We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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After years of mythology, misinterpretation and procrastination, Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton finally chooses Finders Keepers Records as the ideal collaborators to release "the right tracks" from his uber-legendary psych/prog/punk peculiarity shopping list known as The Nurse With Wound List, commencing with a French-specific Volume One of this authentically titled "Strain Crack Break" series. Featuring some Finders Keepers' regulars amongst galactic Gallic rarities (previously presumed to be imaginary red herrings) this deluxe double vinyl dossier demystifies some of the essential French free jazz and Parisian prog inclusions from the alphabetical "dedication" inventory as printed in the anti-band's 1979 industrial milestone debut.
When Steven Stapleton, Heman Pathak and John Fothergill's anti-band Nurse With Wound decided to include an alphabetical dedication to all their favorite bands on the back of their inaugural LP, the notion of creating a future record dealers' trophy list couldn't have been further from their minds. By adding a list of untraveled European mythical musicians and noise makers to their own debut release of unchartered industrial art rock, they were merely providing a suggestive support system of existing potential like-minded bands, establishing safety in numbers should anyone require sonic subtitles for Nurse With Wound's own mutant musical language. Luckily for them, the record landed in record shops in the midst of 1979's memorable summer of abject apathy and its sound became a hit amongst disillusioned agit-pop pickers and artsy post-punks, thus playing a key role in the burgeoning "Industrial" genre that ensued. For the most part, however, the list–like most instruction manuals–remained unreadable, syntactic and suspiciously sarcastic… As potential "real musicians," Nurse With Wound became an Industrial music fan's household name, but in contrast many of the names on The Nurse With Wound List were considered to be imaginary musicians, made-up bands or booby traps for hacks and smart-arses. It took a while for the rest of the record collecting community to catch on or finally catch up.
Since then, many of the rare, obscure and unpronounceable genre-free records on The Nurse With Wound List have slowly found their own feet and stumbled in to the homes of open-minded outernational vinyl junkies, DJs and sample-hungry producers, self-propelled and judged on their own merit, mostly without consultation of the enigmatic NWW map. But, to the inspective competitive collector’s chagrin, one resounding fact recurs: NWW got there first! via vinyl vacations, on cheap flights and Interrail tickets, buying bargain bin LPs on a shoestring while oblivious to the pending pension-worthy price tags after their 40 year vintage. Stapleton and Fothergill, even if you've never heard of them, were at the bottom of the pit before "digging" became paydirt. And NOW at huge international record fairs that occur in massive exhibition halls (or within the confines of your one-touch palm pilot) amongst jive talk acronyms such as SS, PP, BIN, DNAP and BCWHES the coded letters NWW have begun to appear on stickers in the corner of original copies of the same premium progressive records accompanied by a customary 18% price hike to titillate/coerce the initiated as dealers extort the taught. Like "psych" "PINA" or "Krautrock" did before, "NWW" has become a buzzword and in the passed decades since its first publication The List has been mythologized, misunderstood and misconstrued. Its also been overlooked, overestimated and under-appreciated in equal measures, but with a growing interest it has also come to represent a maligned genre in itself, something that all members of the original line-up would have deemed sacrilegious. Bolstered by the subtitle "Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden," all bands on the inventory (many chosen on the strength of just one track alone) were chosen for their genre-defying qualities… A check-list for the uncharted.
Forty years after Nurse With Wound’s first record, Finders Keepers Records, in close collaboration with Steven Stapleton remind fans of THIS kind of "lost" music–that there once existed a feint path which was worn away decades before major label pop property developers built over this psychedelic underground. As long-running fans and liberators of some of the same records, arriving at the same axis from different-but-the-same planets, Finders Keepers and Nurse With Wound finally sing from the same hymn sheet, resulting in a collaborative attempt to officially, authentically, and legally compile the best tracks from the list, succeeding where many overzealous nerds have deferred (or simply, got the wrong end of the stick). Naturally our lavish metallic gatefold double vinyl compendium would only scratch the surface of this DIY dossier of elongated punk-prog peculiarities, hence our decision to release volume one in a series which, in accordance with Steve's wishes, focuses exclusively on individual tracks of French origin, the country that unsurprisingly hosted the highest content of bands on the list. Comprising of musique concrète, free jazz, Rock In Opposition, Zeuhl School space rock, macabre ballet music, lo-fi sci-fi, and classic horror literature-inspired prog, this first volume of the series entitled "Strain Crack And Break" throws us in at the deep end, where the Seine meets the in-sane, introducing the space cadets that found Mars in Marseilles.
