18 August 2018

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Albums and Singles

Musician, researcher, and author Thomas Bey William Bailey has been prolific in all of the disciplines in which he has worked, and La Production Interdite is an excellent entry in his musical body of work. Spread into two 30 minute pieces, one fully instrumental and one with spoken word vocals, Bailey succeeds in a strong piece of sonic, as well as conceptual art that comes together brilliantly with both distinct elements enhancing the other perfectly.

Elevator Bath

Bailey’s last work, the digital only A Desperate Expediency was centered on the concept of enhanced interrogation techniques, while this one is on the seemingly less disturbing and polarizing concept of autoscopy, or the visualization of doppelgangers or doubles of the self.Perhaps fitting then is the fact that the two sides are, musically at least, somewhat similar to one another, but they are different in more than just the inclusion of vocals.The sound is rather similar, but not quite the same, obscuring which version could actually be the ‘real’ one.

The instrumental half opens with a light, slightly noisy electronic drift, with small fragments of piano shining through the obscuring analog and digital electronics. Low fidelity glitch layers and crackling static appear, heralding the transition into icy, deep space expanses of minimalism.The piece has an unrelenting flow, evolving from falling tones into grinding static to frigid ambient space.The blend is exceptional, juxtaposing the light and dark elements of Bailey's sound, from thunderous crashes into cold shimmers.The final eight or so minutes heralds a distinctly darker transition though.The more dissonant elements take on a sharper, cold metallic sheen, as it eventually becomes a ghostly, empty space of dead air.

The vocal mix on the other side of the tape features many of the same sounds and sonic elements, but with a final product that differs from the other half of the tape.Opening with a more sputtering, noisy passage, the piece again settles into a mix of conventional piano sounds and rhythmic, glitch patterns, distorted into an understated grind.When Bailey's narration appears, relaying stories of doppelgangers and hallucinations, the backing track thins out and drops to accommodate his words, but never fades away too drastically.

Between the spoken passages, the music continues as deep space melodies and more distorted electronic bursts, at times devolving into chaotic noise but being kept under his control.The airy electronics and dirty crunch transition between one another nicely, as Bailey's narration sometimes sounds as if it is treated with the slightest amount of processing.The passages are spaced apart well enough to never overshadow the music but instead demand attention when appropriate.On the surface this would seem to be a lighter topic than the interrogation techniques of his previous release, but things still take a very dark turn in the narrative.

As a person who is not usually a spoken word fan, La Production Interdite still manages to work wonderfully in my opinion.The actual narration is compelling and nicely punctuated with the music, but also spaced out enough to maximize its impact, as well as to give the music an appropriate amount of attention.The compelling thematic elements, mixed with the complex and heavily varied electronic music that Thomas Bey William Bailey creates to complement the text-based work stands powerfully on its own as well.The final product, however, is enhanced by both halves and makes for a great piece of art.

samples:

• La Production Interdite (Instrumental Mix)
• La Production Interdite (Vocal Mix, Excerpt 1)
• La Production Interdite (Vocal Mix, Excerpt 2)

 

12 August 2018

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Albums and Singles

Recently reissued in expanded form, A Turn of Breath was Ian William Craig's 2014 formal debut, though it was predated by a handful of digital-only and cassette releases. In fact, I am quite fond of his first two Recital Program albums, even if they betray a strong Tim Hecker influence. With A Turn of Breath, however, Craig made a major creative leap forward, casting aside any lingering derivative touches to establish himself as one of the most talented and distinctive sound artists in recent memory. Using just his voice as his primary instrument, Craig employs an arsenal of tape players to transform his simple, naked melodies into swooning and warbling dream-like bliss. He later expanded considerably on that aesthetic with the more song-based and shoegaze-inspired Centres, but that vision was already quite lovely and fully formed here–A Turn of Breath just happens to be a more fragmented, flickering, and hallucinatory incarnation of it.

