10 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

Craig Leon revisits the extraterrestrial origins of civilization on Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 2: The Canon. Picking up where the pioneering electronic albums Nommos and Visiting (Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1) left off, The Canon traces the imparted knowledge of alien visitors as it spread from Africa across the ancient world. Co-produced and featuring vocals by Cassell Webb, the pair engage a sonic pallet familiar from Vol. 1, updated with ecstatic contemporary sound and synthesis, creating a propulsive, exploratory album of cosmic lore and speculative anthropology.

More information can be found here.

10 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

Teleplasmiste's first release for Golden Ratio Frequencies, SCIENCE RELIGION is two side-long abstractions, recorded in London, Somerset and Wiltshire between 2017 and 2018, assembled from jams, experiments and accidents that occurred during recording sessions and rehearsals.

More information can be found here.

05 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

I almost slept on this unexpectedly incendiary delight, as it deceptively seemed like just another solid drone album based on my initial and brief exposure to it. Then I noticed that Anna von Hausswolff had described it as "This is just.... wow." Given that she does not seem at all like the sort to be floored easily, I revisited A Meditation of Discord for a proper listen. I found myself sharing her sentiment by the end of the opening "Premonition," as Paul and his violin unleash a slow-burning and breathtaking one-man apocalypse in real time. To some degree, it is undeniably Paul's masterful live loop manipulation that makes that piece such a beguiling and impressive feat, but even if he had a full band and a limitless studio budget at his disposal, its fiery crescendo could not be any more harrowing and visceral. While he regrettably tones down his more volcanic impulses for the album's second half, the squirming and psychotically dissonant final moments of the closer beautifully reignite the album's transcendently disturbing brilliance.

Touch

There are three different pieces on this album, recorded at three different times and in three different places. Two of the three pieces were improvised live performances and one is a film score, which I suppose makes Paul's Touch debut more of a collection of orphaned pieces than a proper album.The unifying theme seems to be that all of these pieces diverge significantly from the aesthetic terrain of Paul’s Poppy Nogood project (which also explains why he chose to use his own name for this release).That said, it would be more accurate to view A Meditation on Discord solely as a document of Paul’s incandescent and darkly rapturous performance at the 2018 Desert Days festival with a couple of solid bonus tracks thrown in to flesh it out a bit.

Armed with just an open-tuned violin (G-D-G-D) and a small battery of effects pedals, Paul slowly and seamlessly constructed a complexly layered and endlessly transforming 30-minute tour de force in "Premonition."Naturally, the piece’s hellishly explosive crescendo inspires the most awe, yet the greater achievement lies in how elegantly and fluidly Paul is able to make the slow journey from the lushly undulating drones of the opening to its ultimate destination (which resembles a deafening and bloodthirsty plague of demonic locusts).Every single one of the movements in "Premonition" could easily have been expanded into an excellent piece of its own, as even the gentlest, simplest drone passages are enlivened with unusually buzzing textures, vibrant harmonies, and an enveloping warmth.It only gets better from there, as that shimmering landscape blossoms into a vivid fantasia of fluttering, shivering strings and swelling chords.It is a sublimely gorgeous piece until it isn’t: almost imperceptibly, Paul starts curdling everything until it becomes an infernal, and gnarled grotesquerie of itself.By the end, the piece has seamlessly become a complexly layered masterpiece of pure screeching, squirming, and sickly cacophony, and it is absolutely glorious.