Like the Swedish flat-pack record shelves that attempt to house the vast amounts of vintage vinyl that goes into a multi-volume compilation like this, it is time to prepare your own musical penchants and preconceived ideas about DIY music and hear them slowly strain, crack and break.
It is the first and it will be certainly the only one album from Otto Solange.
"I’ve decided in 2019 to release some of the pieces of works recorded from 2013 to 2015 to leave an imprint from this period and give a life to an other side of my sound works, more unknown by people who follow my other sound projects (Monolyth & Cobalt, D-Rhöne).
I've traveled a lot at this time and also, this period was precisely at the middle of a great change in my life. My son was born at the end of 2015 and a big part of these works have been recorded for him, with probably some memories from my previous journeys around the world."
"All have been composed and recorded at home with a set of many electronic hardwares and no laptop (samplers, effects and loops). Using some various samples from my music collection library as a collage process and some other sounds have been recorded from a part of my solo instruments and electronics machines."
The simplest questions are often the most difficult to answer. In April of 2018, Drowse's Kyle Bates left his home in Portland, OR for an artist residency in barren northern Iceland. Much of Bates' time there was spent in self-imposed isolation, giving him ample space to ponder the nature of solitude, and what it means to be "closed" or "open" to the world. Upon returning home, Bates worked obsessively. Maya Stoner, a longtime creative partner, sometimes came to sing, but recordings where mostly done alone. The dichotomy of his Icelandic musings materialized in a very real way as he neglected his personal relationships in favor of his art. While he was confronting his life-long fear of intimacy, and reconciling himself to a diagnosis of Bipolar 1, Bates found that the means he employed to conquer these obstacles–self reflection through art–carried with them an equal measure of misery. Light Mirror, Drowse's second album for The Flenser, is a subtle exploration of these contradictory attitudes and their consequences that can be heard as an artifact of sonic self-sabotage.
Light Mirror falls within a lineage of overcast Pacific Northwest albums (think Grouper's Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill), but finds Drowse pushing past its slowcore roots. The album's prismatic sound reflects experimental electronic, noise pop, black metal, krautrock, and more through Kyle's distinct song-worlds. The lyrics are ruminations on the idea of multiple selves, identity, paranoia, fear of the body, alcohol abuse, social media, the power of memory, the truths that are revealed when we are alone, and the significance of human contact. They were influenced by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and poet Louise Glück, who both address self-contradiction. Mastered by Nicholas Wilbur (Mount Eerie, Planning for Burial) at the Unknown, the album showcases a striking maturation in sound. Light Mirror is Drowse's most intimate and desolate work to date.
In his solo work and as a member of Nine Inch Nails, Alessandro Cortini's music casts the listener into an intricately rendered vortex of emotive dynamics, where he expertly maximizes the boundaries of contemporary electronic music. His new album, Volume Massimo, combines his fondness for melody with the rigour of experimental practice. Follows on from 2017's universally acclaimed album Avanti. 8 tracks of deftly arranged synthesizers saturated with sonic artefacts and luscious pop sensibilities.
On Sutarti, Joshua Sabin draws influence from the compositional structures and psychoacoustic properties that exist within early Lithuanian folk music, exploring the emotional potency of the human voice through the manipulation of elements of archival recordings.
Obtaining access to the folk music archives of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre Ethnomusicology Archive from the outset of this project, Sabin felt a particular resonance with the extensive library of vocal recordings and specifically the song forms of the Sutartinė. Derived from the Lithuanian verb "Sutarti" - to be "in agreement," "to attune" – Sutartinės are a Lithuanian form of Schwebungsdiaphonie - a distinct canonic song style consisting of two or more voices that purposefully clash creating extremely precise dissonances and the phenomena of aural ‘beating’.
Inspired by the psychoacoustic research of Rytis Ambrazevičius, whose computer analyses reveal the unique acoustic and harmonic complexities in these archival songs, and transfixed by what Sabin describes as their "arresting and often almost plaintive and minimalistic beauty," he sought to compose directly with the recordings themselves as a raw material.
