01 May 2019

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Albums and Singles

Mariska Baars and Rutger Zuydervelt go way back. And although they regularly work together in the quartet Piiptsjilling, their last effort as a duo stems from 2008, the album Drawn (on Foxy Digitalis/Morc).

But now Eau is here.  Eau (pronounced "oh") means "water" in French, and that's how it sounds; like gently rocking waves of sound, or like a babbling sonic stream of fractured audio debris. It also sounds a bit like the equivalent of sunlight dancing on the ripples of a lake's surface.

Eau is not really a song, or a composition. Well, technically it is, but it functions more like an atmosphere that fills the space. Just let it play (on repeat…) and let the sounds hang in the room - let them co-exist with any other sound that's there. Open a window if you wish! Or, experience the trip on headphones, let these soft tones, gentle voices, buzzes and crackles tickle the inside of your skull.

Eau was mastered by the one and only Stephan Mathieu, who made this carefully crafted audio patchwork shine even more.

More information can be found here.

21 April 2019

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Albums and Singles

Argentinian trio Reynols are perhaps one of the most baffling and unabashedly unique artists to arise from the tape/noise underground scene of the past 20 years. Their recorded output has run the gamut of psychedelic rock, pure noise, heavily conceptual works (such as a processed field recording of chickens), and so much more. With the bulk of their work confined to ultra limited cassettes and CDRs, this beautiful collection of six CDs and a DVD, along with extensive liner notes makes for a perfect starting point of collaborations, two unreleased albums, and a slew of unreleased and rare songs.

Pica Disk

For better or worse, one of the elements of Reynols that has garnered the most attention is drummer/vocalist/"spiritual leader" Miguel Tomasín, who has Down syndrome.On the surface, this could come across as a gimmick at best, and exploitation at worst.However, it is clear that the other two members, Anla Courtis and Roberto Conlazo are guided by Tomasín’s unconventional artistic outlook and conceptual ideas for music and sound art, making him truly the leader of the band.Reynols could also be pigeonholed into the realm of "outsider art" for their unconventional approach, but that also does them a significant injustice as they are true artists in their own right.

The first disc captures Reynols at their earliest, between 1993 and 1994 and makes it abundantly clear that even from the onset they were a band like no other.From their first tape, "3/7" (from when they were still the Burt Reynols Ensemble) is a ramshackle collage of feedback and distortion, while both "Paleolithic Tango" and "Yuczapoll Suite" are sprawling space rock freak-outs of the highest caliber.On the other side of the spectrum are the experimental treated horns of "Port√°til" and the understated electronic tones of "Pre-Pankow".

Disc four, Conceptual Mogal, compiles a selection of previously unreleased conceptual works from throughout their career.This includes the third part to "10,000 Chickens' Symphony," which comes across more as a mass of chirpy almost-synth sounds constructing a harsh noise wall.The churning, bassy noise that makes up "Reynols Plays the Eiffel Tower" is constructed by Courtis and Conlazo literally using the sounds of the tower to make up a classically noise textured piece."Live at NASA" is a lengthy live performance from Houston, Texas in 2000 that covers all the bases:hissing tapes, buzzing synths, monolithic reverbs, and so forth.

Two unreleased albums from the first half of the 2000s are also included, and both feature Reynols in more traditionally musical territories."Adeos Pebro" from Roniles Dasa Selebro makes for an excellent mid-paced post rock number, with Tomasín’s drumming and vocals at the forefront, while the other two flesh out the mix with infrequent noise outbursts and effects.There is an industrial punk edge to "Loh Vijitanos Cuvana", but by the end of the song there’s a ton of distortion and jazz horn outbursts.Of course there are a few curveballs to be had, such as the twangy folk ballads "123051 Caduelo Ridos" and "Un Dama Niticas."

