12 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

After first quietly surfacing with a self-released EP back in 2015, this duo of Seefeel's Mark Clifford and Loops Haunt's Scott Gordon make their formal debut with a full-length on Editions Mego.  While hints of both artists' main gigs are evident, this drone-centric and abstract project is very much its own thing.  For the most part, this album is a likeable suite of incidental vignettes built from warm, sustained synth tones, but a handful of pieces transcend that modest aesthetic and delve into admirably novel territory.  If I were being glib, I would describe the highlights as "hauntological drone," but that has misleading dark ambient connotations and does not do Oto Hiax any justice at all.  Instead, I will just say that Clifford and Gordon have found an evocative and subtly haunting way of blurring together dream-like and gently hallucinatory soundscapes with the sharp edges of reality.

Editions Mego

The opening "Insh" does not exactly put Oto Hiax's best foot forward, but it does provide a vague hint of the duo's vision.  Lasting little over two minutes, the piece is a simple and languorous reverie of pleasantly twinkling synthesizers over a muted bed of gentle rumbles and tape hiss. The bulk of duo's energies were clearly not spent obsessing about crafting a cool melody or massing layers into any kind of rewarding harmonic depth, but there is a lot happening dynamically (albeit on a very small scale): the simple central motif hides a lot of wobbling, whooshing, and glimmering micro-activity.  If given more time to develop, "Insh" probably could have evolved into an absorbing cloud of hazy overtones, but Clifford and Gordon are instead content to just let their motif fade away so they can move onto the next idea.  Fortunately, the next idea is quite a bit more compelling, so I can understand their hurry.  Built upon a stuttering and slightly erratic machine-like pulse, "Flist" is a strangely beautiful and unpredictable piece, lazily ebbing and flowing from one swell of dense, gnarled-sounding synth snatches to another as a host of chaotic electronic flourishes blurts, chirps, and squelches away in the periphery. As much I like the hypnotic throb and the futuristic tone, the real magic lies in the inventive structure: "Flist" feels like the compositional equivalent of a flock of birds endlessly dispersing and recombining into interesting new shapes.

The rest of the album is basically a see-sawing back and forth between those two disparate poles: pastoral ambience and considerably more inventive and distinctive fare. Near the end of the album, a third option emerges as well: obsessively stuttering locked-groove-style rhythm experiments.  To some degree, that bizarre mixture of aesthetics seems to be by design, as if Clifford and Gordon deliberately sequenced a flow of sketches and interludes between their more painstakingly crafted and elaborate set pieces to ensure that their best ideas make maximum impact.  One such high point comes immediately on the heels of "Flist," as the brief but wonderful "Dhull" sounds like a buzzing drone performance taking place as a construction site slowly, fitfully, and reverberantly collapses in the distance.  Aside from a few strong compositions, it is primarily the clattering, crackling, and scraping non-musical textures such as those that make this album special–the more they intrude upon the simple, sketchlike synth motifs, the more compelling the material gets.  Of course, the best moments of all come when a strong composition intersects with a strong textural component, as occurs with the album's sublime centerpiece "Thruft."  Musically, the piece is just a elegantly simple and bittersweetly melancholy chord progression, but it increasingly sounds like it is unfolding in the empty hull of a sinking ship being slowly bent and warped by the steadily increasing pressure.  As such, it is quite a brilliantly executed and absolutely haunting bit of music.

To some degree, the swaying and radiant closer "Loyal Odes" acts as an unofficial sequel to the imaginary and morbid tableaux that I projected onto "Thruft."  This time, however, the ship is resting on the bottom of the sea and the souls of everyone on board are slowly fluttering up to a sun-dappled heaven.  More prosaically, "Odes" is essentially a minimal and elegiac organ-like drone piece, but it is elevated into something far more with a host of hollow thumps, metallic creaks, and a gorgeously shifting nimbus of feedback moans.  Clifford and Gordon certainly know how to end an album on a perfect note, even if some of the preceding material is a bit uneven.  While a number of pieces feel like mildly interesting experiments, prematurely abandoned ideas for more significant works, or mere ambient water-treading, the album unexpectedly works quite well as a complete experience.  This is largely due to the duo's talent for coherent and effective sequencing and their impressive intuition for pacing: a few songs may end a bit too quickly for my taste, but nothing is ever allowed to overstay its welcome and these pieces all flow together quite nicely.  In a perfect world, the album would probably have a more favorable "killer" to "filler" ratio, but Oto Hiax's intermittent flashes of brilliance are easily dazzling and inventive enough to eclipse their less-inspired moments.

