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The trajectory of Drew McDowall’s recent resurgence as a solo artist continues to be a compelling and unpredictable one, as The Third Helix is quite a bit different from either of his previous Dais outings. If Collapse felt like a lost Coil session and Unnatural Channel felt like a vintage noise tape, Helix feels like the assimilation of those two sides into something more forward-looking and unique. It does not quite unseat Collapse as my favorite of McDowall's albums, but a couple of pieces easily rank among his finest work to date. More importantly, the album as a whole cumulatively casts a wonderfully immersive and disorienting spell that is ideal for headphone listening. This is the first of McDowall's albums that makes me feel like he is currently in the midst of a fresh new creative phase rather than merely unearthing and reworking a deep backlog of unreleased material.
The opening "Rhizome" embodies a curious dichotomy that runs throughout The Third Helix, as McDowall seems equally drawn to both sublime beauty and collapsing, distended ruin.Those two sides rarely come together elsewhere on the album, but they certainly do on "Rhizome," making it the strongest and most instantly gratifying piece on the album.While it deceptively begins with a disjointed series of warmly shuddering string flourishes adrift in a haze of slow-motion synth swells, the piece soon coheres into a recognizable structure…then unexpectedly blossoms into rapturous swirl of choral voices and achingly beautiful strings.Once he hits that wonderful crescendo, however, McDowall immediately sets about dismantling it and the piece dissolves into a clanging and buzzing industrial coda.The Third Helix never quite delves into such naked and unambiguous beauty ever again, but it does feature at least one another piece of similar caliber, as the densely throbbing and see-sawing "Impulse" gradually transforms into a lysergically heavy feast of rattling drones and garbled voices.It manages to evoke a mood that is best described as "nightmarishly beautiful," resembling a simple string piece that has been stretched and smeared into lurching horror.I also quite like "Nothing is Hidden," which sounds somewhat similar, yet excises everything organic or melodic to leave only a shambling, hissing, and grinding mechanized hellscape.
Interestingly, the album's brief closer "Immanent Condition" goes in completely the opposite direction, unfolding as a quietly melodic synth theme that merely frays at the edges rather than completely corrode and collapse.The rest of the album takes a much more subtle and willfully destructive approach though, as the appeal lies less in the strength of the motifs and the compositions than it does in how McDowall plays with time and pulls everything apart to weave a fragmented and kaleidoscopic fantasia.I have no idea how much of that strategy was premeditated, but it definitely seems like McDowall had enough strong ideas for only half an album and ingeniously opted to use the second half to mangle and manipulate his lesser ideas in interesting ways.In some cases, such as the excellent "Proximity," it is easy to see the ghost of a fully formed idea driving the churning and heaving abstraction.In most of the other cases, however, the degree to which McDowall succeeds is directly related to how closely I am listening to how things break apart. For example, "YLL" feels like a very simple pattern that has been reduced to a creeping granular ooze.Elsewhere, "Tendrils" is a quietly pretty ambient piece drifting through a reverberant ruin of stomping and clattering machinery, though it eventually loses its way and seems to morph into a completely different piece altogether.The remaining piece, "False Memory," is a bit of a fascinating outlier, as collaborator James K's vocals swoon and slide in a bleary haze over an unpredictably throbbing and jackhammering backdrop.The prominent presence of vocals is an obvious departure for McDowall, but it is equally significant that he completely abandons his usual pattern-manipulation for something more unpredictable and organic.I like it, but it sounds like it belongs on a completely different album or possibly in some kind of avant-garde theater mindfuck.
If The Third Helix has a weakness, it is mostly that some of the more fragmented and deconstructed pieces are too insubstantial to make a real impact on their own or linger in my memory after they are gone.Also, a strong appreciation for nuance, texture, and detail is quite helpful in unlocking the full depth of McDowall's artistry, as the straining seams, falling detritus, and sluggishly hallucinatory timescale play a crucial role in elevating several of these pieces into something much more compelling than is immediately obvious.The Third Helix would probably be a more unambiguously fine album if it featured a better balance between melody/harmony and clattering post-industrial experimentation, yet it still feels like a significant step forward to me, as McDowall has found a novel way to work around his limitations.He has always been much better at coming up with great ideas than he has been at building those ideas into strong compositions with a satisfying arc.With this new approach to time-stretching, however, McDowall manages to drag and strain even the simplest ideas into song-like durations.If that was all he managed to do, it would not be much of an achievement, but almost every one of those distended and broken fragments plays a significant role in the assembly of a slow-burning, coherent, and wonderfully warped and dreamlike whole.
