05 February 2017

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Albums and Singles

Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and Lawrence English are not two artists that I would have ever thought to pair together, but a shared appreciation for David Lynch is probably as solid a foundation for a collaboration as any.  Also, HEXA makes perfect sense given the circumstances:  Xiu Xiu recorded an incredible Twin Peaks homage,  Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art assembled a major retrospective of Lynch’s work, and Lawrence English is one of Australia’s most prominent and distinctive sound artists.  Notably, however, this commissioned accompaniment to Lynch's photographs of abandoned factories sounds almost nothing like either English or Xiu Xiu.  Instead, it sounds a hell of a lot like an artfully restrained and simmering noise album.  More specifically, Factory Photographs is industrial music in the most literal sense of the word, resembling nothing less than the troubled dreams of a ruined and long-deserted factory.

Room40

The most immediately striking aspect of Factory Photographs is how completely Jamie Stewart's aesthetic is subsumed by this commission.  There is absolutely no distinctive aspect of Xiu Xiu’s sound that survives at all, aside from the vaguest elements imaginable, such as "a tendency towards darkness" and "a fondness for harsh textures." Of course, English’s vision does not assert itself all that much either, though Photographs does bear some textural resemblance to his upcoming Cruel Optimism album, albeit with absolutely all of the musical elements excised.  English has worked extensively with field recordings in the past though and that is what Factory Photographs most closely resembles: field recordings of crunching and clanging machines collaged, embellished, and enhanced.  The opening "Sledge" effectively presents the template for the entire project:  echoing clashes of metal, deep crunches and rumbles, subdued and pulsing machine rhythms, menacing feedback, and unexpected transformations of mood. Admittedly, the mood palette here is quite limited, probably only covering "tense," "brooding," and "haunted," but those are all moods that I am quite fond of.

Yet another immediately noticeable feature of this album is that feels like part of an installation (which I suppose it is) rather than a series of stand-alone compositions.  It often feels like quite a harrowing installation though, so if English and Stewart were aiming for mere industrial ambiance, they chose a particularly visceral and menacingly intrusive strain of it.  This album definitely has some teeth.  That said, the overall feel throughout Factory Photographs is that of rusted, churning machinery violently rattling and spraying sparks alone in a cavernous empty space.  With that as the baseline, however, Stewart and English periodically erupt into a handful of striking set pieces.  The gnarled feedback of the opening "Sledge" is one such moment, but it was not until the one-two punch of "Lumber" and "Ring Bark" that Factory Photographs truly grabbed and held my attention.  In "Lumber," a clipped, locked groove-style rhythm relentlessly carries along a howling and crunching cacophony that sounds like a giant machine has gone mad and started tearing apart its surroundings.  "Ring Bark" is a bit more subtle, but no less mesmerizing, as its initial ghostly hum of feedback unexpectedly explodes into a stuttering rhythm of static that sounds like the end of a record being playing at a disconcerting speed.  I suspect Lynch himself would appreciate that small nightmarishly surreal touch.

To my ears, those are probably the strongest pieces on the album, but there are number of other wonderfully haunting motifs strewn through Photographs, like the slowly quavering and uncomfortably harmonizing moans of "There Never Was," the dissolving eruptions of flutters in "Over Horizontal Plains," and the slow-motion volcano of shuddering static that is "The Body."  Given that two of the album’s ten pieces are mere snippets that last less than a minute, English and Stewart rack up quite a strong hit-to-miss ratio, even if it all tends to rapidly flow by in an all-too-brief blur. Weirdly, I am not quite sure if that is a triumph of sequencing or a flaw, as it is hard to tell if Factory Photographs was intended a series of incidental pieces seamlessly stitched together into a coherent whole or an attempt at a fully formed album that needed a little padding to reach an acceptable length.  More likely, it is the former, but it still feels more like a (delicious) snack than a meal.  Of course, that also means that no pieces ever overstay their welcome, which I greatly appreciate.  More importantly, I was quite impressed at how completely Factory Photographs succeeds in other regards.  For one, it feels like a true collaboration with a strong and distinctive vision: if it sounds a bit like a Lawrence English album, it at least sounds like a sinister negative image of one.  Also, HEXA unquestionably nails the grainy, desolate, and unreal mood of Lynch's photographs, which was the whole point of this collaboration.  While it probably is not an essential release within either artist’s canon, it feels like much more than just a soundtrack and is a fine way to imbue my home with an appropriate atmosphere of Lynchian dread.

