13 April 2017

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Albums and Singles

Félicia Atkinson's new full-length album, Hand In Hand, is an expanded development of her musical compositions started with the highly-acclaimed A Readymade Ceremony released on Shelter Press in 2015, and follows her collaborative effort with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma Comme Un Seul Narcisse (Shelter Press, 2016).

Composed over the year of 2016 at EMS during a snow storm and at home in Brittany, Hand in Hand could be considered as the most ambitious body of work recorded by the French musician and artist.

Doubt and Optimism are the two sides of a same coin. Hand in Hand is arid and warm in its whole synchrony and opposition. Days are burning and nights are made of ice. Coyotes are exchanging sounds with rattles snakes while bunnies are hiding. Strident modular sounds are tearing apart minimal beats and drones. The stories told by A Voice to the auditor are no longer fictions and become slowly reality.

Electric waves transmitted by living creatures and machines seem to deliver special sounds and frequencies that only non-human can hear. They grow and vibrate despite of the walls and interdictions. Therefore, the human who is listening to this record might find in it a particular kind of emotion a way to take space in silence, and frame a certain vision of thinking while losing a certain notion of time, acknowledging step by step its universal environment. Plants, galaxies, animals, machines, Hand in Hand.

This record is meant to be a moment of common thinking and listening in its diversity and abstraction. In the same way a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick or a sculpture by Guy Mees can be percieved: trivial, sensitive and mysterious at the same time.

More information can be found here.

13 April 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

On the Echoing Green is an elegant work of lush, shimmering sound, rendered with a singular touch by eternal electric romantic Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

In contrast to the haze and hermetic process of previous albums, Green was conceived as a deliberate experiment in clarity and collaboration: "I was interested in trying to bring out more overt pop elements, to let them come to the front and be present. I also have more trust now in letting things happen – trusting other people’s musicianship, and being open to people’s ideas. Eventually, things emerge."

What emerged from this bond are eight rapturous and richly melodic slow dives of swirling guitar, bass, synthesizer, piano, and drum machines, dramatically accented in places by heavenly arcs of voice courtesy of Argentinian singer-songwriter Sobrenadar. Cantu-Ledesma encouraged chemistry and intuition in the studio by beginning the album without any demos for reference; he and his collaborators pursued patterns and hypnotic textures across long-form improvisations until gradually songs began to take shape.

This is music of growth and grandeur, of ascent and exploration, played with purpose and passion by a craftsman in tune with the beauty of sound and the harmony of light. In his words: "[This album] feels like spring – things coming alive, blooming, emerging from winter."

More information can be found here.  Out in June 2017.

13 April 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

After the long overdue release of Drew McDowall’s debut solo album Collapse in 2015, the experimental music underground saw McDowall as an arrival of an artist that was always here, hiding in plain sight. He was quietly in the background, pulling the levers on some of the most influential recordings in electronic music and with shifting his focus from the role as band member of such legendary acts as Coil & Psychic TV along with his recent collaborative efforts alongside Tres Warren (of Psychic Ills) in Compound Eye, McDowall came to finally identity as a singular artist and figurehead to a movement that has vitally required his presence.

His second full length endeavor for Dais Records is aptly titled Unnatural Channel, allowing McDowall to allocate offerings to the ghosts of his past using methods not fully understood. Moving forward from the impact left with his first album, Unnatural Channel moves McDowall into more uncharted territory. From the opening mark, Drew’s distinct fingerprint is evident on the track "Tell Me the Name," his signature ambient ebb and flow to pulsing electronics painted over reverberated percussions that have been pulled apart and spun around the spectrum.

Once the introduction has been made, the album moves forward into more rhythmic territory using classic industrial structures found on his previous work but fused with tumbling aural friction complimented by more techno-based cadence. Views into McDowall’s unconscious are ever-present in "This Is What It's Like," a reflective decent into madness brought on by the anxiety of sleep deprivation. Looping the title mantra, the listener gets caught into the author's own delusion and lost within the auditory hallucination.

The two part suite of "Unnatural Channel" subjects us to a torrent of fluttering and panic-stricken electronics, subtle in its dispatch but powerful in its impact. Field recordings of the most personal, hypnogogic dream-state, lost within itself until McDowall unveils his unbalanced, sequential patterns of fibrous, metallic waveforms and subsonic bass kicks that hit the air with such strength and coercive force that it is impossible not to be converted.

