We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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Barn Owl was always an intriguingly fluid and evolving project and that creative restlessness has certainly continuing on into the solo work of Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras. For this latest release, Porras takes his conceptual inspiration from Indian musician Gita Sarabhai, who once mentioned in a conversation with John Cage that art exists to "sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences." As such, the tone of Voice of the Air is largely a meditative and drone-based one, but Porras also had some new revelations about composition along the way, diving into John Chowning's frequency modulation (FM) synthesis ideas and exploring how to use them as a structural basis for his own work. The results of that experimentation are often quite wonderful, as Voice of the Air is an album filled with strong, simple themes that vibrantly squirm, shiver, and oscillate with shifting textures.
Few things make my eyes glaze over faster than hearing about which synthesizer someone used to record an album, yet the fact that Porras used a Yamaha DX7 for this album is a noteworthy one for a few reasons.For one, Yamaha licensed Chowning's FM synthesis techniques for that specific model, so the perfect tools were readily available and Porras just needed to figure out how to properly harness them.Secondly, it is a remarkably affordable and easy to acquire bit of gear, which very much runs counter to the current trend of fetishizing the rarest and most fabled modular synths.I definitely understand the appeal of having an unpredictable electronic collaborator and being able to easily tweak and manipulate all aspects of texture, but the trade-off is that the gear itself often plays a significant role in dictating the structure and direction of the work.The traditional route of first having some strong and coherent ideas, then finding the right instrument to realize them is often an underappreciated one these days.That approach likely has a lot to do with why Voice of the Air does not sound like a synth album, nor does it quite cover any of the same aesthetic territory that anyone else has staked out in the drone world.There are certainly recognizable synth sounds and textures, but they are organically pulsing, sizzling, and shuddering in a sea of heady, psychotropic drones, and the mood is a unique one.If androids do not dream exclusively of electric sheep, I suspect their dreams would resemble the corroded and crackling beauty of Porras's soundscapes.
I am not sure if the strongest moments necessarily come at the beginning of the album, but those are the ones I tend to remember, as the album's seven pieces feel like they drift, twist, and curl like a long tendril of smoke.As a result, the boundaries between them become irrelevant almost immediately and the parts are stand out are merely those that occur before I am fully drawn into the album’s languorous and gently billowing spell.In any case, the early "Colors Passing Through Us" is certainly representative of where Porras excels on this album, as the piece is centered on just a slowly flanging pulse that buzzes and throbs its way through a warmly beautiful, soft-focus landscape of woozy chords before being enveloped in a shuddering, rumbling squall of static.Even during the piece's most gnarled moments, however, Porras still manages to maintain a masterful lightness of touch, allowing dreamy glimpses of organ-like chords to faintly pierce through the snarling distortion.Elsewhere, "Peach Fire" repeats similar themes in more inventive and sublimely gorgeous fashion, as the elusive, heavenly chords creep a bit more into the foreground and the pulsing backbone at the center erratically changes the rhythm of its cycling to weave a disorientingly precarious sense of time and place.
Sadly, Voice of the Air is quite a brief album, barely squeaking past thirty minutes, but it is a quiet minor masterpiece of understated psychedelia all the same.In a way, Porras's chameleonic career is like some kind of supernatural space virus from a horror-tinged science fiction film (albeit in a good way), as he seems to move from subgenre to subgenre (host to host), leaving something noticeably transformed and enhanced in his wake.Obviously, a few of Barn Owl's guitar albums are hard to top as far as carving out a small but distinctive niche in an existing scene, but Voice of the Air definitely manages to sidestep a lot of tired drone tropes in remarkably nimble and thoughtful fashion.  For one, these pieces are anything but static, as every single layer seems to be constantly shifting and undulating like a living entity.Moreover, Porras does not overtly appropriate many Eastern musical touches, but instead internalizes a foundational philosophy and applies it to something all his own.I was also struck by the occasional appearances of more prominent and rhythmically pulsing synth motifs that add an unusual neon-lit cityscape element to these flickering dreamlike reveries.Porras is doing something much deeper and more creatively adventurous than trying to evoke ritualistic drone traditions from other cultures or merely adding his voice to the chorus of contemporary drone masters, as Voice of the Air feels like a very contemporary and sincere attempt to create an immersive and hallucinatory soundtrack rooted in the here and now.This is an excellent and inspired album.
