Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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It took more than just some time and imagination to believe that Carte Blanche, this piece of astonishing contemporary music by some of the most talented and able musicians of the international avant-circuit, could be realized. Karkhana, a highly explosive mostly Middle Eastern/Mediterranean ensemble -- Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush, Shalabi Effect, Dwarfs Of East Agouza), Sharif Sehnaoui ("A" Trio), Michael Zerang (Peter Brötzmann, Hamid Drake, Jaap Blonk, Vandermark, etc.), Mazen Kerbaj ("A" Trio), Maurice Louca (Dwarfs Of East Agouza), Tony Elieh, Umut Caglar (Konstrukt) -- is weaving a tapestry of sound for Egyptian songstress Nadah El Shazly's voice to slide deep into. On the other side, two grand seigneurs of underground, ex-Sun City Girls and Rangda guitar whirlwind Richard Bishop and W. David Oliphant (Maybe Mental) play it loud. Far Eastern post-industrial. Very heavy, sharp, and crystal clear. Ripe. Carte Blanche will be released as a one-time pressing. It is released as a part of Unrock's Saraswati Series. Vinyl cut by Peter Koerfer at Ivory Tower. Extra-heavy deluxe cover, printed cardboard insert. 140 gram vinyl.
Hot on the heels of the seismic sine-wave experimentation of Front Variations, this pair of EPs rounds out Richard Skelton's prolific winter with a welcome return to more familiar territory. Both intended as accompaniments to his most recent book of poetry (Dark Hollow Dark), the two releases take differing themes as inspiration, but both paths ultimately lead to strong, slow-burning drone pieces. Of the two, the darker and more primal Another Hand is the more powerful and fully realized work. Together, the releases complement each other beautifully to form an extremely satisfying and haunting diptych.
It is difficult to imagine a Richard Skelton release these days that does not have a thoughtful conceptual inspiration rooted in either arcane antiquarianism or regional geologic history.In this case, Another Hand is explicitly indebted to the former, though it is not a great leap to see how Skelton's fascination with latter might lead to the same place.More specifically, this EP blossomed forth from a notation in the only extant original manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.The notation addresses a word that is "rewritten, over stain, in another hand … in darker ink over another letter."That unintentionally evocative series of words became something of a guiding force for Skelton as he worked on the piece, triggering some deep reflection on how our own stories may be overwritten by "unknown - and possibly supernatural - agencies."That phrase also inspired the artwork within Dark Hollow Dark, as Skelton wrote over handwritten texts from a previous book (The Look Away), erasing their original meaning and transforming them into a dense and enigmatic tapestry of layered symbols.
Such a process of accretion obviously mirrors the changing landscapes of the earth and provides a winning template for making great drone music, provided the artist has a good ear for loop architecture and an even better intuition for pacing.Skelton has both, of course, and employs those talents to wonderful effect on this twenty-four-minute piece.Opening with just a simple foundation of deep, repeating throbs, "Another Hand" quietly blossoms into a melancholy dream-spell of layered and undulating string drones.It steadily accumulates further mass and texture as it unfolds, which is enough to make it a solid example of standard Skelton drone fare if that was all it offered.Happily, however, he had considerably more compelling plans, as the drones gradually start to become subsumed by a ghostly repeating howl around the piece's halfway point.That is the piece's only real transformation, but the half-grinding/half-spectral beauty of the new motif is more than enough to make "Another Hand" a wonderfully heavy and visceral piece.Characteristically, Skelton stays true to his thematic conceit to the very end, as the coda that remains after all the howling fades away feels like a newly bell-like resurrection of the opening motif.Perfect symmetry.