I feel truly sorry for the hapless act that had to take the stage after Paul, but a worthy successor eventually materialized in the form of an intense lightning storm that stopped the show later that night.Amusingly, even Zachary Paul himself has a tough time following the bracing intensity of that performance, as "Premonition" is followed here by the gently languorous drones of "Slow Ascent."Unlike its predecessor, "Slow Ascent" does not sneakily evolve into anything deeper, as Paul contents himself with lingering in a dreamlike state of suspended animation.Given the context, however, that makes a lot of sense, as it was improvised as part of a guided meditation event in Los Angeles.Even at his most pastoral though, Paul finds a way to make his work feel fresh and distinctive, as unexpectedly sharp harmonics squeal and twinkle amidst the heavenly soft-focus languor.The album's final piece, "A Person With Feelings," is quite a bit different from the others, however, as it was composed for a currently unreleased short film.Initially, its departures from more conventional film score fare are quite subtle (mostly strange, passing dissonances), but the bottom drops out around the halfway point, and the piece becomes a sci-fi nightmare of throbbing machinery, crackling electronics, and sickly, hallucinatory jabbers and squiggles (all conjured from a violin, no doubt).That mindfuckery proves to be just the prelude to the main course though, as it gives way to a truly demented crescendo of nightmarishly skittering and gibbering lunacy that would not be out of place on one of Rashad Becker's Notional Species albums.

After hearing Discord, I went back to investigate some of Paul’s work as Poppy Nogood and was somewhat surprised to find little hint of the darkness and intensity that was to come.That project lies at the curious intersection where warmly pastoral drone, subtly experimental neo-classical music a la Sean McCann, and melancholy film score overlap.Occasionally there is some bite, but the impact is blunted quite a bit by the more composed and produced aesthetic.It is likable in its own way at times, yet it is nowhere near as memorable as the work captured here. "Premonition" is a fearless, raw, and completely undiluted work where Paul’s vision is directly executed with wild-eyed intensity.It is not entirely raw, as the recording is clean and crowd-noise free, but none of the rough edges have been sanded away by production, and there is no homogenizing, fleshed-out arrangement to diffuse its focus.It is a simple, direct, and dazzling high-wire act that Paul pulls off with astonishing virtuosity and power.I am curious to see if Paul ever revisits this vein again or if this release captures the one perfect and glorious night in which he was unquestionably the Niccolò Paginini of loop architecture.The former would certainly be wonderful, but A Meditation of Discord captures one hell of a memorable performance either way.

05 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

In the early 2000s, Keith Fullerton Whitman parted ways with his Hrvatski moniker and started recording more ambient-minded work under his own name. His first major release in that vein was 2002's Playthroughs (Kranky), an album that is fairly universally acknowledged as a classic of the genre. While I have no argument at all with Playthroughs' status as A Crucial Ambient Album, it is a bit more than that as well, as Whitman devised quite a fascinating and radical compositional approach for the album. Trying to comprehend the actual specifics of the process makes my synapses fizzle and smoke, but the gist is that he fed his guitar into a system of effects and software that produced a completely transformed beast that expanded, evolved, and reshaped with a mind of its own. Being a restlessly creative sort, Whitman soon moved on to other experiments, but he has been periodically revisiting that early system over the last decade with the benefit of newer software. The aptly named Late Playthroughs documents a divergent pair of live resurrections of that set-up dating from last year. Given the uncut, live nature of these pieces, this album is not quite as focused and sharply realized as the original, but it often does a beautiful job of both recapturing that magic and stretching the original aesthetic into stranger, darker terrain.

self-released

Live sound-processing technology has undeniably evolved quite a lot in the nearly two decades since Whitman recorded Playthroughs, but the differences between that album and Late Playthroughs seem far more informed by Whitman's own (similarly dramatic) transformations over that period.For example, I definitely would not describe Whitman as an ambient artist these days, nor have I ever thought of him as a guitarist.It would be far more accurate to describe him as something of an obsessive electroacoustic researcher, forever perched over comically dense tangles of wires, devising elaborate and convoluted new compositional systems, or absorbing arcane and forgotten works from earlier generations of iconoclastic experimenters.That said, he is still quite adept at creating warmly lovely ambient drone when he wants to, and there is some of that to be found here, albeit always in a very precarious state.It is clear that Whitman's true passion lies primarily in creating and harnessing chaos and unpredictability.

