Himukalt seems to be more than a bit of an enigma. Other than being the solo project of Ester Kärkkäinen from Nevada, there is very little to be found online about her work. That ambiguity suits Conditions of Acrimony (her first release, at least in a public capacity) rather well though. Drawing from a diverse array of abrasive, challenging styles of music, she expertly blends order and chaos, as well as rhythm and dissonance throughout these six pieces.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
|
I suspect someone could probably spend years compiling a thesis that contextualizes and explains the ideas, techniques, and inspirations behind Jan St. Werner's bizarre Fiepblatter series, but its overarching concept is apparently a simple desire to "dismantle genres." Last year’s completely bonkers and uncategorizable Miscontinuum took care of that objective quite conclusively though, so there was not much left to prove with this follow-up.  I am not sure if St. Werner would necessarily agree with me or not, but Felder is certainly a hell of a lot more listenable than its prickly, disorienting predecessor.  That said, it is still quite an unapologetically alien and uncompromising release, gleefully taking organic, orchestral elements and mangling them into a stuttering, splintered, and kaleidoscopic mindfuck.
Harpist Mary Lattimore’s excellent second solo album is the fruit of a grant-financed road trip across the US, inspired by various natural wonders along the way and recorded at several friends' houses.  While traveling around with a harp does not sound particularly convenient to me, it certainly seems like Lattimore knows how to put grant money to good use.  She also knows the fastest way to my heart, which happens to be naming an album after a Joan Didion essay.  Naturally, At The Dam is a beautiful album, as the harp is always an inherently pleasant instrument when in competent hands.  Lattimore goes much deeper than the expected lovely, rippling arpeggios though, crafting five pleasantly relaxed and languorous pieces enhanced with a healthy amount of experimentation and sublime laptop-tweakery.
Tim Hecker’s first album for 4AD is already a major event, unexpectedly garnering praise from sources as mainstream as The New York Times and Rolling Stone.  We live in strange times indeed.  Naturally, it deserves all the accolades it gets, as Tim Hecker seems physically unable to make a disappointing album at this point in his career, but far more interesting than the quality is how Love Streams is such a conspicuous departure from many of Hecker’s usual tropes.  Also, despite its atypically high profile and widespread coverage, it may actually be the most perversely bizarre and experimental album that Hecker has yet released (My Love is Rotten to the Core excluded, of course).
Wyrding may be a relatively new project, this being their debut album other than a single that was previously a limited hand-made object, now reissued as a cassette and bonus tracks on the digital version oft his album. The band, however, is led by Troy Schafer (also a member of Kinit Her and Wreaths, amongst many others) and they have deep roots throughout the Wisconsin underground scene. The resulting album is an idiosyncratic blending of black metal and neofolk minimalism that also draws from religious music and other fields, but comes together in a way that somehow manages to make perfect sense.
Spectre, aka Skiz Fernando, was at the forefront of the sadly short-lived ambient dub/illbient/whatever genre hybrid that popped up in the middle to late part of the 20th century. While many have come and gone that were associated with the loosely defined style, Fernando and his seminal Wordsound label have endured, continually releasing music that may not have been commercially viable, but always retained artistic integrity and conceptual complexity. On his tenth solo record, his trademark sinister moods with infectious beats continues. But best of all, it sounds just as fresh as his debut The Illness did some 21 years ago.
This seventh album under the Surgeon moniker from UK techno iconoclast Anthony Child is a bit of an unexpected divergence from his previous work. Naturally, the pummeling repetition and industrial textures remain delightfully intact, but From Farthest Known Objects is considerably weirder and messier than I would have expected (in a good way).  There is a fairly straightforward explanation for that transformation, as Child discovered that a particular hardware set-up yielded sounds so bizarre that he found himself wondering if he had inadvertently created a receiver for distant intergalactic transmissions.  That is only half the story though, as From Farthest Known Objects works so beautifully only because Child had both the ability and vision to harness those sounds in a compelling way.  I do not know if this is necessarily the best Surgeon album ever, as Force + Form is widely considered to be canonical, but it sure feels that way to me.  If it is not, it is at the very least quite an impressive late-career evolution.
I have a curious relationship with Axel Willner’s music, as I have always thought that he is kind of brilliant, but generally too perfect, poppy and dancefloor-focused to appeal to my personal sensibilities.  Also, I keep forgetting that he even exists for some reason, so I am continually surprised every time that he releases a new album and I discover that I like it.  Predictably, I am most drawn to his darker, weirder side, which previously peaked with Cupid’s Head’s stellar "No.  No…"  Every album by The Field has a couple of great songs though and The Follower is no exception to that trend.  In fact, it is probably my favorite of Willner's albums to date, as it is as flawlessly crafted as ever, but considerably more shot through with ghostly textures and undercurrents of melancholy than I ever would have expected.
On his last couple of albums, Glenn Jones has let the world into his music. Back in 2011, the rattle of Commonwealth Avenue’s B-line train snuck into The Wanting. More or less an invisible addition, it was the consequence of recording in an apartment that sits on one of Boston’s busier thoroughfares. My Garden State opened the doors and windows and walked out into the New Jersey neighborhood of Glenn’s youth. It has a thunderstorm and chimes and an annotation about frogs, and they are more than just filigree on the proverbial fretboard. "Alcouer Gardens" would be a different song without the rain and thunder, and the non-stringed sounds add details to the loose narrative announced in the titles. Now comes Fleeting, Jones’s sixth solo album, recorded in Mount Holly, New Jersey with Laura Baird. The studio windows are open again and there are birds in the trees, but the emphasis placed on the influence of people and places cuts at the idea that there is an inside and an outside to begin with. It argues that music, often tucked away inside headphones or living rooms or performance spaces, is more than a confined curiosity of the wider human world.
On their second album as a duo, Marco Marzuoli and Alessandro Sergente lay out a reticulated blanket of pulsing guitar tones and modulated electronic pitches dedicated to the moon. Luna’s three programmatic tracks do a remarkably good job evoking their subject. Each one sounds like it has been washed in silver light and painted onto a blue-black canvas. Their shapes are uncertain, as much shadow as form, and they radiate with uneasy energy like they know they hide more than they reveal. Appropriately, the album's every sound hovers uneasily in place, shifting the air and color around it in long undulating waves both oceanic and astronomical.
