- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Previously based in Chicago, Steve Fors has build a small, but strong discography first as half of the duo the Golden Sores, and then on his own as Aeronaut. Now based in Switzerland, It's Nothing, but Still is his first full length solo work under his own name. It certainly feels like a new album, but traces of his previous projects can be heard, which is for the best. Lush with both beauty and darkness, it is nuanced and fascinating.
The six distinct pieces that comprise It's Nothing, but Still follow similar structures: mostly leading off with field recordings, Fors then weaves in dense layers of electronic and acoustic sound that build in intensity and complexity. Even though there may be structural similarity, each piece stands out as unique. A piece such as the opener, "(Good Enough) For Now," begins with wet crunching amidst rain and insects before a swelling passage of cello gives the piece an uneasy sense of inertia. To this, he blends in fragments of conversations and the occasional harsher, wobbling bit of noise, all the while continuing to expand upon the droning tonal elements.
There are some similarities in "Unsound Structures," with the use of bowed cello, but instead everything has a bit of a darker hue. The electronics are bleaker, the cello has a greater sense of menace, and its abrupt concluding section makes for a perfect release of tension. "Lead into Aether" features Fors transitioning from light into dark within the same piece: gentle electronic tones are arranged tightly, with some nice panning effects to give depth. However, he slowly increases distortion to the mix, ending the piece on a shrill, feedback heavy note that significantly contrasts the peace from which it began.
There are pieces in which Fors simplifies the mix and instead creates things that are more aligned with conventional song structures. For "It's Nothing, but Still," he transitions from field recordings into pure piano, with fuzzy, distorted electronics tastefully worked in to serve as a countermelody. What resembles processed operatic vocals are added in throughout, resulting in a rather beautiful song-like structure. The concluding "The Way to Heaven" is similarly sparse in its construction: the recording of a train, a hovering melody, and a bit of low end punch come together as a perfectly unified piece of music.
Part of the impetus for It's Nothing, but Still is a chronic lung condition that Fors suffers from, and it is hard to not hear the use of slow, heavy cello swells throughout much of this record as a reflection of that. Heavy, deliberate, and a bit unsettling, the parallel to labored breathing is hard to ignore. Even with this bleak element though, there is a lot of beauty in this record as well, and the pairing of bleak and hopeful is perfect.
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- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
Ten years after her first appearance on Keith Rankin and Seth Graham's perennially bizarre and eclectic Orange Milk label , Paul returns to the fold with her new trio. Naturally, there are plenty of similarities between this latest release and the trio's 2020 debut (Ray), but there has been some significant evolution as well. To my ears, I Am Fog feels considerably more sketchlike and challenging than Ray, but that is not necessarily a bad thing, as anyone seeking out an Ashley Paul album would presumably already have a healthy appreciation for dissonance and deconstruction. A decent analogy might be that Ray is like a short story collection while I Am Fog is more like a series of poems: the voice and vision are instantly recognizable, but these nine pieces are an unusually distilled, minimal, and impressionistic version of that voice. In less abstract terms, that means that I Am Fog again sounds like some kind of unsettling and psychotropic outsider cabaret, but the emphasis is now more upon gnarled/strangled textures and lingering uncomfortable harmonies than it is on melodic hooks and broken, lurching rhythms. In addition to the trio's overall step even further into the outré, the album also features further enticement with one of Paul's strongest "singles" to date ("Shivers").
As a devout fan of Paul's unsettling and singular work, I am intrigued and fascinated by how her vision has evolved since Otto Willberg and Yoni Silver became regular collaborators. While I do miss her prickly, pointillist guitar playing a bit with this album, I quite like how Silver and Willberg provide a somewhat more traditional "jazz trio" foundation for Paul's excursions into the alien and unknown rather than simply following her into increasingly broken and sickly frontiers of strangled dissonance. The opening "A Feeling" is an especially interesting example of that dynamic, as the slow-motion chord progression and male/female vocal harmonies approximate a curdled and unraveling "black lodge" version of Low. My favorite pieces tend to fall on the "creepy and lysergic outsider cabaret" side of the spectrum however. "Escape" is the strongest incarnation of that aesthetic, as it resembles a haunted nursery rhyme recited over an obsessively repeating bass pulse, a broken-sounding martial beat, and sax playing that unpredictably drifts back and forth between a blearily melodic hook and a host of tormented whines and squeaks. It feels like someone accidentally left their childlike whimsy outside and it became partially rotted and macabre overnight.
