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With a quiet intensity over the last 12 years, Strategy has proven himself to be an incredibly resourceful and rewarding musician in both group settings and as a solo artist. In the latter guise, this Portland producer/multi-instrumentalist (aka Paul Dickow) has released a prolific amount of excellent work for quality indie labels such as Kranky, Orac, 100% Silk, Endless Flight, and Entr'acte, putting a cerebral yet sensual spin on dub, ambient, post rock, and house music.
For his Further Records debut, Noise Tape Self, Strategy delves ever deeper into his more ambient inclinations and experiments with tape loops. Most of the six tracks bear titles more suited for a library record, but Noise Tape Self lacks library music's faceless functionality; rather, it's an immersive soundtrack to stimulating one's imagination or losing one's bearings. Dickow says he became obsessed with making tape music in 2008, after tiring of using the computer as his main instrument. Fellow Portland producer/ingenious gear-tinkerer David Chandler (Solenoid) taught Dickow “how to make a tape loop that could be put inside a cassette tape. I got really into this, and got a 4 track, knowing this would allow me to have four synchronized loops per tape. I would then run each channel through a series of effects and 'perform' live mixes using the loops. I alternated between using source material of my own devising and using whatever source material happened to be on the cassettes I was hacking.”
Noise Tape Self kicks off with "Awesome Piano," in which a fragment of a beautiful piano motif gets overwhelmed by a glorious vortex of static and distortion. We're immediately submerged in Strategy's alluring and disorienting world, where rupture and rapture converge. "Cassette Loop" is a gorgeous ambient piece with a lulling, aquatic quality that recalls such masters of uneasy listening as Rapoon, O Yuki Conjugate, and Aube. The self-descriptive "Ominous Lovely Piano" is a ghostly, microcosmic form of dub, an ultimate kind of headphone music of deep psychedelic interiority that's reminiscent of Paul Schütze's 1996 masterpiece, Apart. The hypnotic/amniotic ambience of "Lovely Loop" whispers of a peaceful eternity; this track could be an important step toward a new, improved strain of New Age. The album closes with "Rhen's Loop"; here's where the album really soars into the stratosphere and grows surreal wings. A five-dimensional headfuck of what sounds like analog-synth growls and whirs and desolate drones, "Rhen's Loop" is Doppler-effected and disorienting, like a more somber take on Conrad Schnitzler's Ballet Statique. With Noise Tape Self, Strategy has found a way to build works of compelling, intimate grandeur with some of the humblest of sonic atoms. It's an alchemical wonder.
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A record of slowly evolving beauty that gradually unravels its meditative design. Recorded in Norwegian sculptor and painter Emanuel Vigeland' s (1875 -1948) mausoleum in Oslo in 2013. A recording space that is famous for its acoustics and its long and full-sounding reverb. These three tracks utilize both the delicacy and the power of acoustic instruments and human voice in relation to the unique recording space. This is a record that is otherworldly and eerie but also with a great primal expressive force. Performed by four artists from different backgrounds coming together to create this singular set of music.
- Beneath The Bough (13:03)
- The Green Flood (18:57)
- Afterglow (30:31)
Maja S.K. Ratkje - Voice and Bells
Jon Wesseltoft - Accordion Organ and Harmonium
Camille Norment - Glass Armonica
Per Gisle Galåen - Zither and Harmonium
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Initially I was not sure what to expect from this pairing. I know Sachiko's solo work can be a varying mix of beauty and ugly, and Junko via Hijokaidan, which is always intensely, yet brilliantly abrasive. On Vasilisa the Beautiful, harshness is the clear winner. Two vocal performances of raw throated dissonance over a bed of electronics, recorded live, makes for anything but an easy album to listen to.
Right from the opening moments the duo are on attack.Shrill vocals, mostly dry from Junko and treated from Sachiko, are brought up loud in the mix.Behind the voice is a guttural passage of electronics, unspecific in their origin but trudging along like a dying animal.The vocals shift from harsh screams to babbling noise, all the while the background noise grinds away harshly.
While the vocals stay rather consistent, the electronics are dynamic, shifting register and character.At times the backing sounds like a broken synthesizer, at others a heavily distorted guitar.When the noise is at its most dense, and the vocals firmly locked into screaming mode, I definitely felt parallels with the early/mid 1990s era of Hijokaidan.
Towards the middle of the piece the background shifts into a great, churning mechanical noise din, before transforming into a massive locust swarm buzz.With a great balance between the electronics and the voice, which has become a cracking, dry throated serrated knife.Dive-bombing tones and ringing electronics continue relentlessly, keeping everything harsh.
