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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The Dead C have been on an impressive hot streak in recent years, so it was a reasonably safe bet that I would be delighted yet again by Rare Ravers. However, I was definitely not expecting such a revelatory leap forward this deep into the band's career. Immodestly described as "recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space," this album feels like it was conscientiously sculpted to ravaged perfection in an actual studio and it sounds absolutely amazing. As it turns out, The Dead C's long history of rehearsal tape-level sound quality and shambolic, messy self-indulgence concealed the fact that they were secretly an extremely tight band capable of unleashing firestorms of howling guitar noise with the precision of a scalpel. I imagine some fans are still holding out hope that the band will someday return to writing actual songs with lyrics and vocals, but this album is an instant classic as far as I am concerned.
Much the recent Armed Courage and Trouble albums, Rare Ravers is roughly composed entirely of 20-minute pieces that each fill an entire side of vinyl, though in this case there is a two-minute interlude ("Waver") separating them.The opening salvo, "Staver," erupts with a characteristic snarl of distortion and feedback, but Robbie Yeats' insistently steady and unwavering snare and high-hat rhythm quickly cuts through the maelstrom and drags the song forward through the buzzing, crackling wreckage.That howling mass of distorted ruin never goes away (this is a Dead C album, after all), but in this case it turns out to be the mere foundation for something more structured and compelling rather than the sole raison d'être.That said, the omnipresent snarl and sputter still play an absolutely crucial role: if I saw a cool art show where the gallery was shuddering and collapsing around me, that context would be every bit as memorable and essential to the experience (if not more so) than the art I was ostensibly focused on.In this instance, the nod to structure and an overarching vision is quite a modest but effective one, as "Staver" is anchored by a repeating bent note that sounds like a deep, anguished moan.Notably, the piece briefly seems to collapse into directionless noodling around the halfway point, but that proves to be a cunning feint, as the smoldering ruins soon spring to life with a flurry of atypically sharp and audible drumming.The resurgent piece then goes on to finish in strong fashion, as Yeats' return signals the beginning of an unexpected second act in which the hollow animal moan of the first half slowly converges with a wobbling, pulsing, and insistent swell of distorted feedback.
Following a brief descent into the shuffling, sputtering psych-murk of "Waver," the album's superior second half is ushered in with the sputtering sludge avalanche of "Laver."Again, that is fairly well-covered Dead C territory, but searing howls of strangled feedback soon start viscerally streaking through the chaos as a ramshackle groove lazily starts to cohere.The recording quality plays an essential role here, as the recurring blasts of snarling guitar noise are beautifully intense and physical.That proves to be fortunate, as the rest of the song completely drops out for a while, leaving only a series of howling noise eruptions punctuated by stretches of near silence.After that, it briefly dissolves into an interlude that sounds like a panning and undulating shortwave radio transmission.The piece soon lurches back to life though, cohering into a slow, heavy groove of muscular drums and snatches of clean, melodic guitar.The roiling entropy underneath is the real show, however, as it sounds like there are blood-thirsty noise demons attempting to tear their way through the veil of distortion.Again, the crispness and clarity of the recording plays a major role, as creaking of strings and the intricacies of the feedback squalls are able to gradually seize the foreground from both the beat and the melody.That is optimal, as Michael Morley and Bruce Russell unleash an absolutely glorious tour de force of screaming and distorted noise squall.Lest anyone get too concerned that The Dead C are approaching perfectionism or compositional rigor, however, "Laver" ends by being abruptly cut off mid-note.Maybe that actually is perfect though, as the only appropriate way for this album to end was probably for an amplifier to explode or the recording desk to short out from signal overload.
It feels very wrong to describe a Dead C album as flawless, as the band's aesthetic has always been a fundamentally broken, corroded, and deconstructed one, so I will instead say that Rare Ravers is an album that is impressively devoid of any wasted time, directionless meandering, unrealized potential, or half-baked ideas.I was similarly struck by the volcanic power that this threesome can unleash when they are focused and allow some degree of professionalism to creep into their recording process.The Dead C have always been great at sounding like a shambling, jagged, and brilliant mess of a band, yet the occasions where they could rightfully be described as "face-melting" have been few and far between.Rare Ravers is legitimately face-melting during its howling crescendos.Similarly, the sheer ingenuity of Morley and Russell warrants praise as well, as the two have somehow managed to avoid repeating themselves again and again despite their hyper-constrained palette of blown-out bass and feral feedback squall.It is like watching a magician keep pulling rabbits out of a hat that cannot possibly contain any more rabbits.The Dead C have been a fitfully great band for decades, but they have truly defied the odds and blossomed into a reliably formidable and tirelessly evolving unit over the last several years.For now, Rare Ravers feels like a high-water mark, but I have no doubt that Morley, Russell, and Yeats will soon surpass it if they continue on their present trajectory.