• Dhull
• Thruft
• Loyal Odes

 

12 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

After a lengthy six-year hiatus, this long-running bi-coastal duo have unexpectedly resurfaced with a new LP of buzzing, bass-heavy drones.  I am not sure if Disorder necessarily counts as a radical departure given Growing's history of constant re-invention, but it is certainly a remarkably far cry from their last full-length (2010's dance-damaged and sampler-centric PUMPS!). It also bears little resemblance to the more shimmering and gently psychedelic fare for which Growing is best known.  Instead, the dominant aesthetic seems to be that of Kevin Doria’s recent pure drone work as Total Life, though that vision sounds artfully blurred together with Joe DeNardo's own (noisier) Ornament project, adding some welcome layers of depth and harmonic complexity.  While it does not necessarily recapture the magic of the duo's prime, it makes up for it by opening a promising and surprisingly visceral new chapter.

Important

Growing has been compared to a lot of other artists over the years as they have evolved, but none of the familiar names are remotely relevant anymore.  With Disorder, Doria and DeNardo seem to be looking back into the past to the early days of electronic minimalism, albeit with some much rougher edges thrown into the mix.  The most apt summary that I can conjure is this: picture Eliane Radigue doing a solo improv show with a sine wave generator; some distortion pedals; a large, rusty fan; and an ancient and fitfully operational air conditioner.  That just about nails it, I think

The first half of Disorder commences with a slowly sweeping flange over a dense bed of humming and buzzing sustained tones of indeterminate source.  The flanging is subtly hallucinatory and creates a useful kind of structure and pulse, but the real activity is sneakily hiding in the deceptively static-sounding foundation.  At first, Doria and DeNardo just slip in subtle changes in harmonic coloration, but after about five minutes, some harsher feedback-like tones intrude and the piece makes an unexpected chord change.  No further chord changes immediately follow, but the tone of piece is transformed into something more throbbing and dynamically unusual as the flanging becomes more distant and spectral.  At that point, the piece begins to take shape in earnest, as a host of overtones and buzzing oscillations glacially ebb and flow over the gently undulating drones.  It is quite a quietly impressive trick, taking the distortion-heavy "amplifer worship" aesthetic of bands like Earth and Sunn O))) and using it as a backdrop for the small-scale pleasures of a well-crafted cloud of shifting overtones.  In classic "vinyl release" fashion, however, a grinding new "locked groove"-style motif emerges from the reverie to ride out of the final few minutes of the side.  Fortunately, I like that part too, but it does sound like a completely different piece.  On the bright side, drone music is especially conducive to making such moves seem relatively seamless.

The second side of the album begins with a steady bass throb, but the melodic foreground is comparatively kinetic, as some hollow-sounding guitar feedback slowly moans and pulses.  While the guitars initially sound like they are going to mass into a roiling maelstrom, they instead cohere into a restrained rhythm that is out of phase with the underlying bass hum, albeit not in a particularly rewarding way.  That basic  theme is somewhat enlivened by some harmonics and overtones, but the piece does not truly come alive until a squall of guitar noise blossoms into another obsessive locked-groove motif that sounds half like industrial machinery and half like a relentless robotic juggernaut slowly bulldozing a dystopian futuristic landscape.  As much as I enjoy that unexpected twist, Doria and DeNardo do not do all that much with their cool new theme for quite some time, opting to embellish it only with a quavering haze of distant and ghostly feedback moans.  Eventually, however, a similarly mechanical and shuddering counterpoint emerges and an erratic and mesmerizing polyrhythm takes shape.  The final few minutes are the payoff, as all the thickly buzzing instrumentation disappears, pulling back the curtain to reveal quite a fascinating and complex skeleton of moving parts.