For the first of these two performances, recorded at a French art museum, he keeps those latter impulses largely in check, as the early part of "Nantes Playthroughs" is a gorgeously undulating and twinkling dreamscape of lush drones and subtly crackling, gurgling electronics.Gradually, however, some more prominent tones with sharper edges begin to swell out of the bliss-haze, smearing together into passing shadows of dissonance.And by the time the second movement starts (around the 18-minute mark), almost all traces of that former drone nirvana have been obliterated by deep, buzzing bass throbs and a dense, engulfing roar of frequency-saturated chords.Whitman himself describes the piece as the more "placid, calm, measured" of the two performances, but the midsection of the Nantes performance evokes the sensation of being sucked into a crushing black hole: it is an incredibly dense and howling maelstrom mingled with glimpses of transcendent radiance.That storm eventually passes though, and the third and final act is an understated reverie of gently burbling ambience mingled with non-musical sounds that resemble distant industrial machinery.

The second performance is from an "outdoor floodplain in rural Western Japan flanked by mountains in all directions," and Whitman describes it as "wild, risk-enabled, chaotic."At first, however, the Naeba performance is not all that radically different from the Nantes one.The key difference is that the ambience is more woozily hallucinatory and sci-fi-damaged this time around, evoking the quietly humming, buzzing, and bleeping computers of a deserted space station control room.The mood slowly darkens as the piece progresses, though, as a subterranean rumbling creeps in and the twinkling electronic sounds blur together into unsettling harmonies.Unexpectedly, that trajectory fades away in favor of a lovely passage of shivering and swaying processed guitar tones floating above a sputtering and bubbling morass of noise. From there, the piece becomes a constantly shifting fantasia that languorously drifts from kosmische-tinged meditations to rumbling, abstract soundscapes to lazily churning masses of dense guitar tones.The final minutes eventually do get somewhat wild and chaotic (as threatened), but I would actually describe the Naeba performance as the less intense of the two.While there are a couple of sublime "set pieces," the primary appeal of the piece lies in how seamlessly Whitman is able to move from one seemingly disparate thread to another: one moment I am in an immense and echoing cavernous space, then I am being blasted by a howling gale of noise, and then I am sitting quietly in a garden being serenaded by gentle windchimes, yet it all feels weirdly natural, appropriate, and unforced.

Amusingly, Late Playthroughs is the rare album where I find myself exasperated that I cannot turn off my more critical impulses at will to just appreciate the pure pleasure of hearing a master at work.I could not escape the nagging thought that are several extended passages here that could easily be the starting point for yet another classic and beloved album on par with Playthroughs.Instead, such stretches are merely wonderful and ephemeral moments in a larger real-time duel between man and technology.That issue is my own though, as I always want every prolific artist to rein themselves in and focus exclusively on releasing a major, fully formed statement every couple of years rather than an endless succession of minor ones.The "hey, why not spend some time crafting a great album?" mindset is very much a fan-focused one though, and Whitman is one of a pantheon of great artists (Kevin Drumm, Jason Lescalleet, Jim O’Rourke) who are far more interested in constantly moving forward with their art rather than stopping to provide polished and concise summaries of each individual stage.Each certainly has a handful of (often unrepresentative) entry points into their endlessly expanding oeuvre of sketches and experiments, yet the full depth and scope of their artistry lies in the unfolding evolution itself.I am embarrassed that it took a remake of a classic album (of sorts) to lure me into Whitman’s stream of under-the-radar flashes of brilliance, as Late Playthroughs makes it clear that his fitful succession of digital releases is well-worth paying attention to.Late Playthroughs is not quite distilled enough to be a truly great album, but the pair of performances that it documents is quite an awe-inspiring illustration of the vibrant, intricate, and immense soundworlds that Whitman alone can conjure into being.