Alive in Dark Rooms is the third live release from Joao Da Silva’s Luciernaga project, following two equally limited, handmade CDs from 2015 and 2017. Compiling four full performances between 2017 and 2018 it functions not only as a snapshot of how the Luciernaga project translates to a live setting, but also is a brilliant overview of the different styles and approaches Da Silva has been working with these past years. At times meditative and beautiful, and at other turns dark and harsh, it is a superb document of his recent work.
In a live setting, the Luciernaga sound is not one that is drastically different from his studio releases, with the only obvious point being their longer durations and structure.Much of the non-live work Da Silva has released previously is likely improvisations captured in the studio and then edited down/cleaned up as needed. So in these live performances, the only difference is their long-form nature, the fact they are recorded with just a portable recorder in the room, but also the presence of an audience.Given the fact Da Silva prefers to play small spaces with largely groups of friends and fellow artists, I can imagine that their presence is a positive force, at least in the case of these shows.
The first performance, "Dirge" (Ridgewood NY, 2018) captures more of the lighter, ambient side of Luciernaga.Da Silva slowly weaves together various loops, building them up but keeping them spacious in sound, making for a rich yet subtle mix.Soon more overt guitar droning and what almost sounds like a sustained chanting voice are mixed in, bringing a stoic, almost sacred minimalism feel to the piece.As the 20 minute performance continues, Da Silva places more emphasis on the melodic sounds in the mix, eventually taking the focus in an icy, shimmering, powerful, yet mournful tone to conclude the performance.
"Untitled" (Charlottesville, VA, 2017) has a dirge-like quality to it, but on the whole follows the previous performance in a more melodic, tonal approach.There is a slowness to his playing, but one that is pleasantly spacious.Again Da Silva takes his time before introducing slightly more conventional guitar sounds to the composition.Here the sound is less effected in comparison, focusing more on the traditional tone of the instrument, but elongated with ebow-like sustain.On the whole it is largely a light, drifting piece with some more commanding guitar performances, making for a nice balance between two extremes.However, with the murder of Heather Heyer just a couple of weeks later in the same city, I imagine Da Silva’s performance would have been drastically different had it been a bit later on.
The other pair of performances on Alive in Dark Rooms capture the bleaker, more grim side of Luciernaga.The short (just a bit under 10 minutes) performance of "Raga for LMC" (also recorded in Ridgewood NY, in 2017) immediately opens with a darker, vaguely sinister midrange hum.The swells in volume are a bit more intense here, and while Da Silva's guitar work is a bit more musically melodic, the effects and overall feel of the piece have a profound depressing quality when compared to the previous two shows.Finally, "Untitled" (Maspeth NY, 2017) begins with an immediate sense of bleakness.Various sounds expand into a frigid, open space that, while beautiful, is anything but inviting.Soaring guitar sounds cut through the cold, empty mix with a distinctly beautiful quality to them, but the dreariness never subsides.Eventually what beauty remains in the piece is stripped away, becoming more ugly and almost violent in the closing minutes of the performance.
Sitting alongside his studio works perfectly, Alive in Dark Rooms is an exemplary release that brings the more spontaneous elements of Joao Da Silva’s work as Luciernaga to the forefront.It may be a subtle impact, but I feel that part of the variation, besides the inherent long form structure to the performances, would be the presence of an audience.It is never an obvious thing:only rarely on these four performances do you even hear any clear evidence of other people present for recording and then it is only a bit of dialogue at the very onset.However, it surely impacted Da Silva’s playing, and whatever the influence was, makes for four complex, multifaceted compositions that stand just as strongly as any of his studio material.