To their credit, Disorder is definitely not the album I would have expected Doria and DeNardo to make after being apart for so many years: Growing's erratic trajectory always at least seemed to be heading towards vaguely more and more accessible, melodic, and electronic-based territory.  Consequently, I expected them to either look backwards toward their own prime or instead pick up roughly where they left off and try to rekindle some of their upward momentum.  Instead, they completely mashed the "reset" button and made a deep plunge back into the subterranean.  The Growing of Disorder genuinely sounds like a band that might have beaten up the Growing that made PUMPS! (an observation that I mean in the best possible way).  Of course, on another level, this release makes perfect sense and is probably the most honest album that the duo could have possibly made: Disorder is an improbably natural-feeling culmination of the stripped-down and darker directions that both artists have been exploring lately in their own solo careers.  While this is not a perfect release (the second half feels a bit too meandering and unfocused for my liking), the flaws lie only in the execution and the pacing: I have absolutely no qualms at all regarding the vision.  At its best, Disorder strikes the perfect balance of power, nuance, simplicity, and machine-like repetition.

Samples:

• Excerpt One
• Excerpt Two
• Excerpt Three

 

12 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

On paper, this is quite an improbable and unexpected collaboration: an iconic and mercurial Japanese noise-guitar god teams up with a pair of serious Belgian jazz musicians.  For one, Keiji Haino generally tends to work with artists that are nearly as outré as himself (My Cat is an Alien, Merzbow, Peter Brötzmann, etc.).  Also, playing with an elemental force as unpredictable and unhinged as Haino seems like it would be roughly as harrowing as riding a bucking bronco for anyone new to his orbit.  To their credit, however, both Verbruggen and Demoulin prove to be inspiring foils and manage to ably follow Haino's muse to whichever strange places it wanders.  Needless to say, this is very much Haino's show, veering wildly between free-form chaos, roiling electronic maelstroms, feral howling, and a few passages of sublime accessibility.  Given that, Miracles is a bit of an overwhelming mixed bag as a whole, but one with some genuine flashes of brilliance inside.

Sub Rosa

This endeavor originated back in 2015 when drummer Teun Verbruggen and keyboardist Jozef Demoulin (of Othin Spake and Lilly Joel, respectively) embarked upon a three-week Japanese tour together. At some of the dates, the pair were joined by "local" musicians, one of whom happened to be Haino.  I am not sure if that initial meeting was recorded or found its way onto The Miracles of Only One Thing at all, but the trio found enough common ground that night to make some studio recordings together, then record a live show.  Miracles is apparently a distillation of the best moments from those two events, but the line separating the live and studio work is an extremely blurry one–if anything, the opening epic "Non-Dark Destinations" sounds like an apocalyptic live performance (it is not), while the cleaner sounding "Hotel Chaika" comes from a show at SuperDeluxe in Tokyo.  Though there are two other pieces on Miracles (one of which is only included on the CD version), the extended and explosive "Destinations" and "Hotel Chaika" performances are the real meat of the album.  Everything else is basically intermittently interesting filler.

"Non-Dark Destinations" appropriately opens the album with a storm of cacophonous gong crashes courtesy of Haino that are soon enhanced with a healthy dose of blown-out bass frequencies and howling, gibbering electronic textures.  That basically sets the tone for the rest of the piece, which progresses like a fitfully erupting volcano ably accompanied by rolling and clattering free-jazz drumming from Verbruggen.  Neither Haino nor Demoulin offer anything particularly melodic for quite some time, content to instead weave a snarling maelstrom of hums, buzzes, blurts, and swooping frequencies, spewing out some wonderfully sickly sounds in the process.  Unexpectedly, however, the piece coheres into a steady off-kilter groove and some floating chords around the halfway point to give way to a strangely beautiful interlude that elevates the piece into something almost transcendent (though that oasis of comparatively sanity is short-lived). Also of note:  Haino picks up his guitar for rare solo at the end, unleashing an oddly timed and cleanly dissonant theme that sounds almost Jandek-ian.