05 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

This Italian synth visionary made quite a spectacular impression with 2017's Patterns of Consciousness and now makes her Editions Mego debut with its proper follow-up. To some degree, Barbieri picks up exactly where she left off, as Ecstatic Computation shares its predecessor's masterfully executed conceptual conceit: using subtle shifts in obsessively repeating patterns to achieve a trancelike and hallucinatory effect. Given both that objective and Barbieri's singular compositional rigor, Ecstatic Computation bears little resemblance at all to the work of other synth artists, but it also sounds quite different from the sprawling and sometimes overwhelming Patterns of Consciousness as well. While it is hard to pick a favorite between the two albums, this one is definitely the more accessible, as Barbieri has distilled her vision into a much more concise and focused presentation. This album is also quite a bit more varied and unpredictable, as Barbieri occasionally allows the machine-like precision of these pieces to careen off the rails and unleash a glorious and vivid shower of sparks.

Editions Mego

Anyone in search of one single piece that perfectly captures all that is unique and wonderful about Barbieri's vision would be well-served by heading straight for Ecstatic Computation's opening stunner "Fantas."The piece begins by slowly billowing up through a static-ravaged fog streaked with howling, corroded snatches of melody, then coheres into a propulsively tight, dense, and pulsing arpeggio theme.It is an eerily beautifully and tense motif on a purely musical level, yet I am still more stuck by how sleek and futuristic it all sounds.Curiously, however, that central theme dissolves around the halfway point to reveal a disorientingly blurred and woozy interlude that sounds like out-of-phase tape loops of an organ mass.Initially, Barbieri's choice to derail that impressive initial momentum seems like a quite a perplexing one, but the original theme slowly fades back into focus to ride out the piece's final minutes…except that it is not quite as straightforward as that.Instead of fading away or just ending, the central theme is instead deconstructed, slowed, and stretched until it is destroyed in a visceral flurry of eruptions that feels like a dangerously close fireworks display.From start to finish, "Fantas" is a tour de force performance that vividly illustrates where Barbieri is at this stage of her career.Most other synth artists are content with coming up with a killer patch and shaping it into a composition–with Barbieri, that seems like it is merely the starting point.It is very easy to picture her room strewn with obsessive diagrams, notes, and drawings as she wrestles to find a way to transform each new piece into something mesmerizing and surprising rather than merely good.

Following the virtuosic latticework of that initial statement of intent, Barbieri allows herself to get a bit loose and experimental for next few pieces.While "Spine of Desire" is merely a brief and pleasant interlude, "Closest Approach to Your Orbit" is yet another intricate pattern of subtly shifting and transforming arpeggios.For the most part, it is a more understated work than "Fantas," which enables the tumbling and occasionally squirming patterns to be a bit more hypnotic as there is no prominent melodic figure to steal the focus.There are some unusual dynamic and textural curveballs to be found as well, as the piece opens sounding vaguely like a marimba and closes sounding like a harpsichord, while everything in between is characteristically burbling and futuristic.Aside from that, there is yet another climactic eruption of reverberating fireworks.The following "Arrows of Time," on the other hand, is quite a radical detour, as Barbieri replaces her synth with a ghostly layered chorale of her own vocals over some sparse chords.It is quite a lovely piece and one that is far outside Barbieri's usual approach, yet it still feels strange and haunting enough that it would not seem out of place in a space-themed Kubrick or Tarkovsky film.The album is rounded out by two final pieces that return to the rough template of "Fantas" with some ingenious and distinctive twists.The better of the two is the twinkling and majestic "Pinnacles of You," which becomes increasingly frayed and disorienting as notes begin to sizzle and unpredictably lag and linger.The slower and simpler "Bow of Perception" is initially less impressive, but gradually becomes appealingly erratic and unstable as individual notes start to break free of their pattern to squeal and squirm.Also, the final moments sound like a vividly kinetic laser battle at an unhinged robot dance party.