Sutarti exists fundamentally as an emotional "response," presenting archival voices through radical recontextualizations that Sabin hopes simultaneously express both his personal perspective and experience, and also speak universally to the power and versatility of the voice as a communicator of meaning and emotion.
Produced with archival recordings, instrumentation including, Skudučiai and Fiddle, and field recordings of Lithuanian forest ambiences.
Joshua Sabin is an Edinburgh based composer and sound designer, who’s first LP Terminus Drift was released on Subtext in 2017.
Done as part of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision's RE:VIVE initiative in collaboration with the Lithuanian Archivist's Association and the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council
After a trilogy of spectacular explorations of relentlessly driving rhythms – Sagittarian Domain (2012), Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016) – Simian Angel finds Oren Ambarchi renewing his focus on his singular approach to the electric guitar, returning in part to the spacious canvases of classic releases like Grapes from the Estate while also following his muse down previously unexplored byways.
Reflecting Ambarchi's profound love of Brazilian music – an aspect of his omnivorous musical appetite not immediately apparent in his own work until now – Simian Angel features the remarkable percussive talents of the legendary Cyro Baptista, a key part of the Downtown scene who has collaborated with everyone from John Zorn and Derek Bailey to Robert Palmer and Herbie Hancock. Like the music of Nana Vasconcelos and Airto Moreira, Simian Angel places Baptista's dexterous and rhythmically nuanced handling of traditional Brazilian percussion instruments into an unexpected musical context. On the first side, "Palm Sugar Candy," Baptista's spare and halting rhythms wind their way through a landscape of gliding electronic tones, gently rising up and momentarily subsiding until the piece's final minutes leave Ambarchi's guitar unaccompanied. While the rich, swirling harmonics of Ambarchi's guitar performance are familiar to listeners from his previous recordings, the subtly wavering, synthetic guitar tone we hear is quite new, coming across at times like an abstracted, splayed-out take on the 80s guitar-synth work of Pat Metheny or Bill Frisell. Equally new is the harmonic complexity of Ambarchi's playing, which leaves behind the minimalist simplicity of much of his previous work for a constantly-shifting play between lush consonance and uneasy dissonance.
Beginning with a beautiful passage of unaccompanied percussion dominated by the berimbau, the side-long title piece carries on the first side's exploration of subtle, non-linear dynamic arcs, taking the form of a gently episodic suite, in which distinctive moments, like a lyrical passage of guitar-triggered piano, unexpectedly arise from intervals of drifting tones like dream images suddenly cohering. In the piece’s second half, the piano tones becomes increasingly more clipped and synthetic, scattering themselves into aleatoric melodies that call to mind an imaginary collaboration between Albert Marcoeur and David Behrman, grounded all the while by the pulse of Baptista's percussion. Subtle yet complex, fleeting yet emotionally affecting, Simian Angel is an essential chapter in Ambarchi's restlessly exploratory oeuvre.
Piezo sensor and contact speaker attached on rear side of each plate Amplifying and mirroring their subtle and naturally occurring vibrations Evoking the characteristic resonant frequencies of each type of metal
The sound art of Jacob Kirkegaard explores ways to reflect on immediate complex, unnoticed or unapproachable aspects of the human condition or civilisation. His works have treated themes such as radioactivity in Chernobyl and Fukushima, melting ice in the Arctic, border walls in Palestine, and tones - otoacoustic emissions - generated from the actual human ear.
Currently Jacob Kirkegaard works on two projects, one on the sound of global waste and waste management. The other on sound environments related to the immediate human post mortem.
With his peculiar alchemist approach and extensive research, complex phenomena and current conditions are portrayed through composition, installation, video and photography. Rather than providing answers, his portrayals create spaces for reflection.
Kirkegaard has presented his works at galleries, museums, biennales and concert spaces throughout the world, including MoMA in New York, LOUISIANA - Museum of Modern Art and ARoS in Denmark, The Menil Collection and at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, The Sydney Biennale in Australia, Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan.
"When I was a child I lived in a small house on the outskirts of a small village in Sardinia.
The house was located 100 meters from the countryside (close to San Gavino Monreale castle).
I spent my whole childhood playing and exploring all these uninhabited places, sometimes there were dangers but the love for nature was much stronger.