Miracles' other epic salvo, "Hotel Chaika" offers no hidden melodic heart, though it does kick-off with a gloriously broken and wrong-sounding groove and some very uncomfortable pitch-swoops and sea-sick synth vibrato.  If it stayed in that vein, it would be another instant classic, but Haino and I part ways a bit later in the piece when he starts cathartically stuttering and shouting, transforming "Hotel" from bizarre and drugged-sounding sci-fi jazz into something that feels like an exorcism or a bout of Tourette's syndrome.  From that point on, "Hotel Chaika" feels like a deranged performance art piece punctuated by wild drum soloing and dense masses of electronic entropy.  At some point, that somehow morphs into something resembling a hard rock song with overdriven bass, wild drum fills, and plenty of screaming vocals, but that too is soon derailed by a jarring explosion of electronic blurts and bloops.  Overall, it seems like a disjointed show of force and an exercise in constantly wrong-footing me at every turn with abrupt shifts, which mostly leaves me cold despite some impressively wild drumming from Verbruggen.

Sadly, the other two pieces do not add much of substance to the album.  The first, "Snow is Frequent, Though Light, In Winter" is 5-minute interlude of ringing cymbals and quietly simmering hisses and crackles that sounds like the prelude to a larger piece that never comes. I suppose it provides a strangely calm and effective coda to the preceding fury, but it mostly just feels like it is there to eat the remaining space on the second side of the vinyl release. The meditative CD-only "Tonight" is a bit more substantial and intriguing though, opening with a fluttering flute solo from Haino that weirdly evokes Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis before unexpectedly evolving into something resembling Tuvan throat-singing.  Unfortunately, Haino cannot resist the temptation to get in a few more screams, so it has kind of a confusing and uneven tone.  Alas.  Still, Haino and his collaborations certainly unleash one hell of a firestorm on the first half of the album and they had no shortage of great ideas here.  The catch is just that Miracles captures unbridled and unfiltered creativity in its raw form, which makes for a challenging and sometimes frustrating listening experience.  To their credit, Verbruggen and Demoulin helped push Haino to some dazzling heights, but Miracles probably could have been legitimately canonical if they brought a merciless producer/editor along for the ride as well.  Of course, it would not truly be a Keiji Haino album then, as erratic shifts and questionable decisions are the necessary trade-offs for his white-hot spontaneity and tirelessly bold experimentation.

• Non-Dark Destination
• Hotel Chaika
• Tonight

 

12 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

I was not sure quite what to expect with this collaboration, as Jim O'Rourke is quite an adept shape-shifter and Kassel Jaeger (Francoise Bonnet) is a bit of an unknown quantity as well.  Also, many seemingly enticing pairings tend to feel like the polished and edited distillation of a single improv session. Wakes on Cerulean does not entirely elude that free-form and off-the-cuff territory, but it is a consistently rich and vibrant release nonetheless.  More importantly, it sometimes shares a lot of stylistic common ground with O'Rourke’s classic I'm Happy And I'm Singing album, albeit one frequently embellished by an inventive host of field recordings.  Cerulean probably errs a bit too much into genial burbling and restlessly shifting through motifs to quite attain canonical greatness itself, but it boasts enough striking passages to compensate for the lesser moments. With a bit more work, Cerulean probably could have surpassed I'm Happy and I'm Singing.

Editions Mego

Although available digitally, Cerulean was primarily intended as a vinyl release, so the two side-long pieces here are very much shaped by the limitations of that format: they are roughly are the same length and time gets filled in some unexpected and unusual ways.

