17 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This prolific Nottingham-based duo are back with their fifth formal full-length and the first to be released on their own Extreme Eating imprint. Unsurprisingly, Eton Alive does not tamper much with the band’s signature backdrop of spare, simple grooves and Jason Williamson has no shortage of fresh topics that displease him. That consistency is a huge part of Sleaford Mods' charm though (along with Andrew Fearn’s eternally deadpan, head-bobbing presence, of course): sometimes the grooves are quite good and sometimes they are not, but they exist primarily as a platform for Williamson to unleash his vitriolic, heavily accented, and sometimes blackly funny stream-of-consciousness critiques of everything that rankles his sensibilities. Given the pair's continued hyper-constrained aesthetic and one-note approach to mood and melody, Eton Alive is a characteristically hit-or-miss affair, as everything depends the inspiration or impenetrability Williamson’s wordplay and how it fits with Fearn’s minimal, repetitive beats. That is to be expected though. During its strongest moments like "Top It Up," Eton Alive can be quite a bracing and invigorating reminder that Sleaford Mods are a singular bastion of integrity and spirited, free-floating hostility in a world that desperately needs both.

Extreme Eating

On its surface, the almost cartoonish simplicity of Sleaford Mods' music can seem quite ridiculous and infantile, particularly on the lead single "Kebab Spider," which feels like an amusingly wrong-headed mash-up of The Offspring and Tone Loc.Such dubious decisions are not exactly the wisest path to a great album, but they arguably serve a real purpose, balancing the bile of Williamson's motor-mouthed spoken-word with a healthy dose of dumb fun.Interestingly, Fearn's solo beat tapes as EXTNDDNTWRK show that he has plenty of inventive and nuanced ideas and the skill to execute them, but such experimental fare is almost entirely anathema to the Sleaford Mods aesthetic.In fact, it would not surprise me at all to learn that many of the beats Fearn brings to the project are intended solely to amuse and wrong-foot Williamson.Sometimes his more absurd curveballs work surprisingly well though, like the cell phone ringtone disco groove of "Discourse."More often, however, it is Fearn's legitimately great beats that yield the strongest songs.For example, "Negative Script" feels like a wonderfully squelching and sexy '90s hip-hop party jam.While the ratio between great beats and beats that fall somewhat flat is not entirely optimal, I find Fearn's overarching vision to be a legitimate stroke of outsider genius: at their best, Sleaford Mods do not feel like a band–they feel like someone just stepped onto my subway car, set down a boombox, and erupted into a scathing torrent of free-form poetry enlivened by some truly first-class swearing.

That is just one facet of another, larger stroke of genius that partially explains Sleaford Mods improbable ascent and deep relevance though.I am not going to foolishly pronounce punk dead, as there are always a handful of bands that miraculously manage to reanimate its weary carcass.However, endlessly rehashing the "three chords and a bad attitude" formula of the genre is a depressing and grotesque perversion of the original punk ethos.Similarly, very few people are clamoring for rap albums by middle-aged white men.Consequently, it is extremely hard for embittered forty-somethings to lash out at a stupid and corrupt world without looking ridiculous, as the prime window for being sneering and antisocial is when you are young, attractive, and stylish.The audience tends to dwindle precipitously as one ages into a grizzled and craggy crank, which is one of life's cruelest tragedies.Anyone that has suffered through an additional few decades of dashed dreams, bad jobs, and failed relationships likely has quite a bit of deep disillusionment and sad wisdom to share, yet has few options for artistically articulating their thoughts to the masses.

To their credit, Fearn and Williamson have found a perfect formula for making angry music by and for adults and it rightly resonates with people: no posturing, no pretensions, no frills, and an effortless disregard for genre tropes and trends–just a direct and very real connection to a charismatic working class malcontent with some colorful grievances to share over some minimal beats.On this album, the most striking manifestation of that connection is "Top It Up," as Williamson unleashes a frenetic and fiery rant over a backdrop of just a two-note bass line and a lurching drum shuffle.I truly have no idea what he is going on about most of the time, which is weirdly quite charming, as he is a basically a broken fire hydrant of British slang, eclectic allusions, imagined dialogue, surreal scenes, and apparent non sequiturs.Even after reading the damn lyrics to "Kebab Spider," I still have absolutely no idea what is happening, yet Williamson’s conviction and intensity almost make it all seem cryptically meaningful.