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There is an old Norse myth that says the great northern glaciers stored energy until they burst with fluorescent light, creating the Aurora Borealis. Saariselka is inspired by the meeting of earth and light, where slowly moving land masses merge with enveloping light fields. This sonic collaboration is between composers Marielle Jakobsons (Fender Rhodes, organ, synthesisers) and Chuck Johnson (pedal steel guitar and treatments).
Chuck Johnson is an Oakland, California based composer and musician. He approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on guitar, experimental electronics, minimalism and soundtrack composition. Recordings of his work have been published by VDSQ, Trouble in Mind, Scissor Tail, Merge, and Three Lobed, among others.
Marielle V. Jakobsons is a composer and intermedia artist based in Oakland, CA. Her compositions evoke minimalism with melodic drone and enveloping polyrhythmic soundscapes of synthesizers, strings, and voice. She has published recordings and toured internationally on Thrill Jockey, Mexican Summer, Students of Decay, Digitalis, Important Records, among others.
Artist notes:
"Ceres is inspired by whiteouts, where the rhythm of your breath and body become a container for experiencing the fine gradations of your surroundings. The process of creating this piece was one of learning how to get out of the way, and of emphasizing the use of space and decay to alter one’s perception of time. With a skeleton formed by a simple chord progression, we focused on the compelling sonic subtleties of the pedal steel guitar, Fender Rhodes electric piano, and a Yamaha electric organ.
One of the many profound lessons I learned from my studies with Pauline Oliveros was the concept of truly existing inside the sound. Rather than thinking about a sonic structure as a horizontal timeline as in a score or audio editing software, or as a vertical stack of frequencies as depicted in a spectrogram, Oliveros' approach invites us to exist inside a piece as if it was a three dimensional structure that surrounds the listener like a sphere. In fact, in her meditation exercises she encouraged participants to think of any sonic environment as a composition that is always available if one is willing to listen. These ideas inform my music making to this day." (Chuck)
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When is one plus one not two? When two paths converge and a new one appears. But what is this newly activated neural pathway? A Third Mind? In the 1960s, multimedia artist Brion Gysin cut through the words of a newspaper and rearranged them to reveal a new kind of truth contained within the words but not freed until his knife cut it loose. He described this as part of the Third Mind. Likewise, Limpid As The Solitudes cuts through sound-making techniques to enter a new zone of sonic revelations.
If you had to look for musical precedents, you might say the record recalls the turn-of-the-century Mille Plateaux glitch era, the warmth of La Monte Young's raga-inspired microtonal electronic "dream house" drones, a sense of adventure evident in the acousmatic non-space recordings made by GRM artists in the 1960s/ 1970s, 4AD's floor-gazing guitar sound circa Cocteau Twins peak, and blissfully diverse field recordings. But you could equally equate it with entirely different recording sources. Limpid As The Solitudes has a widescreen sound that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Warm, comforting and also unsettling in unpredictable ways. Deliberate yet exploratory. It’s a record composed of opposites and contrasts. Following historical guidelines yet also throwing them out of the window. It's hard to tell if the process of creating it was more akin to abstract painting but it might possibly be easier to understand if it was a large museum painting (to steal a thought from David Stubbs). To describe the album as ambient would indicate a much too passive engagement with the sound – leave it to play in the background and you’ll miss a lot of the joy.
Felicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma describe the record as a series of postcards - things and sounds that happen vertically as a slow ascension, vessels communicating in dreams. In this collaborative recording, there is a feeling of "becoming" - things metamorphose - a concrete sound turns into a electronic sound that turns into a spiral-like melody which then furls / unfurls at the same time.
The title of the album - Limpid As The Solitudes - as well as track titles, are all verses stolen from Sylvia Plath's poems. If you look at the cover, you’ll find another key clue - you’ll see an image created by photographer Julien Carreyn of a young women wearing destroyed jeans, playing with bubble wrap. The image is intended to give the viewer an eerie 1990's feeling that echoes the recording. Think films like Trust (Hal Hartley, 1990) or Chungking Express (Wong Kar Wai, 1994). It's the ultra modern solitude of characters lost in an early-digital urban vacuum, looking for a more time to wonder, a soul mate or just some compassion in the grey sky.