Ending with the statement of "Unshielded," the album ties off with the primal voice talents of artist Roxy Farman of the Brooklyn avant-techno duo Wetware. Roxy’s confused phrasing seemingly crashes head-on with McDowall’s cathartic finale, using every method of sonic hypnosis at his disposal to finish with a bold yet disconcerting assurance.

Out May 26, 2017 on Dais.

09 April 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Natalie Chami's project TALsounds documents solo sessions of improvised synthesis and live-looped vocal performances, presented to the listener as discrete takes without overdubs. The decisions she makes in her atmospheric sketches - the onset of a quivering vocal melody, the echoing turn of a delay knob - flash across her stereo spreads as seismic ripples within a network of standing sounds. Frozen into recursive afterimages of fingers on keys, her intricate synth arrangements juxtapose textures from her rig of analog electronic instruments and compound into narrative arcs at once alien in tone and direct in human-to-human address. Love Sick, TALsounds's first LP release, follows a series of full-length tapes on labels like Hausu Mountain (run by Chami's bandmates in free music trio Good Willsmith), Patient Sounds, and Moog's own physical imprint. While these releases showcased Chami's ideas in the context of looser improvisations, drifting off into extended states of narcosis and looping architectures, Love Sick distills her tactics of spontaneous composition into her most concise song cycle to date.

Love Sick shifts through a program of contrasting moods and tonal palettes, from close-mic confessional meditations to funereal deep space ritualism. Queasy and clipped percussion samples pop into view over live-layered sheets of sawtooth drone. Liturgical organ chords intersect with the fine-grain whirr of monophonic noise formants. With each live sketch laid out over a length closer to the traditional pop format, far-flung sonic elements arrive as momentary upheavals to animate the space Chami allots them before falling back into the murk. Within webs of texture, TALsounds's vocal performances sound out in her most frank mode of address yet captured. Fragments of discernible lyrics smear into melismatic melody lines and loop back around, intertwining into complex harmonies with her wordless vocalizations. Her vocal style, informed as much by her classical voice and opera training as by a lifetime of immersion in Björk, Portishead, Aaliyah, and Sade, blends a hands-on process of technical self-accompaniment with moments of diaristic intimacy. A more direct recording strategy, with individual feeds of her live performances mixed in isolation, renders every sigh, whisper, and wail at a level of detail far from the realm of cavernous reverb ambience. When Chami's lyrics emerge on the spot in flashes of legibility, they draw out a fascination, or maybe a preoccupation, with the control that raw emotions have over mind and body. The love sickness she offers sidesteps any cutesy, wistful implications, and skirts closer to a state of physical illness whose cause and solution can't be identified. TALsounds captures the stewing within these feelings, the confidence to keep them close and use them for fuel for another fire, without letting confusion or fear of imperfection overtake her.

Love Sick reveals TALsounds as a remarkable anomaly in an era of bedroom producers and laptop-abetted pop projects - capable of sculpting dense fields of sound in live takes and channeling improvised vocal performances into emotional frameworks that betray no defects for their process of instant conception. Quite simply, this way of making music has become second nature for Chami. Distinctions between genres and performance style give way to the clear limitlessness of her musical practice, the experiments of her workaday recording regimen. Her art floats with a body and character not quite identical to her own, pressed into fluid and squeezed of symbolism. TALsounds paints Love Sick from moment to moment with clouds of abstraction and ambiguity, while understanding with some cosmic certainty that this music is the only appropriate form through which to communicate her own depths.

Out June 2nd on Ba Da Bing.

09 April 2017

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Albums and Singles

Mono No Aware (もののあわれ) is the first compilation to be released on PAN, collating unreleased ambient tracks from both new and existing PAN artists.

Featuring Jeff Witscher, Helm, TCF, Yves Tumor, M.E.S.H., Pan Daijing, HVAD, Kareem Lotfy, ADR, Mya Gomez, Sky H1, James K, Oli XL, Bill Kouligas, Flora Yin-Wong, Malibu, and AYYA, the compilation moves through more traditional notions of what is called "ambient," to incorporating wider variations that fall under the term.

"Mono no aware," "the pathos of things," also translates as "an empathy toward things," or "a sensitivity to ephemera." A term for the awareness of impermanence, or the transience of things. A meditation on mortality and life's transience, ephemerality heightens the appreciation of beauty and sensitivity to their passing. In investigating the passing of time, the boundaries between memory and hallucination become blurred; between fiction and reality. The movement of time transforms into an eternal present.