Samples:

• Sledge
• Lumber
• Ring Bark

 

 

05 February 2017

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Albums and Singles

This winter marks the 20th anniversary of Maurizio and Roberto Opalio’s singular My Cat is an Alien project, a milestone that they are celebrating with a pair of fascinating and divergent releases.  Originally recorded back in 2015, Eternal Beyond is the fruit of an explosive and wildly experimental 4-day session with French black metal vocalist Joëlle Vinciarelli that does not sound at all like black metal.  RE-SI-STEN-ZA!, on the other hand, is billed as a sort of culmination of My Cat is an Alien’s entire career.  As I have not yet heard much of the Opalio’s earlier work, I cannot vouch for the truth of that, but I was pleasantly surprised by the title piece, which sounds like the work of a radical art commune a la Amon Düül embellished and collaged by a talented noise/musique concrète artist.

Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers!

I am always especially eager to hear the Opalio brothers' collaborative endeavors, as My Cat is an Alien is such a singular and hermetic entity.  As such, it presents quite a unique challenge for any artist attempting to merge with their aesthetic, which generally leads to some intriguingly bizarre results.  Also, I am often unfamiliar with the other artists who enter the Alien orbit, so it can be a potential opportunity for me to discover some similarly outré minds.  In this case, I was vaguely aware of Joëlle Vinciarelli’s La Morte Young side project, but completely unfamiliar with her status as the howling frontwoman of French black metal band Talweg.  Black metal and MCIAA seem like unlikely bedfellows, but it is immediately apparent from the harrowing shrieks in brief opener "Preludio" that Joëlle’s feral edge is probably the perfect foil for the Opalios' burbling psychotropic miasma.  The first fully formed piece of the album, "Eternal Marriage of Heaven and Hell," only deepened that belief.  The core of "Eternal Marriage" is very much in line with MCIAA's recent aesthetic of plinking and disjointed strings, churning electronic drones, and a quavering and wordless vocal haze, but it is viscerally enhanced by crunching and scraping metal textures and a host of guttural screams and jungle sounds.  It sounds like a wonderfully cacophonous and unearthly collision of lysergic reverie, space battle, metal recycling plant, and monkey orgy.  That is certainly not a niche that I knew needed filling beforehand, but it works brilliantly.

The other two major pieces on the album are similarly compelling, particularly "Eternal Albert Ayler," which enhances Maurizio Opalio's harp-like backdrop and the buzzing electronic periphery with a wonderfully strangled and primal trumpet solo from Vinciarelli.  The 22-minute "Eternal Eclipse du Soleil" is the album’s massive centerpiece though, unleashing a buzzing and sizzling bed of electronic textures, wordless ritualistic chants and moans, and plenty of crunching and scraping metal textures.  As it progresses, some of the components grow increasingly unreal in texture.  Also, it often sounds like there is a hapless noise-guitar band a la The Dead C trying to be heard above the din.  The overall effect is quite a difficult one to convey, but the closest description I can muster is "it sounds like approaching a remote monastery through a jungle while the earth shakes and fire rains from the sky."  As with many great MCIAA works, it could arguably benefit from more aggressive editing, but the length feels fundamentally crucial for pulling me completely out of my reality in time for the heavy and beautifully crafted final crescendo.