"Sixteen hours of peerless, important works by Eliane Radigue relating to her work with the ARP 2500 synthesiser between 1971-2000. Prior to this period, Eliane worked exclusively with feedback on tape and oscillators, but her work from the '70s onward is defined by an uniquely meditative and transcendent grasp of microtonal minimalism which has latterly come to place her among the 20th century’s most esteemed and truly inimitable composers. Bearing in mind that Eliane realized this fathomless body of work in her Paris apartment away from professional recording studios, only makes it resonate more strongly with the idea that Eliane was a genuine outlier whose uniquely sober work divined an unquantifiable yet ultimately human nature in electronic music.
Eliane Radigue was born in Paris. She studied musique concrète techniques at the Studio d’Essai of the RTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1956-57). She was married to the painter and sculptor Arman and devoted ten years to their three children. She then worked with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio APSOME (1967-68). She was in residence at the New York University School of Arts (1970-71), the University of Iowa and the California Institute of the Arts (1973) and Mills College (1998). She has created sound environments using looped tapes of various durations, gradually desynchronising.
Her works have been featured in numerous galleries and museums since the late 60s and from 1970, she has been associated to the ARP 2500 Synthesizer and tape through many compositions from "Chry-ptus" (1970) up to "L’Île resonante" (2000). These include: "Biogenesis," "Arthesis," "Ψ 847," "Adnos I, II and III" ('70s), "Les Chants de Milarepa" and "Jetsun Mila" ('80s) and the three pieces constituting the Trilogie de la Mort (1988-91-93). Since 2002, she has been composing mostly acoustic works for performers and instruments. Her music has been featured in major international festivals. Her extremely sober, almost ascetic concerts, are made of a continuous, ever-changing yet extremely slow stream of sound, whose transformation occurs within the sonic material itself.
Radigue found her musical voice through the decisive encounter with musique concrète and its founding fathers. With Pierre Schaeffer, first, and then Pierre Henry, with whom she learned and perfected the art of tape recorders. She then developed a unique style by herself, freely continuing the exploration of electronic sounds, progressing with tenacity through her musical quest, without worrying about current trends or fashions, paying no attention to creeds or dogmas. An isolated course, out with fashions and institutions, such a singular and intense music, so remote from everything..."
"Joachim Nordwall marks 20 years of his iDEAL label with The Black Book, a blinding sweep of original material from JASSS, Stephen O'Malley, Ramleh, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Carlos Giffoni & Prurient, Ectoplasm Girls, JH1.FS3, JS Aurelius, Autumns, John Duncan, and many more.
The story of iDEAL starts out in London 1998, when Nordwall was living the hardscrabble life: working in an underwear shop near Liverpool Street station; living in a filthy Bayswater apartment; scoring industrial records from the Music and Video Exchange; getting drunk in cheap pubs, and dreaming of starting a new record label and platform. He called it iDEAL, and 180 releases, 20 years later, it has become an invaluable node for non-standard, wayward expressions of modern electronic noise in all its mutable variation.
iDEAL's success and longevity may well be down to the way that Nordwall treated it as a social and artistic home, offering a place where mutually exclusive styles could bed down away from the mainstream or the genre police, and feed into a much larger, work-in-progress definition of fringe music. The Black Book extends, in the spirit of the label, an idealized compilation of disparate possibilities connected by a sense of musical mystery and chaotic energy.