Alhough I lamentably cannot claim to have been a fan since the beginning, I have been aware of Ectoplasm Girls' intermittently surfacing bouts of outsider genius long enough to feel like a fool for sleeping on this latest solo album from Nadine Byrne (released last spring). In my defense, it was billed as a soundtrack and I am generally averse to such things, but Dreaming Remembering is quite unlike anything resembling a conventional soundtrack that I have heard. Instead, this album feels like a collection of B-sides from a great synth pop/minimal wave artist, stretching and reshaping their hook-heavy hits into something considerably weirder, more abstract, and subtly hallucinatory. Some pieces are certainly more substantial than others, but the best moments bring an extremely appealing pop sensibility to the synth and experimental music milieu.
This is Byrne’s second solo release under her own name, following 2014’s maddeningly out-of-print A Different Gesture (also a soundtrack of sorts).She has also surfaced as The Magic State on a similarly elusive release, but Dreaming Remembering uncharacteristically got a digital release, making it likely to be Byrne's widest reaching solo work to date.It is certainly a solid pick for that honor.Unsurprisingly, the film being soundtracked here is one of Nadine's own, as music is just one facet of an oeuvre that also stretches into video art, textiles, sculpture, photography, and probably several other additional disciplines that I have missed.The album is a bit more substantial than the film itself, which feels like a looping video installation or an interrelated series of music videos (there are three different vignettes set to five of these songs).According to Byrne, both the album and the 19-minute film are intended to "exist in the borderland between memory and dream, drawing their inspiration from that threshold of consciousness where one cannot tell one from the other."In that regard, the album succeeds quite admirably, as the unusual approach to vocals gives these pieces an elusive and fragmented mystery.It is not unlike voyeuristically getting a glimpse of someone's deepest secrets in their diary, but lacking the necessary context to unlock their actual meaning.
Notably, Ectoplasm Girls' earliest work was characterized by an eclectic and computer-averse "anything goes" approach that incorporated samples pregnant with childhood memories, yet Dreaming Remembering feels like the work of a gifted synthesizer artist with sharply honed production skills and a clear vision.While she handles all of the instrumentation herself, Byrne curiously enlisted a guest vocalist (Sarah Kim) for four pieces; primarily the ones that are most heavily based on lyrics/poetry.Neither Kim nor Byrne actually sing at any point on the album, however, as their voices are either devoted to confessional-sounding spoken-word monologues or loops that act like an additional layer of instrumentation.Admittedly, the former probably gives the album its most substantial content and depth (at least conceptually), but Byrne is able to wield something as outwardly vapid as a repeating loop of "Um hmm, ok" to great effect in "Okay."The lion's share of the album's appeal lies primarily in the hypnotically buzzing and throbbing synth loops that Byrne assembles, so the vocals essentially just need to be there to imbue these burbling post-industrial soundscapes with a glimmer of soul and human warmth.The sole exception to that is the album's centerpiece "Mothers and Daughters and Sisters," in which a variation of the title phrase becomes kind of an intensifying and cathartic mantra that eclipses the surrounding music.Aside from the brief and insistently throbbing "Nothing Is Opposite to Forever," the remainder of the album’s highlights delve into much more vaporous and dreamlike territory, such the warmly ripping reverie of "ATDN."
While "Mothers and Daughters and Sisters" is the album's unquestionable zenith, it is another piece "But You Don't" that best highlights Byrne's endearingly unique and off-kilter sensibilities, favorably reminding me of the obsessive and deranged collages of early Severed Heads without ever crossing the line into feeling derivative. I would have already been delighted by the piece if it were just an endless loop of the syllable "Ehh" over an energetically lurching and clap-based drum machine groove, yet Byrne ingeniously builds on that playfully maniacal foundation with further loops that sound like sped up tapes, as well as a slowed-down snatch of sassy trash-talking.The overall effect is both wonderfully disorienting and gleefully, infectiously ridiculous. To my ears, that direction is where Byrne's true genius lies: making experimental music that feels genuinely experimental, yet deftly evading self-serious artiness with a healthy appreciation for hooks and a strong intuition for wryly mischievous juxtapositions.I wish Byrne had explored her lunatic dance party side more, but this is ostensibly a soundtrack for an art film, so it is a welcome and unexpected treat that such a piece even turned up here at all.As it stands, Dreaming Remembering is a mostly excellent album diluted by a few weaker pieces, but its impressive highlights and the elusiveness of Nadine's other releases combine to make that it the ideal entry point to the work of a wonderfully talented and idiosyncratic artist.