Out now on PAN.

09 April 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

After nearly a decade-long recording hiatus, iconic force of nature Diamanda Galás has resurfaced with pair of themed albums of characteristically dark covers and interpretations.  Linked by two different versions of the traditional "O Death," the partially studio-recorded All The Way revisits the familiar territory of classic blues and country while the St. Thomas the Apostle live performance delves into the even more familiar subject of death.  Both albums have their moments of brilliance, but the St. Thomas performance is arguably more accessible, if only because Galás's demonic operatic flourishes  feel a bit more at home in her own arrangements of poems and texts than they do when all that firepower is directed at, say, a Johnny Paycheck song.  Also, it is quite a bit looser and more varied.  Accessibility is quite relative with an artist as simultaneously beloved and polarizing as Galás though, as even the sultriest, sexiest jazz standards can erupt into primal, window-rattling intensity with absolutely no warning.

Intravenal Sound Operations

All the Way kicks off with the studio-recorded title piece, a song that I best remember via Frank Sinatra.  All similarities to Sinatra are strictly limited to the lyrics though, as the sometimes dissonant and erratic avant-jazz piano and Diamanda's alternately hissing and snarling vocals makes the song feel like a bitter and threatening warning from a wronged woman who is probably on her way to go repeatedly stab a happy couple.  Curiously, it gradually becomes somewhat less threatening and a bit more conventionally melodic as it progresses, which is almost more disturbing, as it could mean that menace is slowly becoming mingled with better memories or just that the narrator is prone to unpredictably shifting moods.  In either case, it is quite an unsettling piece and a prime example of the sort of disturbing twists on the torch song genre Galás excels at here, as she subverts the expected kittenish seduction into something that feels a lot more like being mesmerized by a succubus...then being ferociously ripped apart.  Much like the rest of the album, "All the Way" is essentially just Galás alone at a piano (raw and undiluted), though it does offer some rare and subtle studio embellishment in the form of well-placed echoing after-images.

The hot streak that began with "All the Way" continues uninterrupted for the entire first side of the album, as the smoldering "You Don’t Know What Love Is" is especially electrifying.  Galás also returns to the Chet Baker chestnut she so harrowingly interpreted on Malediction and Prayer ("The Thrill is Gone"), but plays it fairly straight this time around, taking a tender and mournful tone rather than a feral one…initially, at least–it takes a hard turn towards the cathartic, maniacal, and obsessive near the end.  I suppose that unpredictable trajectory, aside from her prodigious vocal range and power, is what makes Diamanda's interpretations of these standards so unique: I never know when a Pandora's box of howling anguish is about to be unleashed.  The following foray into Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight," however, is an unexpected aberration to that trend, as Diamanda gives her throat a brief rest to showcase her mercurial piano virtuosity.  "Round Midnight" proves to be the calm before the storm though, as Galás plunges into the album’s bizarre and eccentric centerpiece, "O Death."  It is a piece that she seems singularly fixated upon, as it appears in live form on both of her new releases in addition to its previous appearance on 2008's Guilty Guilty Guilty.  I suspect it is exactly the kind of piece that separates the serious Diamanda fans from the more faint-hearted dabblers like myself, as its simple piano blues erupts something that sounds like an entire musical theater production or one-woman show condensed into a disorienting 10-minute tour de force of howling, shrieking, and ululating.  I truly do not know what to make of it, as the high points are absolutely face-melting, but it makes for a thoroughly unsettling and challenging listening experience as a whole (Galás even seems to be speaking in tongues at one point).  It feels embarrassingly lazy to observe that Diamanda sounds "possessed," but that is exactly how she sounds during the more unhinged and explosive moments of "O Death."

In theory, that demented freeform hurricane should be an impossible act to follow, but the coda of Johnny Paycheck’s "Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone to Kill" feels weirdly appropriate.  Naturally, it does not sound at all like the original, as Galás inventively transforms it from vaguely "outlaw country" territory into something resembling a rapturous gospel piece.  It also has an almost conversational tone in places, as if she is cheerfully explaining the liberating pleasures of murdering one's former lover  to a roomful of rapt (yet understandably somewhat confused) children.  After the harrowing eruption of "O Death," nothing could be more perversely welcome.

