, goes hard into the "harsh" realm of his work. Immediately a mix of shrill feedback and roaring electronics, I had to turn the volume knob down quickly and kept it down for the remainder of the piece. The shrillness comes and goes, but some rudimentary synth tones and lots of delay manipulation balance things out well, and it occasionally drifts into wall noise territories. The nearly 23 minute closer "Hat 1046," besides having a baffling title compared to the remainder of the album, encompasses almost everything that came before. There is a bit more synth sounds overall, but the overall relentlessness of noise sounds like golden era Merzbow, albeit a bit less harsh overall. Ironically, a bit of a tweaked synth passage almost sounds like the meow of a cat for the first time, and it shows up on a piece titled "Hat 1046."

I found myself pleasantly surprised at the variety Akita displays on CATalysis, but part of that may simply be my intentionally limited Merzbow consumption in recent years. Many of the same elements appear throughout this disc: bleeping synths, banging metal, and a ton of distortion, but his varying implementation of them makes each piece stand out distinctly. The whole album has a bit of a digital sheen to it, at times sounding intentionally reduced bit rates, but it works well, in my opinion. Anything but monochromatic, it is disc that encompasses a lot of style, but still has an album-like sense of cohesion, which puts it high in my own personal Merzbow hierarchy.

Listen here.

16 July 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest collection from Folklore Tapes borrows its title from a Japanese proverb about knowing one's limitations ("the frog in the well knows nothing of the sea"), which was itself borrowed from a Chinese fable. In the context of an album devoted to UFO lore, of course, humans are the frogs, the infinite universe is the ocean, and the usual eclectic Folklore Tapes cast of characters gleefully devote themselves to celebrating the colorful hoaxes and stories of their countrymen who claim to have experienced a visit from extraterrestrial life. While alien visitations are admittedly a bit outside the usual realm of Folklore Tapes' research, I would be hard pressed to think of a roster of artists better suited to tackle the topic, as just about everyone involved brings a freewheeling playfulness to the theme and surprises abound. This is yet another characteristically brilliant and inspired compilation from the inimitable Folklore Tapes. Hell, it might even be their best yet.

Folklore Tapes

As is the case with most major Folklore Tapes releases, this collection exists only in physical form, as music and scholarship are eternally intertwined for the label (the LP includes quite a comprehensive essay by Jez Winship, as well as artist notes about stories that inspired their individual pieces). Also as expected, the album's contributors are a welcome murderers' row of names that will likely be familiar only to those who have delved into previous Folklore Tapes collections. That said, the album does include a killer (if brief) new piece from Dean McPhee ("The Second Message") that is predictably an album highlight. Unsurprisingly, I am predisposed to enjoy just about everything he releases, but "The Second Message" is doubly enjoyable for being something of an aberration, as McPhee's usual sustain-heavy melodicism is beautifully enhanced by a gorgeous descending chord motif and an unexpectedly wild and psychotropic finale. I was also thoroughly delighted by the trio of Carl Turney, Brian Campbell & Peter Smyth, as "July Aitee" is a perfectly distilled swirl of groovy, synth-driven dreampop magic (as well as a healthy bit of howling chaos).

The remaining pieces are frequently wonderful as well, as the fertile subject material inspired quite a lot of charmingly weird, wonky, and hallucinatory compositions and performances. Also, nearly every piece sticks to a tight two- or three-minute duration, which is very effective at ensuring that no pieces overstay their welcome or slow the album's momentum. Naturally, there are plenty of samples of people describing their supernatural experiences throughout the album as well, which provides a consistent (and compelling) thematic thread throughout the stylistically varied cavalcade of surreal miniatures. That said, there are a couple of strains that occur more frequently than others. One of those strains is best described as a sort of retrofuturism that feels indebted to '60s sci-fi television and BBC Radiophonic Workshop-style electronics, while the other is more atmospheric in nature (squelching abstract weirdness, drifting voices, crackling shortwave radio transmissions, etc.).