Agora is Christian Fennesz's first solo album since Mahler Remixed [Touch, 2014] and Bécs [Editions Mego, 2014]. Fennesz writes: "It's a simple story. I had temporarily lost a proper studio workspace and had to move all my gear back to a small bedroom in my flat where I recorded this album. It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first, but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s. In the end it was inspiring. I used very minimal equipment; I didn't even have the courage to plug in all the gear and instruments which were at my disposal. I just used what was to hand."
"Michael O’Shea’s sole, breathtaking album ranks among our favourite of all time - yet hardly anyone seems to have heard of it. Produced by Wire's Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis at the Dome studio in 1982, it's an utterly singular work of magick, meshing myriad, worldly modes into music that rarely fails to reduce us to tears. It's one of those albums that basically sounds like nothing else - the only record we can draw some parallels to is Dariush Dolat-Shahi's life-changing Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar, despite it coming from the other end of the world.
First brought to our attention by Blackest Ever Black at the start of this decade, we've gradually developed an obsessive fascination with its sublime, rapid dervishes and warbling rhythmelodies, so it’s a pleasure to see it finally made easily available to everyone who we’ve ranted about it over the years (2nd hand copies have been historically pricey and hard to come by!), and especially replete with its enlightening new sleeve notes by archivist and writer Failed Bohemian.
A busker among other trades, O'Shea was an itinerant soul who, after a childhood and formative years spent between Northern Ireland and Kerry in the south of the country, and extensive travel between Europe, Turkey and Bangladesh, created his own instrument - an electrified dulcimer known as Mó Cará (Irish for 'My Friend') - which he performed on at Ronnie Scott's, before later playing on bills with everyone from Ravi Shankar to Don Cherry, and also recording with The The's Matt and Tom Johnson.
Aside from his two contributions to the Stano album, "Content To Dine In I Dine Weathercraft" (also recently reissued by Dublin’s Allchival), O'Shea's first and only album is the main point of reference for this unique artist. Like some eccentric expression of ancient Indo-European voices channeled thru a Celtic body, Michael O'Shea's improvised acousto-electric music intuitively distills a world of styles into singularly hypnotic works. Using his self-built instrument; a hybrid of a zelochord and a sitar, made on a wooden door salvaged in Munich, and with the crucial addition of electric pick-ups and the "Black Hole Space Box," O'Shea would absorb sounds from his travels like a sponge, and relay them back thru the instrument with effortlessly freeform and achingly lush results as elaborate as a Celtic knot or elegant as Sanskrit text.
The mercurial flow of syncretised styles in 15 minute opener "No Journey’s End" catches your breath and doesn’t give it back, leaving us utterly light-headed and feeling something akin to religious experience, before his "Kerry" vignette most beautifully limns the epic coastline he hails from. The plasmic swirl and phasing of "Guitar No. 1" is perhaps the one piece that time dates the LP to the post-punk era, even if it could have come from ancient Mesopotamia, while the album and artist's underlying metaphysics bleed thru most hauntingly in the timbral shadowplay of "Voices," and the rapidly tremulous, animist voodoo of "Anfa Dásachtach."
Noted in his lifetime, not least by himself as: "…joker, transvestite, inventor, psychonaut, actor, catalyst, community worker, musician, traveler, instrument maker," Michael O'Shea's life was, by all accounts, every bit as colourful as his music, which only makes his untimely death in 1991 all that more tragic, as we’d practically give an arm to hear what he could have made in the early techno era, as he was purportedly getting heavy into London's rave scene before he was taken.
Honestly no other record has cast such a strong spell over us in recent memory - to the extent of sending us on wild goose chases on the wrong peninsula in Kerry - so please pardon the gush 'cos we can’t help but share love for this life-affirming disc and Michael O'Shea's beautifully transcendent music."