Elsewhere, the album's other highlight ("Shivers") feels a bit like a torch song or standard, as Paul's lilting vocals fall somewhere in the uncomfortable sweet spot between "lovesick lament" and "I am going to murder you and wear your skin" over an unexpectedly melodic (if spartan) backdrop of double bass, wandering clarinet melodies, and pleasantly clattering, lurching drums. While "Escape" and "Shivers" admittedly feel like they are on a level above the other pieces on the album, I Am Fog's second-tier gems are quite strong as well and there is quite a solid mid-album run of them (though the omnipresent strangled dissonance may be an endurance test for some). For me, the pieces that work best are the ones in which Willberg plays it straight and opts for bass lines that would not feel out of place on a classic Bill Evans album. That said, the appeal of those pieces is simply that they make Paul's excursions into more difficult terrain feel a bit more grounded and digestible. That is certainly a welcome and effective touch (Willberg is a great foil), but Paul's provocatively original and endlessly evolving transcendence of the familiar is still the main draw.
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- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
Jeff Barsky has been quietly releasing alternately sublime and noise-ravaged guitar albums for years and this latest album finds him returning to LA's oft ahead-of-the-curve Already Dead Tapes (where he last surfaced with 2015's Flickering). Normally, I would not describe an edition of 100 tapes as a major release, but most of Barsky's solo work has historically appeared on his own Insect Fields imprint so Celestial Cycles will likely reach more ears than usual. Fittingly, it is an especially strong album, capturing Barsky at the absolute height of his powers. While few solo guitarists can summon dreamlike beauty from their ax as reliably and masterfully as Barsky, the centerpiece of this album is unquestionably the swirling and nightmarish closing epic "Become The Birds," which arguably recaptures the magic of Campbell Kneale's Birchville Cat Motel project in its prime (which is damn high praise coming from me).
The brief yet lovely "Follow the Moon" introduces Celestial Cycles' general aesthetic of quavering drones, flickering harmonic whines, and rippling flurries of hammer-ons and pull-offs before the album begins in earnest with the more substantial "Celestial Shift." Given the loop-based nature of Insect Factory, extended durations tend to almost always result in increased textural and harmonic sophistication and "Celestial Shift" is a solid illustration of that, as the expected shimmering beauty is nicely enhanced with a host of twinkling, smoldering, buzzing, and seesawing themes. If the remainder of the album was simply four more variations of that vision, I would be perfectly happy, but Barsky instead chose to go with a parade of cool twists and curveballs and the album is better and more memorable for it.
The lurching, blurting melody of "Movement" is especially delightful and would be my personal pick for a chart-burning single, as Barsky simply unleashes a killer theme then wisely checks out before it overstays its welcome. The next two pieces plunge the album into darker territory, as Barsky first balances beauty with blackened, grinding heaviness and tape hiss ("Infection Chain"), then abandons conventional beauty altogether with the oscillating, blown-out industrial thrum of "Low Gear Meditation." That sets the stage nicely for the main course, as "Become The Birds" gradually evolves from tenderly murmuring swells of bliss to a roiling and howling crescendo that sounds like an angry swarm of noise hornets over the course of about 23 minutes. To my ears, the whole album is stellar, but "Become The Birds" ends it with one hell of an exclamation point (and an instant classic in my personal pantheon of noise guitar masterpieces).
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- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
On the trio's first album in seven years (the largest period of dormancy ever for them), Locrian simultaneously return to their origins while evolving and refining their sound forward. Stripped back to the barest essence of their sound but with some 17 years of evolution, New Catastrophism feels both like a reset but also a culmination of everything they have accomplished thus far.
