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Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain is the quintessential work of artist/filmmaker/composer Tony Conrad. Comprised of both film installation and minimalist score for amplified strings, Ten Years leaps across genre and medium to connect his revolutionary structural filmmaking with the experiments in long-duration sound that Conrad had begun in the 1960s as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music.
"Ten Years began with image before sound," writes Andrew Lampert, "a row of quadruple projections arranged side-by-side, all the shuffling stripes cascading into each other. Over the next two hours the music throbbed and the projectors incrementally shifted inwards, their beams gradually uniting to form one pulsating, overlapping picture."
For its 1972 premiere at New York's The Kitchen, "Ten Years" included Conrad on violin as well as Rhys Chatham and Laurie Spiegel performing on instruments of the composer's own making. Chatham played the Long String Drone – a 6-foot long strip of wood with bass strings, electric pickup, tuning keys, tape, rubber band and metal hardware – while Spiegel carried out an arrhythmic bass pulse throughout.
Superior Viaduct is honored to present this previously unreleased recording of the project's breathtaking premier performance. As Chatham recounts in the liner notes, "When I first listened to this recording after not hearing it for over 40 years, it transported me back to the early Kitchen and the heyday of early minimalism, played outside the Dream Syndicate."
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The transcontinental collaboration of Arcata shoegaze abstractionist Brian Pyle and spectral Russian songstress Galya Chikiss began in Berlin (where the former was on tour and crashing with the latter) then finished in Northern California. Despite such distance, the duo's debut feels symbiotic and seductive, shimmering nocturnal mirages of devotional drone and processional dub. Named after the site of certain of Chikiss’ formative teenage experiences ("trashy rooms with old anonymous TV sets and video recorders, a zone of freedom and new information"), Video Salon conjure a ghostly, glassy-eyed mood, low-lidded metronomes layered in haze, whispers, and dazed fluorescent static. Sung in Russian, the lyrics cast an ominous spell: "I turn around and see the door / the lock moves in my hand like a cold grey snake / your sharp talons tear apart my shadow." An eerie and entrancing suite of electronic incantations by a complementary pair of exploratory expressionists.
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This Montreal-based composer/producer/church organist has been quite hard to miss over the last several years, collaborating on Tim Hecker's Virgins album, releasing a cassette on one of my favorite tape labels (Sacred Phrases), and garnering much critical praise with her 2015 collaboration with LXV (Sirens).  For her latest release, she joins the Boomkat Editions series with this brief one-sided vinyl EP.  I am not normally a fan of gimmicky vinyl formats, but that condensed format works wonders for Coverdale, as her earlier releases were a bit too uneven, fitfully pastoral, and diffuse to fully connect with me (even though they all admittedly featured some occasional flashes of brilliance).  With Grafts, however, she distills all of the best aspects of her work into roughly 20 minutes of lushly melodic and dreamily multilayered sustained beauty.  In fact, in some ways, Grafts feels like an inspired negative image of Virgins, reimagining that nerve-jangling opus as a languorous, sensuously flowing, and gently hallucinatory reverie of hazy drones and rippling pianos.
Grafts is ostensibly composed of three separate pieces, but the boundaries between them are so blurry that they seem largely inconsequential: this EP very much feels like a single longform piece that seamlessly blossoms into new shapes as it evolves.  The initial motif of the opening "2c" sounds like an elegiac and occasionally stuttering processed piano melody unfolding over a breathy bed of organ.  Each time it falters, however, it seems to restart with renewed depth and more complex harmonic coloration in the periphery.  After effectively establishing the piece's strange momentum, Coverdale launches into a distorted harpsichord-sounding solo.  For a while, that arguably becomes the piece's primary focus, but the backdrop continues to subtly and sneakily evolve, as the piano theme coheres into an obsessively repeating pulse as the organ chords shift around it.  In some ways, it seems an awful lot like classical minimalism, but there is a surprising amount of emotional resonance in those repeating chords and the various other layers unfold with an appealingly kinetic and organic looseness that bears no resemblance to the rigidity of Glass or Reich at all.  In one of her many great tricks, Coverdale repurposes their tools to weave something quite swirling and dreamlike.  Unexpectedly, that idyll is briefly disrupted by a strange small-scale storm of dissonance before the blearily gorgeous smears of piano resolve into the more sharp-focused and almost harp-like interlude of "Flutter."