The other unreleased album, Vedeosmas Tecretre, features a similar combination of off-kilter musical styles.On "Pawe Recy Catu (Gradero)" and "Un Mastro Cademia," Tomasín leads the band with his vocals, culminating in some rather light, pleasantly bent pop songs, while the latter does drift into harsh guitar squall later on.There is an almost pop-punk sound to "Los Cara Utica" that is undeniably catchy, even through its intensely low fidelity production.For "Ruavas Ruman Macia" the band goes full on into Latin disco mode for an even more out there song.Reynols’ traditional noise tendencies shine through on here as well, especially on the distorted loops of "Catuneru Rinti Domati" and the distorted synth throb of "Novi Ormigas Tomica."

Reynols have also taken part in a multitude of diverse collaborations that are captured on Disc six.There are two collaborations with Dr. Socolinksy, a famous Argentinean television personality, both of which feature the band embracing an almost jazzy lounge sound that does not appear much on the other recordings.There is also a collaboration with legendary composer Pauline Oliveros, "El Pajaro Mixto Returns" that is clearly in line with her body of work, consisting largely of spacious, meditative tones and rumbles.At the other end there is their collaboration with Acid Mothers Temple, "Burning the Sun, Gently," which is a slowly unfolding psychedelic mass of sound that peaks in a gloriously overdriven climax.

Perhaps the most striking—and I would argue important—facet of Reynols is that there is an undeniable sense of true joy and fun to their work.The concepts that the trio work with potentially could come across as beard stroking pretense, framed by self-felliating artist statements and unnecessary verbiage, but there is none of that here.Instead, Reynols are motivated by the simple pleasure of creating sounds from a wide array of methodologies, for their own enjoyment as well as anyone who decides to listen.As always with Pica Disk, Lasse Marhaug’s work on curating and the presentation of this material deserves recognition as well.Lavishly presented with individual photo sleeves for the discs and two substantial booklets, one of essays and another of photos, it is another labor of love that truly makes for a complete package.With so much material and so many different styles to be had, Minecxio Emanations 1993​-​2018 is an infinitely engaging collection of heady, yet entirely enjoyable art.

Samples available here.

21 April 2019

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Albums and Singles

One of the many, many things that I feel vaguely and irrationally guilty about on a daily basis is my failure to take a deep plunge into the Editions Mego-curated Recollection GRM series, as there was a period in my life where I was extremely interested in classic musique concrète and was maddeningly unable to find much of it. Consequently, this series would have been an absolute revelation for me back then. Unfortunately, my passion for early electronic music is considerably diminished these days, as my historical curiosity has long since been sated and a lot of very important pieces have not aged particularly well. That said, there are some pieces that have aged quite well indeed and there are always some long-forgotten gems that have eluded me. This, the third Luc Ferrari release in the series, is one of those very pleasant surprises, resurrecting two lengthy tape pieces that range from playfully anarchic to enigmatically seductive.

Recollection GRM

The two pieces combined for this release make a curious and unexpectedly complementary pair, as they were never intended to share an album and explore very different sides of Ferrari's iconoclastic vision.Of the two, "Music Promenade" enjoys a far greater stature in Ferrari's oeuvre, standing as one of his most revolutionary and landmark works.It was first premiered in 1970 and was the culmination of five long years of recording and editing.Primarily intended as an installation, the piece was "played" by four separate tape machines and was intended to evoke "a (walking) man…struck by the violence of his surroundings.Nature has disappeared in a whirlwind of warfare and industry in the midst of which he encounters a dying folklore and a lost young girl."I cannot necessarily say that all (or any) of that quite comes across to me, but the piece is unquestionably a cacophonous and surreal mindfuck, as it sounds like an avant-garde theater performance colliding with multiple marching bands.

There are also some alternately space-y and cartoonish touches thrown in to further ensure that I am wrong-footed at all times.To top it all off, each of the four tapes is a slightly different length, so the bizarre juxtapositions between the disparate elements were intended to change their relation to one another with each repetition (the loops are each roughly twenty minutes).Sadly, putting the piece on an actual album necessarily fixes one of the near-infinite variations as the definitive version of the piece, but at least that version is one hell of a wonderfully deranged and vivid sensory assault.Also, it feels refreshingly different from today's insular experimental music scene in that it attempts (to some degree) to capture the life and sounds of the streets and the spirit of an era.Whether or not the average person had any interest in hearing it is certainly up for debate, but if one had happened to blunder into the installation, I suspect it would have made an impact on them.