Samples:

• All The Way
• You Don't Know What Love Is
• O Death

Galás has made no secret of her love of Maria Callas, so it is fitting that her St. Thomas the Apostle performance opens with a dose of relatively pure opera in the form of her own adaptation of a text by Cesare Pavese.Although it roughly translates as "Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes," it is not nearly as terrifying as some of Galás's jazz standards, opting instead for a kind of ghostly beauty.  Much like All the Way, the Pavese piece and the seven other songs that follow all feature Galás alone at her piano, which suits the material just fine.  This album feels a bit more loose, improvised, tender, and informal though, as if I am listening in on Diamanda playing late at night in her living room after a couple glasses of wine (rather than listening to her channel an intense parade of murderous seductresses and spurned lovers).  That casual charm extends to the eclectic nature of the selections as well–though death is the unwavering theme, Galás effortlessly shifts languages and moods from song to song.  For example, "Anoixe Petra" sounds like a rousing Greek wake, while her cover of Albert Ayler's "Angels" sounds like a meandering gospel piece that intermittently erupts into atypically joyful upper-register vocal pyrotechnics.  It is nice to hear some major chords every once in a while, as darkness needs contrast to make its full impact.

After Ayler, Galás shifts to German, giving voice to a text by poet/radical Ferdinand Freiligrath, which is an intriguing journey through rumbling low-end piano flourishes, dissonant chords, tender lyricism, lovely ascending melodies, and a crescendo of blood-curdling banshee howls.  French poet Gérard de Nerval turns up to the party as well, as Diamanda transforms his ode to Artemis (the huntress and protector of womankind) into a snarling lament.  Apparently the French language is an especially fertile ground for musings on mortality, as a pair of Jacques Brel pieces make the cut as well ("Fernand" and "Amsterdam").  His chansons are an especially good fit for Galás's aesthetic, as their inherent melodrama and theatricality make her biting and snarling divergences a comparatively short trip up the intensity dial.  Brel's "Amsterdam" is especially delightful and spirited, as Diamanda seems to be channeling a boisterous, fast-talking prostitute and having a wonderful time doing it.  I daresay I would even describe it as "fun," albeit in a "macabre show tune" kind of way.  Less overtly fun is yet another incarnation of "O Death," which is the lengthy centerpiece of this album as well.  I definitely like this version a lot better than the one on All The Way though, as its freewheeling sassiness and cackling bluesiness is considerably less shrill than its sister version.  Of course, Galás still hits her share of unearthly peaks and bestial screeches and howls, but they feel more natural and ecstatic here.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I was actually at one of the two Harlem shows, I did not have particularly high expectations for At Saint Thomas The Apostle, as I generally find live albums extraneous and indulgent.  More importantly, watching Diamanda perform live is a singularly mesmerizing and profound experience–one that I knew could not possibly be approximated by a mere recording.  This album offers quite an appealing and surprisingly intimate consolation prize though, as Galás feels less like An Important Artist Creating Important Art and more like a charismatic creative supernova unselfconsciously and joyously burning through all of her favorite songs for a church full of devoted fans.  Naturally, Galás's more terrifying, intense, and iconic work will continue to be her legacy, but Saint Thomas the Apostle is probably the best entry point to her singularly uncompromising oeuvre that anyone could ever hope for…aside from, of course, attending one of her actual performances: anyone who can walk away from one of those unmoved is categorically dead inside.

Samples:

• Angels
• Fernand
• Verr√° La More E Avr√° I Tuoi Occhi

 

02 April 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

I have historically had a complicated relationship with Michal Jacaszek's music, as I love his aesthetic and he consistently releases deeply immersive and intriguing albums, yet he has an uncanny knack for stylistic quirks that subjectively rub me the wrong way (harpsichords, a penchant for gloom and somberness, etc.).  Consequently, I was more or less just waiting around for an album to finally surface that was a bit more to my taste and KWIATY is that album. One one hand, Jacaszek mostly sticks to his familiar territory of dark, hiss-ravaged neo-classical fare, but the new twist is that he enlisted a trio of female vocalists to give voice to the metaphysical poetry of 17th century Englishman Robert Herrick.  While such a conceit admittedly sounds very arcane and high-concept on paper, it reveals itself to be quite beautiful in execution, often resembling an eerie, crackling, fractured, and otherworldly strain of dreampop.