Naturally, there are a decent number of compelling outliers as well and several of them occupy a niche seldom found anywhere outside of Folklore Tapes' collections, such as the closing spoken word piece ("Glorious Green Globe") from poet Emily Oldfield. Thorn Wych's "Windy Hill" is another favorite, resembling a scratchy recording of a traditional folk ensemble (and possibly a nearby horse) getting sucked into a time-distorting extra-dimensional portal. Notably, the pleasures of this album further deepened by the accompanying artist notes, as there are several pieces that instantly became significantly more compelling once I knew their backstory. In fact, this LP would still be a fascinating release even if all the music vanished, as the stories are an incredible Pandora's Box of weirdness that crosses into counterculture and outsider art in some very unexpected ways (Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, tape music, and The Happy Mondays all play a role and the hypothesis that Hendrix himself may have been an alien is certainly not something that I had previously considered).

As much as I enjoy many individual pieces and stories, however, the star of When the Frog from the Well Sees the Ocean (Reports from English UFOlklore) is Folklore Tapes' curatorial vision, as the label has a singular talent for finding unusual, intriguing, and thoughtful contributors, which combines beautifully with the label's "anything goes" approach to creative freedom (as long as the result roughly sticks to the album's theme, of course). Consequently, the best Folklore Tapes compilations transform scholarship and history into a charming and eclectic collision of tall tales, high art, humor, literature, pop culture references, kitsch, folk horror, and playful experimentalism unlike anything being released by other labels. And, of course, there is always Jez Winship around to provide necessary context and tie everything together. The label truly outdid themselves with this one, as the liner notes alone are an endlessly fascinating rabbit hole of secret societies, enigmatic CIA projects, and obscure books that illuminate some very enticing cultural undercurrents that will probably hold my interest long after the album falls out of rotation (first stop: researching visionary artist Charles Dellschau). Much like previous Folklore Tapes classics like The Folklore of Plants and Calendar Customs, this LP is much more than a mere compilation: it is a one-of-a-kind labor of love that celebrates the weird, wonderful, forgotten, and oft-unexplainable bits of humanity's long and strange history.

Listen here.

16 July 2023

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

Like 2021's Four Lies in the Eavesdrop Business, composer/multi-instrumentalist Matt Weston's latest work is a lengthy double record. However, this time he specifically utilizes the format to create four side-long and expansive pieces that constantly develop, bringing in a multitude of different sounds and elements. The result is a series of intense, dense compositions that can be hard to keep up with at first, but eventually reveal a deep sense of complexity in their structures.

7272Music

"The Drunken Dance with the Telegrapher" is the first (and longest) of the four works. It clocks in at over 17 minutes and is always shifting and evolving through that entire duration. Opening with oddly processed, mangled sounds that resemble a pained monster, Weston adds sporadic, intense drumming and a creepy, droning ambience. He introduces high pitched noises and metallic pulses, the piece goes into shrill, harsh spaces at times, but the captivating bent tapes and layered tones keep it from being anything but an endurance test. Percussive thuds, drill-like electronic tones, and tumbling drums all appear at different times, making for a dizzying piece.

For "The Sky Over Petrograd," Weston leads off with a sustained, emergency alert-like tone that loses stability. He adds stuttering samples and pounding drums to bring even more dimension. It has the dense, heavy mood of the previous piece, but here there is a greater use of rhythms (conventional and otherwise) and more varied use of space and dynamics. Shifting from squeaky, waxy sounds into ritualistic rhythms, there is a strange sense of catchiness at times, but overall the composition is anything but conventional.

"Halfway to Smearing," the shortest piece at 10 and a half minutes, also makes for the rawest one in the set. From a low rumble into clipped spoken words, Weston piles on clattering passages, weird electronics, and a seemingly chaotic structure that floats into squelching walls of sound. Closing work "Every Day You Will See the Dust" features Weston steering back into less oppressive spaces, with thumping drums, squeaking electronics, and a constant metallic shimmer. It is anything but calm: static, creaking noises, and a machinery like hum all eventually lead to a weird pseudo-melody and structured, rhythmic drumming that flows into a buzzy, abrupt conclusion.