Among the many other references for this album is how Google Maps have created new digital perceptions of space, Gilles Deleuze's examination of Alice In Wonderland, Andre Breton's poems, and more films including the classics Sacrifice (Tarkovsky), Passenger (Antonioni), and Last Year In Marienbad (Resnais). To dig into the more of the ideas and sources behind this record, you'll simply have to talk to the duo. We simply cannot give you the full depth here.
Be sure to come back to this record more than once - it's then that its power will work - you'll recall the sound of a lover, a garden you once walked through, an echo of a record you once loved. To be appreciated, Limpid As The Solitudes requires you to immerse yourself as if in a hot spring, letting the sounds float over you and alter your perceptions and memories.
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Brace Up! is the first ever studio release from the duo of Chris Corsano (drums) and Bill Orcutt (guitar). Recorded in Brussels at Les Ateliers Claus by Christophe Albertijn on March 19th and 20th, 2018. Stage dive photograph by Jason Penner.
"Over the past six years or so, drummer Chris Corsano has proven to be one of Bill Orcutt's most reliably flexible collusionists. Regardless of whether Bill is cluster-busting electric guitar strings, weaseling around with cracked electronics, or playing relatively spacious free-rock, Corsano is able to provide the proper base for his aural sculpting. A lot of Orcutt's instrumental work has traditionally felt hermetic even though he's exploring caverns of explosive ecstasy. One often got the impression Bill was operating in the way John Travolta did in the classic 1976 ABC television drama, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Orcutt's actual interaction with collaborators emerged not from communication so much as pure observation. While he was fully cognizant of his musical surroundings, his reactions to it were walled off. This approach did not encourage sonic dialogue so much as parallel streams of discourse. These streams could interact with each other, but not in particularly standard ways. On Brace Up! , their first ever studio release, this precept has changed considerably. Whether it's a function of emotional familiarity or an intellectual choice I dunno, but there's a whole new kind of duo exchange going down on this record. Bill and Chris are clearly playing off each other's moves throughout the album. And it really raises the level of the music to an all-time high. From the cop car see-saw of "Poundland Frenzy" to the mutual pummeling of "Paranoid Time" (possibly a Minutemen tribute?) to the lazychicken-gets-stung-prog of "She Punched a Hole in the Moon for Me," the sounds on Brace Up! display a constant flow of ideas and instantaneous conjugation of newly forged verbs. As great as Bill and Chris's previous duo records have been, this one's greater." -- Byron Coley
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To simply categorize the music of Rivulets as spare or desolate is to unjustly deny it the hot blood sizzling through its very veins.
Sure, on the band's 6th album In Our Circle, there are prairies of space over which notes and tones often hang like dust specks in a light beam. But there is a pulsing intensity to these moments, these Rust Belt incantations. Denver-via-Minneapolis Songwriter Nathan Amundson might be laconic in his presentation, but his music is abound with thoughtful sentiment and rich in soul. Think of the way the seemingly austere music of Low (with whom Amundson has toured and collaborated), Jason Molina or even, say, the repetitive psych-metal of the vastly under-appreciated Lungfish, vibrated with raw nerve and dark energy. In Our Circle vibrates with a similar hard-earned confidence and perhaps with an even darker energy.
In Our Circle dwells heavy in a contemporary American psyche. Rare is the news that doesn’t feel worse than the day before. If we're currently in the Autumn of the American Era, then In Our Circle sits out there in late November in a first snow made of ash. And this is from a band who once called an album We're Fucked. But the hounds of time are really nipping at our heels now. "Another dark day, another dark day, another dark day, another dark day," Amundson quivers in his lovely, breathy tenor over a slo(ooo)w shuffling strum and a striking lap steel. Coming at the album's midpoint, one might see this as Rivulets waving the white flag halfway through. But there's a comfort in these blues, some sort of communal sadness in the dark. If the dad in Cormac McCarthy's The Road had a guitar in his grocery cart, these would be the last songs he played before he used the guitar for campfire kindling.
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BEAST is a new project by composer Koen Holtkamp, known for his sweeping, maximalist work with Mountains, as well as his labyrinthian solo recordings. While taking some time away from music to focus on working with light and color his approach shifted, opening himself up to new working methods which led to the creation of a virtual ensemble of sorts. The process of refocusing on music found Holtkamp gravitating towards pieces centered on simple rhythmic patterns which, when built upon one another, create elaborately intertwining castles of sound. On Ens, Holtkamp reins in his sprawling sound with new resolve, crafting tightly constructed pieces of engaging and ecstatic beauty.