Recital Program

For good reason, it is damn near impossible to find any description of A Turn of Breath that does not use the word "angelic."There is no word more apt for this album, so there is no point in going through linguistic contortions to find an alternative.Craig, a classically trained vocalist, certainly sings quite beautifully, yet the world is absolutely full of other classically trained vocalists and I generally have no interest in their recordings–a great voice is only a starting point.Fortunately, Craig had (and has) plenty of great ideas for how to use that voice.His work is special primarily because he has found an especially ingenious way to use tapes and has a singular compositional genius for transforming tape music into something warm, melodic, and lushly Romantic.At its best, A Turn of Breath sounds like the sublimely rapturous recordings of a heavenly choir…if a bumbling recording engineer tripped and the master tapes rolled off the cloud and fell to earth.That is only the first part, though, as it also seem like the tapes probably sat in the sun for a while before Craig found them.That last bit is especially crucial, as pieces like "Red Gate With Starling" and "Either Or" seems to retain a divine essence, yet transform that prettiness into something deeper, elegantly frayed, and vulnerable.While that summarizes the bulk of the album, Craig occasionally picks up his guitar as well, earning him several similarly deserved comparisons to a medieval troubadour (albeit one with access to some reverb effects).Admittedly, I am not quite as fond of that side of Breath, but pieces like "Rooms" and "A Forgetting Place" play an essential role in balancing out the vaporous and elusive nature of the more abstract pieces with some clear words and melodies.I am able to fully appreciate the gorgeous fog of this album precisely because there are occasional breaks in it.

The album's best pieces tend to be ones that blur the lines between those two poles, however.Only "A Slight Grip, A Gentle Hold" fully achieves that feat, but it is the album's two-part centerpiece and the two halves take achingly beautiful and divergent paths.For the first part, Craig weaves an unusually lush and layered backdrop of warbling, fluttering vocal loops that are quite gorgeous on their own.When the main vocals finally appear, it feels absolutely transcendent, like Craig is singing a simple and pure hymn as the heavens open up and cherubim flutter around the rafters.The second part boldly strips away all those underlying loops, reducing the piece to just the unadorned central melody, then adding layers of harmonies until Craig sounds like a one-man choir.It is great, of course, but it gets even better when it unexpectedly erupts into a shivering and lovely coda of lush organ chords and wobbly tapes.Speaking of the latter, I am also quite fond of "Second Lens," which sounds like the tape machine itself has become possessed with the divine spirit.There are still some lovely slow-moving clouds of harmonized vocals, but the real magic of the piece lies in the textural details, as it feels like all of the smallest mechanical sounds have been amplified to become a symphony of hiss, crackle, straining wheels, and flapping tape.

Curiously, it was only with the gift of hindsight that I was able to appreciate what a unique and wonderful album this is: Craig was great when he was just using self-built instruments (Heretic Surface), then he was great when he started singing into tape recorders.It did not seem like a big deal to me at the time, though it is now baffling to think that there was once a time when Craig conspicuously avoided singing.I needed the added context of Centres to grasp that a seismic shift had occurred.I suppose part of that slow realization was because Breath was still primarily composed of soundscapes rather than songs, though "A Slight Grip" is a dazzling exception.This album is far more like a beautiful mosaic rather than a collection of individual highlights–a structure that makes the expanded edition's inclusion of two additional EPs quite interesting.The Short of Breath EP is the less striking of the two, as it simply feels like a seamless extension of the parent album (there is even a third variation of "A Slight Grip").It is all good, but it is so clearly cut from the exact same cloth as A Turn of Breath that it just feels like the album got a little longer.The Fresh Breath EP, on the other hand, offers a glimpse of a slightly darker, starker, and more experimental album that might have been.It seems like it would have been a good one, but Craig's instincts were infallible enough to leave me with no regrets about the path he chose.To go back to my mosaic metaphor, what Craig left out of the album is just as important as what he left in: A Turn of Breath is not great solely because he had plenty of wonderful new material–it is also great because he distilled it all to its simplest essence and avoided diluting that by paring away absolutely everything that was not necessary.The extra material is nice, but A Turn of Breath was already an essential release without it.

