- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
Madeline Johnston’s fourth solo album as Midwife borrows its title from The Carter Family’s timeless and transcendent classic about leaving one’s worldly cares behind. The title presumably has some aspirational meaning, as the darker side of life is an eternal theme for Midwife, but it is also a nod to both Johnston’s life on the highway as a traveling musician (with a dying tour van) and to the many other road warriors that came before her. In keeping with that “road album” theme, Johnston also name-checks “outlaws” and “the psyche of America’s underbelly” as big influences and notes that most of the album was written almost entirely from the back of tour vans. That claim rings true, as this entire album feels unusually intimate, nocturnal, and stripped down and most songs are centered upon little more than Johnston’s voice and a few simple chords or arpeggios. In fact, almost every song on No Depression could literally be played on an unamplified electric guitar in the back of a van. Impressively, that stark minimalism suits these songs extremely well, as there are enough great lines and killer hooks here to make it clear that Johnston does not need much more than six strings and her voice to craft a memorable and emotionally heavy song. This is the Midwife vision distilled to its absolute essence.
Last year, I read Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life and there was a small bit in it about wanting to write a song called “Rock n Roll For President” that made me wince. I bring that up because No Depression’s opening song is entitled “Rock N Roll Never Forgets” and Johnston manages to miraculously sing lines like “if rock n roll is a dream, please don’t wake me” or "rock n roll will never die" without sounding irony-poisoned or ridiculous. As it turns out, execution is everything, as some people (Jason Molina, for example) can sing practically anything and make it sound profound and Johnston is blessed with that same gift herself. Consequently, “Rock N Roll Never Forgets” is a minor masterpiece of slow-burning magic and reads like a hissing, hypnagogic, and endearingly sincere love poem to the power and beauty of music. Yet another impressive feat is the stark simplicity of the music, as Johnston nicely embodies the old line about the essence of country music being “three chords and the truth.”
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest album from English violinist/avant-folk visionary Laura Cannell is billed as “an offering of contemporary minimalism to a 12th century composer, a thank you to a lost uncle and a way to process an anxiety disorder.” Cannell was first turned onto Benedictine abbess/polymath Hildegard von Bingen back in the late ‘90s when her uncle played her Sequentia’s Canticles of Ecstasy album and the iconoclastic German nun’s compositions have been an alternating source of comfort and inspiration ever since. In keeping with the "inspiration" theme, The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined is essentially a great new Laura Cannell album rather than anything resembling a conventional homage. As Cannell describes it, she broke down and reconstructed selected Hildegard pieces and interspersed them with her own work. She also set aside both her violin and her usual working methods, as these pieces were improvised and recorded in single takes using a simple palette of bass recorder, 12-string medieval harp (“tuned in unequal temperament”), and a delay pedal. As it turns out, that is all Cannell needed to cast quite a wonderfully hallucinatory, haunting, and timeless spell. It’s frankly a shame that Hildegard herself isn’t around to hear it, as this album would be an ideal soundtrack for anyone looking to have otherworldly religious visions.
Notably, this is not the first major Laura Cannell release to center upon her recorder playing, as that honor belongs to 2022’s Antiphony of the Trees. On that album, Cannell used a small arsenal of recorders to transform transcribed birdsongs into minimalist chamber music. Rituals is a radically different album for a whole host of reasons (spontaneity, inspiration, a medieval harp, etc.), but the most striking one for me is how masterfully Cannell makes use of her delay pedal this time around. On the opening “The Cosmic Spheres of Being Human,” for example, a tumbling and serpentine melody leaves behind a wake of fluttering and flickering afterimages that call to mind something between “hallucinatory snakecharmer” and “chopped and screwed classical impressionism.” There is also a second layer in which a slow mournful melody drifts through the landscape of dissolving loops, but it occasionally breaks into additional tendrils of looping melody or subtly gnarled feedback as well.
- Creaig Dunton
- Reviews
Being a duo consisting of JR Robinson (Wrekmeister Harmonies) and Mark Solotroff (Anatomy of Habit, Bloodyminded), it is not at all surprising that the debut from The Mercury Impulse is heavily rooted in the world of synths and electronics. Across eight songs, however, the sound cannot be so easily summarized. The result is a rich blend of light and dark, fluctuating from noise to melody effortlessly, often within a single composition.