Ens was made during a time of anticipation of change for Holtkamp: the birth of his first child. Having recorded and mixed the album late at night and at odd hours in the months leading up to the birth and during the early sleepless days of fatherhood, Ens (which means entity or existence) is a profoundly intimate and heartfelt journey into Holtkamp’s psyche. The constant motion created by the ebb and flow of rhythmic elements connects Ens’ diverse compositions and mirrors the building expectation of such a momentous change.
Holtkamp’s initial recordings as BEAST (Vol 1 & Vol 2) were mostly conceived for the immediacy and physicality of performance and were directly linked to a series of visual environments he created with 3D laser projections. As a purely studio project, Ens takes on a more precise and contemplative approach. Moments of blissful grandeur such as the convalescence of melodies in "Paprika Shorts" are at once overwhelming and crystalline in the placement and clarity of each sound. Deceptively simple pieces like "Boketto" and "Miniature" appear more sparse and subtle, but the arrangement of sounds reveal deeper levels of nuance with each listen. By carefully arranging and selecting each element, Holtkamp both references genre tropes, from classical minimalism to beat-driven dance music, and constructs a sound all his own. The intricately detailed depth of field gives the album an almost sculptural presence. This level of detail is underpinned by Holtkamp's move towards more virtual instrumentation which he utilizes to push beyond the physical limitations of their acoustic equivalents, as well as to synthesize new instruments.
As BEAST, Holtkamp has nimbly altered his process of creating dense, immersive music. Ens stands as not only the culmination of his newfound methods, but also a deeply personal moment. In crafting the graceful and passionate sonic tapestries into compact compositions, BEAST's Ens masterfully melds the earthbound and the ethereal.
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Since assuming the recording moniker Hiro Kone in 2011, New York City-based electronic artist Nicky Mao has personalized a space predicated on dark layers interacting with rhythm. With her early EPs on Group Tightener and Bitterroots, leading up to the EP Fallen Angels and the acclaimed debut full length album, Love Is the Capital (both on Geographic North), Mao's meticulously crafted textures attracted collaborators like Drew McDowall (Coil), Little Annie, and Roxy Farman (Wetware) while driving against the grain of experimental techno. Mao's explorations often cast themselves against danceable structures, creating a duality of crisis and escapism.
For Pure Expenditure—her debut on DAIS Records—Mao continues to weave a labyrinth of electronic pattern, with an often economical usage of repeating sequences and ethereal stasis to drive the narrative. The title refers to the sovereign release of a surplus energy, divorced from all imperatives of utility, which otherwise threatens to become morbid. Working from this creative theme, Mao uses this theoretical concept to seek out a long form statement without regard for any immediate interpretation or return.
In the context and construct of the album's format, Pure Expenditure reaches into the psyche of sacrifice and the danger of excess, not in a traditional allegory, but in the actual investigation of where energy is absorbed and how it’s often negatively seeped into moral fiber. While the albums' seven tracks don't offer so much as a resolution to these conundrums as they do a case study, Mao's sound has developed forcibly into the conscientious voice of systematic injustice, albeit often without syntax. Pure Expenditure creates thought through concept and volume through space. Thematically, acclaimed visual artist Tauba Auerbach created the album art, lending a conceptual cohesion through her spectral dissection of structure and ornamental arrangement.
As a journey, Pure Expenditure plunges into meditation and throbs in and out of a lucid consciousness orchestrated by Mao, but never veering into vanity. Pure Expenditure is as much rumination as it is ritual, querying the corners of Capitalism by hypnotically circling its tenets in measured cadence.
Mixed by Telefon Tel Aviv’s Josh Eustis, mastered and cut by Josh Bonati.
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Apollo welcomes ambient legend bvdub AKA San Franciscan Brock Van Wey for a new album Drowning in Daylight.
Van Wey's latest explores cavernous soundscapes on a grand canvas that throbs with a delicate intimacy. A stalwart DJ and promoter of the halcyon '90s San Francisco rave scene, Van Wey fled to China in the early 2000s to escape the curdling of his musical dreams as the scene became more commercial.
Since his return, he's been incredibly prolific in his creation, etching out peerless ambient works that have captivated listeners with their delicate melody and fascinating textures through releases for the likes of Echospace, Kompakt and Styrax - 2018's A Different Definition of Love marks his 30th bvdub album to date.