• Red Gate With Starling
• A Slight Grip, A Gentle Hold (Part 2)
• 6 Years, 33 Million (For Bo) (from Fresh Breath)

 

12 August 2018

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Albums and Singles

This duo of Sofie Herner and Sewer Election's Dan Johannsson is probably my favorite project to emerge from Sweden's flourishing underground in recent years. När, their third album, was originally released on vinyl back in 2017, but I believe it only became widely available in digital form this spring. While Neutral's aesthetic has certainly evolved over the years, Herner's idiosyncratic and oft-creepy lo-fi pop experiments and Johannsson's noisy textures always combine to form something stranger and more compelling than the sum of their parts. I suppose Neutral's closest kindred spirits are probably The Shadow Ring, but the best moments on När sound more like an surreal and intimate answering machine message or a ransom note delivered in the form of a blurry and distorted VHS tape.

Omlott

Neutral's approach to songcraft is quite a fascinating one, particularly when I factor in that both Herner and Johannsson are also involved in the Jandek-ian outsider folk of Enhet för Fri Musik.During the more gnarled and dissonant passages, the overlap between the two projects makes perfect sense, but some of Herner's songs sound like sultry bedroom soul that made a catastrophic wrong turn on its way to being seductive.The opening "Du" very much falls into that category, as Herner intones a breathy monologue over a bubbling synth hook.In fact, there is even a chorus.If those components were handed over to a professional studio, I suspect a credible pop song could probably emerge.Naturally, Neutral have the opposite plan in mind.For one. Herner sounds like she is singing into a boom box.Also, an intrusively oscillating and pitch-shifting drone makes the piece feel vaguely feverish and hallucinatory.Clearly not satisfied with their destruction, the duo then steer the piece into a murkier second half entitled "Ater" that rides pulsing drones into a crescendo of snarling guitar noise.No one would mistake the following "Köldgatan" for a pop song, however, as it is little more than a ghostly haze of drifting vocals and warbling feedback over a wobbly tape of a primitive drum machine beat.The first half of the album is then rounded out by "Inte Vara Rädd," which combines a woozily chorused bass line with erratic snatches of very conversational-sounding vocals.It sounds a lot like a would-be Slits or Raincoats classic that has been sucked dry by a vampire, then ripped apart by searing squalls of guitar noise.

The album's second half opens with "Berg 211," a piece that I find to be weirdly and perversely brilliant.As far as the actual sounds are concerned, it is straight-up noise, but it somehow also feels haunting and rather beautiful by the end.For the first half, Herner distractedly chats away over a throbbing and stuttering squall of white noise, but the storm unexpectedly gives way after a few minutes to leave a languorous blown-out bass groove amidst a hissing sea of tapes and screeching treble.Despite all the grinding dissonance, the piece somehow holds together as Herner shares a sultry monologue in Swedish that is punctuated by conversational asides and laughter as well as vaguely eerie recurring passages (in English) about the springtime in the back of her mind.The following "Brott/Bellevue" then returns to the inscrutable pop-like formula of the opener, as Herner confessionally whispers in Swedish over a slow-motion chord progression of wobbly organ chords.Again, there are snatches of something resembling a chorus, as well as some surprisingly melodic organ soloing.At the halfway point, however, it becomes slowly engulfed by a rumbling, hissing, and cryptic tide of field recordings courtesy of guest Matthias Andersson.  När then comes to end in characteristically enigmatic fashion, as "Rastplats" is a brief, melodic, and structured organ piece that is smeared into something blearily hallucinatory by Johannsson's genius for tape distress.

I suppose "Berg 211" is the only piece on När that truly hits the mark for me, but I am very much intrigued by Neutral's shifting, corroded, and precarious aesthetic.I suppose this album scratches roughly the same itch as some of the better Croatian Amor albums, in that both projects involve noise artists finding a way to merge melody, tenderness, and warmth with chopped-up tape experiments and a healthy dose of entropy.Of the two projects, however, Neutral is definitely the more unknown quantity, as both Herner and Johannsson each seem to bring a strong vision to the project and there is no telling what will emerge each time they collide anew.Hell, Herner by herself seems equally likely to whip up a cacophonous firestorm of guitar noise, make a bedroom soul album, front a great No Wave band, or wander off into a deep forest to make a ritualistic folk album.That is what hooks me, I suppose: I have no real idea of where Herner and Johannsson are going with this project at all, but I know it will likely pass through some unique and memorable terrain every time it surfaces. The world is full of reliably great artists, but it is the outliers like Neutral that keep music exciting for me.