In its closing minutes, the electronics go even darker and more bleak, as the vocals finally scale back, ending the piece with what sounds like processed and treated dialog, rather than the non-stop screaming that preceded it.Make no mistake; Vasilisa the Beautiful is a difficult album.Anyone familiar with Junko's performances with Hijokaidan should know exactly what to expect.Just like that material, however, there are times where this sort of unabashed chaos and dissonance is simply the perfect album.
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With these two near-simultaneous releases, Joao Da Silva's Luciernaga takes two different approaches to his not quite noise, not quite musical. To the Centre of the City in the Night is the more fleshed out release, with its five pieces running the gamut from bowed string drones to harsher electronics. Tile II, a follow up to the similarly titled release from last year is more immediate, which is fitting a super-limited tape and free digital release. They are two sides of the same coin, with both being enthralling in their own ways.
Invisible City Records/Idle Chatter
To the Centre is the more album-like of these two releases, in that it feels as if these pieces were more carefully constructed and composed over a longer period of time.Using only synth, guitar, and his voice, Da Silva creates dynamic and multi-layered pieces that are constructed and deconstructed throughout."A Blue Light" features droning tones paired with shimmering electronics and a hint of noise.There is a progression from purer sounds at the beginning into fragmented and decaying passages towards its end.There was a hint of darkness to that piece, but "Sleeping Green-Eyed Girl" is almost all-peaceful beauty.Loops and beautiful drones make for a dynamic song, but in a calm and placid mood.Even though it is heavily drawn from from electronic sources, it has an extensively organic sound, resembling a living and breathing organism.
The other half of To the Centre is a darker affair.Deep synth and squalling guitar set a darker, menacing mood to "Cold was the Night".With all its scraping and gliding noises, it is the sonic equivalent of a serpent slithering through metal wreckage and barbed wire.The lengthy "Elevated" might not be quite as sinister, but is no less intense.A more hypnotic, loop heavy piece with messy outbursts to keep the sound from becoming too stagnant, Da Silva uses the extended duration to build the piece and allow a bit of light to shine through the otherwise dark haze.
Tile II, on the other hand, comes together as a more immediate, almost improvised sounding work in that the pieces are more sparse, but also have their own minimalist charm.The chiming singing bowl that opens "Mourning Raga", mixed with a harmonium-like drone has a simple, yet meditative quality to it.The two part "Serpentine" sees Da Silva emphasizing clean guitar over what sounds like a slowly changing and evolving loop.The mix may be simple, but the sound is extremely complex.The second part uses a more primal guitar sound that adds dissonance to the overall sound.Like its predecessor, the second side of the tape is a single loop played for nearly 15 minutes with enough complexity to be hypnotic without being overly repetitive.
Both sides of the Luciernaga sound captured on these tapes complement each other extremely well, and I could not choose one as superior to the other.The more composed sound of To the Centre captivates with the constantly shifting mix and varying dynamic, with each listen revealing an additional layer of depth.At the same time, Tile II’s minimalist, almost live sound has a distinct purity and clarity that hits all the right buttons.Either way, both are exceptional and Da Silva is an artist who continues to impress me with each new release I hear.
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September 2015 will see the release of Thighpaulsandra's 7th full length album The Golden Communion, his first since 2006's The Lepore Extrusion. Well over a decade in the making, this is his debut for Editions Mego. It comprises 10 new songs, running well over two hours with individual pieces clocking in between 4 and 28 minutes. Featured musicians on the album include regular collaborators Martin Schellard and Sion Orgon, plus the odd guest/ghost from bands Thighpaulsandra has worked with in the past.
If you have heard any of Thighpaulsandra's previous albums, you will know that you'd best approach this record with no fixed set of expectations, because once again he changes genres and defies easy classification, sometimes more than once within one song. Drawing on his long-time background as a key member in such diverse groups as Coil, Spiritualized and Julian Cope's band (in each case arguably at the height of their creative prowess) and his work as producer and sound engineer for an even larger variety of customers, you'll find classical passages next to hard rock riffing, krauty experimental work-outs turning into super catchy, almost radio-friendly songs and more.
Many adjectives have been used to describe Thighpaulsandra’s work: epic, challenging, timeless, idiosyncratic, but certainly never predictable or boring.
Possibly his most rewarding album yet and a welcome and unusual entry, in the Mego catalogue, which will entertain and astonish listeners who are fond of having their mind severely altered by sound.
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Produced by Kieran Hebden between August 2014 and February 2015
This music was created on a laptop computer using the Ableton Live software to control and mix VST synthesizers and manipulations of found audio recordings.