With Voices is the newest recording by Dutch composer Rutger Zuydervelt under the moniker Machinefabriek. True to its title, the album’s eight pieces exhibit Zuydervelt's use of cassette recorders, tone generators, radios, synths, and other hifi curios to construct bewildering aural architecture around vocal work from Peter Broderick, Marissa Nadler, Richard Youngs, Chantal Acda, Terence Hannum (of Locrian) and others. These human voices are featured as musical instruments rather than mere vehicles of lyrical content, resulting in a sub-linguistic mosaic of primordially stirring moods.
The initial spark of With Voices was kindled while Zuydervelt was in Taipei creating music for a dance company. In the final days of his trip, a dancer named Wei-Yun Chen caught Zuydervelt's ear with an instagram video featuring a voice that turned out to be Wei-Yun's own (she would end up on the album’s seventh movement, a piece that features dissected bits of Taiwanese poetry amid low-pitched murmurs and whispering fogbanks of static). The encounter stirred Zuydervelt to create a single 35 minute soundscape upon which each vocalist on With Voices was encouraged to improvise, be it talking, reading, singing, or wordless, guttural intoning. Such vocal smatterings were then used to determine how the other tonal elements should be arranged, dictating where each musical passage would ultimately lead. "The idea was for everyone to just do what came naturally" he recalls, "the element of unpredictability was important to me."
Indicative of this approach "III" (the tracks are simply titled with Roman numerals) slowly winds like ivy through staccato phrases spoken by Zuydervelt's peer Peter Broderick, whose micro-incantations skip along mechanically only to telescope into monastic grandeur at the track's midpoint; the vibrations of vocal cords are often stretched to a seismic hum to form the heavy implements in Zuydervelt's toolkit. On "V," tape recordings of Berlin electronic artist Zero Years Kid (aka Joachim Badenhorst) sputter with their own apparent intelligence like a faulty AI attempting to interpret reels of human speech in some ruinous library of the distant future. Finally, a Siren-like Marissa Nadler leads the suite to its lullabic endpoint with overlapping wisps of harmony devoid of accompaniment ending the album on an angelic note.
In these moments, like much of With Voices, warm-blooded arteries seem to have grown around bits of well-designed artifice to form something warmly alien, soberly futuristic, and inherently satisfying. More than simply an album of collaborative features, With Voices is a mutating collage of modern minimalism that challenges as often as it comforts. There is an alchemical, metallurgical quality that arises from Zuydervelt's unique way of merging humanness with abstraction, harshness with beauty, and unintelligibility with familiarity on what may be the most affecting Machinefabriek release to date.
Laurie Spiegel's second full-length album, Unseen Worlds, arrived just over ten years after her debut album. Having realized the pieces found on The Expanding Universe (1980) on an instrument no longer available to her, the GROOVE System at Bell Laboratories, Spiegel moved on to composing and developing for the Alles Machine, alphaSyntauri, McLeyvier and various other instruments before creating an instrument entirely her own. Spiegel created "Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument" on a Macintosh 512k so that she could have an instrument that was not general purpose, but a small, specialized, and well-defined musical instrument for and by her that she did not have to compromise on or risk losing access to it. While it was a very personal instrument for Spiegel, demand among friends and colleagues nevertheless grew until "Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument" became a commercial product for the Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari personal computers with a devoted popular following that continues to this day, despite the obsoletion of those platforms. At the time of her Unseen Worlds album's original release in 1991, the issuing record label turned out to be going out of business, dissolved and disappeared, sending the album immediately into obscurity. Outside of a private CD edition issued by Spiegel on her own Aesthetic Engineering label in 1994, this new edition represents the first proper commercial release of Unseen Worlds.
"Unseen Worlds is not so much based on melody and rhythm as it is on textures, pulses, and sonic environments. Sometimes dark, sometimes light, its drama pulls in the adventurous listener who wants to take a musical journey. Using computer software she wrote in order to implement a unique musical vision, Unseen Worlds blends the artistic and the technical, the cerebral and the sensual, and revives the virtually abandoned tradition of electronic music. Unseen Worlds is the work of a sonic explorer whose music can both challenge and caress. Those looking for other worlds of sound can put on headphones and find them here." - Craig Anderton
William Basinski’s On Time Out of Time Utilizes the Sounds of Two Black Holes Merging
On Time Out of Time is a suite of works originally commissioned for the 2017 installations ‘ER=EPR’ and 'Orbihedron' by artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand (in collaboration with Jean-Marc Chomaz and LIGO) for the exhibition, ‘Limits of Knowing’ at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin by curator, Isabel de Sena.