The first half opens with some evocative hollow clatterings that sound like they could have been recorded on a forlorn pier, but the piece soon blossoms into a warm and elegiac drone motif that sounds like church organist in a very tender and melancholy mood.  That theme arguably forms the bedrock of the piece, but it is very easy to lose sight of it amidst the blizzard of twinkling and sputtering laptoppery that follows.  The tone is certainly not harsh at all, but the constantly shifting nature of the foreground makes for an unpredictable and disorienting listen rather than a beautiful and immersive one (despite the initial leanings in that direction).  Beauty is not absent, of course, yet it is often curdled by a stuttering obsessiveness and impatience or derailed by a shifting sense of place due to Jaeger's roving intrusions of textured field recordings.  All of that admittedly feels like it was by design, but it feels "by design" in a way that suggests a lot of disparate ideas collaged into one amorphous piece with a lot of editing.  To their credit, however, O'Rourke and Jaeger are smart enough to linger for a while when they hit upon something truly sublime.  In fact, there is one extended passage that ranks among both artist's finest work:  an undulating haze of swaying synth tones that gradually gives way to a heavenly and understated reverie enhanced by a pack of distantly howling wolves (or something else arguably wolf-like).  Afterwards, unfortunately, the piece swells to an incredibly dense, flanging, and modular synth-heavy crescendo that sounds like an especially indulgent strain of free-form '70s space rock (that, of course, feels like another composition altogether).

The second half opens in far more subdued fashion, as gentle drones slowly sway and swirl together over some understated field recordings.  It gradually masses into far more hallucinatory form, however, as the various sustained tones make shifting and uncomfortably dissonant harmonies with one another. Gradually though, a lovely new motif appears, as dreamy organ-like chords float over a deep pedal tone from O’Rourke's guitar and a bed of crackles, hisses, and quietly strangled electronics.  Uncharacteristically, that theme sticks around for quite a long time, blossoming and deepening rather than being consumed by the next theme.  Eventually, however, it does fade away to be replaced by an unrelated tapestry of bubbling synth arpeggio sweeps and eruptions of splashes, crunches, and scrapes for a final coda.  The field recording component feels like an ingenious variation on the closing fireworks display of Jaeger's Zauberberg collaboration, but with actual fireworks being subversively replaced by everything but fireworks (probably). Unfortunately, it is not a particularly satisfying fanfare overall, as my ears are completely desensitized to candy-colored synth burbling these days and the rest of the piece was far more satisfying.  The format probably deserves the brunt of the blame, as I suspect O'Rourke and Jaeger had a great 14-minute stretch of material and 17 minutes of space to fill.  Sometimes problems like that lead to delightful experiments and sometimes they just lead to perplexing compositional decisions.  This one falls into the latter category.

Ultimately, I like Wakes on Cerulean quite a lot, but albums of this nature always have a nagging element of exasperation to them as well.  This release feels like a sketchbook full of great ideas rather than a great painting made from one of the more promising sketches-it would be a lot more impressive if O'Rourke and Jaeger had focused upon transforming the more beautiful passages into complete, fully formed pieces.  Both halves of the album have a least one kernel of absolute brilliance that could have probably been shaped and expanded into a masterpiece.  Instead, Wakes on Cerulean is merely a fitful flow of many ideas that occasionally gives way to striking vistas of very real inspiration.  As such, Cerulean is a strong album that captures both artists at the peak of their respective powers, but the fruits of that union are not always presented optimally.

• Excerpt One
• Excerpt Two
• Excerpt Three

 

10 March 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Like master painters exploring a subject over a lifetime’s work, Kevin Martin and Dylan Carlson – The Bug and Earth, respectively – have each been mining and defining their genres for more than 20 years. They’re united by an interest in – really an obsession with – heaviness. They search for, examine and break the boundaries between beautiful and ugly, minimal and maximal, light and dark – but The Bug and Earth always make music that is heavy in the most thrilling of ways.

These two uncompromising outsiders met via the visual artist Simon Fowler (Angels & Devils.) Simon arranged for Dylan to come to a King Midas Sound gig, but Martin’s trademark use of a powerful strobe light meant that the epileptic Carlson couldn’t enter the room. Undeterred, Carlson featured King Midas Sound’s music in a podcast, and the pair eventually decided to collaborate around Angels & Devils.