A Great Body Rising and Falling also has some literary roots beyond its ties to Dark Hollow Dark, though they are a bit more modest this time around.Rather than looking to an ancient manuscript from the collection of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, Skelton finds inspiration in his own words–specifically a passage from The Look Away.It is a somewhat lengthy passage, but the crux is "…even then I feel movement.Not the dull workings of my body, but something greater.It is another body, massive and restless, shifting beneath me."The greater "something" in the original quote refers specifically to the hidden and not-so-hidden movements within the streams and hills that surrounded Skelton at the time, but it is certainly evocative and poetic to contemplate even deeper and more unknown forces at work.Naturally, Skelton does exactly that here, using the piece to abstractly explore the possibility of "sentience within the apparently inanimate."
In musical terms, that manifests itself in a longform drone piece that feels like a more melodic variation of the territory explored by "Another Hand."Built upon a similar foundation of bass throbs, "A Great Body Rising and Falling" soon blossoms forth into a smeared and quavering descending melody that becomes the obsessively repeating central theme.As far as such themes go, this one is quite an impressive textural feat, as the sequence of notes seems to become more blurred and feedback-like with each successive tone, weaving a gently oscillating haze over the underlying thrum.Unlike "Another Hand," however, "A Great Body" feels like it is increasingly torn and pulled apart rather than allowed to snowball into an increasingly dense force of nature.Naturally, Skelton had a brilliant bit of transformational sorcery in mind for this piece as well, as its harsh metallic undercurrent finally tears free of the surrounding music around the seventeen-minute mark and erupts into a brief passage that sounds like a chorus of howling phantasms swirling around a reverberant stone enclosure.It is an absolutely haunting and harrowing interlude, but it is all too brief, leaving the piece to ebb to a comparatively anticlimactic close for the next several minutes.
At its zenith, A Great Body Rising and Falling easily rivals anything else in Skelton's oeuvre, but the composition as a whole is not quite focused enough to amount to a fresh masterpiece.At least, not enough to amount to a masterpiece in "Richard Skelton" terms, as even his near-misses occupy quite a high plane of artistry, vision, and craftsmanship.Moreover, given that this digital-only EP was quietly issued along with a pair of other releases around the cultural fallow period of Christmas, it might be more accurate to describe both it and Another Hand as delightfully expectation-defying surprises that beautifully fill the void while Skelton's next major statement takes shape.
I have mixed feelings about vinyl-only reissues, but there is no denying that they are an extremely effective way to rekindle interest in a long-neglected album that should not be languishing in obscurity. This album is an excellent example of that phenomenon, as Geelriandre/Arthesis has been fairly easy to track down digitally for a while and few were clamoring for it. Now that it is getting a formal physical resurrection, however, it is deservedly back in the public consciousness. As far as Radigue albums go, it is a somewhat unique one, occupying a grey area between the more divergent Alga Marghen albums and her more universally revered drone epics. It shares much more common ground with the latter, but it sometimes feels like an embryonic version that is still partially indebted to the avant-garde zeitgeist of the era. Nevertheless, it is quite a fascinating album, taking an alternate and almost sci-fi-damaged path quite unlike the pure and focused vision of Radigue's later recordings.
Eliane Radigue's discography is quite a uniquely confounding chronological mess, as it took an unforgivably long time for the world to recognize her as one of the twentieth century's most singular and gifted composers.That is admittedly true of many other female composers as well, but Radigue has been more prolific than many of her peers.To give an especially damning example, her landmark Adnos trilogy was completed in the early '80s, yet only managed to get released in 2002.While it is not quite on the same level as that opus, Geelriandre/Arthesis also languished unheard for decades, as these two pieces date from the early '70s and only surfaced in 2003 on the Italian Fringes label (it was then reissued roughly a decade later on another Italian label, Senufo).Amusingly, it also just got released again as part of INA-GRM's Electronic Works boxed set, but this reissue is still its first physical release in the US.Interestingly, the earlier of the two pieces ("Geelriandre," recorded in 1972) was composed for the Arp 2500 synthesizer, which soon became Radigue's signature instrument.Apparently, not immediately though, as 1973's "Arthesis" was composed for a Moog synth at the University of Iowa.I would not have expected a visionary Parisian electronic music composer to turn up in Iowa in the early 1970s.I may need to completely reevaluate that state.