I may have insinuated Embrace This Twilight being chaotic a few times throughout this review, and while it may at times sound that way, Weston clearly is working with intention. The vastly different sounds are not just randomly piled atop one another but are deliberately and meticulously constructed. The constantly shifting dynamics and wide array of instrumentation is dizzying at first, but closer listening reveals nuance and order. This is a clear testament to Weston's compositional skills, that even bringing together all of these disparate sounds and rapidly changing structures, everything still makes sense, even if that is not immediately apparent.

Listen here.

02 July 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

As Alter's album description insightfully observes, a collaboration between these two Editions Mego alumnae "somehow seemed inevitable," yet I was still pleasantly surprised at how seamlessly Lewis and Void were able to combine their visions into something that feels both new and wonderful. On one level, the success of this union makes perfect sense, as both artists tend to turn out some of their strongest work in collaborative situations (Carter Tutti Void and Lewis's KLMNOPQ EP with Peder Mannerfelt being prime examples of that phenomenon). However, both artists excel in extremely specific realms that have some limitations: Lewis is exceptionally good at collaging non-musical sounds, while Void seems particularly adept at crafting eccentric noise-damaged techno.

Alter

Obviously, beat-driven sound collages were a distinct possibility, but so were any number of other options, so I had no clear expectations about where this shared vision would ultimately land. Now that said shared vision has landed, however, I can confidently state that Full-On resembles a deeply unconventional beat tape and quite a good one at that. While I suspect some listeners will initially find the album's kaleidoscopic parade of brief loops and vignettes exasperatingly sketchlike (there are a lot of 1-minute songs), I personally warmed to Full-On almost immediately, as practically every piece that made it onto the album is compelling, inventive, and endearingly idiosyncratic.

According to the label, Full-On is billed as a series of "intense miniatures" built from "the process of unadulterated experimentation and whimsical interplay," which feels like an apt enough description to me. Any further generalizations beyond "this is basically an album of extremely cool loops" are hopeless, however, as it is damn near impossible to nail down a rough stylistic niche, identify who is playing, or even identify which instruments are being played (though it is probably safe to assume that any recognizable guitar sounds emanate from Void).

While the duo do provide a rough list of their sound sources (guitars, synths, euro rack modular systems, voice, sampling and outboard processing), the tools used are nearly irrelevant in the face of the extreme transformation that every sound underwent in the aforementioned whimsical interplay. Ingeniously, Lewis and Void treated the composition of the album as something akin to a game of ping pong, constantly challenging each other to take ideas further while also playfully derailing expected paths with teasing curveballs. That probably is not an ideal strategy for composing a conventionally focused and coherent artistic statement, but it does seem to be an ideal strategy for churning out an impressive number of great ideas and for crafting a fun and surprising departure from expected terrain.

A perfect illustration of the latter is "Junk Funk," which sounds like a detuned and lo-fi would-be homage to House of Pain's "Jump Around" (though Lewis and Void wisely restrain themselves from rapping, thankfully). Elsewhere, "Guitar Hero" sounds like a surf guitarist's sound check chopped into stuttering and (eventually) blown-out abstraction, while "Pop" sounds like a hazy and sensuous cloud rap groove looping dreamily into infinity.

On the other end of the spectrum, the opening "Say Why" feels like an excerpt from a killer noise set in which crackling blown-out bass wreckage collides with distorted fragments of melody and visceral slashes of treble violence. "Green" is yet another fine noise detour, as it eerily transforms a voice loop into a relentlessly churning and crunching industrial throb. There are also several pieces that hypnotically delve into more ambient territory, such as the shimmering backwards melody of "Teeth," the warm drones and echoing scrapes of "Found," or the sublime warmth of "Travel With Friend" and "To Hold" (though the latter's bliss is repeatedly threatened by a murky undercurrent). Additionally, there are some wonderful outliers that do not resemble much else on the album. "Swimming," for example, sounds like it could be a two-second sample of an Arthur Russell cello melody looped and stretched into lazily churning ambient beauty with a slowed-down train rhythm. I was also quite captivated by "Ski," which relentlessly loops a descending Turkish-sounding melody into increasingly jumbled and pitch-shifted mindfuckery, though I think I love the loop more than the piece itself. That brings up an interesting feature of Full-on: I cannot stop wondering what other directions these pieces might have taken or what might have resulted had any of them been expanded into something more substantial.