The anglophile Carlson had long admired Martin, and other British sonic experimenters like Spacemen 3 or Pentangle. In turn, Martin understood the genius in Carlson’s deconstruction of metal, and Earth's boiling down of the genre to its core, elemental riffs. Martin saw that he and Dylan were both "wanderers," and "misfits in the world we live in." They were both huge fans of dub and the Velvet Underground, and they discussed how those influences could provide a combined template for something entirely new.

When they finally began to record, it quickly became apparent that the music they made together needed room to stretch out and "drone," – to be its own thing. Two tracks eventually emerged, "Boa" & "Cold," and were released as a standalone EP, with Dylan's signature guitar sound weaving seamlessly around some of Kevin's most destructively heady bass explorations. Martin had decided to exclude those songs from Angels & Devils, as he felt "They had developed a singular life of their own, outside of the identity of that album."

Ninja Tune asked The Bug and Dylan Carlson to perform live in LA around the label’s 25th anniversary, and Martin and Carlson took the opportunity to further the recording project in person. So The Bug vs Earth project holed up in Daddy Kev’s legendary LA studio, with DJ Nobody engineering, for two very long days. Those recording sessions have resulted in the masterpiece that is Concrete Desert. Inspired by J.G. Ballard’s urban dystopias, and the Californian dream capital's sordid, fragmented underbelly, Martin says that the album is in some ways a Los Angeles-set companion piece to London Zoo.

The record's beautiful, chiming melodies are like shards of sonic light, glowing in currents of heavy bass darkness. There are pulsing soundscapes, ambient pinks and whites, and irresistible grooves. This is music that grips you entirely, and catches you in its lava-flow – an astonishing, primal album of vast depth.

Releases March 24, 2017 on Ninja Tune.

10 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

One of the most exciting new movements in modern music involves electronic producers venturing into sonic realms of fear and uncertainty. Though these artists’ unforgiving style places plenty of demands on their listeners, it is devoid of cheap shock value and predictable moralizing, and is capable of finding and creating romance in a grayscale world of Brutalist architecture and all-pervasive automation.

While typically associated with the artist rosters of labels like Downwards, Blackest Ever Black and Modern Love, Stroboscopic Artefacts has played just as strong a role in shaping this aesthetic. So it's only fitting that the next Monad issue from Stroboscopic Artefacts would come from the German duo of Eric Goldstein and Konstanze Bathseba Zippora, - better known as OAKE - whose previous efforts on Regis' Downwards label have established them as one of the most unique products of their genre.

Like OAKE's previous work, their new Monad EP immediately establishes a tight hold on the listener's consciousness with its rigorous balance of ethereal vocal seduction and concussive rhythm, making one feel thrust into a world where the forces of techno-science and magic are involved in a constant reciprocal conversation. The opening track "L'esclandre," while just a harbinger of things to come, is still as intense on its own as anything else in the electronic music realm, ritualistically laying a foundation of heavy kick drums and metallic lashes that seem aimed at key pressure points of the body.

The following track "Jardin d'évasion," bringing spoken vocals and haunted sung melodies into the caustic mix, allows the listener to soar over the aforementioned Brutalist landscape while still somehow feeling the full weight of it - a dark musical gem whose vocal repetition of “keeping...awake” elegantly completes a feeling of post-industrial yearning and restlessness.

"Hélicorde" returns OAKE to a more stripped-down, rhythmically dominant format; in the process offering a track that seems to have been by some kind of hybrid machine-wolves rather than by humans enhanced with studio technology. The feeling of being ‘on the hunt’ is captured here with great panache, but doesn’t leave the ears so exhausted that they won’t be able to enjoy the breathtaking finale "Paysage dépaysé." Initially powered along by hammering kicks and grinding ambience, a siren voice appears which leads the instrumentation through a number of increasingly intense permutations on the main theme. Immense, yawning dirge tones and dissonant strings combine with the already established presence of pneumatic drill percussion to make a timeless meditation on lost grandeur.

More information can be found here.