With "Flutter," Coverdale trades in her more drone-like impulses for an undulating tapestry of sweeping and rippling piano arpeggios.  That is one just small part of a richly multilayered piece though, as muted organ chords quietly evolve in the hidden depths, pointillist single notes ring out in the foreground, mysterious fluttering textures creep into the periphery, and the air fills with hazy and angelic clouds of overtones and snatches of synth melodies.  It is very much a feast for the ears, though admittedly a rather short-lived one, as the final "Moments in Love" gradually emerges from the dissipating fog.  As it slowly takes shape, it becomes clear that "Moments" is quite a bit different from the swirling lushness that pervades the rest of Grafts, settling into a strangely simmering groove of shuffling snare and a tenderly played yet murkily blown-out-sounding organ melody.  Vestiges of Grafts' earlier passages continue to blearily hang in the air as a lingering fog, so "Moments" has the feel of a half-sensuous, half-broken coda of wounded beats and lazy melodies drifting from ruined, half-submerged speakers.  Such a simple and damaged-sounding outro feels weirdly appropriate after the rapturous and all-enveloping bliss of the earlier half, presenting itself as a well-timed come-down before heaven becomes numbingly predictable. Naturally, part of me is mildly exasperated that Grafts is over so quickly, but that part is easily drowned out by the part of me that feels that Grafts is an absolutely perfect EP and easily the finest work of Coverdale's career.  I genuinely feel that there is not a single wasted second here, as every single moment of this EP is either bursting with inspiration or seamlessly setting the stage for the next beguiling transition.
 
 
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Given the current social climate across the world, it is not surprising at all that Paul Thomsen Kirk, the Scottish artist (by way of Hiroshima, Japan) has not lightened the mood on his latest work as Akatombo. Short Fuse is a direct follow-up to the 2015 release Sometime, Never, and continues his penchant for memorable rhythms paired with often abrasive electronics and obscure samples, coming together familiar and timeless at the same time his first vinyl release.
Kirk has always been a stickler for presentation, and this one is no different.Short Fuse is his first vinyl release as Akatombo, and still includes his normal handmade personal accents to the packaging, as well as a CD with the entire album plus three additional pieces that would not fit on the record.Like his previous work, the music contained recklessly plows through various subgenres of electronic while never settling into one:it is too loud to be downtempo, but the production is too nuanced to be made for crashing the dance floor, and so on.The beats are always strong, however, and the complex production is not easily dissected.
On some parts of the album, the touchstones are a bit more overt.With the pulsating synthesizer loops and processed drums, there is a distinctly 1980s industrial feel throughout "Project FEAR," exacerbated by his liberal (but appropriate) use of reverb.For "Tensile Strength," he throws in some excellently distorted, grinding bass synth layers and a multitude of voice samples, resulting in what could be a lost Wax Trax release circa 1989.Things are a bit different on "Haarp! The Herald," where a somewhat relaxed Middle Eastern ambience permeates into what could be a more chilled out version of Muslimgauze, without losing the unique Akatombo sound.
Many of the songs that are not as easily categorized feature the same level of dissonance and an overall bleak mood."The Incarceration of Habit," for example, is all a mass of dense, serrated metallic layers and grinding rhythms.Kirk piles on the instrumentation and effects, but it is exactly due to that heavy dissonance and multitracked beats that the piece stands out strongly.For "Tilt, Turn, Defenestrate," which is the CD-only closer to the album, he piles the layers on even more, for a mass of sound peppered with vocal samples that nudges into more traditionally noise territories.
