18 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

A month ago, I had absolutely no idea who Patrick Flegel was, but the buzz surrounding Superior Viaduct's Cindy Lee reissue series piqued my interest and Flegel quickly became one of my new favorite people. In a past life, Flegel was the frontman of Canadian indie-rock band Women, who famously imploded in a Halloween-costumed, guitar-smashing onstage meltdown in 2010. Soon afterwards, Flegel began dressing in drag and his "diva alter-ego" Cindy Lee was born. Sometimes a full band, sometimes a solo act, Cindy Lee has a strikingly guileless, idiosyncratic, and oft-disturbing aesthetic that almost feels like outsider art. On Act of Tenderness, Flegel's vision focuses primarily on intimately and eerily channeling '60s girl-group pop through a hissing and hallucinatory fog of melancholy. Some songs certainly work better than others, but when Cindy hits the mark, it feels like a memory-haunted chanteuse has stepped directly out of David Lynch's imagination and become actual flesh and blood.

Superior Viaduct/W. 25th/Maple Death

I was lured into Act of Tenderness by the tender and hauntingly lovely would-be single "Power and Possession" (as well as the deliciously weird cover art), but I was truly and wonderfully unprepared for the depth and intensity of Flegel's commitment to his alternate persona.While there are a couple of other gorgeously eerie pop confections hidden amidst these twelve songs, the album as a whole resembles a fractured and lysergic series of glimpses into a complex, lonely, and darkness-shrouded life.As such, it is much more than an album.Flegel has essentially created an entire life and it is quite a complex and compelling one: Act of Tenderness feels like the disjointed audio diary of a tormented pop genius in a fog of pain-killers slowly losing her mind in a series of depressing motel rooms.Not every day is bad though, even if it seems like Cindy has been extremely unlucky in love.In her better moods, Cindy conjures up songs like the aforementioned "Power and Possession," which is an understated and swooningly beautiful swirl of heartbreaking melodies, ghostly swathes of backing vocals, and a few simple chords.Also: plenty of hiss and reverb.Normally, I have a bit of a hostile attitude towards vocalists who always blur their vocals into oblivion with effects, but Flegel is a striking exception, as the hazy lo-fi aesthetic is pitch-perfect for this project: it feels like Lee is always singing her heavenly, heartfelt songs into a crappy tape deck alone in her room and all the veil of hiss and murk makes it all feel like a bleary half-dream.That unsettling feeling of being inside a flickering and precarious dream is further heightened by some of the album's distinctly non-pop moments, like "New Romance" and "Quit Doing Me Wrong," both of which sound troublingly broken and wrong."New Romance" in particular is especially unnerving, as it sounds like Cindy is blissfully and obliviously recording a sweet and sincere vocal track over blown-out, gnarled chaos and squalls of feedback, far too fucked-up to ever notice that all the levels are completely wrong and that the "song" is a flaming wreck.

As disturbed-sounding as it is, however, "New Romance" still has the ghost of a pop song at its core.The shrieking, strangled, and visceral nightmare of "Bonsai Garden," on the other hand, sounds like a full-on psychotic meltdown that would feel confrontational even by Throbbing Gristle standards."Miracle of the Rose" is similarly bananas, resembling a very cool and ritualistic Eastern-influenced psych-rock jam…but with all of the guitars cranked up and layered into an oceanic roar of grinding horror.Those two incredibly striking pieces also illustrate something else quite fascinating about Act of Tenderness: Cindy seems quite fond of The East and also seems to occasionally dissociate from her persona entirely (Cindy the diva would not be particularly into menacingly noisy psychedelia, nor would she ever sing in such a low, male-sounding voice).Some of the other notable tears in Cindy's precarious, kimono-clad reality are considerably less hostile though, as "Operation" sounds like a hypnagogic New Wave hit, while the opening title piece songs like a ravaged 78 of an anachronistic torch song that could have been recorded in 1930s Singapore or Morocco.Even the poppiest moments can be quite bizarre, however, as "What I Need" sounds like girl-group pop played with gloopy analog synthesizers and somnambulantly sung through a malfunctioning microphone.One of Flegel's truly inspired twists on Act of Tenderness is that almost everything is disorientingly "off" in some way or steeped in some kind of vague dread, yet he continually finds new ways for that wrongness to creep into his work.His greatest moment is probably the deeply sensuous and sexy "The Last Train's Come and Gone," which takes a wonderfully languorous groove and a gorgeous guitar hook and marries them to a vaguely Asian melody and an increasingly haunted-sounding backdrop (it sounds a ghoulishly pitch-shifted, spectral, and distressed tape of a Phil Spector-style wall of sound).