Ghostly International

One of the most appealing aspects of Michal Jacaszek's art, for me anyway, is how effortlessly pure and anachronistic his music seems.While he is ostensibly a modern classical composer, he crafts melancholy and Romantic chamber music in a way that suggests he is stylistically indifferent to the last few hundred years of trends. As if that were not enough, Jacaszek further blurs the lines of reality with an elegant patina of hiss and distortion and artful infusions of field recordings. In the realm of texture, Jacaszek is a true master, bringing his groaning strings and simple melodies to vibrant life with a mixture of visceral graininess, ghostly afterimages, tape distress, and decay.He also has an impressive intuitive talent for spacious, uncluttered arrangements, conveying a lot with a minimum of moving parts.At his best, Jacaszek essentially sounds like a broken music box playing in a haunted snowglobe.My only real sticking point is how monochromatically bleak that vision can be, which is why KWIATY is such a revelation: with vocalist Hania Malarowska, Jacaszek has found the ideal foil for transforming his deep melancholy into something darkly sensual.Jacaszek has not so much changed as simply found the one piece that was naggingly missing from his otherwise perfect puzzle. While Malarowska is the album's clear centerpiece, she is also joined by Joasia Sobowiec-Jamioł and Natalia Grzebała to form a trio of ghostly Sirens cooing through the crackling, psychotropic murk of Jacaszek’s otherworldly dream.

Amusingly, I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out who Malarowska’s vocals called to mind, before finally realizing that it was Sade.That goes a long way towards explaining why gorgeous pieces like "To Perenna" sound like they were recorded by an erotic ghost on a windsweptbeach.Curiously, despite his hazy and diffuse aesthetic and the fact that he is borrowing his words from a 17^th century poet, Jacaszek proves to be an astonishingly great songwriter.If "To Perenna" had been handed to a producer less unswervingly focused on evoking a bleary, hallucinatory, and achingly romanticpast, it is not inconceivable that it could have been a soulful R&B smash.  "To Violets" is another favorite of mine, as it boasts similarly strong melodies and sensuous vocals, as well as an absolute beautiful theme that sounds like a warbling gramophone recording of an angelic chorus.  As for the rest of the album, Jacaszek and company occassionally allow themselves to blossom again into fully formed song ("kwiaty" translates as "flowers," incidentally), but the primary emphasis is upon mood and atmosphere.KWIATY does not feel like a suite of discrete and structured songs so much as it feels like mysterious and flickering transmission from a lovesick apparition from an imagined past.The melodies and arrangements are wonderful, but they are largely secondary to the immersive and transcendent illusion that Jacaszek is expertly weaving.If I found an mysterious old Victrola record in the dusty attic of a ruined mansion and a sexy revenant seemed to be bleeding into a cracking, hissing, and distressed recording of a string ensemble, the last things on my mind would be chord changes and harmonies.  The same is true of KWIATY.

The sole wobble in Jacaszek's otherwise perfect vision comes near the end of the album with the duet "To Blossoms," as the straightforward acoustic guitar, male-female duel vocals, and subtle electronic bloops make it feel like a cover of a Trembling Blue Stars song rather than a half-remembered dream of an enigmatic and beautiful otherworldly tableaux.  Admittedly, it is a perfectly fine and well-crafted song, but it is a bit too structured and conspicuously contemporary to avoid breaking through the sustained soft-focus unreality that wonderfully pervades the rest of the album.Aside from that, I love absolutely everything about KWIATY, as Jacaszek displays an unerring gift for mood, dynamics, melody, texture, nuance, depth, and mystery.This album is a sublime masterpiece, revealing just enough soul and exquisite melody at the surface to instantly lure me in, but elegantly obscuring an ocean of unknown depth beneath.

Samples:

• To Flowers
• To Perenna
• Soft Music

 

02 April 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

I am only a casual Wolf Eyes fan, so the bulk of their endless tide of releases passes by me unnoticed.  Every couple of years, however, they unleash something big to remind everyone that they are just as relevant as ever and continuing to tirelessly evolve.  The latest salvo in that vein is ostensibly this one, which also happens to be the inaugural release for the band's new Lower Floor Music imprint.  Stylistically, the two bookend pieces share a lot of common ground with the better moments of 2013's No Answer : Lower Floors, eschewing noise for something resembling deconstructed rock music that has gone sick and wrong.  When it sticks to that template, Undertow is quite good, but the more abstract and sketchlike material separating its two highlights makes for a somewhat uneven whole.