Despite being a fairly devout fan of Radigue's work, I was a bit slow to fully appreciate this unique and quietly wonderful pair of structurally and temporally ambiguous drone works.I suspect my initial lukewarm reaction was because Geelriandre/Arthesis conspicuously lacks much of what I love about Radigue's major works: elegant, perfect simplicity and gradual, sublime transformation.Both traits are admittedly present on this album to some degree, but they are not the focus, and neither piece feels like it has a deliberate arc or evolution.As a result, I mistook Geelriandre/Arthesis for a primitive version of Radigue's later work until it slowly dawned on me that it was instead a highly evolved version of something else altogether.That is what makes this an important album, as it captures a rare moment when Radigue turned her formidable talents towards texture and mood, as if she was masterfully portraying a single scene in great detail rather than embarking on a transcendent abstract journey.Also, it helps that the two scenes Radigue paints are so alien and weirdly beautiful, as if she was trying to capture the elusive and fragmented dreams of an android.That certainly is not the expected territory for an Eliane Radigue album and partially explains why these recordings languished unheard for so long: these two strange visions were presumably both too far ahead of their time and radically outside of time to be fully appreciated in their own era.
It recently occurred to me that Phill Niblock has a remarkably meager discography for a visionary composer with a body of work that spans five decades. I hesitate to describe anyone's career as undocumented these days, as the experimental music world is drowning in live recordings, unfortunate one-off collaborations, vault scrapings, and unnecessary reissues. Nevertheless, Music for Cello makes a strong case that Niblock probably has quite a backlog of unheard masterpieces wrongfully gathering dust somewhere, as the three pieces compiled here all date back roughly forty years (or more). However, they all sound like they could have been recorded this week. While these pieces chronologically represent quite an early stage of Niblock's lifelong fascination with sustained acoustic tones and the interplay of frequencies, his mastery of the form was already amply evident. In fact, Music For Cello is actually superior to some albums from Niblock's classic run of Touch releases. I am delighted that I finally got to hear it.
As some more alert readers may already suspect at this point, Music for Cello consists entirely of cello pieces.In fact, all three were performed by the same cellist (David Gibson) despite a twenty-one-year gap between the earliest recordings and the most recent.The three compositions are presented in chronological order, so the album opens with 1972's "3 to 7 – 196," a work that Niblock notes was his first to feature extremely precise tuning (a sine wave oscillator and frequency counter were used to tune Gibson's cello to exact frequencies).Niblock also notes that the piece is intended to be played at a high volume, as that intensity makes the overtone patterns more prominent.In more practical terms, "3 to 7 – 196" employs a steadily snowballing mass of uncomfortably harmonizing cello drones to weave something that resembles a nightmarishly buzzing swarm of harrowing dissonances.It is quite a tour de force of exquisite discomfort, as the gnarled and oscillating death cloud beautifully ebbs and flows and changes shape as various tones are added and subtracted.Also, it is heavy as hell.
Niblock and Gibson gamely keep the visceral discomfort party going with 1978's "Descent Plus," which presumably earned the "plus" because the duo revisited the piece in 1995 to add several more layers.Like its predecessor, "Descent" is a manifestation of some deep thinking about how frequencies interact and collide.In this case, Gibson played "four cello tones descending one octave over twenty-two minutes, from 300 hertz to 150 hertz," a feat achieved by sloooowly detuning his instrument "without lifting his bow from the strings."The later recordings added several additional drones that did NOT move, giving the glacially plunging tones a static foundation to uncomfortably harmonize with.Unsurprisingly, the piece is another feast of escalating darkness and discomfort, though it is much more of a slow-burner than the previous demonic storm of malevolent buzzing.Instead, "Descent" sounds like a score to a horror film or thriller in which the composer subtly adds some dissonant harmonies to imbue a quiet scene with an ominous sense of tension…then mercilessly continues to ratchet up that tension for the next twenty minutes with little hint of relief or resolution.