Notably, if I had written about this album a few weeks ago, I probably would have probably written a very different review: my initial impression was that Flegel had written a handful of achingly lovely pop songs, then padded out the rest of the album with noisy, lo-fi filler.After essentially living inside this album for the last week, however, I now grasp that the uglier and harsher moments are an absolutely integral part of a rather brilliant artistic vision.The pop songs are certainly great, but a full album of them would be a cavalcade of pretty pastiches rather than what Act of Tenderness actually is: a wildly experimental and disturbing plunge into an absorbing and fully formed world that is half dream and half deeply phantasmagoric nightmare (Flegel's very own Mulholland Drive, if you will).I cannot think of anyone else who is so strikingly adept at both unleashing harrowing, noise-damaged weirdness and crafting sublime pop hooks.I think I want to write Patrick Flegel a gushing fan letter now.This was easily one of the best albums to come out in 2015 and now it is likely to be the single best reissue of 2018.I am properly floored.

Samples:

• Power and Possession
• What I Need
• Wandering and Solitude

 

18 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

I was a bit surprised to belatedly discover that Irisarri’s latest release was conceived as an imaginary soundtrack to the Doomsday Clock, as Midnight Colours is often an atypically warm and beautiful release, shedding much of the pervasive melancholy that runs throughout his previous work. Perhaps, however, it would be more accurate to say that Irisarri has merely become a bit better at effectively wielding that melancholy, as the shadows that shroud the lush heaven of Midnight Colours tend to add depth and gravitas without crossing the line into brooding reverie. That may sound like a subtle evolution, yet it is quite an important one from my standpoint, as Irisarri's eternal somberness was always a bit of an obstacle for me. I am not normally one to praise accessibility, but I am delighted by it in this instance, as his grainy, hissing, and gorgeously enveloping drones have rarely been more listenable than they are here.

Geographic North

Over the course of his last few albums, I have increasingly found Rafael Anton Irisarri to be quite a fascinating and underappreciated artist, as he is kind of a negative image doppelganger for Tim Hecker.Both artists are incredibly talented and have a similar aesthetic at their core, yet Hecker has lately been reaching towards the heavens with increasingly ambitious, timeless, and thematically powerful compositions while Irisarri continues to burrow further and further inward, deeply feeling all the anxiety and sorrow of our current age and trying to channel that into something meaningful.Put more prosaically, Irisarri remains extremely committed to drone, pouring his soul into his elegantly blurred and swirling sound worlds in hopes of occasionally achieving something transcendent and poetic.With the first few songs on Midnight Colours, he succeeds beautifully in that regard, especially with the opening "The Clock."While it is built on a simple and bittersweetly gorgeous chord progression, the lion's share of Irisarri's artistic vision is devoted to harnessing the cumulative power of small details and layered textures.Regarding the latter, there are very few other artists who are on Irisarri's level, as "The Clock" is a sumptuous feast of woozily ravaged tapes and buried field recordings that hint at deeper mystery and meaning.When he is at his best, Irisarri's work feels like a hallucinatory plunge into the swirling mists of his subconscious, resembling a warm and lovely dream populated with ephemeral fragments of more concrete memories.The sweeping and lush "The Falling Curtain" that follows is similarly revelatory, as a simple two-note pattern acts as a lilting sonar ping that guides me through a rapturous fog of blearily swelling chords, blurred drones, and tape noise.

