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WRITTEN AND RECORDED
August 31st to Dec. 6th, 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments, her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper, looking out the same window.
Why share this much? Why open up like this? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? Our little family bubble was so sacred for so long. We carefully held it behind a curtain of privacy when we’d go out and do our art and music selves, too special to share, especially in our hyper-shared imbalanced times. Then we had a baby and this barrier felt even more important. (I still don’t want to tell you our daughter’s name.) Then in May 2015 they told us Geneviève had a surprise bad cancer, advanced pancreatic, and the ground opened up. What matters now? we thought. Then on July 9th 2016 she died at home and I belonged to nobody anymore. My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea leftover from a more self-indulgent time before I was a hospital-driver, a caregiver, a child-raiser, a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known.
"Death Is Real" could be the name of this album. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That's why.
- Phil Elverum
Dec. 11th, 2016
Anacortes
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Last year, Mary Lattimore's At The Dam marked a watershed moment for the classically trained harpist. While over the past decade she had recorded and performed with notable talents like Kurt Vile, Sharon Van Etten, Steve Gunn, Jarvis Cocker, Meg Baird, and Thurston Moore, Mary’s acclaimed third solo full-length (her first long-player for Ghostly International) saw her own music deservedly embraced by a wider audience. It was certainly no small feat coming from a beguiling album of improvised, processed harp pieces that had been recorded during stops along a road trip across America – all funded by an esteemed fellowship that she received from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Out April 14 on cassette and digital, Collected Pieces is a gorgeous counterpart to At The Dam, featuring six tracks previously available only as a download and/or streaming off Mary's Bandcamp and SoundCloud pages. Recorded at her old home in Philadelphia between 2011 and 2016 and mixed by longtime collaborator Jeff Zeigler, Mary is reflective when describing this album-length compilation. “It’s me opening a box filled with 12 years worth of memories made while living there, with lots of beauty and sorrow, as well as total sunshine, blurriness, and some darkness all housed within.”
Throughout Collected Pieces, she conjures a mesmerizing range of colors and emotions from her 47-string Lyon & Healy harp along with subtle augmentations of effects and processed electronics. Dedicated to Mary’s favorite beach town, Ship Bottom, NJ, 10-and-a-half-minute opener "Wawa By The Ocean" gently unfolds like a daydream, with the song’s delicate refrain slowly dissolving into a light wash of delayed plucks and sun-kissed countermelodies. "We Just Found Out She Died," however, takes a more celestial turn as her airy vocal harmonies shimmer underneath the meditative flutter of her harp. (The chimeric atmosphere is befitting of the song’s inspiration: Twin Peaks actress Margaret Lanterman, a/k/a the Log Lady, who sadly passed away shortly after Mary had seen her speak at a library in Philadelphia.) From the sweet yearn of "The Warm Shoulder" to the flickering drift of "Your Glossy Camry," Mary’s music is all at once intimate and inviting as she effortlessly balances her exquisite sense of melodicism with an inventive ear for experimentation.
"It's only in looking back that you realize how impermanent stuff always was, even though 12 years felt really long,"Mary explains. "The songs here have always been really special to me, and more so after bringing together these scraps and odes to memories of a burning motel, people from high school who are old now, or that Wawa convenience store on the Jersey shoreline which will probably always be there but is now so far away."
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Hundreds of releases and countless live performances littered the path that lead to 2012's Modern Jester, artist Aaron Dilloway's last major artistic statement as a solo artist and one his most well received documents since leaving Wolf Eyes, the prolific noise troupe that Dilloway co-founded in the late '90s with musician Nate Young. Within these pieces, we find a surreal treasure hunt that helps guide us through Dilloway’s obsessions, neurosis and influences while also developing a splintered maturity of someone with great complexity stumbling through a well thought-out, yet totally unplanned "long game" of an artistic career. Since then, Dilloway has been busy collaborating with the likes of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Jason Lescalleet, releasing various short form sketches and running his retail outpost, Hanson Records, while slowly working on his next major album, The Gag File.
Introducing itself with the cover image of a posed dummy ready for his yearbook portraiture, The Gag File pick up right where Modern Jester left off; its identity is directly tied to an absurdly uncomfortable head shot that stays permanently fixed in the listener’s mind whenever the album is summoned. The opening track, "Ghost," sets the heartbeat for the record. A rogue pulse that becomes lost in a disjointed, trapdoor loop but becomes even more unorthodox as Dilloway introduces himself through parable of jumbled, confused vocals and phrasing. Past this point, nothing in this record is typical or expected.