To my ears, Eternal Beyond was an ideal collaboration for the Opalios at this stage in their career, as they have plunged as deeply and completely into a hallucinatory rabbit hole of otherworldliness as anyone. While I am sure Maurizio and Roberto will no doubt go even deeper into that singular headspace with future albums, this release is an unexpectedly explosive lateral move away from that expected trajectory.  Most MCIAA albums evoke and explore an increasingly vibrant and fully realized alien soundworld totally unlike anything else I have heard–on Eternal Beyond, the Opalio’s vision instead feels like it is ripping through a dimensional barrier to bleed into our own.  That is a welcome twist: as much as I love being totally unmoored in unfettered imagination run wild, some earthbound context and contrast adds some very effective sharp edges to MCIAA's strange dreams.

Samples:

• Eternal Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• Eternal Albert Ayler
• Eternal Eclipse Du Soleil

 

05 February 2017

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Albums and Singles

Emptyset has always been a project that I felt weirdly guilty about not appreciating more, as they seemed like a more cerebral and mercilessly deconstructed twist on the UK's industrial-damaged post-dance milieu of Raime, Haxan Cloak, and Demdike Stare.  Also, I love James Ginzburg's Subtext label.  Unfortunately, all their songs sounded vaguely the same to me and I found all the praise for their architectural inspirations a bit mystifying.  Yet still I kept optimistically buying each new album hoping for a masterpiece that never arrived.  Thankfully, this debut release for Thrill Jockey finally makes everything click for me.  The same general template as always is still in place (improbably dense, ribcage-rattling bass and a slow-motion kick drum pulse), but Ginzburg and Paul Purgas have now distilled it into a thing of truly bludgeoning elemental force: Borders absolutely explodes from my speakers.  Also, the duo now wield a bass-heavy homemade "zither" to wonderfully visceral and snarling effect, which I did not see coming at all.  I am officially now a convert.

Thrill Jockey

I freely admit to being very late to the party in embracing Emptyset, but there have always been some rather significant and mitigating "the emperor has no clothes" aspects to the duo that were somewhat difficult to get past While I have not heard all of their releases, I have heard several of the major ones and Ginzburg and Purgas have a long history of avoiding anything resembling hooks, chord changes, melodies, propulsive rhythms, or songcraft. In fact, a remarkable number of Emptyset pieces (particularly the ones on this album) are built upon the obsessive repetition of just one note.  There is also an unwavering fixation on deep, slow-motion thuds for the rhythmic component.  Occasionally, on pieces like "Descent," Emptyset open up with something resembling a relentlessly pummeling groove with multiple notes and rare ping-ponging snare-like drums.  Even then, however, the duo lock into that groove to a mechanically rigid and relentless degree. In general, however, Borders is a feast of extreme bass worship, heavy industrial textures, and cutting edge sound design.  To some degree, many these eleven songs are almost interchangeable, but not in a "this band has absolutely no ideas" way.  Rather, each new piece sounds like yet another monomaniacal attempt to bulldoze me into dust.  I am totally fine with endless variations upon that theme.

On paper, that might not sound especially compelling, but the sheer single-mindedness and absolutely crushing execution of Borders can be legitimately awe-inspiring, particularly when played at an appropriately high volume.  In fact, I suspect the monolithic immensity of Emptyset can probably only be fully captured live, though Borders seems to come as close as a mere recording can possibly come to replicating such viscerally seismic and all-consuming force.  Also, the self-built zither was exactly the missing tool that Emptyset needed for their mission, as its buzzing metallic snarl gives these pieces a real sense of violence that far transcends conceptual sound art.  The zither is especially effective when it is strummed with punky urgency, as in "Speak" and "Dissolve."  Any attempt at maintaining forward momentum at all adds another yet layer of gratification.  It is certainly not something that Emptyset has explored much in the past.