The album's second half is devoted to the comparatively simple and subdued "Unheimlich Schön," which can be roughly translated as "weirdly (or eerily) beautiful."That is an apt title for a couple of reasons.For one, the heart of the piece is essentially just a loop of actress Ilse Mengel seductively whispering that phrase again and again.Secondly, the piece is indeed a weirdly beautiful one, as Mengel's sibilant speech is deconstructed, overlapped, and combined with the sounds of gasps and deep breathes until it becomes a dreamlike, textural abstraction.Its inclusion as an accompaniment to "Music Promenade" was an especially inspired choice, as "Unheimlich Schön" is a comparatively underheard and uncelebrated piece within Ferrari's influential body of work.As someone hearing it for the first time now, however, I am struck by how incredibly contemporary it sounds, presciently anticipating the "ASMR" aesthetic by nearly five decades and not disrupting that illusion with anything that might sound dated.Aside from the language difference, "Unheimlich Schön" sounds far more like it was plucked from a current Félicia Atkinson album than it does like a minor tape experiment from the distant past.

Of course, there are some caveats.Obviously, it would be unforgivably arrogant describe groundbreaking and visionary art from a half century ago as "flawed," but any honest discussion of this release should at least note that "Music Promenade" did not emerge completely unscathed from its technological limitations and the prevailing trends of the era.Like many other serious composers from the mid-20th century, Ferrari gleefully rejected conventional notions of harmony or melody, but the chromatic blurts and jarring jump cuts that he replaced them with have not aged particularly well.Nor have the more electronic sounds that he sporadically uses.The actual field recordings, however, sound as vibrant and physical as ever.With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that "natural" sounds have a timelessness to them and pointedly unnatural sounds tend to have a very short window before they are eclipsed by whatever the next new thing is.That said, while the more modest "Unheimlich Schön" miraculously managed to nimbly avoid all the perils of embracing an ephemeral future, I am still more struck by the maniacal chaos of "Music Promenade."Ferrari was definitely swinging for the fences with that piece and I always appreciate messy, crazy gambles more than safer work executed masterfully.Much the like other two Ferrari reissues in this series, this one vividly shows exactly why Ferrari and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales have had such a large and lasting impact on the experimental music world.Nevertheless, I was delighted to find that Music Promenade/Unheimlich Schön also transcends its deserved status as A Very Important Historical Document and remains quite a unique and absorbing listening experience to this day.

Samples:

• Music Promenade
• Unheimlich Sch√∂n

 

21 April 2019

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Albums and Singles

I am embarrassed to say that I naively thought last year's stellar split with Wayne Robert Thomas might be the dawning of a new era, as Dunn's "The Searchers" was a brilliantly distilled masterpiece of focused, sublime beauty. While there is at least one piece on this latest release that attains a similar degree of dazzling, dreamlike perfection, Dunn's flair for grand gestures has returned with a vengeance for From Here To Eternity (an album that is every bit as characteristically infinite as it is characteristically sad). On one level, I dearly wish Dunn would stop burying his brightest moments in overwhelming double- or triple-album avalanches of ambient drone. On another, however, the sprawling scope of this album offers its own pleasures, as immersing myself into a three-hour reverie of billowing, soft-focus suspended animation is quite a quietly lovely and meditative way to spend an afternoon. To Dunn's great credit, however, there are also some menacing spectres of unexpected violence and dissonance lurking within his fog of drones, revealing that the seeming tranquility is a fragile veneer that conceals simmering tensions and enigmatic depths.