Much has happened for the band since 2015's Infinite Dissolution. Guitarist André Foisy and vocalist/synth player Terence Hannum relocated from their previous home base of Chicago to the east coast, leaving drummer Steven Hess as the only member in Illinois. Both Hannum and Hess have been extremely prolific with other projects, with the former starting Axebreaker, The Holy Circle, and Brutalism. Hess has continued with Haptic, Cleared, and RLYR. Foisy, on the other hand, has mainly pursued non-musical endeavors.
These different projects certainly contributed to the four lengthy pieces that make up New Catastrophism, which at first seems one of their most sparse works, yet hides significant complexity. Compared to their two most recent albums (2015's Infinite Dissolution and 2013's Return to Annihilation) the trio abandons some of the more conventional prog and metal elements to expose the bleak, seething electronics and understated guitar that always lay beneath. This sparser approach characterized their earlier works, but here the nuance and depth is distinctly more mature and multifaceted.
Locrian make this clear on the opener "Mortichnia." Starting from a slow fade in, Foisy's guitar appears, layered and dense, as Hannum's synths underscore, resulting in a slow, yet cinematic expanse of sound. However, even with the rather basic instrumentation, the overall sound is dense and varied, giving a greater sense of intricacy and focus than heard on their previous, similar works.
They dial up the menace and sense of impending doom on "The Glare is Everywhere and Nowhere Our Shadow," via guitars and electronics within sustained distortion swelling off from afar. More guitar, drums, and Hannum's demonic vocals hit all at once, making for a wonderfully jarring transition. Vocals continue as Hess pounds out a steady rhythm; the jerky construction of the piece makes it all the more intense. By the end the drums pummel, the layers become even denser, and the conclusion is appropriately dramatic.
Comparatively, the other side of the album is more melancholy than malicious. "Incomplete Map of Voids" is lighter from the onset, with the focus on glistening synths and subtle guitar, underscored by a basic, but effective rhythm. The guitar is the focus, and as distortion increases, the trio restrains. Vocals and drums make for a heavier sensibility, but the clean guitar and lush synths keep things calm, by the end it sounds like a lost Cure outtake circa Faith. The trio's love for prog is in display in the first half of the closing "Cenotaph to the Final Glacier," with Foisy's acoustic guitar layering and oddly recorded drums. As things begin to get noisy, the guitar is overtaken by a pulsing synth mass that lurks and menaces yet never fully erupts, rekindling the darkness that was prevalent on the first half of the album.
Admittedly, I was a big fan of when Locrian went a bit more "rock" on their two previous album, so it took me a few spins of New Catastrophism to fully appreciate the return to more minimalist, ambient song structures. Even with this approach, a universe of complexity lurks, both in the production and the way in which the songs are constructed, with subtle production techniques adding so much. It is a bleak and depressing experience at times, but a beautifully crafted one, and one with themes of social decay and environmental damage, it is far too perfect for the present day.
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- Duncan Edwards
- Albums and Singles
I only recently heard Laura Cannell’s fabulous album The Earth With Her Crowns from 2020 and could easily spend 500 words praising its dazzling allure and stark—yet comforting—beauty. Time marches on, though, and since she already has two new releases in 2022 I am focusing on the present year. Both are excellent but, of the two, I am most immediately impressed by Antiphony, wherein Cannell uses alto, bass, and tenor recorders to riff on the birdsong of rural Suffolk , where she lives, which called to her amid the quietness of lockdown. It is riveting and a work that I am unlikely to set aside any time soon.
Laura Cannell’s background in baroque, medieval, and renaissance music suits this project down to the ground, as does her understanding of folk music tradition. Her playing makes it easy to visualize figures throughout the centuries inspired by the call and response of the winged creatures around them to blow into recorders in castles, churchyards, classrooms, farmyards and meadows. Cannell can play double recorders and also create a third tone between the two oscillations. This ability, along with her penchant for drone and delay, indicates a sensibility which honors tradition without being rooted in any regional spot. She clearly understands the power of simplicity and repetition without becoming predictable, and embraces imaginative abstraction without sacrificing melody or sounding feeble. All of which lifts her compositions on Antiphony of the Trees away from the mimicry of nature and into a magical realm closer to sacred chamber music.