I am most fascinated by Emptyset's core aesthetic though, as it dawned on me as I revisited some of their other albums that Ginzburg and Purgas were essentially applying a high-powered microscope to underground dance: they would essentially focus on small snippet of a groove, excise it, blow it up to rumbling and monstrous size, and then loop it.  In that light, I now appreciate the "architecture" component of Emptyset's art a bit better, as their real magic is their ability to take a simple idea and absolutely overwhelm a space with their highly localized earthquake of oversaturated frequencies, rich overtones, and subterranean rumble. That, of course, makes perfect sense, as anyone who heard last year's Paul Jebanasam and Roly Porter albums can attest that the Subtext milieu have a genius for explosive production values.  They also have a tendency towards crystalline clarity, but Emptyset bucks the trend, as Borders is quite an appealingly gritty and distorted affair.  There truly is not anything else out there quite like this, as Borders feels half like old Raime and Haxan Cloak snippets that have been chiseled and jacked-up to brutal effect and half like a boozed-up Ellen Fullman album spoiling for a street fight.  Borders is admittedly all force and density, but it is nearly impossible to imagine anyone else pulling off that feat any better than Ginzburg and Purgas do here.

Samples:

• Body
• Descent
• Speak

 

05 February 2017

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Albums and Singles

Eli Keszler's Cold Pin was easily one of most remarkable and inventive albums of 2011, but he has largely been working under my radar ever since, steadily releasing a flow of live recordings and small-edition vinyl-only collaborations.  Consequently, I was delighted to discover that he was finally ready to unleash another solo opus.  Last Signs of Speed, the inaugural release from Berlin's Empty Editions, is inherently a bit less radical than Cold Pin, as it is sadly not built from a motorized string installation.  It may as well have been built from a motorized percussion installation though, as Keszler's hyper-kinetic free-jazz-inspired drumming is compellingly inhuman and unpredictable.  There is also some music: the album description intriguingly references both Scientist and Iannis Xenakis as key influences, but that dub influence is a damn subtle one.  Instead, Last Signs generally sounds more like Xenakis mixed with a truckload of drumsticks being fitfully poured down a long and winding flight of stairs (in the best way possible).

Empty Editions

I tend to think of Eli Keszler primarily as an incredibly talented percussionist with a lot of bold and interesting ideas, so I sometimes forget that he is a formidable composer and multi-instrumentalist as well.  In fact, most of these twelve pieces were performed entirely by Keszler himself, which goes a long way towards explaining why it was recorded in three different cities over two years.  Sometimes Keszler had some talented help though, as he is occasionally joined by cellist Leila Bordreuil, percussionist Geoff Mullen, and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn.  Unsurprisingly, the pieces featuring the string orchestra tend to be the most Xenakis-like and often the most vibrant, rich, and fully formed.  That is not always the case though, as Keszler goes it alone in the wonderfully deranged opener "Sudden Laughter, Laughter Without Reason," which sounds like a handful of sickly, out-of-phase sonar pings uncomfortably harmonizing with one another as Keszler unleashes a wildly skittering drum solo.  It is a quite an opening salvo.  As for the orchestra, they make their strongest showing on "Is Stage Director," as they work up quite a churning and cacophonous din of ugly drones as Keszler goes absolutely bananas on his kit.  It is probably the strongest piece on the album just on sheer intensity alone, as Keszler is an unpredictable blur of oddly timed and insanely intricate fills.  Curiously, that unhinged flurry is immediately followed by my other favorite piece ("Holes, Parts Missing"), which eschews percussive pyrotechnics altogether in favor of a quietly lurching and see-sawing rhythm of deep bowed strings.

The rest of the album is a bit more one-dimensionally percussion-focused, but there is indeed a bizarrely manifested and deeply abstract dub influence that arguably surfaces again and again in the form of woozily throbbing bass pulses. "No Iodine, No Breeze" is an especially representative example of that strain, resembling a crawling reggae groove that has been deconstructed into ghostly starkness with some eerily tinkling piano accompaniment.  It is the sort of thing that would definitely drag in the wrong hands, but the wildly plinking and ricocheting percussion handily erases any danger of a lull.  Also, aside from his "conventional" drumming, Keszler additionally creates a lot of unusual textural and rhythmic effects using rocks and gravel on his kit.  It is quite a distinctive sound.  