Sudden, crude cuts from one piece to another and psychotic jumps in fidelity make one rethink the ideas of confusion and desperation as something more abstract rather than visceral. "Karaoke with Cal" and "It's Not Alright" have an intoxicated sense of depression, taking in the world’s problems and regurgitating them back in hopes of finding some enjoyment. That enjoyment seems to be found in the non-music aspect of side B’s long form party field recording, that loops in on itself making sure you never really know when the party begins or ends, regardless of one partygoers claim.
Nods to Dilloway's recent live performances have been unusually captured as the song "Inhuman Form Reflected" doubles as a sound portrait of the artist’s internal struggle with hysteria, but suddenly breaks away from a recorded song into an accidental segue way of someone on the edge. Most hallmarks of Dilloway's signature are seemingly here but not firmly imprinted into the recording. Instead, Dilloway used his methods of vocal manipulation and frenzied reference to tell a completely foreign narrative, one that subjects himself to naked uncertainty, audible anxiety and discourse.
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UK shoegaze pioneers Slowdive are pleased to announce their self-titled fourth album, out May 5th via Dead Oceans, and the beautifully understated new single, "Sugar For The Pill," which follows the release of "Star Roving."
Slowdive’s stargazing alchemy is set to further entrance the faithful while beguiling a legion of fresh ears. These eight new tracks, simultaneously expansive and the band’s most direct material to date, deftly swerve away from any "trip down memory lane." They were birthed at the band’s talismanic Oxfordshire haunt, The Courtyard, and mixed at Los Angeles'famed Sunset Sound by Chris Coady (Beach House). Throughout, the group dynamic was all-important.
"When you’re in a band and you do three records, there’s a continuous flow and a development. For us, that flow re-started with us playing live again and that has continued into the record," notes principle songwriter Neil Halstead.
The video for “Sugar For The Pill,” product by in/out, takes its inspiration from the Slowdive album artwork, which is itself a still from Harry Smith’s cult classic animation Heaven and Earth Magic – the vast spiritual narrative that has influenced so many artists since it was originally released back in 1957.
Slowdive is Neil Halstead (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Christian Savill (guitar), Nick Chaplin (bass), Rachel Goswell (vocals) and Simon Scott (drums, electronics). Their debut album, Just For A Day, was released in 1991 by Creation Records, and was followed by the band’s now revered 1993 album Souvlaki and 1995’s Pygmalion before they disbanded. In the 22 years of their virtual disappearance, compilation albums have been released and the core members of the group have gone on to join other musical endeavors. In 2014, the band announced that they’d reunited and more new music would follow.
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For their first vinyl release, Rafael Femiano (guitars and electronics) and Felipe Pavon (drums and percussion) pulled out all of the stops on the most recent Oikos release. In this case, that metaphor may be a bit of a misnomer, since most of The Great Upheaval is much more about mood and ambience than full bore explosions of sound, although those feature here as well. The tasteful balance of the two, and the impeccable compositional structures, results in an album that is gripping in its intentional bleakness.
Knockturne/Envelope Collective
Admittedly, it is hard to listen to the opening moments of "Ravaged, Burned" without being reminded of Earth’s 21st century output.Oikos does a similarly excellent job at capturing that desolate Western expanse, like a Morricone soundtrack stripped to its barest essentials.However, it is really only the one part of atmosphere where the two seem similar.Oikos instead works more in change and variation, adding more dissonant and varied sounds to the mix in comparison, creating an effect akin to a camera shot widening to show the windswept dustbowl is not in the past, but a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the near future.
As the aforementioned "Ravaged, Burned" slowly expands with cymbal washes and clean guitar tones, the transition into the slow burning darkness of "Menace and Portent" (with David Cordero on additional guitar and synthesizer and Raul Perez on bass) strengthens both pieces.The previously clean tones take on more of a dissonant, vibrating quality, with an underlying sense of menace growing by the minute.The piece finally erupts with a satisfying distorted guitar chug and heavy, pounding drums that beautifully contrast the uneasy peace that preceded it.  The somewhat brief interlude "Joik" makes for a nice transition.The resonating and echoing guitar is blended with an all too brief passage of snappy rhythm (by High Aura’d’s John Kolodij), hinting at a more noise rock sound that never comes.Instead, the rhythms just as quickly fade out, a fleeting bit of uptempo sounds that instead fall back to the ambient desolation that is its own unique form of beautiful, with additional voices by Maria Gil.