That said, the album closes with an unexpectedly lovely departure from its long stretch of roiling dissonance, revealing that the young Phill Niblock did not quite spend ALL of his time dreaming up ingenious new ways to weave slow-motion clouds of billowing horror (just most of it).Naturally, "Summing II" (one section of a larger, mostly unreleased four-part work) has some frequency experimentation at its core, but the essence is that Gibson's drones gradually build into an increasingly rich and immense chord over the course of thirty minutes.I suspect that the album art (portraying a brilliant sunrise) was directly inspired by "Summing," as the piece is a perfect evocation of a fiery orb slowly rising above a dark horizon to burn away the clouds and bathe the landscape in light and warmth.It is also a perfect end to the album, erasing all of the previous tension as it builds into a benevolent, all-engulfing roar.Of the three pieces, I am most enamored of the ugliest and most viscerally intense one ("3 to 7 – 196"), yet all the compositions improbably combine to form a beautifully crafted and coherent triptych (despite their varied origins and the fact that they were presumably never intended to be presented together).Obviously, Niblock continued to hone his artistry and recorded a handful of legitimate drone masterpieces in the decades since these pieces were recorded, but the organic tone of the cello, the elegant simplicity of the compositions, and the physical/raw production of these performances add up to a timeless work that ranks among Niblock's best.Which it absolutely should be, given that Niblock patiently waited more than four decades for all of these various threads to finally come together just right.
Over the last several years, Marc Richter's Black to Comm project has swelled considerably in ambition and scope, blossoming into a shape-shifting and idiosyncratic force with a strong propensity for the epic. With this latest album, his first for Thrill Jockey, Richter reaches a darkly hallucinatory new plateau with his art. It is difficult to say whether Seven Horses For Seven Kings is Richter's masterpiece, as there is stiff competition from a couple of his other recent albums, but it is unquestionably his heaviest and most vividly absorbing opus to date, unfolding as a disorienting and harrowing nightmare that increasingly stretches and strains towards transcendence.
Marc Richter certainly has a gift for properly setting the stage for a uniquely phantasmagoric experience, as "Asphodel Mansions" slurs and oozes into being as a squirming mass of sickly, deflated, and uncomfortably discordant horns.In fact, the early pieces on all evoke the feeling that I have just been drugged or fatally poisoned and that I used my last burst of strength to stumble into a cabaret before fading out of consciousness.As my life ebbs away, I can hear all of the expected sounds of a small jazz band, but they all take on a menacingly disjointed, distended, and hellish texture as the neon-lit room spins around me.Even the drums in "A Miracle No-Mother Child At Your Breast" are not safe from the infernal transformation, as they feel like they are happening at an extremely slowed time-scale in which a lively fill is reduced to a deep, hollow, and echoing caricature of itself.Richter also seems to draw inspiration from fundamentally uncomfortable and unpleasant sounds during that first phase of the album, as the crescendos are rife with artfully blurred and transformed homages to alarm clocks and car alarms.It is not until the third piece, "Lethe," that the veil of dissonant and undulating grotesquerie starts to dissipate, allowing the first hints of a more structured and deeper album to creep into the frame.At first, the shift towards more warm and melodic fare takes the shape of a smoky and serpentine saxophone over a hissing and throbbing backdrop of drones, but glimpses of considerably more detailed and harmonically rich vistas increasingly emerge as the album reaches its midpoint.In that regard, "Ten Tons of Rain in a Plastic Cup" feels like the doorway that frees me from the claustrophobic cacophony...and opens into somewhat more expansive and varied hellscape, as its swirling dissonance is gradually eclipsed by an ascending and darkly radiant progression of synth chords (albeit one gnawed by inhuman howls).