Curiously, there does seem to be some indication that Williamson is evolving a bit as a songwriter, as several of these pieces have snatches of almost-melody that act as a chorus of sorts.That is probably a solid instinct career longevity-wise, but it is still a work in progress, as melody is not a big factor in stand-out pieces like the throbbing creep of "Into The Payzone."If Eton Alive has a genuine weakness, it is merely that there just are not enough solid songs to amount to a great album, but Sleaford Mods have always been far more of a singles band anyway.That is hardly news.However, I am also reminded of a throw-away line from the documentary A Bunch of Kunst, where someone from Williamson's circle observes that the project has transformed from a mirror on Williamson himself to a mirror on society.That makes sense, as Williamson’s world has transformed quite a bit since Sleaford Mods' early years: he is no longer a cranky nihilist with a miserable factory job–he is a successful musician dealing with tours, press, and record labels.As such, much of his bile is focused on the shallowness, fakery, and disposability of the culture industry these days.Those are deserving targets to be sure, but for me, those songs do not hit on quite the same deep, existential level as his hilariously bitter tales of desperation like "Jobseeker."Of course, expecting Williamson to still pretend he is that same person would be to fundamentally misunderstand the honesty and realness of this band.Still, I cannot help it if I relate more strongly to Williamson's downtrodden and embittered everyman phase: whether celebrities are fake or not has no bearing on my life at all.Fortunately, Williamson remains the sort of guy who could deliver an impassioned and scathingly funny reading of a phone book if he put his mind to it, so I do not see myself looking away anytime soon.

 

17 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This latest EP is a companion piece of sorts to Caminiti's 2017 Toxic City album, albeit one that draws its inspiration from NYC's hidden oases of calm and space rather than its more claustrophobic and dystopian elements. Much like its predecessor, Refraction continues to explore Caminiti's deep interest in dub techno, yet he has stretched the boundaries of the form in an intriguing, thoughtful, and almost quixotic way: with these four pieces, he attempts to replace the rhythm of the dancefloor with a more languorous and organic pulse ("like a circulatory system made audible"). With casual and relatively inattentive listening, these experiments feel kind of like a classic Basic Channel or Mille Plateaux release that has been deconstructed and stretched into something vaporous and drifting rather than pulsing, but the depth and quiet beauty of Caminiti's unconventional vision comes into vivid focus when Refraction is experienced through headphones.

Make Noise

Given that Refraction was released by Make Noise, it is no surprise that Caminiti composed these four pieces using a synthesizer.However, describing it as a "synth album" would be quite deceptive, as Caminiti's approach to the instrument was every bit as inventive as his approach to dub.In fact, he arguably subverts the whole idea of making a synth album, but it would probably be more accurate to say that he exploits that constrained palette in ways that illustrate some intriguing and fresh possibilities.Each piece is built primarily from a single patch recorded "live," but that recording was then fed into a different "dub-style" patch to transform it into something quite different.For the most part, all of the essential components of classic dub techno are present (warm synth chords, reverberant decay, loads of hiss, throbbing bass), but everything has been slowed down and recontextualized so that it adds up to a dreamlike ambient fog rather than a groove.Or perhaps those elements have merely been transformed into a new type of groove that approximates the tempo of slow inhalation/exhalation (the key difference lies mostly the timescale rather than the structure).In essence, Caminiti has crafted an understated and subtly hallucinatory soundtrack for a meditative nocturnal stroll, which makes perfect sense, as many of the EP's non-synth sounds are field recordings that he made in Brooklyn Bridge Park on summer nights.Much like with the original synth patches, however, those field recordings are more of a lingering ghost than a consistently recognizable, palpable presence.The essence certainly remains, but usually not in the original form.

The opening "Refraction Praxis" is a fairly representative piece, as a hissing chorus of crickets drifts in and out of hearing while a series of warm, shivering chords fitfully propel the song forward.It would be a strong start to a conventional dub techno gem, but Caminiti never allows it to fully cohere into a consistent pulse, opting instead to let it linger in an unusual state of suspended animation.If that was the full extent of his vision, it would be a bit frustrating, as it feels like a promising theme has been reduced to a limping and precarious shadow of what it could be.Instead of completely languishing in neutral, however, "Refraction Praxis" is a vibrant feast of playfully unpredictable dynamics and false starts, as phantom chord changes and bass throbs endlessly hint at a transformation that never comes.The other, subtly different, type of piece on Refraction is best represented by "Mutation (Version)."In a lot of ways, it closely adheres to the same template as "Refraction Praxis," yet the spaces between the chords are allowed to fill with long, reverberant decays and gurgling, wobbly bass pulses.While that is structurally quite a minor difference, it has a significant impact on the feel of the piece, resembling an undulating fog that occasionally blossoms into more defined shapes.The remaining two pieces do not depart much from those twin templates, but they offer enough variation to keep the release compelling.In "Neurotoxin," for example, the underlying chords lock into in a slow-motion pulse of whooshing swells as a moaning, spectral theme elusively drifts through the foreground.The closing "Revealer (Reduction)," on the other hand, almost completely dissolves any recognizable structure, slowing to just a glacially repeating chord in a sea of hiss, albeit one illuminated by hints of a buried, burbling melody that is never allowed to fully surface.