12 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

"Electro-acoustic maestro and noted mastering engineer Stephen Mathieu commits a decade of spellbinding work to Radiance, collecting 12 album length discs (total: almost 13 hours!) revolving around the concept of stasis, the unfolding of time and sustained frequencies, deep listening, and immersive soundscapes. We've barely touched the sides with this one but, boy, it's a compelling, deeply immersive ride...

Completing Mathieu’s most significant cycle of work in his twenty year oeuvre, Radiance operates in a push and pull of reflection and absorption, using heat and light as metaphors for the synaesthetic qualities of sound, and how it is perceived by the listener not just thru ears. The title itself also connotes a vast scale of timelessness, but also one prone to fade away, decay, and its from these polysemous readings that Mathieu draws a remarkable spectrum of interrelated yet variegated compositions.

As ever, Mathieu is effectively dealing with the metaphysics of sound, using an array of electronics and electronic processes to divine new life in old instruments and samples, getting right down to their grain and accentuating their normally imperceptible peculiarities and latent spirits. In a sense he’s tactfully highlighting the lustre of his sounds, brining out their unique qualities for the ear to feel.That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all shiny and seductive. Rather, the pieces' textures range from blingy to coruscating and every integer in-between, sharing a feel for and fascination with the infidelity of acoustic, mechanical, and electronic sounds perhaps only comparable with the likes of previous collaborators, Akira Rabelais and the GRM’s Kassel Jaeger, or Leyland Kirby, for example, within the contemporary field.

All 12 albums in the set were individually a year or so in the making, and thusly require patient, committed listening for full comprehension The time we've spent with it so far is enlightening, rendering truly sublime passages and moments in the multi-timbral shimmer of "Sea Song I," and likewise in the tantalizing, prickly haze of "The Answer VII," while the longer pieces naturally give broader room for his ideas to grow, and beautifully so in the likes of his heavy-lidded and keening drone panorama "First Consort," while "To Have Elements Exist In Space (GRM Version)" patiently and exquisitely evokes a state of weightlessness, and, at its longest, the hour long breadth of "Feldman" operates with deeply uncanny, surface level tonal reflections, which, as glib as it may read, recalls to us the magick of looking out a bus window at night, where the internal reflections and external street lights create refractive, illusory dimensions to get totally lost in.

The slow gaze is key to this amazing suite, as it purposefully pulls away from the time-constricted demands of contemporary music consumption to offer a wide, open space where time moves differently and perceptions are readjusted, becoming malleable in the process. It’s not quick fix music, but when applied properly, the results endure."

-via Boomkat

More information can be found here.

12 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records, however, The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.

Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary’s compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within the self towards preservation. The traumatized body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice centered on first-person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.

"To Possess Is To Be In Control" makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while "Red Desert," named after Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces. The seven-minute epic "The Size of Our Desires" acts as the emotional tipping point of the record; amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.

Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part of a 'corporeal architecture' where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of industrial music. The Drought chronologizes the artist's transformation through a psychological famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.

More information can be found here.

12 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases, Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records.  However, The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.

Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary's compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within the self towards preservation. The traumatized body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice centered on first-person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.

"To Possess Is To Be In Control" makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while "Red Desert," named after Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces. The seven-minute epic "The Size of Our Desires" acts as the emotional tipping point of the record; amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.

Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part of a ‘corporeal architecture’ where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of industrial music. The Drought chronologizes the artist’s transformation through a psychological famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.

More information can be found here.

12 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Originally published as a tour cassette in June 2017, the initial run of 100 hand-numbered copies sold out at the end of the tour. A second edition was published in July and that edition sold out soon thereafter.

Many people have asked about buying downloads so we've finally decided to honor these requests while also offering a hard copy available for collectors that enjoy seeing spines on shelves.

We hope you can appreciate that we've decided to make this album an unlimited edition here on Bandcamp instead of repressing the cassette for a third edition.

You may also notice the appearance of a bonus track taken from a live recording in June 2017. Please enjoy!

More information can be found here.