Robinson and Solotroff began collaborating in Chicago over a decade ago, most notably with Solotroff playing in a large ensemble form of Wrekmeister Harmonies, but the two never recorded much beyond that. These opportunities being limited even further when Robinson relocated to New York. It was only at the beginning of this year that work began in earnest, stemming from unfinished recordings the two had shared in the years before in a long-distance collaboration.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
Unsurprisingly, I have been following Holy Tongue since the project first surfaced with their killer self-titled EP back in 2020, as few things could more obviously be more right up my alley than a dub project from one of the most reliably fascinating drummers on the planet right now (Valentina Magaletti). While I have certainly enjoyed the project’s entire discography thus far, my experience has been that there are plenty of times when Holy Tongue has sounded exactly like what I would expect from a Magaletti-centric dub project (a stripped-down, post-punk-influenced On-U Sound homage), but those pieces are sometimes interspersed with transcendent flashes of inspiration that feel like something considerably more adventurous and unique. Notably, those left-field moments of brilliance started to appear a bit more frequently once the other half of Vanishing Twin’s rhythm section (bassist Susumu Mukai) joined the fold. In keeping with that theme, the addition of yet another talented collaborator (Sam Shackleton) has triggered yet another sizable creative leap forward, as The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now is legitimately impressive enough to back up the wildly bold promise of its title (an Ornette Coleman-level feat if I ever saw one).
This particular dream collaboration began exactly the same way as many other dream collaborations before it: Holy Tongue and Shackleton shared a bill at a festival and their mutual admiration led to plans to work together. In this case, the original idea was for Shackleton to remix an existing Holy Tongue song, but the scope happily blossomed into something much more interesting: Magaletti, Mukai, and Al Wootton recorded a bunch of raw new Holy Tongue material, handed it off to Shackleton, and gave him free rein to go hog wild with it. Speaking as someone who was absolutely mesmerized by Shackleton’s recent collaboration with Six Organs of Admittance, I can confidently say that “let Shackleton go absolutely bananas” tends to be a winning strategy and Tumbling Psychic Joy adds another instant classic to the pre-existing pile of supporting evidence.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This singular trio composed of Australian avant-guitar visionary Oren Ambarchi and the rhythm section from Sweden’s Fire!/Fire! Orchestra first surfaced back in 2022 with Ghosted and they are now back with an aptly named sequel. While that earlier album was inconveniently eclipsed by Ambarchi’s solo Shebang album for me that year, I connect quite a bit more with Ghosted II, as the trio’s vision seems to have fully blossomed this time around. I have admittedly grumbled in the past about my preference for Ambarchi’s earlier, more abstract work over his more recent jazz/fusion/krautrock-inspired rhythmic excursions, but this album happily strikes a near-perfect balance of those two sides, as drummer Andreas Werliin’s Latin-esque percussion workouts are an ideal backdrop for Ambarchi’s flickering and impressionistic guitar phantasms. Also, I think I finally grasped that “ghosted” is a perfect description of Ambarchi’s guitar aesthetic in this context, as his playing is abstracted into an incorporeal shimmer in nearly every piece (and the few well-chosen exceptions make quite an impact).
I have quickly grown to love this album, but It took me some time to warm to the opening “en,” as Ambarchi’s playing is primarily limited to gently warbling and painterly smears while Johan Berthling’s bass playing is seemingly relegated to just a single jazzy yet endlessly repeating riff. Once I listened to it on headphones, however, I quickly understood that the piece was essentially a killer drum showcase for Werliin: Ambarchi is providing subtle coloration, Berthling is holding down the pulse, and Werliin is absolutely tearing it up on a rolling and clattering groove. As I am always a fan of great drummers given space to go off, merely shifting my focus to Werliin instantly worked wonders in deepening my appreciation for the piece. I found some other quiet delights as well (the way Ambarchi’s guitar sometimes sounds like an organ fading in and out of focus, the way the final fade out reveals new details in the bass line, etc.), but the other three pieces still feel stronger simply because they are more of a full-band effort. In the following “två,” for example, Berthling’s lovely bass harmonic motif is the heart of a stellar foray into a simmering and austere Tortoise-esque groove. Ambarchi’s contribution is still quite muted (woozy vapor trails, gently oscillating shimmer), but the trio make the most out of the piece’s spaciousness, as the vacuum of space makes a mere kick drum thump or bass throb feel sensual and significant.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
My first exposure to Li Chao's long-running project "from the filthy concrete cave of smoggy Beijing" was 2022's Misbegotten Ballads (SVBKULT) and that album's unique collision of grimy, junkyard-style "early industrial" sounds and playful weirdness left quite a deep impression on me. This latest album is not exactly a proper follow up, as it is a collection of material created between 2016 and 2020 that "nearly faded into oblivion" in the dark early days of the pandemic, but those orphaned pieces have now "been reborn with the strongest wishes" and Chao considers them to be among his "most cherished works." Happily, I can now cherish them too, as Chao's single-minded pursuit of a curdled and corroded vision frequently yields fascinating and singular results.