Much of Short Fuse is aggressive and beat heavy, but Kirk knows how to keep things varied and dynamic."George Kaplan" is fragmented and deconstructed in its construction, putting more of the focus on the grimy textures and the intentionally overcast, foggy sounding production."Solitude in Numbers" is also a somewhat ambient work, with much of the thick mixing spread out to create an excellent sense of space and depth.Never dull, but Kirk’s choice to slowly drift passages in and out, rather than throw them all together, gives it a unique edge on an otherwise oppressive sounding record.
Previous Akatombo work has been exclusively in the digital format, but the analog sound benefits Short Fuse quite well, helping to bring out the subtleties to the production.The textures seem to have a greater depth, and the beats hit even harder.The album sounds fine on CD as well, and the extra bonus songs are appreciated, although I think Paul Thomsen Kirk made the right decision as far as what to include on the record and what would be considered ancillary material.Format philosophizing aside, however, what it really boils down to is that the new Akatombo record continues Kirk’s streak in the realm of dissonant, at times ugly, but always memorable rhythm heavy electronic music.It is a marvelous sounding and compelling form of oppression though, and quite possibly the best record he has made to date.
samples:
 
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I was initially planning to write something like "somehow this wonderfully sublime 2015 release managed to slip by me completely unnoticed," but immediately realized that there was no mystery at all: the only effective way to keep abreast of Andrew Chalk's quietly expanding oeuvre is to actively keep an eye on the Faraway Press website and hope that anything I gamble on is up to Chalk's usual high standards.  While a few of his recent releases have admittedly been a bit too pastoral to fully connect with me, the glistening and gently hallucinatory reverie of this single extended piece for electric piano completely hits the mark.  In some ways it reminds me of William Basinski's eroding tape loops or Steve Roach's classic Structures From Silence album, but not in any sort of direct way.  Rather, A Light At The End of The World just feels like a mesmerizing soundscape of almost liquid textures that I could happily listen to an infinite loop for hours.
At its surface, this album is essentially a single very simple and meditative motif extended for album-length duration.  There is no clear beginning or clear end, as "A Light at the Edge of the World" essentially just begins happening and then eventually stops happening with no overtly significant evolution in-between.  Rather, Chalk is content to just quietly, tenderly, and languorously improvise around a few arpeggios.  The magic, of course, lies in the details, as Chalk has made his career as a master of nuance and understatement and this album perversely takes those (non-extreme) tendencies to their hypnotically beautiful extreme.  The single most striking aspect here is the glistening tone that Chalk conjures from his piano, as each individual note seems like a sun-dappled droplet of water slowly rolling down a windowpane.  That curiously radiant, fluid, and organic texture, coupled with the flowing, arrhythmic pace of the notes combines to evoke a slow-motion cascade of shimmering globes leaving a blearily spectral and hallucinatory after-image in their wake.  Chalk truly weaves a near-perfect illusion here, masterfully erasing himself from the picture to leave just a lazily undulating mist of warm and elegantly blurred heaven that seems to extend forever.  In short, this album is basically a lysergic summer rain experienced in extreme slow-motion (not a particularly common aesthetic).
Naturally, creating a texturally rich and dreamily shifting soundscape that feels like a living organic entity is considerably more complex than it may seem from the apparent simplicity of the central theme.  While I have admittedly encountered a few loops that were perfect enough to warrant infinite repetition, the idea of an endless loop or floating stasis tends to be a hell of a lot more compelling than the reality.  Consequently, maintaining such an illusion requires a masterful sleight of hand to inconspicuously sneak in some much needed unpredictability and dynamic variability.  Chalk achieves that objective by quietly ensuring that his rippling tumble of individual notes unfolds over a constantly shifting haze of sustained lower tones.  Also, while he is not overt about it, the arpeggios in the foreground lazily follow the drift of the underlying chords rather than lingering around the same small cluster of notes.  Consequently, what feels like a warm, amorphous drift is actually a glacially unfolding flux of constantly evolving new harmonies (and one that is beautifully deepened by the lingering, quavering cloud of overtones to boot).