The following "Licking The Fig Tree" is the first unambiguously beautiful piece on the album, as a passionate eruption of free-jazz saxophone howls and squirms its way across a warm and lush landscape of deep organ chords. After that reverie, however, the bottom drops out and Seven Horses hits its lysergic, fragmented, and fitfully visceral crescendo.On the album's single (of sorts) "Fly On You," masses of shivering drones and strangled horns collide with booming and clattering percussion that sounds like massive, clanking machinery trying to replicate the sounds of a ping-pong game."If Not, Not" is even more unhinged, as it feels like a thunderous taiko drumming ensemble drifts in and out of phase beneath a chaos of guitar noise and dissonant synth tones…then gets joined by the cabaret chanteuse who was enigmatically absent from the album's first third.Normally, the appearance of a recognizable human voice would soften such a roiling miasma, but not this time, as the vocalist's phases grotesquely smear, warp, and intertwine into sinister incomprehensibility.The anachronistic Japanese war drums recur a few more times, most notably in "Semirechye" (courtesy of guest Jon Mueller), but the album's final stretch is primarily significant for featuring its most most gorgeous and swooningly hallucinatory pieces.The first of those is "Angel Investor," which is essentially just an immensely dense and oversaturated two-chord organ motif embellished with a vibrant nimbus of alternately howling and angelically warbling tones.In characteristic Richter fashion, however, the piece undergoes a brief rocky spell in which it violently warps like a collapsing star.Even heaven itself is precarious in the context of this album.
The ominously titled final piece ("The Courtesan Jigokudayū Sees Herself as a Skeleton in the Mirror of Hell") is the most lovely of all though, as its squirming and ghostlike loops recall Richter’s Jemh Circs project (repurposed YouTube samples) at its most achingly sublime.That title also sheds some light on one of Richter's probable inspirations for the album, as it references a hauntingly macabre Yoshitoshi woodblock print, which itself references the much older Japanese/Buddhist tale of "The Hell Courtesan."Though it has taken several different forms and tones since it first appeared, it is ultimately a tale of enlightenment and redemption, themes that Richter seems to have a deep interest in (samples of evangelists are a recent recurring theme in his work and "The Deseret Alphabet" references the Mormons' doomed attempt to create a new alphabet).I would hesitate to call Black to Comm "religious" though, even if if it occasionally approaches the ecstatic.It seems more accurate to say that Richter is fascinated and inspired by the myriad ways in which people wrestle with meaning and the condition of being human.That said, it would not surprise me at all if Seven Horses was intended as a deeply abstract reenvisioning of Jigokudayū’s story, as it definitely feels like an album that valiantly strains to pour a lifetime of anguish, lust, doubt, and transfiguration into two slabs of vinyl.I am not sure such a quixotic feat is entirely possible, but Richter's efforts certainly make a powerful impression regardless of his intentions or inspirations.While both Black to Comm and Alphabet 1968 have their share of compositional wonders that rival Seven Horses’ strongest moments, this album is nevertheless on a plane all its own in terms of distinctiveness, execution, and boldness of vision.
As audacious as the sleeve it comes housed in, the UK’s most eccentric audio malefactor returns with his eighth studio album, Practical Electronics. Unique in the Thighpaulsandra oeuvre, this one eschews the usual group-based recordings, consisting of electronics and vocals only.
Hovering between haunted narratives and extended instrumental sequences, Practical Electronics is an eccentric excursion into playful pop and fearless electronic experimentation. Simultaneously intimidating and accessible, the energy of this untamed mind unleashes an artefact where high art unfolds as an oblique electronic cabaret.
Having cut is teeth amongst such legendary outfits such as Coil and Spiritualized, Thighpaulsandra has constantly catapulted himself further and further into a musical landscape utterly of his own devising. Practical Electronics is the latest exemplary installment of a voice that is uncompromising as it is outlandish.
"Imagine Richard Youngs as the junior member of a cabal of prolific and puritanical English musician-mystics, including The Fall's Mark E Smith, Van der Graaf Generator's Peter Hammill, Martin Carthy and The Clangers composer Vernon Elliot, and still his nature will elude you."