Each piece is texturally vibrant and unusual in its own way, which amounts to a solid EP, but Caminiti was wise to make this a fairly concise release: Refraction is all tease with no pay-off.While these pieces work to some degree as both experimental dub and shimmering, ghostly ambience, their ability to fully satisfy as the latter is limited by the starkly minimal palette: Caminiti is wringing as many shades of emotion and intriguing transformations as he can from a single patch, so building a steadily deepening longform piece from that would be a tall order. As the former, however, Refraction is quite a characteristically impressive achievement.Over the years, Caminiti's vision has taken many shapes, but the thread that runs through it all is his ability to master a form, then intuitively reassemble the component pieces into his own distinctive take that bleeds through the expected boundaries and opens up new territory.Based on the wonderful and varied textures he conjures and the skillful way that they are juggled and manipulated here, it is safe to say that Caminiti could have easily made a stellar straightforward dub album if he put his mind to it, but likely have been bored out of his goddamn mind in the process.Admittedly, I would have been perfectly happy to hear him try his hand at more instantly gratifying fare, as I can count the number of great recent dub albums on one hand (an amusing dearth, given how pervasive it is as an influence).From an artistic standpoint, however, I am glad that Caminiti chose this more challenging path instead, asattentive listening reveals Refraction to be a unique and memorable gem of understated beauty.

17 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

While Frederikke Hoffmeier is justifiably best-known for her solo Puce Mary project, she has had a hand in quite a few collaborative projects over the years as well (a common trait within the Post Isolation milieu). Most have been one-off events, but this duo with Jesse Sanes (Liebestod/Hoax) has held together long enough to make a second album (or arguably a third, if their earlier Fejhed project counts). I am delighted that it did, as JH1.FS3 have evolved from a solid noise act into something considerably more distinctive and wonderful. In fact, Trials and Tribulations shares a hell of a lot of common ground with last year's brilliant The Drought, though the focus is shifted away from Hoffmeier's confessional-sounding spoken word and more towards an inventive and vibrant onslaught of mangled and haunting textures. It sounds like two dueling noise artists at top of their games, except they are trading imaginative, sharply realized textures rather than escalating ferocity. And it also feels like Hoffmeier has brought the same incredible level of compositional and editing rigor to this album that she brought to her most recent solo work. The Drought was one of my favorite albums of 2018 and Trials and Tribulations will likely be one of my favorite albums of 2019: it is a bit more seething and understated, but it is every bit as masterfully crafted.

Dais

For an album recorded by two artists with such a history of extreme music, Trials and Tribulations is an unexpectedly slow-burning and nuanced affair.As a result, I was only fully drawn into it after being beguiled by its Puce Mary-esque centerpiece "Every Little Detail."On its surface, the piece is quite a compelling and unnervingly intimate tale of erotic obsession that unfolds within a shifting and evocative miasma of ghostly harmonies and tormented electronics.As I listened to it more and more, however, I began to appreciate its deeper complexity and detail, falling in love with the wobbling and distorted "tuning fork" sounds and the way that the clouds occasionally part to allow some tenderly beautiful harmonies to fleetingly dispel the tense, creepily voyeuristic mood.Also, Sanes and Hoffmeier unleash quite an impressive firestorm of strangled, squirming, jabbering, and snarling noise while the rest of the piece calmly and quietly moves forward as a languorous reverie.It is a brilliant balancing act, adding visceral bite to the piece's more melodic and tenderly human core while allowing enough space for each fresh eruption of ferocity to be felt deeply.Naturally, once I became entranced by the sheer depth and craftsmanship of "Every Little Detail," I began to notice and appreciate similar small-scale flashes of inspiration through the rest of the album. In that regard, Trials and Tribulations does not fully catch fire until its second half.The pleasures of the first half are a bit more overt and expected, though they are still pleasures.For example, the opening "Far From Spring" is a mournfully heaving and undulating thicket of moaning, sliding, and squealing strings.Elsewhere, "The Chaos of Illusion" is a wonderfully stark and brooding bit of industrial ambiance, as the duo's overlapping spoken voices murmur over a throbbing and reverberating bed of machine-like clatter and hum.