I am hard-pressed to find any flaws at all with this album, as the only real caveat is that it unavoidably feels less substantial than its massive and wildly ambitious predecessor.That is fine by me, as I am just as happy with a short, filler-free, and oft-brilliant array of new pieces as I would be with another grand statement on par with Patterns.Every single piece on Ecstatic Computation is an inspired one, particularly "Fantas" and "Pinnacles of You."I suppose that arguably makes this Barbieri's "singles album," but it is a remarkably thoughtful, coherent, and thematically consistent one.I am hard-pressed to think of any other artists that embody the balance of surgical exactitude and artistic vision as beautifully as Barbieri, as this album feels like the work of a hyper-intelligent android that has discovered human emotions and feels them quite intensely.While I am generally loathe to describe any artist’s work as "essential," it seems reasonable to state that any collection of contemporary synth albums that does not include either this one or Patterns of Consciousness has quite a glaring hole in it.In the span of only a few years, Barbieri has established herself as one of the select few synthesizer artists who sets new standards and redefines what is possible with each new release.Ecstatic Computation is an excellent illustration of why she has earned that stature.

Samples can be found here.

04 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

Via Boomkat:

"The one you were waiting for: some of Chris Carter's earliest home studio productions appear on Archival Recordings 1973-1977, which was previously part of the Miscellany boxed set, and now available as stand-alone vinyl release.

For fans of Carter, his CTI and Chris & Cosey duo with Cosey Fanni Tutti, or indeed his crucial role in Throbbing Gristle, these recordings scan the relatively serene roots of what would become Industrial Music, and a seismic shift in underground experimental musicks.

Predating both his work in COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, and his zinging debt LP The Spaces Between, the Archival Recordings disc is perhaps of greatest interest, historically and artistically, to long-term fans of Carter’s musick. Spanning 1973-77, it covers the years just before, and after, Throbbing Gristle’s conception, when Carter was clearly in thrall to kosmische and psychedelia, but not beholden to them. Across 13 parts, Carter's take on space music and pulsing early electronics is definitely less whimsical, much darker than other music of that period, progressing chronologically over the LP to reveal a full embrace of electronic music’s dark allure by the time we get to the hellish miasma of "See Sick" [1977]."

More information will eventually be available at Mute.

04 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

Transcendental tape loops and bedroom ambient dream states from the teenage mind of Warren Defever aka His Name Is Alive. All The Mirrors In The House is the first of three projected releases of very early works by the Detroit-based savant, prior to signing to 4AD in the late-1980s.

With help transferring aging cassettes and annotating the results from Shelley Salant of Tyvek, the unearthed results are revelatory - a gorgeous sequence of gently decaying tone float made with an incredibly primitive DIY set-up.

As Defever recounts in the liner notes: "By age ten, I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brother's LP collection played at the wrong speeds. As a teenager, I got deep into all kinds of music - punk, new age, blues - and played bass in the high school jazz band, as well as studying Bach chorale harmonization and counterpoint. My first album consists of rhythm tracks made of loops of the next door neighbor raking leaves and shoveling the driveway with echoey guitars and vocals with lyrics about ghosts."

Inner sleeve essay and interview by Mike McGonigal, the founder of Chemical Balance magazine and YETI publishing, and the author of acclaimed books on My Bloody Valentine and Galaxie 500.

More information can be found here.

04 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

The first release from The Bug’s PRESSURE label in 2019 is an absolute sound system crusher from JK Flesh (aka Justin Broadrick Godflesh/Jesu/Zonal etc…). Three tracks of the slowest, heaviest, dread techno you are ever likely to hear. Plus a remix from The Bug himself, in full doom riff mode.

Kevin Martin (aka The Bug) is quoted as saying "I'm as proud of dropping this epic 12" as i was of being the person to release Godflesh's Love is a Dog from Hell, many moons ago on my old label Pathological Records. This time around, Justin again redefines absolute heaviness, but in a club format, as he gets sociopathic with his homicidal riffs and deep space explorations. Absolute malevolence, a complete body slaughter. I virtually begged Justin to let me release In Your Pit! Haha. And I'm very happy he agreed and additionally passed me two more tracks of utter dirt."

More information can be found here.