Lower Floor

There are a lot of esoteric strains of underground music colliding on Undertow's opening title piece, but none of them feels particularly like noise.  That is neither a good nor bad thing, but James Baljo-era Wolf Eyes can seem an awful lot like a rock band (or at least a "trip metal" band, as they would describe themselves).  Structurally, "Undertow" is basically just a simple and slow stoner metal bass line endlessly repeated beneath Nate Young's deadpan, misanthropic, and existential dread-filled monologue ("I count every deceit as they repeat like receipts of doom").  There is some distinctively un-rock activity happening in the periphery, however, like subtly buzzing electronics and reverb-soaked howls from John Olson’s self-built wind instruments.  Still, for the most part, the piece essentially feels like a skeletal Black Sabbath jamming with a terminally depressed beat poet and a heroin-impaired saxophonist.  That is perhaps not an aesthetic that many are clamoring to replicate, but it works just fine for Wolf Eyes: though Young’s vocals probably verge on (possibly intended) self-parody, their blasé cool fits well with the broken, stuck-in-neutral feel of the groove.  Also, in a weird way, the piece is a lot hookier than most of Wolf Eyes' deconstruction-happy contemporaries such as The Dead C.  It is almost like they could casually toss off catchy songs if they felt like it, but are not particularly happy about it at all.

Of course, the next three pieces show that Wolf Eyes are even more adept at tossing off non-catchy non-songs.  Clocking in under two minutes, "Laughing Tides" is little more than a forgettable interlude of strangled whines and creaking strings over a random-sounding backdrop of whooshes and squelches. It is hard to believe that they did not have anything stronger that they could have included instead, but it is probably just a space-filler necessitated by the vinyl format.  Still, the following "Texas" is roughly more of the same, though it is twice as long and at least throws in an eerie flute-like melody.  It kind of sounds like a rotting orchestra of the undead tuning up for a performance that never starts.  Remarkably, the perplexing trend of false-starts continues unabated with "Empty Island," which sounds like a Jamaican dub producer who willfully set out to do everything as wrongly as possible: the groove is sluggish and gutted, the percussion is non-existent, and Olson’s ghostly haze of horns occasionally duels with Baljo's anachronistic metal-damaged noodling and shredding.  Exasperatingly, none of those pieces are particularly derivative, uninspired, or indicative of a lack of vision.  Rather, they all just kind of stop before developing into anything substantial enough to be rewarding.

Thankfully, that trend is reversed with the closing epic "Thirteen," which gamely revisits the slow-motion groove and spoken-word aesthetic of "Undertow," but stretches out for almost 14 minutes.  Instead of a strong bass line this time around, there is a wobbly and gnarled repeating chord, yet otherwise the template is the same.  The sole significant difference is merely that Olson, Young, and Baljo actually hang around long enough to use their groove as a jumping off point into something more.  In this case, the "something more" is increasingly distorted and warped vocals and an almost free-jazz degree of howling and echoing horns from Olson.  Disorientingly, Baljo sometimes seems like he is playing a completely different song when he is not laying down murky slabs of power chord sludge, which adds nicely to the escalating sense of wrongness and disquiet.  At its zenith, it sounds an awful lot like a flock of drugged geese circling a malfunctioning tape player, an aesthetic I very much enjoy.  In fact, pieces like "Thirteen" are exactly why I keep buying Wolf Eyes albums.  I just wish there were more of them here.  In fact, I wish there was more of anything here, as Undertow is under half an hour long and almost half of it feels like filler thrown together in an afternoon.  I suppose that is the fundamental caveat with Wolf Eyes though:  they could not have churned out 300 releases if they made a habit of lingering on ideas long enough to bring out their full potential.  As a fan, my expectation is merely that an occasional gem will sometimes surface from the endless messy torrent spewing forth from Wolf Eyes’ bleak and disturbed collective psyche.  With "Thirteen" at least, they have added one more to the pile.

• Undertow
• Texas
• Thirteen

 

02 April 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

I truly never know quite what to expect from erstwhile Starving Weirdo Brian Pyle, as his Ensemble Economique project has covered plenty of shifting territory with varying results over the last decade.  His albums are certainly always intriguing and often deliciously aberrant, but I have not been truly knocked sideways since 2011's Crossing The Path, By Torchlight.  With In Silhouette, his 12th album, Pyle steps away from his recent forays into darkwave to plunge back into the unapologetically hallucinatory and warped terrain that I love best.  He has not entirely jettisoned his dark pop instructs though, as In Silhouette's deep psychedelia is enhanced by host of whispering and mysterious female voices.  While not every piece quite captures Pyle at his zenith, In Silhouette is cinematic in the best sense of the word, as it feels like being plunged completely (and uncomfortably) into a noirish and Lynchian world of shadow, menace, and dark sexuality.