While it is probably fair to say that "Every Little Detail" is decisively the album’s strongest moment, the final four pieces are cumulatively on a similar level, as they add up to quite an impressive hot streak."At the Bottom of the Night" is the most unexpected and straightforward of the bunch, as it is a gorgeously warm and dreamlike swirl of lush chords and floating vocal melodies without a trace of violence to be found.The following "Pipe Talk" partially returns to more expected industrial fare, but the hollow, churning pulse is interspersed with an innocent-sounding dialogue sample that sounds like two people flirting at a county fair.Elsewhere, "Infinite Emptiness of a Heavy Heart" is an especially strong example of Hoffmeier's genius for making dissonant and ugly experimental music feel perversely melodic and structured, as the howling chaos beneath her voice is held together by a wobbly, lurching bass line and glimmering synth motifs occasionally blossom into welcome splashes of color.The closing "Nice" also simultaneously flirts with and subverts noise convention, as its crackling textures and howls of feedback coexist with a bittersweetly lovely synth melody.Also, the foreground is occasionally overtaken by a drifting recording of Hoffmeier blissfully singing "As Tears Go By" to herself (though not always remembering the lyrics).Such playful touches may not seem all that radical, but they are very effective when wielded wisely.Sanes and Hoffmeier intuitively grasp a crucial truth that eludes a lot of similar artists: catharsis and raw power make a much deeper impact when balanced with some human warmth and vulnerability.Contrast, balance, space, and lightness of touch are all woefully underappreciated elements of great art and all can be found here in the proper amount.

I occasionally see artists from the Posh Isolation scene dismissed as "industrial-lite" (or whatever) and it always makes me want to throttle someone, as Hoffmeier's recent work (along with a couple of earlier Croatian Amor albums) is exactly the sort of thing that rekindles my oft-flagging interest in the noise milieu.I am sure someone will soon arise to prove me wrong, but plenty of noise artists have already taken visceral brute force and editing mastery as far as they can go, so there is no real need to try to replicate those achievements (and plenty of artists are already doing exactly that anyway).No one needs another purist artist dogmatically worshipping Whitehouse, Merzbow, or SPK.With albums like The Drought and Trials and Tribulations, Hoffmeier is not making a more accessible version of a beloved underground subgenre so much as she is injecting it with new vitality by pulling in cool touches from elsewhere and shaping them to fit her needs.As much as I appreciate the scope of her vision, however, the true beauty of Hoffmeier's recent work lies primarily in its execution.The sounds are vivid and given plenty of space to breathe, no ideas ever overstay their welcome, and all of the harmonies and nods to conventional structures converge and shift with fluidity and elegance.There is no point on Trials and Tribulations where Sanes and Hoffmeier explicitly betray any of their more wide-ranging influences, nor do the more melodic and song-like elements ever feel forced or unnatural: the pair make incredibly layered and complex soundscapes feel organic and effortless.This is a hell of an headphone album.

Samples can be found here.

16 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

From Here to Eternity is the first full length album from Canadian composer Kyle Bobby Dunn since his 2014 long play, Infinite Sadness.

The use of processed guitar and his passion for cinematic swells reaches new realms that are markedly more ominous and dense than his previous long play. Kyle Bobby Dunn also recruited prominent ambient composers and a handful of his favorite musicians to arrange their own instrumentation for several works on this release that add multiple layers of mystery and intrigue of the human mind and heart. Artists that contributed to this effort are: Benoît Pioulard, Simon Scott, Loscil, Pan-American, Wayne Robert Thomas, Isaac Helsen, Mark Nelson, Robert Donne, Maryam Sirvan, and Michael Vincent Waller.

Kyle Bobby Dunn wanted this album to be very much about the eternal conflict with all human emotions and life circumstances and to somehow go even further than the concepts left behind on Infinite Sadness. The moods and sounds range from angelic choral elements to motion picture soundtrack epics; permeating the skeletal system of the listener with a sense of boundaries and mortality. There are also moments that capture the dynamics of the artist performing in the live setting perfectly and were engineered meticulously by Matt Rogalsky and Kyle Bobby Dunn himself. Truly a difficult album of unending loss, confusion, pain, identity, disease and even death, but also some of the most reflective and warm moments of his career to date.

Releases May 3, 2019 on Past Inside the Present.