Past Inside The Present

Much like Celer's Will Long, Kyle Bobby Dunn is a prolific and beloved figure in the contemporary ambient drone scene with a strong predilection for floating, soft-focus melancholy.While the two diverge in significant ways (Dunn is bitterly droll and fond of epic, monolithic releases), they share a very similar problem: it is extremely hard to make each new batch of elegantly blurred, slow-motion dreamscapes seem different and distinct from previous batches, especially when working with a very constrained, minimal palette.On From Here to Eternity, "Years Later Theme" is probably the most archetypal example of that particular palette, as gently shimmering swells of processed guitar languorously twist together to weave a blissful reverie. I expected to find a lot of such fare scattered through this opus given its extreme length, but Dunn proves to admirably inventive at finding fresh variations upon that familiar template (and he sometimes departs from it almost entirely).For the most part, those twists tend to involve a boiling or grinding undercurrent of harsh guitar noise, though there are also some occasional moments of almost beatific radiance, such as "Boul. Gouin" and "The Flattening."The endlessly shifting contrast and tension between the album's lighter and darker moments is an intriguing framework, as the album feels like a series of heartfelt attempts to recapture the elusive lingering impressions and half-remembered scenes from a lifetime of emotional peaks and valleys.During the most lovely pieces, it is very easy to imagine a flickering, soft-focus film loop that blurs the boundaries between childhood home movies and the sweeping romanticism of Hollywood's golden age.

Though I have no doubt at all that Dunn could have easily assembled an album this massive entirely on his own, he opted to try something a bit different with this release and invited a talented cast of collaborators to flesh out some of these pieces with their own arrangements.Notably, that list includes a murderers' row of artists from Kranky's golden age, as like-minded representatives from loscil, Pan American, Labradford, and Benoit Pioulard all make appearances.Curiously, however, all of their contributions blend quite seamlessly into Dunn's own vision, so it is quite easy to forget that they were even involved.In a few cases, however, Dunn's guests manage to assert themselves in more striking ways.The most impressive example is "Triple Axel on Cremazie," as Michael Vincent Waller's delicately twinkling and achingly beautiful piano motifs transform the warm, gently churning drones into the album's haunting centerpiece.Elsewhere, Josh Barsky adds some lovely organ to the hiss-soaked thrum of "Zendel Holiday Hangover Toccata," while Maryam Sirvan likely had a big hand in the howling and grinding crescendo of the album's closer "Eternity, the Stars & You."With the exception of "Triple Axel," however, Dunn still burns brightest on his own–particularly on "La Stationnement de Finders," which sounds like "The Searchers" being played back on a slightly murky and slowly disintegrating tape.Elsewhere, I was quite fond of "From Over to Wendover," which makes very poignant use of a movie sample for an understated crescendo (a woman's voice breaks through the bleary haze to plead "wait for me!").

I feel comfortable stating that From Here To Eternity is probably Dunn's strongest full-length to date, but he is still basically doing the same thing that he has always done and he has been quite good at it for a long time.The only real difference is that has become a bit more focused over the years.In fact, Kyle Bobby Dunn albums remind me of Haruki Murakami novels: no matter what the ostensible premise might be, Murakami is always irrevocably and obsessively drawn back to the same themes again and again.It feels like he is endlessly chasing an elusive vision and will not stop returning to it until he finally gets it exactly right (or, more likely, dies trying).If I had to guess, I would say that Dunn's own quixotic obsession is a desire to replace the cold harshness of the outside world with an appealingly warm, blurred, and poetic cinema of bittersweet memories.He is admittedly quite adept at conjuring that beautiful and sustained illusion on a grand scale, but it is a precarious edifice and this album in particular reveals an omnipresent darkness gnawing at the edges of that idyll.While the strongest pieces tend to be the ones where the light and dark attain a sort of fragile and temporary internal balance, the true depth and artistry of From Here to Eternity lies in the cumulative power of the whole rather than in its individual moments.

Samples can be found here.

19 April 2019

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Albums and Singles

Passageways is John Daniel's most personal work to date. An ode to his childhood home - a secluded apartment complex in Cleveland that his parents managed - Passageways refer to the various connecting hallways running between rooms as much as it refers to the way the passing of time overtakes our perception of spaces that seemed to be endless corridors into discovery and imagination. Passageways is full of submerged melodies, gentle pulls of surging tonal shifts that arc, shimmer and fade into the dark purple hue of the album's shifting overtones. The album rides the line of decaying drones that recall the best of Basinksi or Belong's October Language.

From John:

Passageways is a record about my childhood home.

The "passageways", in this case, are partially referring to hallways.