02 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

Shawnee, Ohio, the first album by sonic ethnographer Brian Harnetty on Karl, is an intriguing blend of archive recordings of interviews with residents of that small town and melancholic chamber-folk.

Brian Harnetty (b. 1973) is an interdisciplinary artist working between music composition, sound, and socially engaged art. Rooted in sound archives and the communities connected to them, his body of work contends that the simple act of listening –– to people, places, and their pasts –– can transform our futures.

Both a 2018 A Blade of Grass Fellow for Contemplative Practice and a recipient of the 2016 Creative Capital Performing Arts Award, Harnetty is deeply involved with local issues of Appalachia and the Midwest. He connects sound archives with performance, ecology, and place - an approach for which he was labelled a "sonic ethnographer." Many of his pieces transform archival material –– including field recordings, transcriptions, and historic recordings –– into newly re-contextualized sound collages. For more than a decade, this has led to projects with archives such as the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, the Sun Ra / El Saturn Archives in Chicago, and the Anne Grimes Collection in the Library of Congress. Harnetty has released four internationally acclaimed albums: American Winter (2007), Silent City (2009), The Star-Faced One (2013, MOJO Magazine's Underground Album of the Year!), and Rawhead & Bloodybones (2015).

In the words of Brian Harnetty himself:

Shawnee, Ohio is a sonic portrait––past and present, real and imagined––of a small Appalachian town in the United States.

Shawnee emerged as a coal mining town in the 1870s. A century of decline forced businesses and people to leave, and today local residents fight to hold their buildings and community up amid a new “fracking” boom. Despite an uncertain future, these residents continue to work for environmental, economic, and cultural enrichment. Since 2010, I have been visiting and working in Shawnee. I have also been retracing the footsteps of my family, who immigrated there as Welsh coal miners in the nineteenth century.

Shawnee, Ohio focuses on eleven portraits of local residents recounting their lives, work, friendships, and deeds. They talk and sing of mining, disasters, underground fires, social life, protest, and hope. They include women and men, are black and white, and are across generations and centuries. Working directly with community members, I use archival samples of their voices and weave them together with my own ensemble.  Past and present are tangled together in a haunting world of music, stories, and images."

More information can be found here.

02 May 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Danielle de Picciotto was born a nomad on the US Army base at Ft. Lewis in Tacoma, Washington. Thus her journey started, moving from one base to another for years.

In 1987 she moved from NYC to Berlin to initiate the Berlin Love Parade together with her then boyfriend Dr. Motte, to create the Ocean Club with Gudrun Gut, one of her longest standing collaborators, to be engaged to the late Roland Wolf of the Bad Seeds, to become the renowned singer of the Berlin band Space Cowboys, to exhibit her art and films internationally in multiple museums, and from 2001 to start collaborating with Alexander Hacke, founding member of Einstürzende Neubauten.

They married in 2006 and with him her travels continue! The artist couple gave up their home in Berlin 2010, and have been touring the world since.

Danielle de Picciotto’s new album Deliverance speaks of these travels and the state of our world from an eagle’s perspective. Despair and hope lie side by side, mirroring the dark shadows and beauty she has experienced on her journey. Her music is a mixture of spoken word, electronic soundscapes, melancholic violin harmonies, and surreal choirs, moving back and forth from experimental sounds to beautiful melodies managing thus to blend hope and despair into a cosmos of constant flux.

Imagine Laurie Anderson dancing with This Mortal Coil in a strange wasteland of dreams and sounds, that is Danielle's universe. It is one that faces reality and its challenges with mystical, dreamlike wisdom, discovering solutions in unexpected alcoves, offering hope and wonder as an alternative.

The album, a limited edition of just 150 pressed on black vinyl presented case bound with 24 pages of the art she has created during her years of traveling including a hand-numbered and signed screen print.

Her black and white ink sketches that also overlay colourful backgrounds, reveal her personal state of mind and emotions in a college of images and textures that expand her musical visions into a fascinating three dimensional experience.

More information can be found here.