This is her seventh solo album and it is loaded with brilliant tracks. It was followed by the hyper-minimal four track EP Unlocking Rituals featuring single-take recordings made on a full church pipe organ built in 1899. The slow peaceful recordings make the organ appear lifelike, with air moving like breaths through the instrument. At some points this old life form seems close to flatlining, and when the end silence comes it is an abrupt shock. Three of the pieces have titles taken from John Burnside’s book Black Cat Bone and the other one, “Lay Down By The Golden Reeds” is dedicated to her friend, musician and sound artist Mira Calix who died this year.
In collaboration with cellist Kate Ellis, Cannell has also released a regular series of monthly EPs on which she typically uses overbowed violin, church organ, and vocals to striking effect. Much of Laura Cannell’s music may be heard as a collaboration between settings with unique acoustical qualities (such as a lighthouse and a hydraulic power station) and whatever is her chosen instrument (to which she brings an idiosyncratic twist). So it is with Antiphony of the Trees wherein she absolutely shreds whatever preconceived notions I had of the recorder. I once attended a concert in Lichfield cathedral where the choir moved to and from different areas in the building. The effect of this was incredibly moving and the way Cannell pays attention to her surroundings offers a similar experience.
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- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest release from the long-running ambient dub solo project of erstwhile Mi Ami/Black Eyes bassist Jacob Long is stirring up some feelings of regret about how I managed to sleep on this project for so long. While I am not yet sure if Ghost Poems simply caught me at the right time or if Long has been unusually inspired recently, my previous exposures to Earthen Sea left me feeling like the ambient/dub balance was too heavily weighted towards the "ambient" side to leave a deep impression. I suspect the balance has not changed all that much since I last checked in, but Long seems to have made a big leap forward in perfecting his execution with this album (it "further refines his fragile, fractured palette into fluttering arrythmias of dust, percussion, and yearning," according to the label). Apparently, I am very much into fluttering arrhythmias of yearning now, as the first half of this album boasts a handful of pieces that can stand with just about anything in Kranky's rich and influential discography: rather than resembling dub techno that has been deconstructed and dissolved into a soft-focus haze, Ghost Poems often feels like Long has managed to seamlessly combine the best of ambient and the best of dub techno into something fresh, wonderful, and uniquely his own.
According to Long, one of this project's central themes is "the melancholy of 7th chords on a fake Rhodes patch," which feels like quite an apt and self-aware description. In lesser hands, that might be uncharitably viewed as a formulaic approach, but Long seems to instead belong to a more rarified type of artist who is passionately devoted to perfecting a single theme that obsesses him and he seemingly has no trouble finding myriad intriguing ways to keep that theme evolving. Unsurprisingly, blearily melancholy and repeating fake Rhodes chords are indeed the heart of the album, but Long inventively enhances that simple theme with a host of delightful textural and rhythmic elements. Some of those elements are expected ones, such as the presence of deep bass throb, understated kick drum patterns, and subtle cymbal flourishes that give these pieces their physicality and sense of forward motion. Those more conventionally musical touches are just pieces of a larger puzzle though, as Long also gets a lot of mileage from "domestic sounds (sink splashing, room tone, clinking objects) filtered through live FX to imbue them with an intuitive, immaterial feel."
In theory, that is not exactly new territory, but it sure feels like it sometimes (particularly on the opening "Shiny Nowhere," as crackling, shuffling, and dripping sounds gamely replace the expected snare and cymbals in the lurching, slow-motion groove). Given how explosive and cacophonous some of Long's previous bands have been, I was quite surprised by his talent for distilling a piece to its absolute essence and never playing a single wasted or unnecessary note. My favorite piece is the hiss-soaked and sensuously seductive "Stolen Time," but "Felt Absence" and "Snowy Water" help make the whole first half a murderers' row of elegantly frayed and dreamlike hits. To some degree, Long's "variations on a theme" aesthetic unavoidably starts to yield diminishing returns as I get deeper into the album, but some of his best ideas do not surface until later pieces like "Slate Horizon" and "Deep Sky" (both of which make very inspired use of subtly shivering cymbals and clicking drum sticks).