Denovali

The opening epic "In the Clear Blue Water of Memory" instantly makes it clear that In Silhouette is going to be quite an unnerving, sinister, and challenging mindfuck of an album.  Joined by Editions Mego artist Jung an Tagen, Pyle unleashes a roiling miasma of breathy, backwards female voices; ghostly "horror movie" choral touches; evocative field recordings; and nervously stuttering and skittering synthesizers.  Stretching out for over 20 minutes, "Clear Blue Water" is a complexly layered and shifting haze of eerie moods and sputtering textures that often sounds like a séance being fitfully drowned out by an apocalyptic plague of extra-dimensional crickets. Other times, it feels like a bad dream set in a vast empty factory or deserted boatyard.  In either case, there is no respite to Pyle's gleefully blackened onslaught of bad vibes.  If the piece has a fault, it is only that Pyle is content to amorphously drift and undulate for the duration rather than ever blossoming into something more structured or melodic.  It still works though, as there is a compelling dynamic arc in its endless ebb and flow and a truly bewildering amount of activity.  It somehow manages to be simultaneously nerve-jangling and completely immersive, which is quite a tricky feat to pull off.  I am very much the target demographic for disturbing uneasy listening in this vein, of course, but an entire album of it would be absolutely exhausting and overwhelming, so I was somewhat relieved that the remaining four pieces dialed back the deranged intensity a bit.  Visiting a nightmare is always preferable to living in one.

Actually, the following "Battle Cry" might be even more malicious in intent, but it is at least mercifully shorter.  Built upon a thick and menacing synth motif and a tense backdrop of howling winds, ominous crackling, and dissonant howling harmonies, it sounds like it belongs over the slowly panning opening shot of an absolutely soul-scorching horror film.  Curiously, "Gonna Get Right With God" sounds like a thinly veiled variation on the exact same motif, but with a somewhat different mood due to the emphasis on an echoing female voice (French?) and the muted, erratic pulse of a drum machine.  In a way, Pyle seems to be embracing a very post-melody aesthetic, as large swaths of In Silhouette feel like the fruit of a monomaniacal obsession with the same one or two chords.  Those chords admittedly sound impossibly dense and harmonically rich, so I cannot blame him–especially since their menacing foundation is so skillfully embellished with swelling, flanging, and undulating dynamics and dissonant harmonies.  Appropriately, however, "I Can See The Light" breaks the spell to let in a small amount of light in the form of an ascending flute-like theme.  Naturally, a dark undercurrent remains, but it is more of a melancholy and mysterious darkness than a "a John Carpenter soundtrack has come to life and is standing over my bed with butcher knife" darkness.  Given the surrounding material, I think that counts as a respite.  The closing "You in the Horizon"is also a bit of a comparative oasis, as Pyle grabs the microphone to accompany more snatches of French femme fatale movie dialogue.  Given that there is singing, a groove, and a structured chord progression, it is tempting to say that it is an actual song, but it is the type of blurred, drugged, and creepily sexy song that might be emanating from a radio in an abandoned car in Twin Peaks at 3am.

With In Silhouette, I have finally come to grasp that Brian Pyle is one of the most singular and truly bizarre artists currently active in the experimental music milieu.  The perverse dearth of actual melodic foundation on this album is quite radical, as is how much Pyle is able to do with so little.  He seems to be a minimalist composer sharing the same body as a maximalist producer, as it certainly feels like he just took maybe one strong melody and a couple of cool chords and painstaking built them up into a sustained psychosexual plunge into a rabbit hole of hallucinatory horror.  As such, I have some minor mixed feelings about this album, as I have certainly heard stronger music from Pyle before, but In Silhouette is such a striking vision coupled with such a tour de force of production genius that it almost renders the actual music at the core irrelevant.  In fact, I think this might be an uncategorizable outsider masterpiece of some kind: I do not necessarily love it from start to finish (it is far too prickly), but there is nothing else quite like it and it certainly leaves one hell of a strong impression.