While it is probably fair to say that Midnight Colours is front-loaded with its two finest moments, it is a thoughtfully sequenced and immersive album from start to finish–it just happens to dissolve more and more into hallucinatory abstraction as it unfolds (for a while, anyway).For example, the sustained, quavering, and engulfing roar of "Oh Paris, We Are Fucked" is not a piece that would have struck me if it were decontextualized from its surroundings, but it is quite a pleasant place to linger for several minutes after "The Falling Curtain" fades away.While the next couple of pieces continue that descent into increasingly diffuse and drifting terrain, there are subtle and cunning machinations at work, as the album gradually darkens and takes firmer form again, though the radiantly burbling "Two and Half Minutes" is a bit of perplexing and tonally anachronistic detour.Aside from that curious aberration, the overall trajectory of Midnight Colours is like slowly descending into a blissful sleep only to be haunted by a sense of vague menace in my dreams…then ruefully awakening into a reality that seethes with simmering dread and regret (as well as quite a bit of stark beauty, thankfully).That dark awakening seems to begin in earnest with "Drifting," which unfolds as an empty-sounding murky thrum beneath a languorous melody that feels distant and corroded.In many ways, it is a corroded inversion of the album's earlier pieces, as the textures are gnarled and scorched and their distorted wake creates a snarl of uncomfortable harmonies. The brief and understated final piece, "A Ruptured Tranquility," is not nearly as overtly blackened, yet is perhaps even more unnerving, as it feels like I am among the innards of a massive clock, surrounded by straining, weary gears that are slowly shuddering to a halt.To quote TS Eliot's The Hollow Men: "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper."

Midnight Colours is mostly devoid of flaws, aside from possibly some curious choices in pacing (Irisarri occasionally makes his weaker pieces too long and his stronger pieces too short).My only significant caveat with this album is that Irisarri's brilliance lies primarily in his production talents: he is always a master craftsman, yet his triumphs as a composer are a bit less consistent.When he is at the peak of his powers in both regards, as he is on Midnight Colours' first two pieces, the results are glorious.The remainder of the album is still quite an absorbing and lushly immersive whole though: I have been listening to it for weeks and I am still finding plenty to like in Irisarri's beautifully roiling and frayed dronescapes.While I have not heard enough of Irisarri’s early work to know whether or not Midnight Colours is his strongest album, I can say without reservation that it is definitely a serious contender for that honor (as well as a significant leap forward artistically).

Samples:

• The¬†Clock
• Falling Curtain
• A Ruptured Tranquility

 

16 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Chapel Perilous exists whereby the supernatural converges with the everyday - whatever one's definition of reality, this psychological realm serves to prove it endlessly subjective and changeable. Robert Anton Wilson may have laid claim to the modern use of this phrase - as in his 1977 tome Cosmic Trigger - yet there can be few musical outfits in the here and now more worthy of carrying on its tradition than Gnod. In more than a decade on the planet, this singular Salford-birthed entity have married intrepid musical exploration with psychic fearlessness - not to mention a tendency to leave any tag or bracket one attempts to place on them utterly redundant.

In a sense, the latest adventure bearing this title evolved both from the lengthy European tour that the band embarked upon in the wake of their stripped-down and paint-stripping 2017 opus Just Say No The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine. Yet recording in Supernova studio in Eindhoven under the auspices of Bob De Wit, the band found themselves free not only to lay down two tumultuous tracks that they had been honing and hammering into shape on the road - the pulverizing fifteen-minute opener "Donovan’s Daughters" and the bracingly brutal "Uncle Frank Says Turn It Down" - but to sculpt more abstract material, utilizing dubbed-out repetition, furious riff-driven rancour, bleak soundscapes and off-the-map experimentation to create an intimidating and invigorating tableau of dystopian dread and unflinching intensity.