These works utilize, among other things, exclusive source recordings from the interferometers of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) capturing the sounds of the merging of two distant massive black holes, 1.3 billion years ago.
The CD and Digital formats feature two tracks: The 40-minute title track, “On Time Out of Time,” as well as “4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)”, a track recorded for the aforementioned installation. The vinyl LP format features two exclusive mixes of the title track: “On Time Out of Time” on the a-side; and “On Time Out of Time (The Lovers)” on the b-side, made especially for the vinyl format.
William Basinski is a classically trained musician and composer who has been working in experimental media for over 40 years – originally in NYC, and most recently Los Angeles. Employing obsolete technology and analogue tape loops, his haunting and melancholy soundscapes explore the temporal nature of life and resound with the reverberations of memory and the mystery of time. His epic 4-disc masterwork, The Disintegration Loops received international critical acclaim and was chosen as one of Pitchfork’s Top 18 Albums of 2004. The Temporary Residence Ltd. deluxe box set reissue of The Disintegration Loops (2012) was awarded the rare perfect 10.0 by Pitchfork, and ranked as Best Reissue of 2012. Installations and films made in collaboration with artist-filmmaker, James Elaine, have been presented in festivals and museums internationally, and his concerts are presented to sold-out crowds around the world. Basinski was chosen by Music Director, Antony Hegarty to create music for the Robert Wilson opera, The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic which had its world premiere at the Manchester International Festival in July 2011, and toured Europe in 2012 and North America in 2013. Orchestral transcriptions of The Disintegration Loops by Maxim Moston have been performed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queen Elizabeth Hall, La Batie Festival in Geneva, Switzerland, as well as Tauron Nowa Muzyka Festival in Katowice, Poland in 2017, and the 2018 Dark Mofo Festival in Hobart,Tasmania. Basinski is currently touring the world in support of his latest work, On Time Out of Time.
Rema-Rema : Announce Debut Album, 'Fond Reflections', 40 Years After Disbanding. 14th January 2019
Rema-Rema featured former members of The Models and Siouxsie and The Banshees, and their much-loved Wheel in the Roses EP (1980) was among the first records to be released on 4AD. Their only contribution to the label, they split-up just before its release, going on to form or join bands as diverse as Renegade Soundwave, The Wolfgang Press, Mass, and Adam and the Ants.
The debut album that never was, Fond Reflections, comes almost forty years after their debut EP and has been culled from the band’s rich archive of reel-to-reel and cassette recordings, with member Gary Asquith and mixing engineer Takatsuna Mukai painstakingly working on them to make this collection as cohesive as possible.
The resultant ten tracks that make up Fond Reflections pretty much reflect the band’s live set and is the closest to what their debut album could have sounded like. Worth noting too that although all their 1980 EP tracks are present on the album, they all come from different recordings.
The album will be available from the 1st of March on both Double CD and LP, as well as most digital platforms. In addition to the new album, the CD edition also comes with a second disc entitled Extended Wheel in the Roses. As its title suggests, it’s the four EP tracks as they were plus ‘Entry’ (taken from the same studio session as the EP’s A-side of ‘Feedback Song’ and ‘Rema- Rema’) and ‘No Applause’ and ‘Murdermuzic’, two more tracks recorded at the same Albany Empire, London show in 1979 as the EP’s B-side, ‘Instrumental’ and ‘Fond Affections’.
Fond Reflections is available to pre-order now from the 4AD store, here. Fans in London can also attend a Q&A with the band on release day at Rough Trade West by pre-ordering the album here.