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Sirens is the first collaborative LP of Kara-Lis Coverdale (Tim Hecker, L/B) and LXV (David Sutton). Following their respective solo cassette releases Aftertouches (2015) and Spectral Playmate (2014) on Sacred Phrases, Coverdale and LXV debut on Umor Rex with a collection of multi-textural and multi-source electronic music rich in narrative, melody, and spectral intrigue.
Inspired by the link between seduction and violence, Sirens comprises a series of timbrally vast anamorphic pieces that poise the voice as a newly imagined tool of multiplicity. Processes of sample manipulation, signal processing, routing, and source design inform instrumental writing and performance in feedback until intertwined, flickering between states of conflict and consonance. Apparitions of the schitzophrenic voice are at one moment fractured and cold and at the next full of warmth and vivaciousness, embodying velvet rituals of romanticism in the digital age.
Ultimately, Sirens is music for ambitious dreamers: surreal sound portraits sound like the warmth of the world laid over an ice cold virtual altar. LXV’s vocal truncations and fleshy sound palettes depict the archivation of the breath and aural fantasies of the flesh which Coverdale sets amongst a vast and unconfined landscape of deeper and unknown force. Harmonically active and dynamic orchestrations underpin post-sacred tonalities while brooding pipe organs, sphinx flutes, and hailstorms of metallic percussion characterize uniquely disjointed discussions between disparate compositional ontologies. At times violent and at others serenely peaceful and seductive, these pieces, at their most powerful moments illuminate a felt space between cybernetic energy and the body.
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Chassis is the undercarriage, the skeletal core of a car. Any seasoned racecar driver knows the chassis gotta be true, intact. Psychic Reality (est. 2009 by Leyna Noel, formerly of Pocahaunted) grew up in the dirt of the pits, scrutinizing wrecks in all their Days of Thunder carnage. Here’s the track law: after a smash-up the body can always be replaced, but not the core. So you care for it. With everything you got.
In 2013 Psychic Reality’s own pile-up took her to Portmore, Jamaica. Kingston.Where, with friend and pit crew collaborator M. Geddes Gengras, she re-shaped. Hard.
…what about the leftover skid marks, the rubber-coated gravelly smear? They’re all aurally here. Revving in the interval following Vibrant New Age (Not Not Fun, 2011), Psychic Reality’s second full length record CHASSIS, makes tracks like when road ice melts under a hot engine, the path wet and revealing. The contrast between soft and hard dragging out the leftover grit.
Chassis is also the ribs of an electronic device, a bare circuit board. This particular board (with audile contributions by Damon Eliza Palermo (Magic Touch), Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw) and M. Geddes Gengras) makes ambient vocal tides. Each track as it appears on the record is ecosystemic, body electric in scope. But beneath the surface is another song, a tensile core for lung-power only that can be sung in a room. These are songs of distention, elongation. Bodies held at an intimate distance. Sonic spaces that stretch so far you fall into them. The structural two-ness gives the tracks their grind.
But does drift have chassis? Does halyconic L.A. (where the album was recorded) light? Can chassis be supple, spectral? No coincidence Psychic Reality’s been running her own Pilates studio in Brooklyn since 2011. Her core practice holds all contradiction as gift. To meet at the source: Liz Phair’s gutty Exile in Guyville, Sade’s Soldier of Love, dancehall do-overs plus spatterings of daily junk: emails texts iphone recordings detritus tissue feelings. CHASSIS is something like church, something like swimming, like spirit straining towards.
These are health jams. That the beats are muffled by a body makes them beats in the body. There’s genuine ganja here but the real heady clouds are palo santo. Voice is resinous. Smoke what you want, Psychic Reality's pitch is sticky, growing from the center-out like trees.
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Guitarist Ken Camden returns for his third solo album, continuing his explorations to seek out new techniques and sounds from the electric guitar. By utilizing both a steel slide and e-bow technique, Camden has moved into micro-tonal territory to bridge the textural gap between guitar and synthesizer while examining their inherent differences.
The palette is further broadened by introducing an organic vocal sampling machine described as a Vocaltron. Much like a Mellotron, vocal samples (contributed by Emily Elhaj and Angel Olsen) are chromatically organized in half steps from the lowest note to the highest possible. Each set is specific to the contributor's range and each note is unedited to keep all original characteristics of that particular individual's voice. This organized organic information adds a contrast to the electric guitar and synthesizer arrangements on the album.
The development of all of these systems gives Dream Memory a diversity throughout its tracks while maintaining an atmospheric bond that weaves the ideas into a thematic whole.