I grew up in a unique environment - a quiet and secluded 3-story apartment building in the west suburbs of Cleveland. My parents managed the building so our family had two apartments, eventually right next to each other. As a young kid I would adventure around the apartment building and its surrounding property, thick woods and greenery were behind the building and felt like an endless backyard. I attribute much of my early imagination and creativity to this place.
My folks will be moving away in the next few years as my Dad plans to retire, so I'm planning on leaving a copy of the record with the building, hidden somewhere. I had lived in that building since I was 4 years old - the idea of your home no longer being there is strange, but change is necessary. This home was simply a "passageway" into the life that I live now- I believe it was instrumental in becoming an artist.

This is my folk record in a way. It is not musically obvious, but more in terms of how I approached the writing: A sense of sentimentality about home, about a place and time.

My first instrument (outside of the drums) was an acoustic guitar, and that's how I started out making solo music. I eventually learned that I wasn't a guitarist and sought more minimal, simple ways of making sounds. But that's really where things started, so I've always felt a connection to that type of music, even in these days of electronic music. I also think there's an idea about electronic music being a bit evasive or emotionally inaccessible at times, or lacking personal transparency. I wanted to challenge expectations of an ambient record by framing it how I would have 10 years ago. This is a development in a side of Forest Management that I've only recently begun to feel, and am doing my best to roll with it.

More information can be found here.

19 April 2019

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Albums and Singles

With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio, Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: DOME (July 1980), DOME 2 (October 1980) and DOME 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, WILL YOU SPEAK THIS WORD: DOME IV was released on the Norwegian Uniton label in May 1983.

These albums represent some of the most beautifully stark and above all timeless exercises in studio experimentation from early 1980s alternative music scene.

Previously issued in the out of print DOME 1-4+5 box set in 2011. Now available as standalone LP with download card.

Out May 31st on Editions Mego.

19 April 2019

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Albums and Singles

Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis present this collection of curated compositions from Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman. Two Lucier pieces, "August Moon" and "Trio For Clarinet, Cello & Tuba" are presented here for the first time. Liner notes are excerpted from a lecture on Morton Feldman given by Alvin Lucier.

"For Feldman, dynamics serve an acoustical function. When he mitigates a piano attack he reduces that spike of noise that’s at the onset of every piano sound leaving only the sinusoidal pure after-sound. It’s as if he invented electronic music with the piano." Alvin Lucier from liner notes.

"Lucier manages to hear a layer of acoustical physics in Feldman’s music that perhaps no one else would hear. He’s hearing something in Feldman that is actually coming from his own musical world; in a way, hearing his own music in Feldman’s, and drawing inspiration from that."

More information can be found here.

18 April 2019

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Albums and Singles

"Kukangendai is a kick ass rock trio from Kyoto (Tokyo transplants). When I first hear this band live I was instantly transfixed by their minimalist yet illusory primitive, polyrythmic and structural, memory evoking rock narratives. Their energy is completely and transparently palpable yet handled with restraint of the pleasure of a disciplined form dealing with time and articulation. They are a power trio of bass, drums and guitar but the music they play is as much the limbic system of a forest than it is a geode. They started in 2006. They left Tokyo to Kyoto and started the cult venue Soto ("Outside") "to listen to music they hadn’t heard yet" a few years later. They collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto last year. They reminded me of James Brown on a heavy binge of Bastro–there's a deep current of both archaic musical tastes and the human desire for articulating that archaism in there, but you shake your ass and get the shouting in… in a punk basement … 13th century version of Breadwinner, the bare soul version.  I'm honored and proud to work with this tribe, and to count them amongst friends."

-Stephen O’Malley, February 2019, Paris

More information can be found here.

18 April 2019

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Albums and Singles

Matthew Sage is a composer, producer, label owner, and publisher based in Chicago, IL. Since his earliest recordings, Sage has carefully considered and crafted each of his various approaches to experimental music. His debut LP A Singular Continent was an endless epic that charted imaginative aural cartography and seemed to soundtrack actual worldbuilding. Now, after five years personal changes and growth, Sage returns with his tried and true sonic trademarks, but with a noticeably liberated approach to his brand of experimental studio music.