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- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Similar to his recent works Family Secret and House Blessing, the newest work from drummer/percussionist Jon Mueller features little in the way of overt rhythms or obvious instrumentation. Instead, The Future is Unlimited, Always captures Mueller at his most spacious: layers of frequencies and tones that are as engaging as they are mysterious, and capturing more than just audio, but a deeper sense of existence.
Consisting of a single 33-minute piece, The Future is Unlimited, Always features Mueller working with sustained tones, ghostly frequencies, and shimmering, low-end rumbles. The abstraction of sound takes on an almost spiritual quality that is palpable through the tones and textures that never fade into the background, but also never become too aggressive or oppressive. Instead they sit just at the right level to be mesmerizing while still allowing breathing room.
The instrumentation Mueller utilizes throughout this album is not the most apparent, but I think detect what might be some of his traditional percussion work weaved in, but processed and rendered into lush tones that float, rather than pummel. Beyond that, only what sounds like some digital treatments are identifiable, with everything else merging into a beautiful, dynamic world of various frequencies. Towards the end, a rumbling drifts in that also may be the sound of drums, but heavily treated into something else entirely.
Accompanied by a short piece of fiction in a luxurious digibook, Mueller clearly examines the existential and metaphysical realms with The Future is Unlimited, Always, and it continues to demonstrate what a multifaceted artist he is. His recent works have been exceptionally diverse, but these themes have been a consistent thread through them, and it is quite obvious throughout here as well. Sonically this could not be any more different than another favorite of mine, the relentless but meditative drumming of 2017’s dHrAaNwDn, but both feature his unique gift in conjuring a sense of space and place simply through sound.
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- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
In general, releasing a three-hour album is a highly dubious endeavor, as such an extreme length usually turns even very good music into an endurance test and virtually guarantees that few people will ever listen to the entire opus more than once. When "Memphis dronegaze cult" Nonconnah do it, however, it feels like an absolute godsend. Part of that is because the husband/wife duo of Zachary and Denny Wilkerson Corsa lead what is possibly the most consistently fascinating and wonderful shoegaze/drone project around, but there is an equally important second part as well: the Corsas seem to be constantly collaborating with a host of talented guests. Unsurprisingly, that generates an ungodly amount of material and each major new Nonconnah album feels like a mere tantalizing glimpse into the innumerable killer jams and recording sessions that led up to the release. When I say that Don't Go Down to Lonesome Holler could have probably been an equally brilliant six- or nine-hour album, it is not hyperbole: there are over 50 credited performers involved in this album including folks from heavy hitters like Archers of Loaf, Swans, and No Age (as well as more than 60 instruments ranging from singing saws to cats). My guess is that the only limiting factor was how much time the Corsas could spend culling and editing their mountain of killer material without starting to lose their goddamn minds. This album is an absolute revelation ("Nonconnah's most comprehensive vision yet for the American halfpocalypse," according to the label).
Given Nonconnah's unusual compositional techniques (an endlessly shapeshifting series of themes that blur and bleed into each other), the extended song durations (nothing clocks in under 20 minutes), and the fact that this album is the culmination of six years of recordings made in many locations (silos, graveyards, overpasses, etc.) involving several dozen participants, any attempt to concisely describe a single piece is absolutely hopeless. The overall effect, however, feels somewhat akin to being adrift on a sea of shoegaze-y guitar noise in a boat with no oars so I am completely at the mercy of wherever the waves decide to take me. Sometimes the guitar sounds are sun-dappled and beautiful, sometimes they are quivering and hallucinatory, and other times they are roaring and gnarled. Other times, however, the shimmering shoegaze tides roll back out to sea and leave me somewhere else enchanted and dreamlike. Occasionally, I catch myself wishing that a particular theme stuck around longer or had been expanded into a stand-alone piece, but those thoughts tend to immediately dissipate when said passage bleeds into something else that is every bit as gorgeous.