11 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Sebastian Banaszczyk's sound recycling project Bionulor's recent works have been part of larger multimedia projects such as theater, but for A. S., he has returned to a purely audio format. He maintains a thematic unity to the album, however, making it as conceptual as any of his prior works. For this one, his starting point was the work of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Banaszczyk strikes that perfect balance between creating something new while allowing the source material to be recognizable throughout.

Oniron

This equilibrium is apparent from the onset with "Rêverie."Lightly surging electronics are blended with transient piano notes that meld the sensibilities of classical and modern composition together, with a bit of light distortion added to give texture.For "Nocturne," Banaszczyk again utilizes some infrequent piano samples, shaped into distinct loops.The sounds of plucked strings are added, solidifying the piece as a deconstructed series of classical loops that sound great, even if the piece is not quite as dynamic as some of the others here.

While Banazczyk never entirely processes Scriabin's work into pure abstraction, there are moments where he pushes the source material a bit further into abstraction.For "Ballet Acoustique," he bends the traditional instruments into something more reminiscent of synthesizers or other electronics.Here they take on a metallic clang, blending some plaintive tones with ping-pong echoing electronic sounds for a disorienting combination.The short "Poème 2" again features Banazczyk in clanging electronics mode, with the final product sounding like a purely electronic piece.

Somewhere in the middle lies a composition such as "Fantaisie," where source melodies are cast in a phantasmal space of reverb and echo, with some additional flanging and effects giving an even greater layer of complexity.With the addition of some percussive sounds, the final product is a rich and diverse one.There is the occasional piano note that sneaks through on "Elégie," but on the whole it is another one that is focused on electronic textures.Pinging, resonating notes appear from a series of rising and falling bent, processed tones.

Banazczyk ends the album on a strong note with "Noir Camomille."Encapsulating most of the album’s themes into one piece, it is a slow and spacious piece built on a wobbly piano sound and a heartbeat like pulsation.With these differing elements and ample time for the composition to build, the result is a dynamic and ever changing work that ends appropriately with some sampling noises arranged into a rhythmic coda.

Just like his other releases, Sebastian Banazczyk has created something distinctly Bionulor while remaining faithful to the original source. A. S. is exemplary in the way he uses this audio clay to sculpt something unique, and after eight albums and ten years of work, he continues to impress me with each release.

Samples Available Here

11 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Mark Solotroff’s contributions to harsh electronic music cannot be overstated. Beginning with the adult bookstore sleaze of the 1980s power electronics project Intrinsic Action into the present day psychologically disturbing noise of Bloodyminded (which, in a live context, becomes the perfect deconstruction of rock performance) and the doom metal tinged Anatomy of Habit, he has been an influential force for the past 35 years. This does not even take into account his multitude of solo and side projects, such as these two recent cassettes. All of his work is joined together by a single, distinct thread: a love of analog synthesizers that borders on the obsessive. Here those synths are used to create the perfect soundtrack to city isolation.

Self-released

One of Solotroff’s most ambitious projects of the past was Super Eight Loop:100 hours of just the rawest analog synth improvisations possible.Completed over the span of 25 years, albeit with a ten year hiatus thrown in there, it is a perfect distillation of his obsessive love of the instrument. Super Eight Loop was intended to capture the New York City of old, the one full of seedy movie theaters and an omnipresent sense of danger.His latest work follows this same line of abstract soundtracks for urban spaces, but reoriented to the contradictory sense of loneliness and isolation that arise from a large, heavily populated city, in this case his current home of Chicago.Symmetrical Spaces of Communication and Social Objectives are the two most recent installments this series of recordings joined by themes of the intersection between sociological theory and distinct urban spaces.

Compared to the Super Eight Loop works, there is less aggression and filth to be had, but instead replaced with sounds of corrosion, decay, and isolation."Ego Machine", on Symmetrical Spaces opens with an industrial grind and acidic, rust laden electronics slicing through concrete decay.Eventually Solotroff arranges the sounds into a sustained drone, not unlike a humming power generator or far off airplane passing through.He does an exceptional job at capturing bleakness, casting out cold sheets of sound like frigid rain falling in a vast, deserted space.

On the other side of the tape, "Achievement Society" features Solotroff keeping the same isolated mood and cold concrete spaces, but here awash in echo and hollow drone.Non-specific rumbles appear far away, just far enough out of focus to be forceful.At times, he blends in what almost sounds like a bit of melody distant in the mix:an appropriately desolate bit of delicate beauty in the otherwise cold and inhospitable mix.Even amidst all of that bleakness the melody adds in that tiniest bit of hope, as remote as it may seem.