Most of Last Signs of Speed is devoted to interesting variations upon similarly minimal melodic themes, such as "Breaches Breaches," which sounds like someone tirelessly pumping away at a dying accordion.  The more dramatic departures tend to occur only when other musicians are involved, such as Leila Bordreuil’s nuanced miasma of nightmarish cello drones in "The Next Day, In the Afternoon." Not to be upstaged on his own album, Keszler's percussion for that piece resembles nothing less than several overlapping and fast-paced ping-pong matches.  Later, Keszler teams up with Geoff Mullen for an apparent reprise of "No Iodine, No Breeze" entitled "Willing to be Open," which takes the album’s percussion to strange and frenzied new heights.  Wielding an array of glass, metal, and wood fragments, it sounds like either the work of an insanely busy Rube Goldberg contraption or an amplified and bizarrely rhythmic hail storm.

Naturally, the problem with making an album as brilliant and inventive as Cold Pin is that there will inevitably have to be a follow-up and that it will be nearly impossible to make the same impact a second time, though Keszler did revisit Cold Pin's mechanized installation once more with 2012's Catching Net.  Last Signs of Speed is a different beast altogether though, veering away from installations and sound art into a kinetic tour de force performance behind the drum kit.  As such, it is considerably more technique-driven than conceptually visionary, but Keszler's technique is quite staggering on its own, as he is a skittering, clattering whirlwind.  His talents as a composer are not quite on the same level though, so Speed probably would have been stronger as just a single LP rather than a double.  The pieces are all generally quite good, but a few feel interchangeable with one another and a broodingly monochromatic mood has a tendency to make an album feel longer than it actually is.  Minor grumbling aside, however, Last Signs of Speed is still quite a singular and inspired album.  My opinion may be somewhat suspect though, as I love listening to great drummers flexing their improv skills and could probably happily listen to Keszler play for hours with no music at all.  While I am sure that such a predisposition towards free-jazz drumming helps make Speed a bit more mesmerizing, it is probably not essential, as this is exactly the sort of album that could make someone excited about virtuosic percussionists.

Samples:

• Sudden Laughter, Laughter Without Reason
• Is Stage Director
• Holes, Parts Missing

 

 

 

03 February 2017

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Albums and Singles

UnicaZürn build their long, ceaselessly evolving musical compositions through a process of improvisation followed by careful editing and processing. Their music, drawn from subconscious associations while recording, is frequently aquatic or oceanic in overall mood and texture. Knight has spent most of his life living on the banks of the Thames while Thrower resides on the East Sussex coast, and their musical flights of imagination tend toward rolling river dynamics and the open seas of synthesised sound.

For UnicaZürn, tidal imagery, oceanic forms and the slow rhythms of coastal water are a recurring structural presence, with strong associations of rootlessness, of being far away from home, a stranger in a strange land. The inability of human lungs to breathe water endows rivers and seas with a special poetics: a boundary between two different but inter-related states. On the one hand, solidity, clarity, definition; on the other, fluidity, uncertainty, dissolution. The sense of a threshold between opposites gives rise to an elusive otherness, suggesting a portal through which the everyday world can be escaped. Death under the water, the survivors of a lost kingdom clinging to the rocks of an unfamiliar island, a coastal boat ride into deepest abstraction, a deserted beach expressing a world outside reality.

A sexual frisson too: a hovering at the brink, poised at the turbulent edge of pleasure, swept away into oblivion. Do we head toward the sea when we want to escape? And at the coastline, do we walk to the edge because we want to jump, or be swept away by an unexpected wave? There’s a darkness in the sea, even if illuminated by the most dazzling sunshine. Open horizons shows the clutter of our lives to be transient, and as we look to the sea we feel a dizzying sense of the eternal. Aquatic sensibility, oceanic timescales: the action of the salt sea beating on the shore. Each grain of sand a rock smashed to dust. Beaches are cosmic, elemental. They are images of time.