Naturally, If the album were less uniformly delightful, such thoughts would mostly be of the "ugh-what a missed opportunity" variety, but in this case they are more akin to experiencing a great film that ends with a cliffhanger: I love this album, but I also feel like this creative partnership is a long way from running its course.

Listen here.

02 July 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest album from Barbieri is intended as a sister album to 2019's landmark Ecstatic Computation and has been released to correspond with the imminent reissue of the latter. The central difference between the two albums is that Myuthafoo gradually and organically took shape during Barbieri's extensive touring, as the "nomadic, interactive energy" of those many live dates inspired her to play with experimental variations in her process each night. More specifically, she would program patterns into her sequencer, then feed them into her "arsenal of noise generators" to explore different combinations and the most compelling results were set aside for future expansion and/or eventual release.

light-years

In characteristically cerebral fashion, Barbieri's arcane processes have their roots in cosmogony, as she is fascinated with how a small number of limited options can "branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility." Admittedly, comparing Myuthafoo to the birth of a universe will probably establish unreasonably high expectations for some listeners, but they can at least console themselves with yet another killer Caterina Barbieri album while they patiently wait for a new and better universe to form.

The opening "Memory Leak" sadly lasts for only a single minute, but it crash lands onto the album in truly impressive fashion, as the undulating swirl of smearing, howling, and tormented sounds almost makes me forget that precision, patterns, and repetition have historically been at the heart of all of Barbieri's work. Hopefully, she will someday explore that more feral and explosive side in more depth, as the rest of Myuthafoo is devoted to somewhat less radical variations upon traditional Barbieri fare. Far more representative is the album's lead single, "Math of You," which can only be described as "classic Barbieri": an intricate web of moving parts centered around tense minor key arpeggios that increasingly become more slippery, tumbling, and streaking. While the term "cyberpunk" always makes me wince, it feels weirdly apt to describe "Math of You" as a cyberpunk twist upon burbling synth-driven kosmische, as Barbieri's vision is similar yet significantly more tense, tight, muscular, and volatile (patterns subtly unravel and break apart throughout the piece). Interestingly, the similarly named "Myuthafoo" seems rooted in a similar melodic pattern, but takes a very different and more melancholy direction, as it is slowed down and dematerialized into tripped-out ghostly beauty.

"Alphabet of Light" opens the album's second half in similarly subdued territory, as it resembles a viscous slow-motion deconstruction of an organ mass in which notes gradually start streaking outwards to leave pulsing vapor trails in their wake. The following "Sufyosowirl" then snaps back into tense, complexly rhythmic patterns for one of the album's strongest pieces. In a general sense, it has all of the usual hallmarks of a classic Barbieri piece, but it also feels like a killer psychedelic upgrade for a whole host of reasons (though mostly because it resembles an intense and hallucinatory synth/marimba duet that culminates in a wild laser light show). The comparatively simple closer "Swirls of You" then ends the album with yet another gem, as it resembles the outro of a cool dreampop song expanded into warm, sensuously dissolving abstraction.

To my ears, there is not a weak piece in the bunch here (six songs, six hits) and some even feel like an significant creative leap forward for an artist who was already in a pretty enviable place to begin with. That said, whether a listener experiences Myuthafoo as a good album or a brilliant one is largely dependent upon how closely one listens, as Barbieri's genius for detail is what sets her apart from just about every other synth visionary on earth (or as the album description more poetically puts it, "phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave" while "rubbery möbius strips…twist romantically"). Caterina Barbieri remains a goddamn magician.

Listen here.