To focus on just a few highlights, the ever unpredictable JASSS makes a notable inclusion with the serene vignette of LP opener, "Parental Youth," while Jim O'Rourke unfurls 17 minutes of gloaming post-industrial drone with "In Regards." Label friend Jonathan Uliel Saldanha contributes the tense, searching horns of "Siren Frontier," and Ectoplasm Girls cook up the grim, thrumming electronics of "Neuropean." John Duncan parses the airwaves to find the curdling organism of "Shortwave6," and Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary) and Jesse Sanes seduce with the narcotic drone-pop of "At The Bottom Of The Night" as JH1.FS3, alongside a powerful rhythmic oddity from Stephen O'Malley, a stark death rattle from Trepaneringsritualen as Týr × Reið × Vend with "nd þau né átto, óð þau né hfðo," and Norn Iron's Autumns "Lose It" on a mucky acid 'floor swill."
For over three decades now, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project has patiently sifted through the damaged remains and bygone refuse from the late 20th century pop culture of America. Mining the snippets of audio found from abandoned drive-in theaters, mangled VHS tapes, and discarded cassettes, Fossil Aerosol studiously pieces together empathic, haunted abstractions of their original source material. their cryptic sound collages address the continued ramifications of the inherent paranoia from the cold war dissonance of stark morality and nuclear apocalypse.
The Recounting of Night Time begins and ends with the scratchy melodies from a well-worn violin. echoes and their amplifications from this instrument gradually subsume the original amidst cascades of tape manipulations and time-delay techniques. This motif repeats through the album with profound emotional torpor through Fossil Aerosol's hypnotic cycles of foggy ambience and back-masked rhythmic events that intertwine with varispeed-pitched dilations of melancholy melody. It makes for a beautifully corroded smear of sound, recalling the works of William Basinski and Fossil Aerosol's occasional collaborators :zoviet*france:
Fossil Aerosol addresses the album this way:
The Recounting of Night Time was composed and mixed in October of 2014. The source material focuses principally on a certain piece of German gothic cinema made during the late 1970s. This material was culled from both VHS audio tracks, as well a "field recording" made at a poorly-attended screening of the film in a decaying theater in St. Louis, Missouri sometime during the mid-1980s. Evidence of video control track glitches are present, while the scent of the acutely mildewed theater is recollected and implied."
A special edition of the CD, limited to only 18 copies, will also be available via Helen Scarsdale, and also from Afterdays Media. This edition consists of shrink-wrapped CDs overpainted in chalkboard resurfacing paint, erased chalk, acrylic, and a hand-lettered Bandcamp download code for an additional 18+ minute track.
Black To Comm is the solo project of German sound artist Marc Richter. Through his output both as an artist and through his eclectic Dekorder label, Richter has established himself as a singular voice of new music. Operating at the fringes of drone and ambient genres, his music is darkly magical and deeply atmospheric, underpinned by a signature surrealism. A relentless sonic explorer, Richter approaches the studio as his instrument, using sampling, analogue production and digital manipulation to offer an almost infinite choice of tones and textures. Audio fragments are liberated from their original context and sculpted into surprising new shapes, creating work that transcends time or genre. Seven Horses For Seven Kings sees Richter reaching out again into the limitless field of sound, summoning forth his darkest and most visceral work to date.
Seven Horses For Seven Kings was completed during a particularly prolific period for Richter. Working on a broad range of commissions since his last album - from writing for film and theatre works to composing for art installations, apps and sleep music - generated a flurry of new ideas and influences. Site-specific residencies in particular let Richter shift his focus from melody and song architecture to more abstract sound art. Extensive touring would equally come to inform a key shift in Richter's music, simulating the raw, unpredictable energy of live performances on record. Rather than ironing out mistakes in samples or his own playing, he exploits or even forces such imperfections. While rhythm has been largely absent from previous Black To Comm releases, here the music seems totally bound to it, from the fractured techno breaks of "Fly on You," to the pounding war drums of "Rameses II" and pulsing Mellotron sounds of “Angel Investor." The album's breath-taking pace drives Richter's music to new levels of intensity.