This blends nicely into the other side's 10 minute "Marrow of Prayer," at first a lush sea of guitar tone that nicely expands with time.Even with its slightly sinister mood, there is a pleasant and beautiful sound to it.As the piece goes on, the light begins to fade and the mood turns bleaker, with the band adding in more dissonant layers of guitar (with additional contributions by Juan G. Acosta).What at first sounds like simple guitar drone reveals itself to be something much more complex; a contrast that becomes the piece’s strongest facet.The transition into the concluding "Arch" has Oikos continuing the same mood and space, but the subtle addition of drums is an exceptional touch.The rhythms are slid in carefully, and never do they upset the mood generated by the guitars.Finally, after the swell of bowed contrabass sounds (by Marco Serrato), the album ends on a weird dying motor type noise, a fitting conclusion for a sound that is so balanced between natural and man-made destruction and decay.
One of the greatest assets of The Great Upheaval is its mood and variation.Femiano, Pavon, and the guest artists do an amazing job at capturing the bleak emptiness of a wasteland and the decay surrounding it.But there is more to here than just mood, of course.Memorable melodies and rhythms appear all throughout, making for a strong musical counterpoint to the imaginary landscapes Oikos creates via their sound.The palpable desolation just makes for an additional layer to an already exceptional album.
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His last major release, Samoobrona (with Lukáš Jiřička) may have had Piotrowicz trying something rather different by scoring a radio play, but Walser is a step back into the conventional album format, even if it was originally intended as a score for the film of the same title. However, that motivation to try new things as far as instrumentation and composition goes (something that has been a distinct facet of his recent works) is not lost here. Electric and acoustic instruments blend together, making for perhaps his most diverse and complex work to date.
The dense synthesizer opening on "Oleh Rami Pohon" is appropriately dramatic, with a heavy arrangement that then is mixed perfectly with bowed double bass strings.Robert layers the electronics expertly, and with the addition of some rhythmic bits, makes for a complex piece of music that nicely vacillates between harsh darkness and pastoral spaces.The drama does not relent into the subsequent "Tingal," with its introduction of booming war drums and complex synthesizer passages.The unrelenting martial beat does not relent, while Piotrowicz takes the electronics into chaotic, at times frightening passages of sound.
The forceful rhythms reappear on "Utara," with additional percussive bits thrown in.The pounding drums, buzzing strings, and other bits come together very well, resulting in a piece of music that is more of an emphasis on the strings and percussion when compared to the electronics.Overall though, there is a nice creepy moodiness (or moody creepiness) that pervades the piece.The brief "Elok Pada Masa" is more of a transitional passage:the ominous hums are offset by lighter sounds, each of which slide in and out to keep things dynamic.
Things are not quite as dark for the entire record though."Automatu" opens with lighter, shimmering wind chime ambience that gives a more pleasant mood overall.However, the foundation of churning electronics low in the mix and the subtle addition of what sounds like heavily treated human voice keep a distinct creepiness to the sound overall.The concluding "Dimana" is more open and spacious, keeping the dark elements via a low frequency drone with abrupt swells and drops.The dynamic is less sustained and more erratic, with the occasional outburst of piano keeping this weird.The piano sound itself becomes stranger and less conventional sounding as it goes on, ending the record on a strong, if idiosyncratic note.
While I will always associate Robert Piotrowicz's output with his work for modular synthesizers, Walser is yet another step away from that and instead into more varied and complex composition.One of his darkest releases to date, however, his ear for diversity in sound ensures that it never becomes too mundane, and is yet another impressive entry in his already impressive body of work.Considering it was initially created in 5.1 surround, however, I wish there would have been an opportunity to hear it in that format though.
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Part of the impetus of this three cassette compilation (by Wren Turco, who also contributes one of the tapes) was to showcase experimental electronic work by female artists that, not only often marginalized because of their gender, are also relatively new on the scene. With her, Gambletron, and NaEE RobERts, a wide spectrum of electronic art is presented, from Gambletron's more discordant abstraction, to Turco’s stripped down deconstructed techno, into NaEE RoBErts' more conventional song structures. All three tapes stand strongly on their own, but also compliment each other exceptionally well, making for a very strong compilation.
Montreal's Lisa Gamble (as Gambletron, and also a member of Clues and Hrsta)'s contribution is two lengthy pieces on a tape entitled We Can't See Past the Cliff.The first, "Guelph Ontario" drifts beautifully between dissonance and melody.At times passages of lush electronics and peaceful expanses, and others she transitions into harsher and aggressive territories, the 11 minute piece stays constantly compelling.When Gamble brings in the heavy beats and dubby processing, I started feeling nostalgic for those late 1990s ambient dub days of Scorn and Techno Animal.With the rhythms becoming erratic later on, and a tasteful lo-fi sheen overall, the sound is entirely unique, however.The other half, "AM Theremin Radio Drone" is exactly what the title would indicate, but its massive sub bass and occasional blasts of pure noise keep it from becoming too stagnant.