Fond Reflections: Double LP Edition
A1 Feedback Song (Halligans Live Rehearsal Version) A2 Rema-Rema (Halligans Live Rehearsal Version)
B1 Gallery / Oh Rock ‘n’ Roll B2 Lost My Way B3 Short Stories
D1 Instrumental (Halligans Live Rehearsal Version) D2 Entry (Halligans Live Rehearsal Version)
Fond Reflections: Double CD Edition
Disc One: Fond Reflections 1 Feedback Song (Halligans Live Rehearsal Version) 2 Rema-Rema (Halligans Live Rehearsal Version) 3 Gallery / Oh Rock ‘n’ Roll 4 Lost My Way 5 Short Stories 6 International Scale 7 Fond Affections (Portobello Road Version) 8 Why Ask Why 9 Instrumental (Halligans Live Rehearsal Version) 10 Entry (Halligans Live Rehearsal Version)
Disc Two: Extended Wheel in the Roses 1 Feedback Song 2 Rema-Rema 3 Entry 4 Instrumental 5 Fond Affections 6 No Applause 7 Murdermuzic
On February 1st, 2019, Beggars Arkive will release a 20th Anniversary Edition of Bowery Electric’s classic Lushlife album mastered for vinyl by John Davis (Lana Del Rey, Massive Attack) at Metropolis.
Originally released in early 2000 by Beggars Banquet, Lushlife peaked at No. 14 on the CMJ Top 200 chart and No. 11 on the Core Radio chart. Nearly two years in the making, Lushlife, in what would become the band’s final album, took even greater strides forward from previous releases. The album teems with atomized sounds, each one opening a portal in the mix, importing a haze of space and history, evoking the distant buzz of the city beyond the studio. Throughout, gilded strings build, sway and exhale, plugging the music into the sumptuous melancholy of Philly soul, the emotive Mancini-inspired arrangements of Gaye and Mayfield and the edgy soundtrack scores of David Shire. Yet with all the experiment and variation, Lushlife is actually quite a deliberate and enticing affair for the ear and mind.
Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener met while working at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine and formed Bowery Electric in late 1993. The band earned critical acclaim for experimentation across genres, mixing elements of ambient, drone, electronic, experimental, IDM, minimal and rock music with '70's soul soundtracks, disco, drum and bass, dub and hip hop. Their self-titled debut was named by Pitchfork as one of the best shoegaze albums of all time. Their second album Beat was praised by The Wire as "genre-defining". On Lushlife the touchstone is trip-hop - but set in Brooklyn and through the Bowery Electric filter. The beats are lithe, crisp and deep and lines are perpetually blurred between samples (of which there are more than 75) and live instruments.
Following the Lushlife tour in 2000 the band went on hiatus. Chandler studied composition privately with La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros and at The Juilliard School and Goldsmiths College and worked for Philip Glass. He returned in 2009 with “Everybody Here Is Fine” commissioned for Make Music New York. Recent works include “Music for Rock Ensemble” commissioned for 18 Years of Minimalism and The Tuning of the World, a 24-hour sustained tone composition. His current band is London-based alternative / electronic duo Happy Families.
Schwendener released the solo electronica album Sola in 2003 on Instinct Records and is now a highly regarded art critic on staff at the New York Times. She is also a visiting professor at New York University and a critic in photography at the Yale University School of Art.
"A morphine drip of an album" - Austin Chronicle
"The duo seems to thrive on the thought that opposites attract - bleeding Erik B. & Rakim-flavoured beats into Nick Drake samples into Massive Attack-etched symphonic swirls into Cocteau Twins-hued melancholia" - Billboard Critic's Choice
1. Floating World 2. Lushlife 3. Shook Ones 4. Psalms of Survival 5. Soul City 6. Freedom Fighter 7. Saved 8. Deep Blue 9. After Landing 10. Passages
Without question, The Shadow Ring were one of the strangest and most inscrutable bands to ever exist, yet Graham Lambkin's gnomic solo career frequently makes his previous band look downright conventional by comparison. That is not an unambiguously wonderful achievement, however, as a lot of Lambkin's work leaves me wondering what on earth he is trying to convey and who such albums are for. For better or worse, the presence of Áine O'Dwyer does little to steer Lambkin towards more musical terrain. In fact, this latest release only doubles down further on Lambkin's recent cryptic, no-fi aesthetic, seemingly unfolding as a fragmented and abstract travelogue of a couple's travels across England, Ireland, and Sweden.  As with all Graham Lambkin albums, Green Ways is certainly unique and intriguing, but it is more of an unsolvable mystery and an experiment in extreme artistic constraints than it is a great album.