Catch a Blessing shows Sage in a much more impulsive light. Where past work existed in space that was cerebral, meditated, and composed, the music here is more natural, playful, and effort-less.

Opting for chance and the unknown rather than rules and conceptual rigor, Sage "practiced" an amorphous technique that led to profound moments of accidental, unplanned beauty. And the perks were plenty. As Sage explains: "Learning to know less and to just feel more about what I am making has become important to me. I like, or am learning to like, the possibility of that openness, that uncertainty. Not knowing. It is uncomfortable, but it is nourishing."

Recorded over a summer in a tiny room on the second floor of a 120-year-old apartment in Chicago, Catch a Blessing is the result of and the meditation on the exquisite exhaust and lavish lushness of his crumbling (and rebuilt) locales.

Presented as a collection of ornately expressionistic portraits of Chicago, Sage approached the album more as paintings or sculptures than musical compositions. Album opener "Avondale Primer Gray" unfurls a calm but vibrant quasi-melody that dissolves into a blur of found sonic objects both familiar unknown. "Lions to Baffle" is a semi-synthetic symphony of muted, sax-laden alien jazz, while "Elevator Straffing" maintains a whirling, glittering hum of echoed dissonance. "Claiming Air Rights" could be the literal sound of a piano floating through space, levitating despite an impossible weight. "Michigan Turquoise" brings an exquisitely eerie hymn with the same ghastly grace of Sparklehorse. Album centerpiece "Window Unit +Three Flat" is an open-ended epic of texture and ambiguity, immediately followed by the warped and trickling elegance of "Polish Triangle." "Wolfe Point Fog" closes Catch a Blessing with peculiar focus, departing with an open-ended and wholly optimistic focus.

The moods and modes are constantly, entirely at odds with themselves: private vs. public, abject vs. profound, rural vs. urban(e), and so on. Where other players of experimental studio music take a more high-minded, often stuffy approach, Catch a Blessing floats in airier, more refreshing modes. It’s endlessly lush but sincerely marked by decay. This is naturalism in the truest sense.

Out now on Geographic North.

18 April 2019

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Albums and Singles

Glottal Wolpertinger was initially conceived as a radio installation for documenta 14, the world's most renowned event for contemporary arts, with each of the tracks broadcasting individually over the course of ten weeks and culminating in a convergence of all eight tracks at a performance in Athens. The pieces consist of microtonally tuned feedback, multispectral drones which Werner modulated and filtered with a purposeful, and indeed vocalized, emphasis given to the different frequencies and textures used. By naming the individual frequency bands, Werner defies traditional tuning systems and instead centers the piece on collaging variable elements. Sonic elements churn and sprawl across the tracks in constant motion. Their drones, combatting for space, entangle one another and oscillate into overtones that shift, build, and wither with fluid motion that blurs the line between consonance and dissonance.

Glottal Wolpertinger's incarnation as a recording is no less potent than its preceding forms, but serves as a continuation of the project's evolution as a distinct listening experience. Werner's apt title for the project embellishes the ambiguity and cognitive dissonance inherent with the work, as the wolpertinger is a creature of European myth which is said to be the mutated result of different species breeding under special circumstances in the Alps. Glottal intonations are those produced by the guttural and throat region of the body, the center of organic sound. According to Werner, the wolpertingers are "bastards, collaged freaks who exist in the grey zone of nature’s perfect plan," the same grey zone in which his pieces live.

Jan St. Werner is a critically acclaimed and internationally recognized sound innovator. In myriad ways – as a solo artist, a collaborator, through his group Mouse On Mars, as a producer, as a lecturer at MIT, or as a professor of Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremburg - Werner has challenged traditional approaches to creating and experiencing music. The sixth installment of his "Fiepblatter Catalogue series," Glottal Wolpertinger endeavors to transcribe the phenomenon of sound as anarchic and highly sensitive material. His multilayered presentation of the project highlights the ways in which sound and music can fluctuate and re-constitute depending on context all within one consistent work. In keeping with the series' collaborative nature, the pieces include contributions from guitarists Aaron & Bryce Dessner of The National.

More information can be found here.