12 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

For his inaugural LP for Moving Furniture Records, the Amsterdam-based Swedish sound artist BJ Nilsen turns his intense aural focus and compelling narrative power away from his well-known and much lauded predilection for field recordings of organic nature or the urban built environment. The five pieces presented on this record capture Nilsen during a short residency he did in the Fall of 2017 at Willem Twee Electronic Music Studio in Den Bosch, The Netherlands – five documents these are of improvised sessions using modular synthesizers, tone generators and test and measurement instruments.

Nilsen, ever the exploratory sound experimenter, de facto exchanged his wax rain coat for the white laboratory mantle. On Focus Intensity Power he lets the machines rule supreme. Although BJ says there's no underlying major concept to the record, the quintet of recordings is tied together to form a sturdy sonic package, tied with a red thread of analog pulse, droning waves and subtle and surprising noise interventions. Washes of natural wind or condensed bustle of London traffic as we have come to know and highly appreciate from his previous works have found their machine-counterparts in sessions that retain the flâneur's touch of slowly moving, roaming open ears with keen interest in texture and timbre. And at the same time these indoor improvisations yield a tremendous poetic freedom for both artist and listener; boundless walking through layers of pure sound – freed from time and place and space.

More information can be found here.

06 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Following up last year’s equally difficult titled tape release, the mysterious break_fold project’s newest work, 27_05_17-21_01_18 continues the stripped-down techno style that the artist cultivated on that previous release, but in a way that demonstrates a sense of growth and complexity in comparison. With a unified sound across each of the seven songs—but different arrangements for each—the final product is a varied, satisfying one that draws from a wide variety of rhythm oriented electronic music.

Reject and Fade

Compared to 07_07_15-13_04_16, there is more of an overall album-like sense of structure here, evident by the specifically designated intro and outro pieces that encapsulate the rest of the cassette very well.The opening "08_01_18_Intro" sets the stage:a short song of microscopic drum machine sounds and dramatic synth pads, it provides a strong summary of what is to follow.The concluding "08_01_18_Outro" is instead a cool-down piece:spacy, beat-less sounds that end the tape on a pleasantly calm note.

Between these two points, however, is a lot of activity.The particular sound of break_fold is not necessarily one for pounding club numbers, nor is it clinically minimalist in its approach.Instead it lies somewhere between these two extremes.For "21_01_18" there is a sense of restraint.Beats are held back to place the focus on the gliding, melodic synth passages, all propelled by a lush, dubby bassline.Rich melodies also form the core of "27_05_17," a mass of pulsating electronics that are allowed to breath and slowly expand into a great sense of ambience.

On "07_08_17," the structure may be sparse but the dynamics are not, as old school analog synth stabs and big, echoing drums stand out strongly.The break_fold sense of melody is still here, but in this case, they are pushed down a bit to give emphasis to the rhythms.The final product is a wonderful melding of the rigid, heavy beats that never relent with the subtle, slowly evolving synth melodies that evolve and vary consistently throughout.

The high point of the tape for me would be "15_10_17," which excels in its complex mix and variation in arrangement.The rhythms are layered more densely, there is a greater variety of synth work, and with some almost guitar-like melodies thrown in the piece gels as an excellent piece of instrumental synth-pop.Some of the similar melodies also appear on "19_11_17" as well, within a buzzing electronic lead and fluttering electronics.Here, however, the more melodic elements have a bit too much of a new age-y feel for my liking, but the rest of the piece is quite strong.

Like the previous tape from break_fold, there is a lot of great electronic music to be heard on 27_05_17-21_01_18.There does seem to be a greater sense of structure and cohesion this time, with the pieces going in different directions but all having a unified feel to them.Combined with the carefully planned flow of the tape from song to song, and the final product is an exceptional work of memorable melodies and strong, commanding beats.

samples:

• 27_05_17
• 15_10_17
• 07_01_17

 

05 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Last year's Patterns of Consciousness was a massive, ambitious, and occasionally dazzling psychotropic opus that sought to reshape consciousness through pattern manipulation, instantly establishing Caterina Barbieri as one of the most compelling contemporary synthesizer composers. Naturally, it will be a damn tough act to follow, but Born Again in the Voltage is not its highly anticipated successor, as its four pieces were recorded back in 2014 and 2015. On this more drone-based affair composed for the Buchla 200, Barbieri is joined by cellist Antonello Mostacci for a more modest and understated batch of songs. As such, Voltage is not quite as striking or distinctive as Barbieri's debut, but it is still quite good and "How to Decode an Illusion" is an absolutely gorgeous work.