The opening "One and One is One" is quite possibly the most fascinating riddle on the entire album, as well as the most self-conscious bit of deliberate art, recalling O'Dwyer’s own Music for Church Cleaners if the organ was replaced by strange vocal drones, whooshes of breath, rhythmic clapping, and mumbly wordless jabbering.No explanation is provided, of course, yet it sounds like O'Dwyer and Lambkin are giving a memorably bizarre performance of sorts to a presumably bewildered audience that unexpectedly explodes into applause and cheering.Much like the rest of the album, it feels like I am missing a sizable part of the picture, though my imagination has decided that the performance was a surreal and morbid puppet show.More likely, however, it was just the couple sitting in chairs on an empty stage, enthusiastically and semi-maniacally creating something out of nothing.The following "One and One is Two" is perhaps even weirder, as it sounds like two minutes of Lambkin rhythmically splashing around in a pond while grunting and gasping until the performance is abruptly ended by a much louder, larger splash.The curious suite of similarly named pieces is concluded with "One and One is Three," which sounds like the distant plinking of a broken or prepared piano heard through a quiet sea of tape hiss.While it is damn near impossible to figure out what any of those three pieces mean or how they are linked together, they nevertheless feel distinct from the rest of the album because it seems like O'Dwyer and Lambkin were willfully creating "music" (of a sort).That pretense is summarily dropped with the next piece and rarely resurfaces, as the bulk of Green Ways just sounds like Lambkin turned on a recorder in the middle of some interaction or experience and just let it run for a while.
For example, "The Mushroom Field" is literally just a field recording of the pair wandering around collecting mushroom and idly chattering, though the microphone is either being windblown or constantly rubbed up against a bag to create a disruptive roar.The following "Greenways," on the other hand, sounds like a boat with the microphone up against the motor while someone rattles chains nearby.Throughout it all, there are snatches of mundane dialogue, but very little happens and there is no processing to add any further depth, sound quality, or musicality to what transpires.Nor is there any larger arc to these seventeen vignettes that could likely be deduced by anyone other than Lambkin and O'Dwyer.In some ways, it would be fair to call Green Ways artless, as it is almost entirely devoid of conscious artifice.In other ways, however, it is art in the most honest and intimate sense, as Lambkin and O'Dwyer are framing and presenting their very lives as art and doing it in a radically impressionistic and unglamorous way.Rather than selectively picking and choosing the most beautiful or significant episodes from their shared life, Lambkin and O'Dwyer have instead woven a disorienting, ragged, and uneven tapestry of memories that pulls in a bit of everything: their wedding(?), street fairs, charming snatches of singing, facts about Vikings, deranged-sounding accordion performances, and lazy conversations about plants over some tea.It is not always particularly captivating material, but it does perversely work somehow and occasionally yields some lovely surprises, such as the tender "Down by Sally Gardens," in which a pretty and delicate piano melody embellishes the antics of some very loud cows.Then, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the seething, grinding, and darkly phantasmagoric "Night Music," which sounds like a desolate, windblown shipyard at 4am and would certainly send any small child diving under their bed to hide from imagined terrors.
Notably, while O'Dwyer is arguably both the muse and a ubiquitous presence on Green Ways, this release is very much a Graham Lambkin album in its aesthetic and it is probably an album that only he could have made work.It is not unlike Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal, in fact: if a lesser/unknown artist had presented their own toilet first, no one would have cared at all.It was a significant statement because of who was making it and why.Appreciating Green Ways is similar, as there is not much about it that feels instantly gratifying, but if I trust Lambkin and believe in his art enough to let myself get enveloped in this lazy swirl of enigmatic scenes, some of the album's secrets become unlocked and glimpses of quiet beauty start to emerge.That said, I do not completely trust Lambkin, as he has always seemed like an elusive and complex collision of prankster, madman, charlatan, and genius with inscrutable motivations to me.Sometimes his work is revelatory and sometimes it is very much the opposite, but it is almost always a curious and unique experience (my favorite piece on Amateur Doubles is seemingly just Lambkin listening to a French prog rock album and occasionally sneezing).I do trust Erstwhile's curatorial instincts though and I am delighted that they gave this strange collage a formal release, as it likely would have eluded me otherwise.Green Ways is far too weirdly paced and indulgent to be a great album in any conventional sense, but it has burrowed into my consciousness and left a lingering impression like few other albums have from this year.