Aside from Zachary/Magpie's invariably beautiful and inventively warped guitar playing, there are extended nods to tape music, classic midwestern emo, numbers stations, spaced-out psychedelia, spoken word and everything in between (including a fireworks display) and it all fits together perfectly into an immersive and truly mind-expanding tour de force. But it is also more than that as well, as the spoken word/sample-based passages give the whole an oft-fascinating narrative arc that feels like an impressionistic swirl of the jumbled thoughts of a crumbling, confused, and possibly doomed empire: thoughtful monologues about capitalism and the nature of consciousness collide with institutional instructions on eluding active shooters and an impassioned preacher ranting about the end times. If these truly are the end times, at least we got an absolutely stunning album out of it as a consolation prize. I realize it is only July right now, but I feel quite confident in declaring this to be my favorite album of the year, as trying to imagine anything more ambitious, zeitgeist-capturing, and visionary album being released between now and December makes my synapses fizzle and smoke.
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- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Following a multitude of self-released tapes and digital releases, Vagrancies is Austin, Texas's Andrew Anderson's first CD based work. Ostensibly created by the instrumentation and sources listed in the disc's liner notes, Anderson's treatment renders them largely unidentifiable, instead using them to construct something else entirely. Consisting of four long-form pieces connected with shorter interludes, Vagrancies covers a lot of ground, with an impressive amount of variety from piece to piece, but still a strong sense of continuity from one piece to the next.
Anderson sets the tone for the disc with the opening "Dressed in No Light." It's a massive, tumbling avalanche of reverberated clicks, with a foghorn-like sound giving a ghostly approximation of a melody. The entirety is bleak and dour, with a fascinating density peppered with spinning and sputtering passages of sound. "Shadows Are Roots" differs in what almost sounds like an indistinct twang of an instrument expanding through a bassy hum. The metallic twang stands out and cuts through, but not in a jarring manner. With Anderson throwing in some percussive knocks, scrapes, and a few wet thuds, there is a lot going on, but never does it come across as unfocused.
Andrew Anderson then adopts a more musical focus with the other two lengthy pieces, using looping structures and a more overt sense of composition. On "Vagrancies," featuring Thor Harris—a previous collaborator, there are some almost conventionally musical passages buried under chaotic layers of birds and other fluttering noises. Anderson keeps the piece active, blending these different segments to excellent effect. A sequence of white noise bursts and digital detritus towards the end build to a wonderfully intense climax. Animal field recordings also feature heavily on "Melting Time." Here, birds and/or small animal chirps exist under an aquatic rumble, with ancient wind chimes over loose, warbling tape noise. There is a little less in the way of variety compared to "Vagrancies," however it is engaging from beginning to end.
The interstitial bits that connect the longer pieces come across as less composed, but instead fascinating collages in their own right, mixing unsettling field recordings, sputtering radios, answering machine messages, and heavy processing throughout. Vagrancies balances that subtle sense of menace that is inherent in works focused on reworking everyday sounds into completely abnormal contexts, but with just the right amount of conventional structures to ground it. Beautifully ambiguous, Anderson's work covers all of the right territories to captivate.
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- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
I feel like I got into this Slovenian "imaginary folk" trio a bit late, as 2019’s A Universe That Roasts Blossoms For A Horse was the first Širom album that I picked up. However, it also seems like each new album is the perfect time to discover Širom and those who join the party with this latest release are in for a real treat. Along with Belgium’s Merope and the scene centered around France’s Standard In-Fi and La Nòvia labels, Širom are one of the leading lights in a new wave of imaginative and adventurous international folk ensembles and this fourth album is their most expansive to date (“for the first time the trio…ignore the time constraints of a standard vinyl record to fashion longer, more fully developed entrancing and hypnotizing peregrinations”). Aside from making stellar use of their newly expanded song lengths, it feels like some delightful jazz influences have crept deeper into Širom’s DNA as well, as a couple of pieces feel like the various members trading wonderfully wild, visceral, and hallucinatory solos over strong, unconventional vamps (the album description also explicitly notes that Širom “echo the borderless, collective spirit of groups like Don Cherry's Organic Music Society and Art Ensemble of Chicago”). Obviously, that is enviable and excellent company to be associated with, but Širom’s influences transcend perceived boundaries of time and space so fluidly that trying to forensically determine the contents of their record collections is both hopeless and entirely beside the point. When they are at their best (which happens often here), Širom feel like a glimpse into an alternate timeline where the freewheeling adventurousness of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s never ended and everything just kept getting weirder, cooler, and more sophisticated forever (and record labels were delighted to foot the bill for anything that could potentially be the next The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter).