Samples Available Here

In comparison, Social Objectives exemplifies a bit more of Solotroff’s noisier tendencies.For "Emotive Issues", he sets his synths up to just below the noise threshold, keeping things to a shimmering burst blended with a duller mechanical hum.He again captures the sense of despair via distant echoes and lower register, haunting tones.There may be a lingering sense of harshness, but he keeps the mood much more to depressive than anything on the violent end of the spectrum."Population Advisor" is less textural in comparison, but is instead an excellent approximation of the dull noise of the city.The whole of the piece is a nicely dull machinery hum, with passages approximating the sounds of power lines, florescent lights, or other malfunctioning equipment.There may be the occasional fragment tone that passes through, but as a whole the piece is the perfect audio accompaniment to being alone in a city late at night.

Solotroff has been extremely active as of late, digitizing and remastering older works (including the aforementioned Super Eight Loop project), releasing some archival performances as Bloodyminded all the while working on a new album, and keeping up with his other projects.Even with all of this other activity he has still found time to indulge in his analog synthesizer fetishism.The long form pieces on these tapes never meander or drag on, but instead make for the perfect imaginary soundtracks to the urban landscapes that inspired them.Even spread that thinly across his multitude of projects, this work is obviously a labor of love.The sound is grey, bleak, and isolating, but in the most fascinating and beautiful of ways.

Samples Available Here

10 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As Ellen Fullman can likely attest, one of the downsides to inventing your own instrument with 100-foot-long strings is that it definitely limits the number of possible venues for your performances. Another is that Fullman's Long String Instrument takes roughly five days to install and tune, adding yet another level of amusing inconvenience to the endeavor. Fortunately, an optimal situation surfaced in 2016, as John Chantler's First Edition Festival was given access to Stockholm’s Performing Arts Museum while it was being renovated. Given the limited "pure drone" nature of her instrument, the success of Fullman’s work can be heavily dependent on finding an appropriately sympathetic foil who can add vivid splashes of color and new layers of emotional depth to that rich harmonic backdrop. In that regard, Fullman could not possibly have hoped for a more talented and amenable collaborator than avant garde cello virtuoso Okkyung Lee.

1703 Skivbolaget

Unsurprisingly, the idea for Fullman's Long String Instrument initially came from her exposure to Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire in the early ‘80s.At the time, she was a young sculptor, and she set about creating her own version, initially using a bowl of water as a resonator.Like Lucier's instrument, the Long String Instrument was initially only one string, but departed from his work by making it a more tactile and acoustic phenomenon (Lucier's wire was "played" by an oscillator).Over the ensuing three decades, however, Fullman greatly improved upon her original prototype, using wooden resonators that behave like guitar bodies and expanding the number of strings to as many as fifty-six (a maximum dictated by the span of her arms).Fullman plays the instrument by slowly walking between the two sets of strings, dragging her rosin-covered fingers along them to produce sustained and buzzing metallic drones.In essence, it is like a massive tambura and naturally lends itself to creating dense, harmonically vibrant reveries in the vein of Indian Raga.A tambura usually only has four strings, however, so Fullman's invention opens up significantly deeper and more layered vistas of heavy drones and slowly blossoming clouds of accumulating overtones.In short, it is the ideal instrument for drone music, allowing Fullman to achieve both a palpable physicality and a degree of nuance that was previously not possible.

The album is divided into two separate halves of roughly twenty minutes each, but the two sections are essentially variations on the same theme, so their differences are largely academic.It is possible that the original performance was a single long piece that has been edited to fit the vinyl format, but the second half seems to start anew rather than picking up where the first half left off.The foundation of each, of course, is the languorously undulating and buzzing swells of Fullman's vibrating strings.That backdrop can be quite compelling in its own right, as the shifting metallic thrum can be quite sharp at times and produces quite an unpredictable array of harmonics and harmonies as the sustained tones interact and collide.During her more subdued moments, Okkyung Lee produces her own undulating drones that intertwine with Fullman's to achieve a heaving and simmering baseline intensity, but the most striking passages are those in which a fresh cello theme vividly blossoms into sharp relief.It can be a truly dazzling performance at times, as Lee seems to effortlessly conjure a wide array of vibrant sounds from her cello.Naturally, there are plenty of visceral howls, moans, scrapes, and shudders that are essentially the cello equivalent of free-jazz flame-throwing, but Lee thoughtfully times her eruptions to yield a coherent arc of well-earned crescendos rather than a nerve-jangling and exhausting one-dimensional assault of cacophony.In the spaces between her more fiery passages, Lee delves into some rather striking and inventive territory, sometimes mimicking speech; sometimes wresting deep shudders, swoops, and rattles from her instrument; and other times evoking a wildly fluttering bird.She also fluidly cycles through an atypically rich palette of emotions, eschewing anything resembling melancholy to convey a kaleidoscopic swirl of passion, tenderness, sensuality, calm radiance, and something approaching the ecstatic.