There is not a hell of a lot of information available about Zaliva-D, but the project has been active for roughly two decades now and is ostensibly a husband/wife duo. Notably, the band's other member (Aisin-Gioro Yuanjin) seems to exclusively handle the video art side of the pair's live performances, so Zaliva-D albums are essentially a Li Chao solo project. In the past, Chao has dabbled in dark ambient and black metal and darkness remains a prominent theme in Zaliva-D as well, but the darkness in Zaliva-D's case feels more like a killer basement show in the burnt-out ruins of a post-apocalyptic city.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This collaboration between Kenyan soundscape auteur Joseph Kamaru and industrial dub heavyweight Kevin Martin came as quite a wonderful surprise, as their seemingly unlikely pairing turned out to be a match made in heaven. The unexpected twists do not end there, however, as Martin also persuaded Kamaru to contribute some singing and spoken word passages after being captivated by his lilting voice and "soft-spoken accent." The warmth and humanizing effect of that innovation beautifully elevates Disconnect into something far more compelling than just the collision of two different visions. The dub-inspired format of this release is yet another delightful curveball, as Disconnect has the feel of a maxi-single rather than an album, with the epic "Differences" acting as the killer single that is backed by a darker B-side ("Arkives") and two radically transformed variations of each. The entire release is excellent, but "Differences" in particular stands as one of the strongest pieces in either artist's already revered oeuvre.
The opening "Differences" slowly fades into being with deep bass drones and a slow, simple two-note melody with a long and reverberant decay. Gradually, however, a chant-like vocal loop emerges and the piece slowly blossoms into a rich tapestry of gorgeously textured layers that feels like a sublime and beatless deconstruction of a great Jesu song. It is a perfect marriage of melody and production, as Kamaru's vocal hook is bittersweet and soulful, the psychedelic touches are immersive and spatially mobile, and every note is given plenty of space to linger and be felt. In short, "Differences" is thirteen minutes of pure sonic heaven. Needless to say, that sets the bar quite high for the rest of the album, but revisiting the same raw material two more times is an inventive way to solve such a problem. On the colder "Difference," a slow but insistent kick drum thump carves a path through bleary underground parking garage ambiance, while "Differ" sounds like a spectral, time-stretched, and hiss-soaked deconstruction of Basic Channel-style dub techno.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This collaboration could not possibly have come at a better time, as Sam Shackleton has been riding quite a varied and adventurous hot streak over the last few years with his collaborations with Holy Tongue, Scotch Rolex, Waclaw Zimpel, and Siddhartha Belmannu. Given that Ben Chasney is also quite a creatively restless artist, Jinxed By Being could have gone in any number of possible directions, but the direction that the duo ultimately landed on sounds a hell of a lot like a Six Organs of Admittance album. The twist, however, is that it sounds like a truly great Six Organs album that I have been waiting for my whole life, as Chasney's signature psychedelic folk vision blossoms into vivid psychotropic color with the addition of Shackleton's panning and swirling electronic mindfuckery. Chasney and Shackleton have truly hit upon a magic formula here: usually a Six Organs album lives or dies based on the strength of Chasney's songwriting or the quantity of killer guitar motifs, but Shackleton's "heavy cosmic dread" aesthetic makes every song feel like I am being lured deeper and deeper into a phantasmagoric dreamscape.
The opening "The Voice and the Pulse" is currently one of the leading contenders for my favorite piece on the album, but it is more of a shapeshifting mind-melter than a structured song. While I am not usually a fan of Chasney's falsetto vocals, the hushed, repeating refrain of "keep the corpse alive" makes the piece feel like a morbid nursery rhyme leading me into a reality-dissolving psychedelic fog that is as outre as anything by Current 93 or Legendary Pink Dots. Like most of the pieces on the album, the best parts tend to be the hallucinatory swirl of sounds in the periphery rather than the song itself, but the tribal-ambient percussion flourishes and the vibraphone-sounding melody that surface throughout the piece are sublime pleasures as well. The album's next stunner follows soon after with "The Grip of the Flesh," as Chasney's chant-like vocals guide me into a shapeshifting phantasmagoria of kalimba melodies, layered field recordings, and gorgeously shivering chord strums. Then the bottom drops out and the piece unexpectedly transforms into a more pounding and doom-inspired second act that favorably calls to mind Chasney's erstwhile labelmates Om (albeit only if Al Cisneros swapped out his bass for a formidable arsenal of electronics and effects pedals). More importantly, "The Grip of the Flesh" kicks off an unbroken run of killer pieces that stretches all the way to the end of the album.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
In 1965, John Cage "composed" a piece for Alvin Lucier that debuted at Brandeis University's then-new Rose Art Museum (Lucier was employed as Brandeis's chorus director at the time). The score for the piece was characteristically Cage-ian, as it was essentially just "correspondence and notes regarding the preparation of magnetic tape" and left plenty of room for chance and spontaneity to play significant roles. While Cage settled upon a total of 88 loops to mirror the number of keys on a piano, the contents and length of those loops were left very open-ended (as was the duration of the piece itself, as its beginning and ending were determined by the arrival and departure of the audience). There was also an element of mischief to the piece as well, as Cage's original vision included loops as long as 45 feet that stretched over a fountain and also included instructions for what to do when some of the loops inevitably broke mid-performance. Unsurprisingly, performances of "Rozart Mix" are quite rare for those reasons, but Aaron Dilloway was recently lucky enough to land the time and resources necessary to perform his own personalized interpretation and there is literally no one on earth who could be better suited for such an endeavor.