Less significantly, Chalk peppers the piece with a host of small-scale dynamic touches, such as understated space-y whooshes and washes of hiss.  His greatest small-scale dynamic feats occur with the central arpeggio motif though, as he sensitively varies his attack to give his notes a wonderfully physical and multi-dimensional feel.  It seems as though they are billowing through the mist at varying levels with varying degrees of force: some seem like they barely break the surface, while others feel like a small-scale eruption.  In Chalk's hands, the cumulative effect of all these small acts and behind-the-scenes plate-spinning is quite a wonderfully absorbing spell that feels like a natural event.  I am always in awe of composers who manage to completely dissolve into their work (there are not many around).  Naturally, I feel a bit silly hailing an Andrew Chalk album for all of the same slow-burning, nuanced, and thoughtful virtues that essentially define the bulk of his oft-wonderful oeuvre, but this album definitely feels like one of the more immersive and perfectly executed jewels in his sprawling and under-heard discography.
 
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Félicia Atkinson's radical artistic transformation over the last several years has been quite an interesting one, as each new release seems to distance her further and further from her excellent work as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier and into much stranger and more challenging territory.  With her last major statement, 2015's A Readymade Ceremony, Atkinson shifted the focus away from music towards a strong emphasis on whispered spoken-word performance of repurposed found texts mingled with George Bataille and her own poetry.  Hand in Hand goes still further in that direction, often reducing the accompanying music to an absolute minimum to focus almost entirely on an eclectic and evocative array of hushed readings from old plant books, magazines, JG Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and her own writings.  The overall effect is often wonderfully surreal and intimate, but Atkinson’s hyper constrained and minimal palette does not offer enough melodicism or dynamic variety to quite carry a full album.  A few of the individual pieces, however, are quite mesmerizing (particularly the closing "No Fear But Anticipation").
The album opens in lovely (if deceptive) fashion with the subtly smeared psychedelia of "I’m Following You," a woozy reverie for Fender Rhodes organ.  For better or worse, that is Atkinson's sole foray into conventional melodicism on Hand in Hand, a decision that will never stop perplexing me given her oft-stellar past work as a multi-instrumentalist.  Intellectually, of course, I get it: during the prime of the first phase of her career, Atkinson was one of the most compelling voices in the cassette underground, but she fit very comfortably within that milieu.  With her more recent work, she has forged a much more divergent path that is very much her own.  That is certainly gutsy and inspired, but I wish the break with her past had not been quite so decisive sometimes, as it is like watching a great boxer fight with one of his arms tied behind his back.  Initially, however, Atkinson's radical minimalism serves her fairly well in the Phillip K. Dick-inspired "VALIS," as the overlapping, French-accented voices of her breathy and sensuously whispered monologue feel increasingly disconcerting and inhuman as an undercurrent of noise-damaged and insectoid textures swells below.  While she never attempts anything quite as gauche as singing, Atkinson is admittedly quite skilled at using her voice as an instrument, managing to imbue even the most mundane passages with magnetic intensity and mystery while subtly employing effects to add a patina of hissing, out-of-focus unreality.
The following "Curious in Epidavros" unveils still more of the album's recurring themes, namely a sort of plinking, hollow metal percussion and a blurting, squiggling arsenal of modular synth textures.  Variations on those two elements surface quite a lot in the following songs, which is a very disorienting and counterintuitive aesthetic indeed: half primitive home-made marimba, half retro-futurist space music.  Naturally, such a strange blend of the ancient and the future leads to some interesting directions, such as the broken, shuddering, and wobbly dub-techno of "Adaptation Assez Facile" or the druggy bass slide and clattering ping-pong ball soundscape of "Monstera Deliciosa."  The downside is that many pieces feel like brief, sketch-like experiments rather than fully formed ideas.  One notable exception to that trend, however, is "Visnaga," as the hollow plinking percussion feels like a dull, broken bell resonating through the eerie streets of a deserted town and the strangled, sputtering synth flourishes only deepen the air of menace and desolation.  Atkinson's hushed and fraught vocals seem especially unsettling and confessional, which is an impressive testament to the perverse genius of her art, as the text merely extolls the virtues of a desert plant.  Elsewhere, "A House A Dance A Poem" reprises the deeply broken and warped dub of "Adaptation," tweaking the formula with a buried transmission of chopped, stammering vocal snippets and an invasive, random-sounding high-hat that feels like a grotesque parody of dance music.