Turco's Artesian Pressures is a bit more grounded in the conventional elements of electronic music by comparison.Melodic sequences and rhythmic elements stay prominent throughout."Visual" is a nice pairing of heavy pulsating electronics, but paired with a great sense of melody, with excellent development and dissolution of the piece’s structure, rhythmic but without any actual drum sounds to be heard."Neon Noir", on the other hand, is a brain-jarringly low bit of bass synthesizer sound that eventually develops into something resembling a distorted electronic bassline amplified intensively. The simple "Infinita" closes her tape with a repetitive melodic synth sequence, covered in just the right amount of audio grime.
NaEE RoBErts (Norwegian multimedia artist Sandra Mujinga)’s lengthy contribution to this set, Summer Care is clearly the most conventional.Rich synthesizers and stiff drum machine beats define most of these 16 songs.Opener "Jaws, Eyes and Mouth", for example, is a basic electronic backing to Mujinga's vocals with only a bit of processing to them.On "Residents", she pushes things into darker spaces, with backward string passages and an appropriately gloomy vocal contribution that contrasts the metronome-like snappy beat behind it.Many of these pieces have a stripped down, bedroom demo quality that I always find to be an asset, but "I Have Been Useful" seems larger and more ambitious in scope.Opening with dramatic synth flourishes, the vocals are up front and clean, and the piece evolves strongly to close on a calm note.The instrumental pieces on Summer Care are no less effective."The Birds" is massive kick drum and hardcore bass leads, eventually solidifying as some bizarre take on 1990s rave anthems, while "Diligence" is a more contemporary work, with sharp drums cutting through the idiosyncratic synth passages very well.The beat opening "The Fishes" sounds straight out of a late 1970s Cabaret Voltaire record, but the full piece is more modern with its noisy snaps and varying rhythms.
Given that one of the goals of Transparens was to increase the profile and awareness of these artists, I would say Wren Turco and the Idle Chatter label have been extremely successful in this goal.Very soon after listening to these tapes I hit Discogs to see what else was out there from Turco, NaEE RoBErts, and Gambletron, and sadly did not find much.I am not sure if that is due to the three being relatively new artists or the unfortunately byproduct of obscurity, but I hope this changes soon.There is a lot of fresh, enjoyable, and at times challenging music in this beautifully packaged set, and I found it an excellent compilation of diverse, yet complimentary sounds.
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The rumors are true: 17 years after his last official album release as GAS, Kompakt pioneer Wolfgang Voigt returns to one of his most beloved monickers and will release a brand-new GAS album called Narkopop, due April 21st 2017.
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Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails) and Japanese noise legend Masami Akita (Merzbow) bask in their mutual love for the EMS Synthi, a British synthesizer from the early '70s notorious for its patch matrix, portability and distinct tone.
Astonishingly, these two disparate artists meld into a single sound as they flex the analog circuitry of the EMS Synthi in new ways; giving this classic synth a modern workout and proving that, in capable hands, a 40 year old analog synthesizer is a tool for the ages.
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Patterns Of Consciousness is the powerful second full length album from analog synth composer Caterina Barbieri. Gorgeous high resolution analog textures and algorithmic melodies unfold under Barbieri's careful control, exploring the basic nature of sound and consciousness. These pieces are minimal in arrangement but maximal in presence asserting Barbieri as a unique voice in contemporary electronic music composition. Highly recommended to fans of Alessandro Cortini and Eleh.
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Palto Flats & WRWTFWW Records are ecstatic to announce the highly-anticipated reissue of Japanese percussionist Midori Takada's sought after and timeless ambient / minimal album Through The Looking Glass, originally released in 1983 by RCA Japan.
Considered a Holy Grail of Japanese music by many, Through The Looking Glass is Midori Takada’s first solo endeavor, a captivating four-song suite capturing her deep quests into traditional African and Asian percussive language and exploring contemplative ambient sounds with an admirably precise use of marimba. The result is alternatively ethereal and vibrant, always precise and mesmerizing, and makes for an atmospheric masterpiece and an unparalleled sonic and spiritual experience.
The fully licensed reissue is available as a single 33rpm LP and a limited 45rpm DLP, both cut directly from the original studio reels (AAA), at Emil Berliner (formerly the in-house recording department of renowned classical record label Deutsche Grammophon) for the 45rpm DLP, and at the equally famous Frankfurter SST Studio for the LP. It is also available in CD format for the first time. All versions come with extensive liner notes.
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