UnicaZürn’s core instrumentation blends analogue synthesiser, mellotron and electric piano with electric guitar and clarinet. Both Thrower and Knight draw upon their love and wide experience of of electronic music, from the outer shores of Stockhausen to the outer spaceways of Tangerine Dream. In addition, Knight is reknowned for his pioneering multi-textured fretwork with Danielle Dax and his ambient guitar settings for Lydia Lunch, while Thrower’s reed playing provided a distinctive melancholy in Coil and emerged as electro-acoustic texture in Cyclobe.

More information can be found here.

03 February 2017

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Albums and Singles

A Pink Sunset For No One is the eighth studio album from Noveller, the solo electric guitar project from US composer and filmmaker.

One of the most adept guitarists of our time, Lipstate returns with her signature breathtaking cinematic, experimental soundscapes. Eloquent and striking, her instrumentals evoke colorful and otherworldly imagery. Lipstate writes in majestic, emotional strokes with pieces ranging from remarkably tense environments to shimmering psychedelic rock or unraveling into something darker.

More information can be found here.

03 February 2017

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Albums and Singles

A few years ago, my dear friend and bandmate Jamie Stewart and I were talking about SWANS. I started to mention how much I admired the utterly personal approach to guitar that Norman Westberg had developed on those early records and moreover how that had blossomed out so richly on this latest incarnation of the band. During the course of the conversation Jamie mentioned a CDR that Norman had passed to him, which collected a few pieces of solo work that Norman had been working on. I was instantly curious to hear these pieces and started to track down the recordings online. After some investigating I found Norman’s CDRs available through an Etsy shop he had set up. I ordered one and a couple of weeks later, after I’d listened to that first CDR non-stop for a few days, I order all the others I could get my hands on.

The first solo work I heard from Norman was this recording, Jasper Sits Out. I was instantly struck by the textural sensitivity he managed to create with nothing more than a guitar and some modest pedals. He managed to find a depth in what was a very limited palette and that impressed me greatly. The connections to his work with SWANS was clear, in that his trademark relation to tonality was present. Instead of relying on volume to achieve this sonic state though, Norman’s solo practice relied on a sense of swaying harmony and orbiting loops to create a tonally dense sound world that was very much personal, but overtly invitational to the listener.

Jasper Sits Out, the title referencing the Westberg family mascot who has now sadly departed, reflects Norman’s interest in minimal structures and the processes of iteration that are formed through the manipulation of looping fragments. Creating almost tidal surges across these pieces, Jasper Sits Out speaks to his abilities to contour sound in time. The lead track for example is truly oceanic in that is has a remarkable tidal flow of strumming textures that seem to sink below one another in a effortless wash of textural density.

I could not be more pleased to be able to share this music through Room40. This edition comes completely remastered and features a bonus piece recorded exclusively for this edition. I encourage you to listen deeply.

- Lawrence English January 2017

03 February 2017

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Albums and Singles

So complex and substance-affected was their evolution, Bardo Pond have been creating their dreamy riffs for 26 years alongside a myriad of side projects and their prolific Record Store Day releases. Returning with a career defining album, Under The Pines sees them delve into the subconscious with their transcending cosmic post-rock.

Over 41 minutes The Pond’s fermentation, their languid throb and textured groove (flute, violin, Isobel Sollenberger’s haunting vocals) sounds like cathartic dream pop wrapped in a delicately constructed barbwire shroud.

“Playing fuzzed-out stuff of stoner dreams since the mid '90s,” (thanks Pitchfork) and beyond the mentions of free jazz, the avant garde, Sun Ra and The Book Of The Dead, Bardo Pond’s remarkable career and exemplary output has seen them gain fans from all corners of the pond. In 2010 Lou Reed and his wife Laurie Anderson invited them to perform at the Vivid festival they curated at the Sydney Opera House, not forgetting they were recently handpicked to support Jesus & Mary Chain at London’s Roundhouse as part of Mogwai’s 20th Anniversary and Stewart Lee chose them for the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival which he curated just last year.