• In The Clear Blue Waters of Memory
• Gonna Get Right With God, Right After This Next Cigarette
• You in the Horizon

 

02 April 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

I have an unfortunate tendency to take Sarah Lipstate's work for granted, as if it is somehow not enough that she is one of the most distinctive and inventive solo guitarists currently active.  Part of that is her own fault, as she periodically produces work so beautiful and sublime that she transcends her role as guitarist and instead seems like one of the most compelling artists around.  Those are the moments that I am always chasing and I have not experienced one since the title piece on 2013's No Dreams.  Happily, Pink Sunset manages to floor me once more with "Deep Shelter."  There are a few other memorable moments on this solid and likeable album as well, but not quite enough to disabuse me of my belief that Lipstate is gradually accumulating the material for an absolutely stunning greatest hits album at a rate of one fresh masterpiece every few years.

Fire

Pink Sunset boldly opens with the aforementioned "Deep Shelter," which is an absolutely lush and gorgeous swirl of dreampop heaven.  Lipstate does absolutely everything right, chiseling a perfect gem of languorous shimmer, cool harmonized guitars, and delirious eruptions of striking melodies.  While it admittedly sets the bar impossibly high for the rest of the album, it also sets a compellingly eclectic template that yields intermittently wonderful results.  For one, Pink Sunset seems to be a compositional leap forward from the transitional-seeming Fantastic Planet, as Lipstate has now fully left the more abstract drone/soundscape aesthetic of her past behind in favor of more tightly structured "songs" with hooks.  As "Deep Shelter" shows, she undeniably has an impressive talent in that regard, but there is also something deeper and stranger going on in these songs than mere skilled songcraft: Lipstate seems to be a preternaturally gifted sonic magpie, casually appropriating tropes from eclectic and more difficult genres and seamlessly working them into her own Romantic pop concoctions.  Pink Sunset is littered with moments that sound like an alternate reality Cocteau Twins where Robin Guthrie was a massive prog, classical, and Iron Maiden fan.  Similarly, Lipstate deftly avoids the navel-gazing, indulgence, and melancholy that dog so much material in this vein, replacing mopery with cool confidence, clarity, and focus.  From a compositional standpoint, I love the tight structure, brisk pace, and complete lack of clutter, though a bit more snarl and grit would have been quite welcome.

"Deep Shelter" aside, Pink Sunset mostly feels like a gauzy, 4AD-damaged hall of mirrors, unfolding as a series of dreamy, delicate interludes that occasionally blossom into something with a bit more heft.  While it is easy to forget that Lipstate is primarily a solo guitarist with an experimental bent when she is at her best and most transcendent, Sunset is still unsurprisingly populated with a number of guitar-centric vignettes.  The title piece is one of the more striking works in that vein, as its gentle and pretty foundation of limpid arpeggios unexpectedly explodes into thick, distorted chords and a muted haze of dissonant and hallucinatory pedal-abuse.  I personally prefer some of the more adventurous later pieces on the album, however–particularly "Trails and Trials," which sounds a lot like Emeralds covering the baroque pop of Kate Bush.  Lipstate does an especially fine job with orchestration and balancing dynamics and textures that piece, embellishing her dense, distorted central melody with a vibrant backdrop of ringing arpeggios, complementary melodic motifs, and well-timed stabs of strings.  The brief and ghostly "Corridors" is yet another minor classic, as a subtly muted and minor key motif unfolds beneath a spectral haze of harmonics or feedback.  It has a very neo-classical feel, but intriguingly subverts that with a strong chorus and some wonderfully ragged-sounding string-bends.  The best part is definitely the spectral haze though, as "Corridors" is a master class in nuanced coloration and shifting mood.  The elegantly warped closer "Emergence" is yet another stand-out, weaving a woozy reverie from a disparate battery of alternately fat, artificial-sounding tones and rippling layers of fragility.

Trying to assess how Pink Sunset fits into Lipstate's oeuvre is a bit tricky, however.  On the hand, it feels like a major creative breakthrough and "Deep Shelter" is easily one of the finest Noveller songs ever recorded (and probably one of the finest songs anyone at all will release in 2017).  On the other hand, most of the album is merely pleasant and misstep-free and Lipstate's increasing shift towards meticulously crafted crystalline perfection is pulling her away from my personal aesthetic and closer to wider accessibility.  That is great for Lipstate, as catering to my taste would ensure a life of poverty and obscurity, but I still prefer more abstract and immersive earlier albums such as Glacial Glow.  That said, I am delighted that Lipstate is taking risks and restlessly evolving rather than repeating herself, especially since she is doing it so distinctively and with such an intuitive grasp of songcraft.  As such, Pink Sunset is both essential for fans and an appealing gateway for the curious, as it is a Noveller album like no other.

Samples:

• Deep Shelter
• Trails and Trials
• Corridors