This album's origins date back to 2020, as Dilloway was contacted by the John Cage Trust and Acra, NY's Wave Farm about staging a fresh performance of the piece. The following year, Dilloway spent "a wonderful and intense week" at Bard College researching Cage's notes and materials, then performed a 6-hour version at the Trust with the assistance of Rose Actor-Engel, Twig Harper, C. Lavender, Quintron, Robert Turman, and John Wiese. According to Dilloway, the performance involved "12 individually amplified reel to reel tape machines, placed around multiple floors of a house, playing 88 tape loops spliced together by 5 to 175 splices" and "created an overwhelming and joyous environment of cacophonous sound." Amusingly, that performance just leapt to the top of my ever-expanding list of "missed concert" regrets, as I used to live a mere 10 minutes from Bard College. Alas. On the bright side, the durational constraints of vinyl have distilled that performance to a mere 16 minutes of surrealist magic that I can now experience at home. It is certainly less immersive and hypnotic than a 6-hour dose would be, but the new brevity imbues the piece with the "all killer, no filler" feel of a great noise set, so I am definitely not complaining.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This unique quartet unusually originated as a collaboration between two French photographers, as Frédéric D. Oberland and Grégory Dargent performed some improvised duo concerts a few years back to accompany screenings and exhibits in Cairo, Beirut, and elsewhere. The duo was then expanded into a quartet to include Lebanese bassist Tony Elieh and darbuka player Wassim Halal and a three-day "improvised sound bacchanalia" ensued. The foursome describe themselves as a "post-anything quartet featuring multi-instrumentalists from the Mediterranean inland Sea" and share an ambitious vision of "new folklore for a devastated planet" and "tangos danced on the glowing ashes of our days." In less colorfully poetic terms, SIHR is a visceral and freewheeling collision of Arabic percussion, snatches of Middle Eastern melodies, timeless folk instrumentation, and ambitiously weird/mangled/abused synth sounds. In fact, literally everyone other than Halal plays a synth of some kind, which makes for a deeply strange collision of traditional music and outré electronics. While SIHR only fully transcends its improvisatory roots on the more melodic and sax-driven "YouGotALight," the album as a whole is an oft-fascinating outlier and this quartet truly never resembles any other improv ensemble that I have encountered.
The opening "Oui-Ja'aa" is a fairly representative plunge into this foursome's bizarre collision of disparate aesthetics, as Halal's clattering percussion builds into a hypnotic groove while a maniacally insistent synth figure wanders and trills all over the place. It eventually becomes a bit more melodic in the second half, but the endlessly propulsive and shapeshifting groove is the highlight by a landslide, as it sounds like it could be a live recording of Can on a particular great and adventurous night. Aside from that, "Oui-Ja'aa" also sounds at times like Catherine Christer Hennix has just ridden a war elephant into a Middle Eastern street fair. The following "Enuma Ellis" cools things down a bit, however, resembling something between a strain of droning oud-driven desert rock and a ritualistic street procession gnawed by pulsing swells of howling distorted electric guitar (Oberland's handiwork, I imagine). "YouGotALight" then further reduces the intensity to a sublime simmer, as Oberland's alto sax sensuously weaves a melody across a subdued landscape of quivering and rippling minor key arpeggios, dubwise percussion, melodic bass, and spasms of electric guitar. The final minute is especially wonderful, as a melodic crescendo unexpectedly drifts in. Frankly, it sounds like the best song that Barn Owl never recorded.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Alex Keller's newest album's title, as well as many of the individual song names, are direct references to the CIA's notorious mind control MKUltra project, with thematic linkage due to Keller's use of electromagnetic sounds and interference, which was also part of those experiments. While this would almost be indicative of a harsh noise endurance test, Sleep room is quite the opposite. It may be a bit raw at times, but Keller's singular approach has a massively impressive depth and complexity to it, both stimulating curiosity as to what the sounds actually are and aesthetically engaging at the same time.
Keller's employment of electromagnetic transducers takes the form of pieces extracted from other technological sources, such as old modems, network servers, LED lightbulbs, and even a bug zapper and stun gun. Manipulated in real time, rather than just processing existing recordings, means that Keller is able to truly treat these as instruments, rather than just sound sources that act as fodder for effects pedals and plug-ins.