This song and its artwork reflect those beautiful moments spent with my dearest and old friends in those magnificent places where human beings have not yet built anything."
Always enigmatic, the latest work from David Jackman is a single 47 minute piece that, for some reason, has been issued under his own name rather than Organum. I have never been clear as to what determines the name that will go on the record, and this is the first Jackman release since a split 7" (with Organum) in 2005. Additionally, the overall feel of the piece is distinct, but not far removed from the Amen/Sanctus/Omega trilogy from 2006-2007. Deliberately minimalist in arrangement, but with an unquestionable dedication to the finest detail of sounds, it is another work of fascinating beauty by the legendary artist.
Herbstsonne (german for Auutum Sun) is a sparse composition, recorded only using tanpura, piano, organ, and bells, and is performed rather deliberately, with Jackman leaving long, open spaces between the sounds of each instrument.On the whole the piece features recurring themes:the tanpura and organ being used to create expansive tones, with the bells scattered throughout.The piano tends to appear in heavy, loud outbursts of single chords, sometimes jarring in volume but complementing everything else perfectly.
There may not be an immediate sense of complexity to Herbstsonne, but Jackman's arrangement does an amazing job at highlighting the minute details of each instrument.The metallic twang of the tanpura expands into space, blended with the sustained organ sounds.There is little in the way of effects or treatment to the sound; I only hear reverb which may just be part of the actual recording, so there is a distinct purity in sound.Some subtle panning adds some dynamics to the recording, but on its own it still sounds amazing.The same goes for the bells, which echo out beautiful in each and every appearance they make.
I could not help but be reminded of the Amen trilogy in both the simple arrangements and the precise detail in each instrument, but there is a different mood here.That amazing trilogy, while not explicitly religious or spiritual in nature, did have a sensibility rooted in ancient holy music, presented in a very abstract setting.There does not seem to be that same underlying feel here, and is instead one that seems more rooted in nature itself.Autumn sun is a fitting title, because there is a sense of warmth from the tonal passages and the occasional chill of bells or abrupt piano chord that heralds the coming of winter.
With constant Internet speculation that each new release may be his last, I always feel a surge of excitement when a new Organum or David Jackman release is announced, and Herbstsonne did not disappoint.With a casual listen this may seem like a simple piece, but like all of Jackman's work, the attention to detail he works into the recording is apparent with intent listening and makes for some of the most engrossing music I have heard all year.
The town of Clifton Park, New York, does not have anything resembling an experimental music scene, other than the basement studio of Mike Griffin. Under the Parashi name, he has been building up an impressive catalog of releases running the gamut from ambient spaciousness to pummeling distortion. These two collaborative releases make it clear how well his personal brand of electronic mangling works alongside another artist as well, and with a contrast from Anthony Pasquarosa's largely guitar-focused work and the darker electronics of Noise Nomads, showcases his versatility.
On the two-disc collaboration with Pasquarosa, Griffin's electronics provide a synthetic counterpoint to Pasquarosa's largely stringed instrument contributions, making for an excellent juxtaposition of conventional versus unconventional instrumentation."Ursus Minor" opens the first disc in a rather contemplative space, with complex guitar workbalanced by some sparse bass guitar and then scraping noises, but with a mix that is rather open and pleasant."Iron to Gold" is another case in which the pair keep things light, constructed from largely just intertwining guitar playing from Pasquarosa and some six string bass from Griffin.
At the other extreme would be something like "Three Sided Coin," where Griffin cranks up the pedals to create some excellent chugging electronics and Pasquarosa throws some heavy distortion and feedback on to his guitar playing to make for a harsher, yet warm and enveloping sound overall.On "Set the Timer for Last Days" there is a similar feel, with distorted rock freakouts on guitar and swelling electronics coming together with a feel that is overall looser and more free feeling compared to the deliberate performances that surround it.
The mood also varies significantly from piece to piece, such as on the frightening drones of "Ashes in the Well," in which Griffin’s crackling electronics oscillate between subtle punctuations and heavy walls.Pasquarosa’s guitar at the onset of "Times Filter (Repaired)" is initially almost new age-y in tone, but is transformed via multiple echoes and delays, and the menacing foghorn like electronics in the background keep it from becoming too airy.The darkness on "Tombstone Chips" is less menacing in nature though, and the ghostly guitar tone and haunted house ambience make it more of a '60s campfilm soundtrack than a horror one, and bonus points for the Flavor Flav/Public Enemy reference in the title.