Hailed for their space rock, drone, shoegaze, noise and/or psychedelia, and in a super lengthy interview in Ptolemaic Terrascope enthused (back in 2001) that they were somewhere between John Cage’s silence on 4’33 and Japanese noisenik Merzbow’s total ear-splitting cacophony.

One of their finest albums to date and nearly three decades on, Bardo Pond are in it for the long haul and remain one of the most significant underground rock bands of our time.

More information can be found here.

03 February 2017

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Albums and Singles

Ultra-modern computer music duo Second Woman offer a preview of their forthcoming Spectrum Spools opus, S/W, with an exclusive EP taking cues from the furthest fringes of digital dub and experimental software composition. “I E/P” and “II E/P” utilize percussive stutter, micro-processed echo, and negative space to explore the limits of rhythmic abstraction, blurring the boundary between human artistry and artificial intelligence. A pair of remixes by Grecian dub-techno progenitor Fluxion and Midwest avant-footwork producer Jlin round out the collection, innovatively mining the source material for vivid rhythmic contours.

More information can be found here.

29 January 2017

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Albums and Singles

I am not fond of tossing the term "weird" out to describe music. Not only is it a vague and somewhat stigmatizing label, I do not consider a lot of what I hear to fit that term. I mean, I have albums of car crashes (GX Jupitter-Larsen), noise made by a ballerina’s performance (The Rita), and on stage improvised masturbation (The Gerogerigegege). However, Carp’s Head is hard to describe in any other way. With painfully guttural vocals by Ghédalia Tazartès, percussion by Andrzej Załęsku, and everything else by Paweł Romańczuk, it is like an Eastern European folk album vomited on an electro-acoustic work and the two were just mashed together with purely malicious intent.

Monotype

The beginning of "Danse Inverse" is somehow one of the more cohesive works.A pulsing bit of electronics at first; it suddenly becomes a mutant synth take on folk music, with the guttural vocals channeling darkness not unlike a black metal album.Later, on "Dobra Nasza," an expansive opening of improvised, shimmering electronics and inhuman vocalizations eventually give way to a jazz-heavy rhythm section and almost conventional rock music vocals (structurally at least, the voice itself is still quite inhuman).

Even with its rhythmic opening and occasional plucked string, "The Far Horizon" is overall dissonant and unpleasant, with a lot of menace in its occasionally open spaces.The drums on "Wild East Blues" may be an almost conventional reference point, but the slow shuffle tempo and terrifying vocals are anything but normal, and even the accordion thrown into the mix takes on a dark hue.Later, on the somewhat peaceful "The End of Western World," the nearly operatic vocal style casts a menacing shadow onto the piece’s bowed strings and chiming percussion, which, on their own would have an almost classical sound.

Perhaps the most unsettling moments are courtesy of the two part "Wolves and Birds" (the second piece is not on the vinyl album but on the companion CD version of the album).The title is rather descriptive, with the first part being field recordings of birds chirping in the distance.However, the hollow drone and far off vocalizations (the wolves part, I assume) give the ambience of an oppressive jungle at night.Things can be heard, not really identifiable and not at all human sounding, but just far enough away to build tension rather than having the trio opt for horror movie scares.The second part is more field recording collage based, with only a bit of cymbal sounding musical, and has the same sense of the oppressive unknown throughout.

The adorable kitten that features on the cover of Carp's Head could not be less of an accurate representation of what is included.This is one of those records where the weirdness comes across not as a contrived attempt to be bizarre or unique, but gives the record a genuinely unsettling quality.Even without Tazartès’ intentionally unpleasant vocals, the sound would be uncomfortable, but the voice just pushes it even further.But I am always an advocate that art does not have to be pleasant to be enjoyable, and this is definitely one of those cases.It is not the type of music I would put on often, but when I am in the mood to be challenged and a bit unsettled, this is one I will reach for.

samples:

• Danse Inverse
• Dobra Nasza
• The Far Horizon