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With only a handful of releases available, Granite Mask is quite an enigma. Little information about the project can be found online, and the artwork on their output is abstract to stay the least. The lack of information is fitting their murky, abstract sound, which does a brilliant job of mixing conventional electronic rhythms with dissonant, abstract blasts of noise.
Granite Mask’s use of what sounds to be vintage analog drum machines and electronics result in the more song-like moments, even amidst long passages of abstract noise."Pulsating Yarn" leads off with accessible synth patterns and moments of rhythm, but the other half of the mix is comprised of explosive blasts of noise."Venom" wraps the faster rhythm in a cloak of distortion, and GM adds a series of textural, dissonant patterns of noise.The piece may stay relatively static throughout, but that makes for a fitting deconstruction of dance music.
The heavy static throughout "Initiation" prevents the piece from becoming too traditional in its approach:a jarring kick drum and hints of melody pass through but are never strong enough to ground it into a dance floor friendly work."Chinatown" may feature a simple, pummeling bass line and more memorable rhythm, but the overall backing is raw and abstract enough to mostly engulf everything else.It too may mimic the staunch repetition of dance music, but there is a notable amount of subtle, yet effective development as it proceeds.
Granite Mask's penchant for experimentation ventures in a different direction on "Retaliation."Rather than simply blending noise in, the group introduces more complex rhythm programming. Along with a battery of delays and reverb, this makes for a more dub-heavy piece. On "Drops," however, the overall structure is looser, with the rhythms kept sparse to emphasize rich expanses of synthesizer.While there is still a fair amount of effects and processing, the result is a more pure sounding piece of music.
The most conventionally musical piece closes the album.On "In an Alley," Granite Mask sticks to mostly techno/electro beats and bass, with the overall structure and composition of the song remaining faithful to that.However, the entirety of its sound and character is the right about of abnormal, adding a significant amount of depth to something that could otherwise just be a piece of repeating sequences.
The ambiguity of Her Venomous Hiss, and the Granite Mask project as a whole, adds an extra dimension to the music on this tape, but that is not a necessity in the grand scheme of appreciation.The noise and dissonant elements used here are excellent, acting more as a complex textural element rather than just an indiscernible wall of static.Compounded with tasteful implementation of conventional rhythms and bass synthesizers, the result is a brilliant piece of music.
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Initially founded as a side project of Club Rialto, with the line-up expanded over time to include the likes of Roel Meelkop and Frans de Waard (so a veritable who’s-who of Dutch experimental music), THU20 has been sporadically active since their formation almost 30 years ago. This set collects compilation pieces and unreleased live performances largely from the 1980s and early 1990s, and acts as an excellent overview of this period, while still managing to compliment their studio albums.
The closest parallel I can draw to THU20’s overall sound is their similarity of P16.D4.While the two differ, both projects combine the high art of electro-acoustic and musique concrète, with the comparatively lower forms of industrial and noise.And like that project, the final product is an idiosyncratic balance of those two extremes, but also one that pulls those two worlds together very well.
A piece such as "Eerste Uni" represents the group’s more academic tendencies.Heavy bass sounds are blended with what sounds like a decrepit, decaying recording of stringed instruments that fall apart into tiny, though identifiable fragments.The sound of 1970s science fiction films seems to be a significant element in the live "Intro Rotterdam" via expansive analog electronics and tape treatments.
At the other extreme, the harsh synths and processed, echo-heavy vocals of "08 JG" would not be out of place on an old Industrial Records release, and filtered rhythms and noisy electronics of "Stuiterthu Ariane Danssolo" could fit nicely on SPK's Information Overload Unit or Genocide Organ's Mind Control.The band’s heavy use of rattling, spring reverb focused rhythms and keyboards on "Delft 3" convey a similar sensibility, but the piece is more abstract overall."Rotterdam 4" is an especially aggressive work, with a brittle drum machine stabbing away as the band creates an diverse array of harsh noises and angry screams.
The hybrid moments of these two styles are some of the moments where this collection shines.The lengthy "Bordeaux" features found sounds and tape effects, which make for a meditative balance to the aggressive, raw vocals that appear heavily on the first half.THU20 also uses treated string sounds on "Tweede Uni," but mixes in creepy electronics and a more rhythmic bass guitar passage to balance out the other "serious" sounds.
THU20's sound and style does not lend itself well to being conventional pop music but one where experimental electronics are not just reserved beard stroking art critics, but a companion to distorted rhythm and aggressive vocals.This blending of pensive, introspective electronic experiments and raw, harsh rhythms and vocals results in a collection, and a project, that captivates as much as it intrigues.
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