-Stewart Lee, Sunday Times.
Dissident is a hallucination of a legendary lost Samizdat-style recording of the legendary lost Richard Youngs Band. It's not clear to me that it is against anything in particular, and as such it is not literally dissident. In fact, I'm a little lost how or why it is dissident, save for being informed by the imagined provisional recordings of pre-Glasnost protest. Perhaps the wordless scratch vocals are voicing dissent, but I remember having fun. So much so, I couldn’t stop myself from fleshing out the rough nylon guitar songs to a full band arrangement, recorded in multiple spaces. Which is as far from the Samizdat spirit as you could care to go.
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 beautifuly 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 boxed set in 2011. Now available as standalone LP with download card.
Martina Lussi's second album fuses together disparate sound sources with a disorienting quality that reflects the modern climate of dispersion and distraction. The Lucerne, Switzerland-based sound artist released her debut album Selected Ambient on Hallow Ground in 2017, and now comes to Latency with a bold new set of themes and processes.
The range of tools at her disposal spans field recordings, processed instrumentation, synthesized elements and snatches of human expression. The guitar is a recurring figure, subjected to a variety of treatments from heavy, sustained distortion to clean, pealing notes. Elsewhere the sound of sports crowds and choral singing merge, and patient beds of drones and noise melt into the sounds of industry and mechanics. The track titles manifest as a compositional game of deception complete with innuendos, empty phrases and claims – flirtations with perfume names and ironic assertions.
From the volatile geopolitical climate to the changing nature of music consumption in the face of streaming and digital access, Diffusion is a Force is a reflection on fractured times where familiar modes and models change their meaning with the ever-quickening pace of communication.
On Epitaph things are different - Jay's voice croons crystalline over goth futurism for the first time on record (if you haven't heard of Ku….) - he sings one of the oldest Greek songs ever written and has spent the last year doing impromptu vocal covers of Tricky tracks in Cambridge pubs. And did you notice the tracks don't have dub in the title any more?
This his first proper proper solo LP from Jay Glass Dubs - a widescreen vision of 4AD nightmares, ballads for River Styx crossings and echoes that never end. It's This Mortal Coil if they knew about dungeon synth and Metalheadz and still thought dub techno was boring as fuck.
Epitaph follows his 2LP retrospective of Dubs on Not Waving's Ecstatic Recordings; and his 12” mini-LP with Leslie Winer on Bokeh early in 2018. It's his 5th and no way final release for Bokeh (do you remember BKV 002, the slowest dancehall mixtape ever made?). Realized with help of Greek vocalist and performing artist Yorgia Karidi and a special saxophone guest spot from Ben Vince (Curl, Where To Now, Hessle Audio). Bokeh graphic visionary Patrick Savile's sensually airbrushed and peeled lemon closes this funeral casket of all the things you thought you knew about Jay Glass Dubs.
"Heart-rending shoegaze entries from the master of rose-tinted but thorny ambient pop hymns, landing smart on the heels of his nostalgic pangs collected in the recent Songs of Remembrance / Songs of Forgiveness LP reissues. The struggle is beautiful.
Accompanied by the languorous basslines of Drew Piraino on the record's broadest and most affective pieces, Jefre's chiming guitars and muffled drums form hymns to rare feels, with the distancing effect of distortion connoting the effect of age, as serene moments appear move ever farther out of reach.
That effect is felt most strongly in the transition of "Love’s Refrain" from something like a crumpled tape recording of shimmering yacht rock thru to its coruscating, noisy finale, and the dense weight of humid air and featherlight chirrups in "Little Dear Isle," while the other side pushes off from the sore synth chorale of "In Summer" and into the slackened drums of "Blue Nudes (I-IV)," again underlined by Drew Piraino’s murmuring bassline, with Jefre pushing the upper registers into the red, before collapsing into the tape noise and lone piano refrain of his "Prelude.""