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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

02 July 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Matthew Cooper's newest Eluvium album is apparently inspired by two works of poetic literature by T.S.Eliot and Richard Brautigan. That's easier said than done, of course, and equally unclear is how Cooper has changed his compositional methodology because of a debilitating medical problem with his left shoulder and arm. It is hard to decipher exactly what is meant by, to paraphrase, blending electronic automations with traditional songwriting and using algorithms to extract from several years of notebook scribble. Perhaps this means he has worked in cyborgian harmony with machines, which would fit with the Brautigan reference point of All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace.

Temporary Residence

I enjoyed the entire album, although did wonder a couple of times if I'd left the Buddha Machine on in the bathroom.

Opener "Escapement" is instantly inspiring and comforting in equal measure. It sounds to me like a cyclist awakened by their alarm clock from a dream of pedaling leisurely down a country lane. Cooper quickens the pace on "Swift Automatons" as if the bike is tipping over the top of a hill for a freewheel downhill. The piece relies on repetition, albeit with a light touch. There is a greater sense of urgency and foreboding to "Vibration Consensus Reality (for Spectral Multiband Resonator)" with overlapping pulses underpinning a cello-like synth melody, and expertly placed, if sparse, keyboard plinks.

Highlights come faster than they would in real life, which is partly why we love music. From the title I expected "Scatterbrains" to be fast, wild and glitchy, rather than lovely, slow, somber, and downright sad. I've no idea what "Phantasia Telephonics" are but the track is so packed with sublime exit folds and reverses echoes of lost dreams that I actually don't care. Cooper uses a section from Eliot's The Wasteland on "The Violet Light". It is unclear why, but it sounds good.

"A current under sea/Picked his bones in whispers/As he rose and fell he passed the stages of his age and youth/Entering the whirlpool."

Cooper provides the knockout punch on the following "Void Manifest," which is a real choral sweet spot with an unabashedly emotional thwack. "Mass Lossless Interbeing" crushes all the feelings which Whirring Marvels has previously engendered into a blender which drips down like how Chinese Water (The Opposite of) Torture might sound. At which point couscous came to mind. I've been eating it a lot lately because it is the perfect light and easy summer food and the weather has turned very warm. Some people find couscous insubstantial. I'm digging it but will grow sick of it if I eat too often.

Matthew Cooper works with members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), Golden Retriever, and the entire Budapest Scoring Orchestra, often via the convenient "good technology" of teleconference during 2020 and 2021.

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25 June 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru passed on early this year, but not before this album was released to celebrate her 99th birthday. It collects pieces originally issued in 1972 as Song of Jerusalem, including the stunning title track and "Quand La Mer Furieuse" in which Gebru sings; a moment which probably should not draw parallels with "Garbo Talks!" (when the speaking voice of that star of silent films first shocked audiences to sleep) but is as startlingly beautiful as you might expect if you have heard her play her compositions for piano at all. These she does in a manner impossible to hear without feeling as if the sun has come out from behind a cloud and is gently warming the side of your face. Reach for adjectives and terms such as liturgical, classical, homemade, and heavenly, but the key word is definitely "transcendent."

Mississippi Records

No superficial label can stick to Emahoy Gebru—although some have been applied which won't be repeated here. The cornerstone of her music is her study of St Yared, the sixth century religious scholar and composer of thousands of hymns, known for devising an 8-note (and 10-note) notation system of music, capable of three different melodic categories. Yared's persistence is legendary and he is the blueprint for the traditional Ethiopian philosophy of musicians making themselves submissive in order to be open to receive musical inspiration from a higher realm. Yaredian melodies are viewed as literally heavenly, timeless or eternal, and capable of creating ecstatic out-of-body trances. Gebru's music follows this path. Her piano playing is neither icy nor flowery, but rather a calm cosmic spot somewhere between the two: like the quiet and tidy alley between rows of houses in a large town where the protagonist in Murukami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle shelters from the stresses and strains of his life (away from memories, strange phone calls, flashbacks, dreams of being pursued, urban ennui, and the obligatory missing cat.)

The notion of music creating out of body trances comes from a legend in which the Emperor of the Aksumite Empire is listening to Yared present some melodic works and the two of them fell naturally into a trance. In this state, the Emperor accidentally impales Yared's foot with his staff, a fact which they only realize after Yared has finished singing. Probably best not to test that theory but Gebru's music does conjure up a lovely feeling, with sporadic anti-metronomic looseness where the rhythm is elastic and can meander or slide happily out of time, lag behind or speed up; rather like how the great Trinidadian calypso singers of the late 1950s would deliver lines with little concern as to whether or not they could fit a prescribed number or bars

Emahoy Gebru persisted through depression and other obstacles, used her music to raise proceeds for building children's homes, and performed for Haile Selassie. Oh to have been a Coptic gadfly on that wall. The legend of Yared didn't end with his death, but concluded that he was hidden away and is still alive (a common way in Ethiopian culture to make a figure's contribution immortal). Earthly fame or riches held no interest for Gebru and thankfully she has avoided becoming the musical equivalent of sun dried tomatoes for the chattering classes. Others may debate the distance from Saturday barroom to Sunday pew, from bedroom to bible, and in which direction music is traveling at any given moment, but what counts is that this transcendent music fits the broader Yaredian worldview suggesting that music is eternal.