Richter's creative practice is informed as much by careful, attentive listening as it is studio experimentation. Pieces often begin life as a single sound that catches his ear, be it a record from his extensive collection, or something in the natural environment. Samples and instrumentation are sometimes presented authentically, a deliberate reference to an era, place or player, and at other times are twisted beyond recognition. Samples from contemporary artists like Nils Frahm are bent and compounded with fragments of early recorded music and medieval song. Richter blurs the lines between organic instrumentation and digital production to the extent that the two become inseparable. Being able to separate sound from context gives Richter complete command of the emotional impact of his music, imbuing pieces with meaning or stripping it back as he sees fit.
While Richter questions whether instrumental music needs to have deeper meaning beyond its sonic qualities, he accepts that the wider world inevitably bleeds into his art. Reflecting the violence and unreality of modern life, Seven Horses For Seven Kings is unashamedly dark, undeniably angry. But rather than be consumed by such emotions, Richter employs them as ecstatic release. Through his mastery of sound, he achieves transcendence through noise, beauty through intensity.
Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore’s collective work—as solo artists, band members, and collaborators—could fill a small record collection. Despite this productivity, these two long-time friends have never recorded an entire album focused exclusively on their unique talents. Ghost Forests mysteriously, thrillingly fills that void.
Independently, Baird and Lattimore have each cultivated highly individual and idiosyncratic tools of expression. Baird's timeless and soaring voice, guitar, and drums have underpinned pastoral and folk rock explorations as a soloist and in band settings with Espers and Heron Oblivion. Lattimore's albums of enigmatic, spectral experimental harp sounds move and unfold like films and nature itself. The list of artists that have called upon their voices, talents, and visions to enrich their own work is expansive—a virtual pocket encyclopedia of contemporary indie and experimental musicians.
Over the course of Ghost Forests' six collaborative compositions we hear deeply sympathetic conversations between the two artists. With access to a deep pool of shared influences, these two friends assembled a collection of sounds conjured from harp, guitar (both acoustic and electric), synths, the human voice, and a shared poetic language. Baird and Lattimore's subjects range from the sound of light on water, seismic geopolitical anxiety, the smog-exploded sunsets of Don Dudley's paintings, and vertigo from their respective relocations to San Francisco and Los Angeles from their once-shared home in Philadelphia.
The synthesis of their vision welcomes listeners who might have been familiar with only one of the performers' solo oeuvres. It also speaks to long-time fans both artists who have long wondered what this dream collaboration might yield.
Steve Gunn has long known Baird and Lattimore and worked with both on his own albums. He says "Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore are two musicians that I greatly admire. Ghost Forests is an ace meld of their abilities; Meg's guitar and voice, and Mary's harp lead each other (and us) into further regions of the strata. With each song you can hear this remarkable kinship. I'm thankful for this soundtrack."
Ghost Forests' musical conversations are intimate, fluid, effortless and spontaneous. They're filled with the euphoria of creation and, at times, they articulate hard truths and tangled emotions with an ease only trusted friends can manage. The songs alternate between extended ethereal instrumental excursions, gauzy and dreamy pop, blown-out "Bull of the Woods" heavy haze, and modern reimaginations of epic traditional balladry—all while touching on the strange and otherworldly places between these stations.
With Ghost Forests, Baird and Lattimore have given us all a timeless gift that generously rewards immersion and deep investigation. It is our collective good fortune as listeners that we are able to eavesdrop on their conversation through these songs. It is also a wonder to hear two unique artists interact to such beautifully original ends.
Having become mutual admirers of each others work; English of Cortini's Sonno and Cortini of English's Wilderness Of Mirrors, the pair were very pleased to receive an invitation to collaborate together.
Following a number of months exchanging compositional ideas and materials, Cortini and English met several days ahead of the Berlin Atonal festival and commenced an intense period of rehearsal and arrangement. The resulting piece, Immediate Horizon, traces their shared interests in harmony and texture. It is a work that meditates on saturation and the ruptures that occur when harmonic elements are stacked. Immediate Horizon's five pieces swell and burst in a perpetual sense of pulse.