Normally, the "some artists meet for a largely improvised one-off collaboration at some festival" genre of experimental music album is a reliably consistent source of instantly forgettable, half-baked, and indulgent fare, but The Air Around Her is an absolutely wonderful exception to that trend.Part of that is likely due to the fact that Fullman and Lee have performed together at a handful of previous festivals, I suppose, but a deep chemistry is quite different from mere familiarity.While I have always prized vision and craftsmanship far more than musicianship, listening to how Lee seamlessly and gracefully dances around and through Fullman’s churning web of buzzing strings and ghostly overtones is almost a transcendent experience (albeit one prone to sudden flashes of violence as well).I had forgotten how mesmerizing it can be to hear a great musician effortlessly and fluidly voice whatever ideas pop into their head in real time.Sadly, a lot of technically brilliant musicians just do not have particularly interesting ideas to conjure up.Lee, on the other hand, arguably has the opposite issue, as some of her previous work errs on the side of too challenging and outré for even my jaded ears.I suppose that might make Fullman the perfect foil for Lee as well, as she provides a solid and listenable foundation for Lee's more radical impulses.As such, The Air Around Her is the rare pure collaboration that is more than the mere sum of its parts, as the organic, effortlessly intuitive, and utterly egoless way the two artists intertwine makes this one of the strongest releases in either's discography.

Samples can be found here.

10 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This unusual and fitfully fascinating album was quietly released near the end of 2018 on the small New Orleans-based Pinkbox Teleport label. INRA are themselves based in Berlin, yet The Content Consuming Its Form sounds very much like it was partially birthed in a bleak and blighted late-'70s industrial area, favorably recalling the UK’s finest art-damaged dystopian experimentalists of the period. While I probably would (guiltily) enjoy an album that was essentially straight-up Throbbing Gristle worship, INRA merely recapture the intelligence, low-budget futurism, and deep sense of post-modern alienation that defined the milieu of the era. Stylistically, they reanimate the formula with fresh blood in the form of kinetic drumming and nods to the heavier side of the dance music underground. While not every song gets the balance of murky mood and skittering, propulsive rhythms exactly right, the ones that do are a deliciously inventive feast of post-industrial collage done beautifully.

Pinkbox Teleport

Both guitarist Adam Ben-Nun and drummer Philipp Rhensius were involved in various noise/drone/experimental projects before they began collaborating as INRA, but it is Rhensius's broader passions that propel the duo’s work into something unique.For one, he is a writer, and the physical releases of The Content Consuming Its Form combines the album with a brief book.I do not have that book, but the impressionistic poetry that I have seen from the pair displays an appealingly sardonic and subtly scathing sensibility ("a tired painter with 703 Facebook friends was doomed to fail with the Greek idea that love is expressed through illusions and compassion").The album's lyrics fall within similarly elliptical and aphoristic territory, though they are frequently obscured by effects and feel like a textural element rather than a focus.Much like identifying himself as a poet, Rhensius's passion for club music is similarly something that could have been a catastrophically bad idea if poorly executed.It actually works quite beautifully though: the pair have an intuitive genius for using Jungle-esque drumming and muscular bass lines as mere tools to add well-placed splashes of color and visceral heft to their crackling and hallucinatory collages.That choice of focus is important.While it may not sound like a big deal on paper, it is an absolutely crucial detail in separating "evocative soundscapes enlivened by cool percussion flourishes" from "atypically murky dance album that will sound dated almost immediately."To their credit, INRA consistently and decisively avoid the latter fate.The strongest example of that perfect balance is "I Don't Have Feet," in which a miasma of machine-like hums, distorted voices, and abused guitar sounds is unexpectedly joined by a thick, rolling bass line that immediately imbues everything with a muscular physicality and welcome sense of forward motion.