For Sluice Gate, Griffin teamed up with Noise Nomads (aka Jeff Hartford) in a less contrasting arrangement, as both work primarily with electronics.Comparably these are also more varied, dynamic compositions where the two layer a multitude of different, often hard to distinguish sounds into complex mixes, such as the opening title piece.From an introduction of sinister amp hum and clinking bottles, Hartford and Griffin layer on passages of crunchy loops and bending frequencies, getting a bit spacier in the closing minutes.
On "Their Cherished Pseudopods," the two create a mass of sputtering electronic tweets and pulsations, and with the erratic bursts of static and noisier segments there is a sense of movement throughout that only relents in the closing moments via an orchestra of slowed down cassette tapes.The collaboration’s bleakest moments occur on "Knacker's Yard," where some pseudo-rhythmic loops collide with pounding metal and decaying tapes, casting the whole thing with a dark clang.The subsequent "Among the Vipers" is less menacing and more bizarre in sound.The duo mangle a variety of synthetic tones, twisting them in an oddly open mix punctuated with strange organic sounds.The whole thing is wonderfully erratic and as things come apart become weirder and weirder.
Taking these two collaborations in together made me appreciate Mike Griffin's work with Parashi even more than I already did.Being familiar with his solo releases, hearing how he collaborated with two distinctly different artists demonstrated not only his versatility, but also how another artist impacts his performance.The set with Anthony Pasquarosa makes it clear how he can both support a more conventional performer with his electronics, and also his ability to bounce off a guitarist like a jazz soloist would, trading their distinctly different sounds while still making for a unified piece.With Noise Nomads, there is more of a band feeling for lack of a better term.Rather than a sense of playful conflict within the instrumentation, the two work alongside each other seemingly as a single unit, layering electronic passages that seemingly become more and more abstract as the pieces continue on.The full range of Griffin's performance and compositional abilities shine through here, and with the other artists doing their own thing so well, the final products are fascinating works.
As befits the curious and unpredictable arc of His Name is Alive, this first installment of a planned trilogy of Warren Defever's adolescent/teenage tape experiments is a truly wonderful and bewildering revelation. Defever must have been one hell of a precocious 10-year-old back in 1979, as his formula of combining field recordings, copious reverb, and samples of records played at the wrong speeds would have easily been strong enough to build an entire career on–I daresay it was a positively Basinski-esque flash of inspiration. Instead, however, Defever opted to move onto more song-based work and this side of his artistry was relegated to some dusty, long-forgotten boxes, which I suppose worked out quite well too. These lovely, haunted sounding soundscapes would have made quite a huge impression if they had been released during the band's 4AD heyday though: the liner notes amusingly suggest that Defever accidentally invented shoegaze while trying to make new age music. Fortunately, these elegantly blurred miniatures still sound absolutely wonderful today, even if the window has passed in which Defever might have been hailed as one of the most important and influential voices in ambient music (or as a proto-Slowdive shoegaze savant).
To a large degree, All The Mirrors in the House sounds much too good to be true, as it is hard to wrap my mind around the fact that some kid in Michigan was making better ambient music than Brian Eno in the early '80s.That caveat will likely appear in every single review of this album and for good reason (there is even a healthy degree of disbelief expressed in Mike McGonigal's liner notes).Warren Defever has been a willfully mischievous and unreliable narrator at times and it is not unreasonable to think that there is some deliberate myth-building behind this release.If there was, it certainly worked on me, as I was very eager to hear it.According to Defever, however, the only post-production magic worked upon these recordings was "the overlapping of the songs for flow" (though he also notes "I really can't remember how any of it was made, or exactly when.").By any measure, these songs sound improbably and suspiciously clean and contemporary.And it is damn hard to imagine a pre-teen with a guitar sampler and a boombox anticipating the evolution of underground music by years, much less doing it this skillfully.Still, I would not put it past a teenage Defever to genuinely have been this advanced at manipulating recordings, as he is a legitimate studio visionary and that did not simply happen overnight.Also, limited resources tend to inspire innovative methods.Anything is possible, I guess.In all likelihood, Defever's backstory is probably at least true in spirit, as this album does not bear much resemblance to any of Defever's other recent releases.Also, the stylistic leap from these pieces to the earliest HNIA albums is not a improbably huge one.