Aside from "Visnaga," the unquestionable zenith of Hand in Hand is saved for the final piece (the aforementioned "No Fear But Anticipation").  For one, it is quite a bit sexier than the rest of the album, as Atkinson ruminates on the nature of desire.  More importantly, she does so over a sensuous and understated groove that offers some rare glimpses of non-subverted chords, melodies, and rhythm.  That alone would be enough to make it the album highlight, but it goes still further to build to a wonderful outro of wildly chirping synth jabbering.  Aside from that, Hand in Hand is mostly a curiously challenging, uneasy, and chance-influenced affair that bears little resemblance at all to any of Atkinson’s peers in the contemporary experimental music scene.  That gulf would almost be wide enough to make Atkinson seem like a hermetic autodidact/outsider artist, but she actually does seem to be part of an established movement: she just happened to be born at the wrong time, as her passion for found text, unconventional tools, and bizarre juxtapositions would have made her very much welcome in the Surrealist/Dada milieu or the '60s/'70s avant-garde that birthed so many of her current influences (Robert Ashley, Joan La Barbara, etc.).  She certainly seems to share that generation’s revolutionary/"anything is possible" mindset, gamely blurring the boundaries between poetry, cut-ups, performance art, conceptual art, and music and even transforming this album into a 7-hour "environmental audiobook" for an exhibition in Rennes.  Such ambition and adventurousness certainly do not always translate into accessible music, but they did not for folks like Stockhausen and John Cage either.  While Hand in Hand is not my favorite Félicia Atkinson album, it is definitely one of her most bold and admirable releases to date, as she is tirelessly straining at the bounds of sound art rather than making any attempt to play it safe.  When she succeeds, the results can be quite striking.
 
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The new EP from Fovea Hex "The Salt Garden, Part 2" is the second in a series of 3 EPs released released on Headphone Dust in conjunction with German label Die Stadt, and contains 4 brand new tracks. Issued as a beautifully packaged limited edition 10 inch vinyl that also includes a CD copy of the EP. Pre-ordered copies also include a bonus remix CD EP by Abul Mogard.
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The Institute of Sonology in Utrecht has earned its international reputation mostly for pioneering work in the field of computer-assisted algorithmic composition and digital sound synthesis by composers such as Gottfried Michael Koenig, Werner Kaegi, Paul Berg and Barry Truax. Anyone familiar with the music of these composers would have to admit that even within this ‘genre’ there were no stylistic dogmas. The stylistic range of Sonology’s artistic output becomes even broader when the work of other staff and frequent guests is taken into account, for example the compositions based on field recordings and audio-visual projects by Frits Weiland, the radiophonic works and pieces for tape and instruments by Luctor Ponse, the cybernetic tape compositions by Roland Kayn, or the experiments with computer graphics by Peter Struycken, to name just a few. And then there was Jaap Vink.
Jaap Vink (Den Helder, 1930) studied engineering at first, but then became interested in electronic music. He attended courses in electroacoustics at Delft University of Technology and installed a pedagogical studio for electronic music in 1961 at the Gaudeamus Foundation in Bilthoven with the help of the Nederlandse Radio Unie (NRU). He was a staff member at the Institute of Sonology as a teacher in analogue studio techniques from 1967 until his retirement in 1993.