Important

The album opens with its most slow-building and minimal piece, "Human Developers," which gradually takes shape around a core motif of distorted synth pulses with long decays.Soon after, Mostacci's cello takes over the foreground and a wonderfully moaning, shivering, and whining swirl of strings coheres, yet Barbieri's Buchla eventually makes a decidedly seismic resurgence.That is probably the most compelling part of the piece, as she whips up a shuddering earthquake of deep throbs that rumble up from the depths.That climax turns out to only be the piece's halfway point though.The second half emerges from that crescendo as a twinkling, cosmic fantasia of rapidly rippling arpeggios, buzzing chords, and vibrantly chirping electronics.It kind of feels like I am in an electronic aviary that is simultaneously hallucinatory and a bit too busy and cacophonous to be entirely comfortable.I am not sure if that is an entirely good thing, but it is certainly a unique headspace to inhabit for a while.The following "Rendering Intuitions" is considerably calmer, as it is built from a slowly churning bed of Mostacci's moaning cello drones.Gradually, a glacial and elegiac chord progression coheres and the piece achieves a kind of lurching, melancholy beauty.It is hard to tell what (if anything) Barbieri is doing performance-wise, as synthesizers are conspicuously absent, but her hand definitely shows in the layering and processing of the intertwining cello themes.In a purely textural sense, I am actually fonder of the warm and organic cello sounds than those of the Buchla, but the next piece shows that the latter can open up an absolutely sublime world of rich emotional depth in the right hands.

"How to Decode an Illusion" is a legitimate stunner, as Barbieri balances a slowly burbling, buzzing, and throbbing melody with bittersweetly swooping bloops and a vivid, haunting undercurrent of buried feedback, crackling noise, and distorted afterimages.It feels a lot like a beautifully heartfelt requiem penned by an android, but the bubbling forward momentum and vibrant textural dynamics create a perfect blend of light and shadow that prevents it from ever becoming a slog through sadness.In fact, it could very well be the most wonderful piece that Barbieri has released to date.After that triumph, the closing "We Access Only a Fraction" comes as quite a bizarre and candy-colored shock, resembling a relentlessly cheery, bubbling, and hyperkinetic synth pop freak-out.Or at least, it would sound like synth pop if it were not so maniacally busy and over-the-top.I truly do not know quite what to make of it, which I suppose is an achievement of sorts.In one sense, it is a bit annoying, but it is also transcendently bonkers, taking a mercilessly repeating simple theme and elevating it to over-caffeinated, tumbling lunacy.As a one-time experiment, its arpeggiated mayhem has some definite appeal, but a full album in that vein would be a borderline psychotic endeavor. I am relieved that Barbieri has thus far not opted to explore that direction further.

Aside from the questionable success of that final piece, however, Born Again in The Voltage is a strong and enjoyable album.Barbieri occasionally makes some unusual compositional choices, but they do seem like deliberate choices rather than flaws and the execution of her ideas is every bit as focused and vividly realized as her work on Patterns of Consciousness.The only real caveat with this release is that Barbieri's overarching aesthetic vision feels like it was still in the formative stages, as each piece on Voltage seems to pull in a different direction.That said, it was an unexpected delight to hear a cello composition from her.Moreover, Barbieri's talents as a composer were already quite formidable at this stage of her career, as "Illusion" is easily one of the best synth pieces that I have ever heard.While Patterns of Consciousness is unquestionably a more essential and visionary album than this one, Born Again in the Voltage is the more accessible and melodic of the pair.As such, it is a welcome addition to Barbieri's discography, offering a more instantly gratifying entry point for new fans than her more challenging, sprawling, and consciousness-warping 2017 epic.

• Human Developers
• Rendering Intuitions
• How to Decode an Illusion