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25 June 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest LP from Big Blood is their first for Ba Da Bing and a spiritual successor of sorts to Do You Want to Have a Skeleton Dream?, as the band are back in "full family trio retro-pop extravaganza" mode. For the most part, Quinnissa (who was apparently only 13 when this album was recorded) handles the lead vocals for a series of hooky, bass-driven garage rock nuggets, though there are also a couple of headier Colleen-sung gems for fans of the band's darker, more psychedelic side. Notably, Caleb's frayed yelp is entirely absent from the proceedings, but it probably would have felt out of place among the unabashed throwback pop fare. Moreover, First Aid Kit feels like a full-on Quinnissa showcase, which makes for a rather unique entry in the Big Blood canon, as she is one hell of a belter and also spontaneously improvised all her lyrics during recordings. As Caleb notes in the album description, being in a band with your teenage daughter is admittedly something of a messy and volatile situation ("lots of practices end with her being tossed from the band"), but I can see why they are sticking with this format, as Quinnissa increasingly feels like a pop supernova in its formative stages.

Ba Da Bing/Feeding Tube

This album's overall feel is something akin to a raucous wedding reception in which members of The Cramps and B-52's join forces for a spirited and spontaneous set of half-remembered '60s bubblegum pop covers. The opening "In My Head" represents that vein in its purest form, as it is built from little more than a meaty bass line, a simple thumping beat, and a subtly surf-damaged guitar tone. The most perfect iteration of that aesthetic comes much later on the album, as "1000 Times" feels like a raw and raucous cover of an imagined classic by someone like The Ronettes. Elsewhere, the dark paranoia of "Never Ending Nightmare" is yet another notable Quinnissa showcase, though its unsettling subject matter is nicely invigorated by a bouncy bassline, quirky percussion, and a killer chorus hook. Quinnissa also handles lead vocals on "Infinite Space," but that piece feels like a comparative anomaly more akin to Big Blood's non-Quinnissa fare. It still feels a bit unusually anthemic and driving for a Big Blood song, but reaching infinitely to space is a more traditional lyrical theme for the band and there are some very cool howling psych touches in the periphery. Admittedly, a lot of Quinnissa's lyrics sound like they were composed by a 13-year-old, but as the album's description insightfully observes, "teenage impulses fit right in with the band's intent, which is making music that's honest, inclusive and flawed." To their everlasting credit, Big Blood seem to be endlessly resourceful in their balancing of flawed spontaneity and thoughtful art, as Mulkerin harvests "the ghostly presence of past takes" as a subtly trippy background layer throughout the album.

To my ears, the strongest pieces on the album are "Ring Telephone Ring" and "Makes Me Wonder." The former is a Barbara Lynn cover transformed into a smoldering, psych-damaged slab of country heartache and beautifully continues Big Blood's near-unbroken run of perfectly chosen and brilliantly executed homages to their favorite songs. It is also a prime example of this album's unusually nuanced approach to psychedelia, as Colleen's sensuous vocals leave a ghostly haze of harmonies in their wake. Similarly weighty is "Makes Me Wonder," which is dedicated to Ma'kihia Bryant, an Ohio 16-year-old murdered by a cop. Given its dark inspiration, it is unsurprisingly a fiery piece, but it is also a wonderfully driving and lushly psychedelic one, as Mulkerin allows himself to go a bit wild on the production side, resulting in a swirling feast of harmonized Siren-esque vocals, field recordings, sound collage elements, and dreamy synths (courtesy of guest Chris Livengood). It almost feels like it could be a stomping, muscular Kate Bush cover that plunges into a gently lysergic rabbit hole, as the gorgeous chorus hypnotically repeats as the piece descends deeper into hazy trippiness. The closing comedown "Weird Road Pt. 1" offers yet another throwback to more traditional Big Blood fare, as it is a Colleen-sung reverie that seems like it is built from little more than harmonium drones and a lazily swooping synth melody (though the buried ghostly vocal layers add a wonderfully hallucinatory touch).