This LP is a live recording, made at the premiere of the piece, held at Kraftwerk in Berlin.
available 8th February 2019 Vinyl, CD, Digital, Streaming
COSEY FANNI TUTTI announces the release of her second solo album, TUTTI, released by Conspiracy International on 8th February 2019.
TUTTI is comprised of eight soundscapes: an audio self portrait comprising of manipulated sound recordings from Cosey’s life, music and art: “It’s the only album I’ve made that is an all encompassing statement expressing the totality of my being. A sense of the past in relation to the present and everything in between.”
Available on Blue Vinyl or Gatefold CD the physical releases feature silver blockfoil embossed covers and the vinyl release include printed inner sleeve and download code.
Originally only available on cassette during dal Forno's summer tour, this EP of six eclectic covers is now available digitally. As anyone who has heard her occasional NTS Radio DJ appearances can attest, dal Forno has delightfully wide-ranging taste and definitely appreciates a great hook when she hears it, so it is not at all surprising that there are some extremely deep cuts here (The Kiwi Animal) mingled with a few names that actually have spent time at the top of the pop charts (Lana del Ray and The B-52s). While the latter's early "Give Me Back My Man" undergoes quite an impressive transformation, Carla is generally quite reverent with her source material, taking a handful of great songs and simply paring them down to their stark and intimate essence.
Self-Released
I generally shy away from tour-only releases these days, as I eventually realized (much later than I should have) that they are almost never very good and are mostly just noteworthy for their scarcity.Consequently, I did not start salivating over Top of the Pops when "Summertime Sadness" surfaced as a teaser, though it is certainly a likably ghostly and skeletal channeling of Lana del Ray.An all-covers EP just seemed like kind of a fun, throw-away release strictly for superfans, which is rarely a category I find myself in.However, I probably should have learned something from Marisa Nadler's cover albums, which sneakily include some of her finest work, as similar feat occurs with Pops.Obviously, Nadler and dal Forno are quite different artists, but they share one extremely significant trait: both have a very distinctive and instantly recognizable style.As such, any cover song that passes through that transformative filter stops feeling like a cover and feels very much like something new.In dal Forno's case, that signature style is a half-sultry/half-spectral minimalism built from just her voice, a simple bass line, and a scratchy, ramshackle drum machine beat.Occasionally, she will also throw in some wobbly, understated synthesizer, but it is generally a deceptively simple and incredibly effective aesthetic.The music is just substantial enough to provide a sense of momentum, but nothing is forceful or busy enough to ever steal the focus from the vocals.Top of the Pops feels a lot like finding a worn and forgotten mixtape and happily discovering that all the parts that truly matter still manage to break through the hiss and flutter.
With "Give Me Back My Man," dal Forno transcends her source material so thoroughly that it is more like a great new original song than a mere cover.In fact, it is probably one of my favorite songs that she has recorded to date, so it was definitely a wise decision to give this EP a more widespread reach.One fresh classic would have been enough to make me delighted about this modest release, but there is not a single weak or even middling song to be found.While the song choices are all unwaveringly cool and the arrangements are frequently inspired, Top of the Pops succeeds on a deeper level as well, as dal Forno manages to playfully indulge her more fun and hook-loving side without sacrificing much of her intensity or depth.While some of the lyrics are admittedly more flirty, breezy, and sexy than usual, the right singer can bring new and previously hidden shades of meaning and soul to just about anything and dal Forno has found a way to make even The B-52s seem enigmatic and introspective with this release.
Frederikke Hoffmeier has been a prominent and distinctive voice in the harsh noise scene for the last several years, releasing a steady stream of viscerally throbbing nightmares primarily on Denmark's Posh Isolation label. With this latest release, however, Hoffmeier makes her debut for PAN. More significantly, The Drought also marks a significant leap forward in Hoffmeier's artistry, as a recent residency at MONOM in Berlin completely transformed the way she thought about both space and evoking a strong sense of place. The result of those revelations is something that transcends Puce Mary's noise roots to arrive at a place that is considerably more unique, sensuous, and intimate, though no less disturbing. Hoffmeier is still an absolutely brilliant purveyor of violent, jagged squalls of noise, but she is now quite a bit better at focusing those eruptions for maximum impact.