Classically trained in piano and violin as a child, Van Wey's symphonic approach to ambience is truly remarkable,
Epic in its scale with each of its 4 tracks clocking in around the 20-minute mark, Drowning In Daylight envelops the listener in swathes of nostalgic pads and nested layers of distortion, strings and haunted voices.
Drowning In Daylight could well be Van Wey's crowning achievement to date and a testament to the power of instrumental abstract music to emotionally engulf the listener.
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2018 marks the 20th anniversary of Wisconsin-based guitarist Erik Kowalski’s expansive and expressionistic solo vehicle, Casino Versus Japan. Across the past two decades he has explored variously interwoven realms of ambient sound – hazy IDM, experimental shoegaze, cinematic drift – but his latest collection voyages even deeper into soft-focus abstraction, unspooling 73 minutes of emotive electric immersion.
Suicide By Sun accrued across countless home studio sessions, slowly sequenced into four sides of narcotic reverberation, reflective loops, and dream-soaked delay. Guitar gestures refract into twilit horizons; hymnal drones swell and shimmer; smeared notes sway like lullabies of quiet communion. This is pensive, patient, personal music, mapped with feeling and finesse by storied hands.
More information can be found here.
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URUK comes from the meeting in 2016 of two totally unclassifiable musicians: Thighpaulsandra and Massimo Pupillo.
Thighpaulsandra has an impressive track record particularly playing on many Coil albums. Traces of this influence can be found in the keyboards used on Mysterium Coniunctionis. We could randomly pick such masterpieces as the two volumes of Musick to Play in the Dark and Astral Disaster, records that were and still are among the best ambient albums ever made. He has also made several records in his own name (including the unpredictable Double Vulgar) and was a member of the UUUU (Mego Editions) project in 2017 which also featured a particularly creative Graham Lewis (Wire).
Massimo Pupillo is well known for having slammed a lot of ears as the bassist with the highly imposing Italian jazzcore trio Zu (those who saw them on stage will understand). 2009's Carboniferous or the more recent 2014 collaboration with Eugene Robinson (Oxbow) still resonate for a lot of listeners. In 2016, Massimo was in Triple Sun (no doubt a reference to the splendid song by Coil, again..) alongside two well-known musicians at Ici d'ailleurs - Raphaël Séguinier and David Chalmin (The Third Eye Foundation).
URUK also and especially brought out their first album in 2017 - I Leave A Silver Trail Through Blackness (Consouling Sounds). This is an imposing piece of dark ambient music in which the two musicians proved that they are more than just the sum their respective experiences. They are sound explorers obsessed by grasping the detail that shifts listeners from one world to another.
Their second album, Mysterium Coniunctionis makes direct reference to the eponymous and testamentary work of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, subtitled An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. It clearly reflects the duo's intention to create particularly immersive and meaningful music from supposedly opposing materials - in this case the meeting of electronic and organic sounds.
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There is complexity in simplicity, and Sparrow Nights is Peter Brötzmann and Heather Leigh's most enduring record to date, and their first studio album. A series of emotionally rich and boldly elucidated tonal and timbral exchanges played like compositions on pedal steel and reeds, the tracks (released as a 6-track LP and 10-track CD) are cold-forged minimalist blues motifs dragged from instrumental laments.
After three years playing together Brötzmann/Leigh's connection and understanding is by now both cerebral and deeply invested in the physical and sensory possibilities of their combined sound, while retaining a melancholic distance. Within this duo there is fluidity – neither is the anchor – and these recordings sound with as much variety as the sea. At times Sparrow Nights carries the clarity and poeticism of still water and open horizon ("This Word Love"), and at others it contains the elemental and ferocious roar of white water breakers on black rocks ("This Time Around").
On their previous three live albums (Ears Are Filled With Wonder, Sex Tape, Crowmoon) the duo have developed an intimate and intense language that manifests here as a focus on power and control, where figures blasted of unnecessary decoration are drawn from the shadows and smoke of collapse. The studio setting also allows Brötzmann to bring a broader range of reeds than in live scenarios: where previously he has played primarily tenor, clarinet and tarogato with Leigh, here he delivers the heat of alto and the low pressure of bass saxophone and clarinet.
Brötzmann's duo with Leigh continues to trace a fresh new arc in his trajectory, and this release also falls at a time when Leigh releases Throne, her most song-based record to date. Here as a studio duo they play a new-old blues for times of complexity, noise and chaos, continuing to redefine and re-sound possibilities for improvised music.
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