Always working purely on their own instincts and co-ordinates, Gnod's pathway into unchartered territory continues to move firmly on with nary a care for the sanity of anyone in their surroundings. Chapel Perilous is a still more indomitable chapter in a transcendental travelogue from an iconoclastic institution that only gathers momentum with the passing of time. Wherever Gnod go in 2018 and beyond, expect reality to be reinvented anew, whatever the consequences.

Out May 4, 2018.  More information can be found here.

11 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

11 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

11 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

11 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Cavern Of Anti-Matter return for their third studio album on their own Duophonic label. Hormone Lemonade sees the band heavily utilising the sounds of modular synths and home built drum machines, yet still keeping the loose, improvised sound familiar to fans of their first two albums, with minimal guitar melodies and live drum kit helping to build hypnotic layers of texture.

The albums genesis was in the self-constructed rhythm machines of band member Holger Zapf, the Taktron Z3 and Taktron Z2, being recorded to tape during three one-hour sessions. These sessions also included the use of 70s Hohner and Eko drum machines. Holger played his parts in a free-form way and the bpm varied wildly as it was not possible to sync it to any outside controllers.

Tim Gane edited these initial jams into useable chunks and proceeded to overdub each new rhythmic “chunk” with some basic musical ideas, keeping in tune to the hum of the machines and retaining the “feel” of the inherent pulse. Joe Dilworth arrived to lay down a beat over these minimal backing tracks, going with the flow as best he could.

In the following months the music was fleshed out using various synths and sequencers from Roland, Arp, Oberheim and Holger’s modular synth set up. As well as many of the bass and sequencer parts the modular also supplied the chords by tuning each one of it’s five oscillators to specific notes and intervals.

The results of these experiments, improvisations, and refinements, are Hormone Lemonade, which will be released as LP, CD, and Digital Download in March 2018.

11 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The Blue Sleep is a brand new studio album by Blaine L. Reininger, the Colorado-born composer and founder member of avant-garde music group Tuxedomoon.

Written and recorded by Blaine in 2017, the album was mixed in his adopted hometown of Athens by noted electronic music producer Coti K. Like most of his previous solo projects, The Blue Sleep combines vocal songs with atmospheric instrumental tracks, three of which (Lost Ballroom, Jacob's Ladder and Odi et Amo) were written for Caligula, a theatre production.

"These days the music plays me," explains Blaine. "The unifying principle behind the songs on Blue Sleep is the method of composition. I apply fine old aleatory techniques - John Cage, William Burroughs, Tristan Tzara - and filter these through my instinctive knowledge of melody and harmony. Lyrics are generated algorithmically (I work with programs which assemble phrases according to mathematical rules) and then edited by me, with phrases suggested by the random output. That's pretty much my modus operandi in the 21st century."

10 track CD. Cover image by George Terzis.

Tracklist

1. Public Transformation
2. The Blue Sleep
3. Lost Ballroom
4. We're Tearing Out
5. Dry Food
6. Camminando Qui
7. Jacob's Ladder
8. The Dull Sea
9. Molecular Landscape
10. Odi et Amo

Available on CD and digital download (MP3). Mailorder copies are delivered in a special Crépuscule slipcase.

Les Disques du Crépuscule

10 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Rendered guitar musings from a Lyttelton room. Outside inside out.

Recordings by Peter Wright.

Lyttelton, Aotearoa, April 2010-October 2017.

More information can be found here.

10 March 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Inexplicable Hours is the sequel of the successful six-CD boxed set Elapsed Time, also released by Sonoris in 2017. The first LP documents a new direction in his music, with some of his last electroacoustic experimentations with audio generators, field recordings, and various electronic devices. The second one explores the same ambient/drone territories as the boxset, with tracks less static and more complex than it appears on the first listen. And as always with recent Kevin Drumm's music there's a sense of majesty, of mystery and a melancholic beauty that is uniquely his own.

More information can be found here.