The album opens with the queasily squirming and shuddering instrumental "Dissolve," which beautifully sets the tone for everything to come, as it feels like an undulating nightmare of twisting, grinding metal and existential horror.It is an especially effective showcase for one of the most compelling aspects of Hoffmeier's artistry: her passion for collecting unusual field recordings and her talent for manipulating them into something uncomfortably otherworldly and unrecognizable.While she certainly makes use of many of the same textures and tools common in the noise scene, such elements rarely do any of the heavy lifting on The Drought.The only relatively consistent nod to familiarity is Hoffmeier's fondness for sinuously throbbing low-frequency drones, which lends an oozing and gelatinous sense of menace mingled with dark sexuality to many of the album's pieces.If that sounds a bit disturbing and perverse, that is because it is, which fits quite (un)comfortably with one of the primary themes of The Drought: body horror ("I pull a hair out of my mouth, but that is not a hair, and that is not my mouth")."The Transformation" is the definitive statement in that vein, as Hoffmeier's calm monologue about liquefying (among other things) is every bit as haunting and skin-crawlingly weird as Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin.That piece in particular highlights another wonderfully creepy and unnerving feature of The Drought: all of the vocal pieces feel like a hushed, trance-like confessional in the eye of a snarling and churning maelstrom.
Closely related to Hoffmeier's preternatural calm is her unusually masterful control of mood and dynamics, as these nine pieces feel like they were precision-engineered to slowly unfold as a dark dream of seething dread punctuated by well-timed blasts of laser-focused violence.I never get the feeling that any part of The Drought is dictated by an unpredictable mass of pedals and cables, yet the elemental power of the more intense passages sacrifices nothing in sense of spontaneity.That supremely elegant mastery of tension and release, as well as Hoffmeier's knack for surgical slashes of primal ferocity are what make The Drought such an excellent noise album.However, there are a few other facets to her artistry that deserve attention far beyond the reaches of that insular scene.For all their grinding and gnarled texture, there is a very human and soulful center to some of these pieces, as well as some unexpected glimpses of otherworldly beauty and poetry amidst the ruin.The most striking example of the latter is "Red Desert," a meditative and quietly devastating piece that cribs some of the most beautiful lines from Antonioni's 1964 film of the same name ("I can’t look at the sea for long or I lose interest in what’s happening on land").Most of the other flashes of unexpected beauty are a bit less overt, though they can be similarly striking.For example, the simmering horror of "The Transformation" harbors an absolutely sublime passage of tenderly warbling feedback.The climactic eruption of a chirping feedback loop in "A Feast Before The Drought" is similarly great.Notably, both passages work so well precisely because Hoffmeier's recent epiphanies about space provide her more inspired sounds adequate room to breathe and flourish.
To my ears, it is the vocal-centric pieces "Red Desert" and "The Transformation" that steal the show on The Drought, but both feel like well-placed set pieces in a wall-to-wall masterpiece rather than isolated flashes of inspiration.I was legitimately blindsided by how immersive, listenable, inventive, and thoughtfully constructed this album is as an artistic statement: the cumulative power is quite impressive and not a single passage or theme ever overstays its welcome or gets diluted by unnecessary clutter.Hoffmeier's greatest sorcery here lies in the details, as The Drought is alive with vivid, vibrant and unusual textures and hidden depth.I suspect that is a gift she has always had, but her compositional talents have now reached a level where she is able to bring those elements of her work into sharper focus and it makes quite a profound difference.Hoffmeier not only conjures up a dazzling nightmare of grinding, jagged metal and wriggling, unearthly cosmic horror–she manages to make it a place that I have no desire to leave.This an absolute tour de force and one of my favorite albums of the year.