My other favorite piece is the title track, which opens with a distorted, semi-robotic voice speaking over a burbling backdrop of flanged tribal tom-toms.It all feels very cruddy and lo-fi, which is a nice touch: it would be so easy to sound convincingly like an actual robot with the technology available today, but choosing instead to sound more like "Hamburger Lady" gives the piece a pervading sense of ruin and sadness.That sense does not persist for long, however, as Rhensius's drums suddenly spring vividly to life and the piece coheres into a wonderfully clattering and bass-heavy groove.Elsewhere, "She is Like the Silence in Ingmar Bergman Movies" goes in the opposite direction, weaving a dreamlike spell of hazily ghostlike ambience, submerged snatches of distracted vocal melodies, and enigmatic crackles and scrapes.As it progresses, the piece becomes steadily more phantasmagoric and haunting, as buried melodies start to emerge, textures fray and sizzle, and the vocals sound like they are being dragged into a black hole.The album is rounded out by three more pieces: an ominous reverie of echoing, disembodied voices ("5 Likes After 7 Minutes") and the two percussion-heavy bookends ("The Last Summer Before Web 2.0" and "Free Power Snacks in the Co-Working Space").All are admittedly quite good in their own way, but INRA are at their best when they blur the lines between those two separate poles of their vision.

While I certainly dig INRA's aesthetic, the true beauty of The Content Consumes Its Form lies in the details and the execution, as the duo largely avoid any false notes or heavy-handed gestures that might dispel their vivid vignettes of industrial decay, disconnectedness, and lysergic Holy Mountain-esque menace.I am especially impressed with Ben-Nun's guitar work, as he deftly sidesteps any conventional touches and instead uses the instrument almost like a paintbrush, crafting enigmatic and subtly textured scenes from a palette of blurred chords, scrapes, and strangled noises.I have since investigated INRA's debut (Suburbs of Utopia) and the difference between the two albums seems to be primarily one of focus: all the elements of The Content Consuming Its Form were in place from the beginning, but it took Ben-Nun and Rhensius a couple of year to master carving away any clutter or lulls that blunted their impact.Aside from that, this album shows a real talent for dynamics, expertly balancing the ravaged and sickly with the vivid and the visceral.If Throbbing Gristle can be said to be logical product of late '70s socioeconomic disillusionment and hopelessness colliding with affordable electronics and the revolutionary spirit of punk and post-punk, INRA can be said to be the logical product of their own time. The sense of disconnection and existential malaise remains, but there is now a numbing cultural oversaturation, and any genuine sense of revolution has been replaced by endless nostalgia cycles.Consequently, there is nothing here that anyone would find transgressive or civilization-wrecking, but it would feel wrong if there was, as INRA have taken their inspirations and artfully shaped them into a compelling reflection of their own late-capitalism point in history.

09 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

"Grouper's Liz Harris has today (February 8) released an album under a new moniker, Nivhek. After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house is out now on Yellow Electric.

Recorded using Mellotron, guitar, field recordings, tapes, and broken FX pedals, the album was developed during two residencies Harris spent in Azores, Portugal and Murmansk, Russia, as well as at her home in Astoria, Oregon."

-via Fact

08 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Chasms was formed in 2011 by Jess Labrador and Shannon Madden. Following 2016's On the Legs of Love Purified and the recent "Divine Illusion" single, The Mirage pushes the band's ethereal sound into the murky depths of dub. Marking a sonic shift for the project, The Mirage finds the duo trading in chaotic bursts of noise for understated minimalism that's still characteristically melancholic and potent with emotion. Labrador's drum production is as deft as ever with an expanded range of electronic samples and tape-delay-induced polyrhythms. Layered with Madden's persistently dubby bass, Labrador's sparse guitar and gliding soprano float above a labyrinth of hypnotic sequences. These dub-laced dirges signify growth within the band, heard in their command of repetition, space, and effects to build a pervasive mood that's often utterly heartbreaking.

The duo’s second LP for the Felte label, The Mirage was conceived following major upheaval in the pair’s lives, including the loss of Madden's brother and a number of the band's friends in Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse fire in 2016. Compounded with the dissolution of a marriage, and leaving San Francisco after more than a decade to relocate to Los Angeles, the album is an exploration of grief and the multi-faceted heartbreak that follows such events. What we think we see, what we think we know to be true, how we think life will turn out, the plans we make – all reduced to an illusion when someone you expected to be alive tomorrow is gone, when plans fail, when the mask is removed, and you are left simply to be.

Mixed by Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv) and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri, The Mirage tells candid narratives of a heavy heart but does not wallow in despair. At times, the album even offers danceable moments as in the entrancing, textural "Every Heaven in Between" with its restless techno and house-inspired four-on-the-floor beat. Sliding guitar chords and a smoky bass line wade between rhythmic pulsing and a booming kick in the narcotic "Shadow." A transformative assemblage of songs, The Mirage is a powerful reflection on the events that shatter and shape our lives.

More information can be found here.