Jaap Vink always tried to break out of the periodicity of the sounds so abundantly available in the electronic music studio. Although his music was entirely produced with purely electronic sound material, its textures resemble the richness of orchestral sounds, or large natural sound-complexes, as a result of recursive processes. The density of this sound material increases and decreases by careful control of feedback networks with configurations of analogue tape recorders (delay lines), filters and modulators. It should come as no surprise that his work is being rediscovered at a time when a new generation of musicians has conquered the stage with modular synthesizer setups and 'no-input mixers,' in which feedback of audio and control signals plays an important role. And although Jaap Vink’s music wasn’t performed live but produced and recorded on magnetic tape in the studio, it is exactly the human interaction with feedback processes that connects his work with the current generation of live electronic music performers. To some extent Jaap Vink’s pieces are indeed recorded live improvisations, and extending his patches and ‘rehearsing’ with them was an ongoing process. To see Jaap Vink at work in the studio was to hear the studio coming to life. After his composition "Screen" (1968) had been performed at concerts and released on the famous Electronic Panorama LP-set (Philips 6740 001), Jaap Vink was asked regularly to contribute to Sonology's concerts in the Netherlands and abroad. It was for these occasions that his recorded studio improvisations were brought to the level of fixed compositions and given titles. The selection presented here gives an overview of Jaap Vink’s works made in Utrecht, ranging from his first composition "Screen" up to "Tide 1985," produced during the Institute of Sonology’s last year in that city.
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Following the widespread critical acclaim of his recent Centres album (July 2016), Vancouver-based vocalist / composer Ian William Craig returns with Slow Vessels, an album-length EP which both extends and radically re-imagines Centres, rendering six of its tracks in a stunning new light. While not quite an “unplugged” version, it is fundamentally stripped back, raw and predominantly acoustic, the songs included have been returned to their point of origin.
Slow Vessels sees Ian paring back the dense, billowing layers and heavily distressed textures that dominated the album and re-playing these tracks on a borrowed acoustic guitar and piano. While four of the tracks also feature some minimal tape manipulation, it’s a move that foregrounds the strength of the songs, imbuing them with a heightened sense of nearness and intimacy and briefly reframing their author in the more traditional mantle of singer-songwriter. Deeply affecting and almost devotional in character, this utterly gorgeous re-setting of the songs sees them bathed in a warm, golden glow and throws a brilliant new slant on Ian’s prodigious creativity.
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"With Zhark's first release of 2017 - its follow-up to aces from Casual Violence and Stärker - Kareem takes the reins with Your Markets Are Volatile for a superb session helming to the tenets of production that have served him beautifully well thus far, effectively divining a proper sort of frequency pressure that translates brilliantly over sound systems which are worth their weight, as opposed to the saturated waveforms and in-your-grill intensity favoured by too many other producers to mention.
With only a corner of tongue-in-cheek, his opening statement "My Degree Is A Black Belt" demonstrates his unique approach in bleakest, suspenseful style with a palette of bone-dry drums, viscous subs and tense strings elegantly arranged with nuff space for bony bodies to move within, whilst "There Is No End In The Light Of The Tunnel" coolly defines a core idea of dark techno - it’s about the journey not destination - in pure blank-eyed, slogging and haunting terms.
Turn over and "Your Markets Are Volatile" offers one of his signature steppers, stripped down to grubbing acid grind, whipcrack snares and swirling darkroom voices with loads of fetid air between he grooves, seemingly prepping you for the Vainio-esque halfstep killllller, "Holy Alliance."
Bonus to the digital, you’ll find the hulking trudge of "Approaching Dying Planet At 65,702qms," and the ‘floor-caving subs of "El Pato" hearkening back to his nastiest gear c. 1999-2000, but choking under fathoms of sub-bass weight."
-via Boomkat.
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Editions Mego is proud to present the first release of a brand new project from JG Thirlwell. This is Xordox.
Xordox orbits a universe inhabited by darkness, wit, mystery adventure and experimentation. The cinematic quality that exudes from Thirlwell’s bent being presents itself in Neospection; unlike Thirlwell’s other works, this is predominantly a synthesizer record, including recording sessions from his residency at the legendary EMS studios in Stockholm. Sarah Lipstate (aka Noveller) plays her super-processed soundscape guitar on three of the tracks on the album, and additional mixing took place at Lazer Sound studios with Al Carlson (who works extensively with Oneohtrix Point Never).
Out July 2017 on Editions Mego.
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