10 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

Editions Mego is pleased to welcome Danish Loke Rahbek (Damien Dubrovnik, Croatian Amor and Posh Isolation) to the fold. Known for countless creative and commercial endeavours, Loke presents his first solo full length under his own name. As with all of Loke’s output City of Woman harnesses the radical with the aesthetic in a manner of extreme pleasure for all who encounter.  Harnessing his thorough knowledge and experience in extreme electronics, melodic encounters and sultry showmanship Loke ties together disparate threads of various underground movements to create a singular and deeply personal journey through industrial temptation, noise refraction and melodic seduction.  This is 21st Century pop music. One which dismantles previous held borders of sound to present a wide palate of sound, song, abstraction and intense emotion.

Out May 19th on Editions Mego.

10 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

In Silhouette is unmistakably the product of Brian Pyle, who once again returns as Ensemble Economique. Well over a decade ago, Pyle and his merry band of Starving Weirdos popped onto the scene from out of nowhere. Truth be told, that ‘nowhere’ is Humboldt County, California whose grand mythologies about its marijuana industry dwarfs all others. The Weirdos, not averse to method acting through Humboldt’s prized chemistry, stood an unusual chimera in the world of out-rock and avant-garde practitioners. Electronic-Improv, fuck-all auto-didacticism, and monotone psychedelia. Too feral to be AMM, too electronic to be NNCK, too discordant to be :zoviet*france:. As the Weirdos slowed to halt, Pyle’s restless energy insisted that he go on. Hence Ensemble Economique. Over an impressive catalogue of albums, he steadfastly continues down this rabbithole, polishing and refining his craft into a signature polyglot of expressionist collage.

Pyle’s latest opus dials up the cinematic flourishes that have graced many of his earlier recordings, through his sinewed synth-tone undulations, polyphonous ostinato, Wolfgang Voigt pulses, and fractalized cascades of generative serialism. All of this glides through the patterned electronic chiaroscuro atmospheres that are at once ethereal and haunted, dotted with male and female vocals whispering unknowable secrets. This tech-gnosticism flickers with light and shadow through Pyle’s rich production and beckons for the big screen, as Pyle’s work is grandiose in scale, psychologically nuanced, and deeply affecting. In Silhouette is the twelfth Ensemble Economique album.

Out March 31st on Denovali.

05 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

All the Way is a collection of radical re-workings of traditional and jazz standards such as “All the Way,” “You Don't Know What Love Is,” and “The Thrill Is Gone” (made famous by Chet Baker). It also includes a solo piano interpretation of Thelonious Monk's “Round Midnight,” and live voice and piano interpretations of the American traditional “O Death” and the country song, “Pardon Me I've Got Someone to Kill.” The album includes both electric live performances (recorded in Paris, Copenhagen, and East Sussex) and studio recordings made in San Diego, CA.

Live at St. Thomas the Apostle documents Galás’ volcanic May 2016 performance at St. Thomas the Apostle church in Harlem NY, described by the New York Times as "guttural and operatic, baleful and inconsolable, spiritual and earthy, polyglot and wordless, nuanced and unhinged." The concert, produced by Intravenal Sound Operations and Red Bull Music Academy, was composed exclusively of what Galás calls “death songs.”

More information can be found here.

04 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

NYC-based artist Evan Caminiti breathes life into the Dust Editions imprint with the release of Toxic City Music. Caminiti has explored electro-acoustic music since the mid 2000's, the latest transmission being 2015's Meridian. While that album was Caminiti’s first to omit electric guitar, he has now returned to the instrument. Here it is buried it in an electronic mist and melted down, its sonic fabric reshaped.

Toxic City Music was inspired by the psychic and physical toxicity of life in late capitalism. Conceived throughout 2015 and 2016, Caminiti captured the sounds of NYC’s machinery and voices before weaving them into his studio experiments. This collection of song mutations unravels in hazy plumes and serrated edges; concrète sounds mesh with disembodied strings and corrosive electronics on "Joaquin", drones ripple under stuttering rhythms and crude synth detritus throughout "NYC Ego." On "Toxic Tape (Love Canal)," layers of digital degradation smear guitar clusters, dissolving into a dubby devotional-ambient space.

More information can be found here.