It would probably be apt to say that this album is the result of three perfect sets of circumstances spanning more than three decades and could not exist if any one piece to did come together just right.The first, obviously, is that Defever acquired a tape recorder and began ingeniously misusing it immediately.The second is that he grew up in a religious household, so the record collection that he was raiding for his sound collages was an eclectic array of "folksongs, polkas, and waltzes."Most kids probably would have just borrowed their older brother's Zeppelin and Sabbath albums and devoted themselves to starting a rock band.Defever also stumbled upon a CBC show in the mid-80s (Brave New Waves) that awakened his ears to fringe-dwellers like Psychic TV, so he certainly had a host of eclectic influences rewiring his brain during those years.The final key puzzle piece is that the adult Warren Defever is singularly adept at assembling compelling and gorgeously hallucinatory album-length collages of short vignettes (1992's Home is in Your Head being easily one of my favorite HNIA albums).Also of note: Defever had some curatorial assistance from Tyvek’s Shelley Salant, which likely played an indispensable role in distilling only the most sublime moments from the dozens of old tapes (he instructed her to specifically search for anything that was "new agey, ambient, or had echoey guitars"). Defever also jokingly suggested that McGonigal use lots of adjectives taken from Slowdive's wikipedia page in order to appeal to today's kids.
Significantly, Defever's distance from these recordings enabled him to have the perspective necessary for shaping them into such a deliberate and fully-formed vision.There are probably many different directions that this collection could have gone, but he chose to present these years as something beautiful, ghostly, and bittersweetly dreamlike (an aesthetic that is even more pronounced in the album's eerie trailer).While these fifteen pieces amount to quite a mesmerizing and emotionally resonant whole, there is a purity and simplicity to the individual pieces that makes their purported provenance seem arguably plausible: each piece seems to be built on just a single theme and some reverb (though Defever purportedly mimicked multitracking with strategically placed boomboxes).For example, "Because Piano" seems totally believable as a bit of Defever's juvenilia, as it is just a minor key piano melody layered and reverb-ed into a lushly wobbly soundscape."Tape Slow" achieves a similar feat, as it is impossible to tell what the raw material behind the shivering, smeared reverie possibly could have been (tape experimentation at its finest).Some of the other pieces are much harder to swallow as authentic remnants from the '80s though, particularly "Liadin" and the closing "F Choir."Both are swooning, shimmering, and angelically beautiful miniature masterpieces.In fact, the latter approximates an Arvo Pärt piece remixed by someone like Tim Hecker.The shuffling and hypnagogic groove of "Outside The Window" is similarly striking–it is only a mere thirty seconds long, but it sounds like it could have been plucked from a cutting-edge dub album released this year.Yet another highlight is "Something About Hope," which masterfully intertwines looping guitars to approximate something that could have been a stand-out on 1993's Mouth By Mouth.
While I cannot shake my skepticism about the veracity of the album's backstory and timeline, it genuinely delights me to think about a young Warren Defever gleefully deconstructing polkas and making beatscapes out of his neighbor shoveling the driveway.Ultimately, however, how and when Defever made these recordings is far less important than the fact that All The Mirrors In The House is a legitimately wonderful album that reminds me exactly why I grew to love His Name Is Alive in the first place.While it is always interesting and unique, Defever's output in recent years has been increasingly inscrutable, prickly, and prone to excess (or at least to outsized ambitions).As such, an understated, intimate, and quietly beautiful album like this one is hugely welcome.All The Mirrors in the House is a flawlessly crafted release and Defever's curatorial and sequencing instincts were unerring: there are many truly wonderful pieces here and they all flow together seamlessly in an immersive and poignant spell that never breaks or wavers.In fact, I actually wish this album was longer, as it goes by so quickly that I find myself immediately restarting it as soon as it ends.Not many albums have that effect on me these days.Happily, I will likely get my wish when the rest of this trilogy eventually surfaces, but for now All The Mirrors in the House has definitively joined the ranks of Defever's strongest and most distinctive albums.