As far as album-length Big Blood statements are concerned, I would personally categorize First Aid Kit as a fun (if uneven) detour rather than a fresh classic, but the album's reception thus far indicates that I am in the minority on that. I suppose it all depends on which side of Big Blood one prefers: the fun, spontaneous and punchy side or out-of-body transcendence of songs like "Destin Rain." For those of us in the latter camp, First Aid Kit will probably never be in heavy rotation as much as some other Big Blood albums, but "Ring Telephone Ring" and "Makes Me Wonder" would certainly earn a place on the imaginary self-curated greatest hits retrospective in my head.

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04 June 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest LP from Wolf Eyes is something of a major release for the duo, as they are currently celebrating their 25th year with "their first widely-distributed non-compilation album in six years." Fittingly, Dreams In Splattered Lines is one of the project's most compelling and sophisticated albums to date, which is likely the result of some recent developments that would have seemed absolutely unimaginable when the project first began (collaborating with a Pulitzer Prize winner, a viral video for a fashion company, sharing stages with jazz titans, a residency at The New York Public Library, etc.). The library residency in particular played an especially large role in shaping this album, as the duo built a number of new instruments while they were there and also spent a lot of time absorbing the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of course, the truly interesting bit is how inventively Nate Young and John Olson assimilated all their new ideas, as well as the fact that their more high art/avant-garde influences amusingly collide with a newfound fascination with how "hit songs" work. While Wolf Eyes have sporadically dazzled me over the years as a cool noise band, Dreams In Splattered Lines feels like the album where they have arguably become the spiritual heirs to Throbbing Gristle in channeling the best ideas of the 20th century avant-garde into a zeitgeist-capturing mirror of the times (a post-hope world of crumbling institutions and widespread alienation).

Disciples

The album is billed as "a surreal dreamscape of disorienting sound collages, where hit songs are transformed into terrariums of sonic flora and decimated fauna," which is a considerably more elegant description than my own "a masterfully choreographed ballet of shit." The album itself is not shit, of course, but the sounds themselves are quite a cavalcade of rotten, shambling, broken, strangled, and ugly sounds conjured from inventively misused gear. The opening "Car Wash Two" is an especially illustrative example of the latter, as it "includes a Short Hands track playing on the car radio while waves of white noise and contact microphones are plunging into water buckets." That trick was then coupled with an added "meta" twist: the recording was then "played in a car while going through an actual car wash" before it was ultimately layered and mixed in the studio. Notably, that piece is singled out as an example of the duo's new "hit single" mindset, but that trait is only evident in an oblique way that involves terrariums. More immediately graspable, however, is the fact that almost every song on the album is distilled to a punchy two- or three-minute running time. On the lesser pieces, it can sometimes feel like a song is over before it gets a chance to make a deep impression, but the stronger pieces tend to regularly attain "all killer, no filler" nirvana.

While terms like "horror jazz" and "psycho jazz" have been used to describe Wolf Eyes many times before (presumably because of John Olson's arsenal of self-built wind instruments), this is the first album that I have heard where the duo genuinely seem to evince the virtuosity of a visionary jazz unit. That virtuosity is admittedly not of the rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic variety, but I cannot think of many other artists that can pull off more impressive feats with texture (or who could even figure out how to use the duo's eclectic arsenal of gear). The analogy that springs immediately to mind is that of practical special effects versus sophisticated CGI effects in horror films, as DIY gore can sometimes feel a lot more viscerally disturbing than digitized perfection. The same is true here, as plenty of artists get amazing sounds from expensive gear and powerful software, but Young and Olson regularly churn out wonderfully squelching, gnarled, and sickly sounds that no one else can get with their array of self-built instruments and convoluted chains of electronics. More importantly, they have a deep intuitive understanding of how to wield all those weird sounds, embracing a seething strain of minimalism that leaves plenty of space for each screech, gurgle, and splatter to be felt.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest pieces are those that most feel like songs, which tend to be those where Young delivers some kind of morbid deadpan monologue over a drum machine pattern strafed with sputtering, buzzing electronics and squalls of noise (such as "Exploding Time" and "My Whole Life"). That said, once the album starts to catch fire around the midpoint, just about every single song is noteworthy in some way. My favorite piece is a bit of an aberration, however, as "In Society" sounds like a bunch of Muppets were unknowingly dosed with LSD before covering Aaron Dilloway's "Karaoke With Cal" and chaos ensued. I'm also quite fond of "Days Decay" though, as the thumping drum machine is a bit more muscular than usual and a Middle Eastern-sounding woodwind motif elusively surfaces in the seething undercurrent of machine noise like some kind of post-industrial Debussy homage. Obviously, it is not hard to become numb to Wolf Eyes' vision, given their insanely voluminous discography and passion for messy spontaneity and experimentation, but the fact that their evolution is a bit overdocumented does not make that evolution any less impressive, as there are plenty of genuine flashes of outsider brilliance to be found on Dreams In Splattered Lines.

Listen here.