The album opens with one hell of a bombshell in the form of “Wilted Superstition Engaged in Copulation,” as the trio unleash an impressive run of killer solos over a pleasantly clattering, oddly timed percussion vamp. Given the exotic nature of the instrumentation and the multiple roles that each of the band members play, it can be quite a challenge to figure out who is doing what at any given moment, but Ana Kravanja’s alternately droning and gnarled viola themes are a definite and recurring highlight. The other highlights are a bit more challenging to wrap my mind around, as one stretch sounds like a buzzing, psychotropic duet between a strangled bagpipe and some Peruvian flutes, while another sounds like a rattling, delay-enhanced cacophony of violently jangled metal chimes. Naturally, there are some other inspired, hard-to-describe moments along the way as well, giving the piece the feel of a 20-minute performance in which a magician pulls increasingly weirder and more surprising things out of his hat. The band then shifts gears a bit for the more subdued “Grazes, Wrinkles, Drifts into Sleep,” as Kravanja unleashes a lovely melancholy viola melody over a quiet backdrop of intertwining balafon and banjo themes. There are plenty of compelling twists early on (sharp and/or ghostly harmonics and warbly, wordless vocals from Kravanja), but the big payoff comes when it shoots right past “psychotropic aviary” and intensifies into a buzzing and heaving crescendo of heavy acoustic drone.
Elsewhere, the trio ride a ritualistic-sounding “tribal” groove en route to a howling and visceral crescendo of tormented strings in “A Bluish Flickering” before surprising me again with a haunting and melodic banjo/viola coda. The last major piece on the album (“Prods the Fire with a Bone, Rolls over with a Snake”) veers into yet another intriguing bit of untrammeled stylistic terrain, as it sounds like a supernatural collision of birdsong-like vocals, Ravel-esque impressionist march, intricate banjo arpeggios, spacey squelches, and feral strings beautifully enlivened with harmonics and bow scrapes. Later, it eventually erupts into a furious maelstrom of tremolo-picked, violently strummed, and furiously bowed strings, but that too collapses to make way for a rolling groove augmented by cool percussion flourishes and circular viola arpeggios. Another impressively volcanic crescendo soon follows and when the dust settles, Širom ride off into the sunset with the rolling, warbling, and jangly outro of “I Unveil a Peppercorn to See It Vanish.” To my ears, the first three songs amount to a nearly unbroken hour of rustic and revelatory brilliance and I have absolutely no grievances with the other two pieces. Širom are an international treasure, as this album sounds like The Incredible String Band, Louise Landes Levi, and the entire Nonesuch Explorer series were mashed together in the best way possible (and with some killer psych touches thrown in for further icing on the cake).
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- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest album from the consistently fascinating Atkinson is yet another plunge into a vibrantly textured and otherworldly dreamspace, this time drawing inspiration from an abstract dialog between house and landscape. Or more specifically, "Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world." In keeping with that theme, Atkinson "revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work." Naturally, there are some other conceptual layers as well (this being a Félicia Atkinson album, after all). One of the more interesting ones is the decision to give the album a name that resembles a "fake title of a fake Godard film." In an obvious sense, that is apt given how Image Langage feels like a film with no actual images, but Godard's mischievous meaning-dissolving weirdness is also manifested in how Atkinson wields and repurposes her sounds. In more concrete terms, that means that Atkinson deliberately used instruments alternately like field recordings or characters in a murky, surreal narrative and often reduces her voice to an unpredictably drifting and elusive presence. The overall effect is like being lost in a beautiful dream where an unreliable narrator periodically drifts in with riddle-like non-clues that only lead me deeper into Atkinson's eerie, soft-focus enigma.
This album is billed as “an environmental record” about “getting lost in places imagined and real.” Naturally, one of the real places central to the album is Atkinson’s home on the “wild coast of Normandy” where much of the writing and recording took place (the rest occurred at a lakeside residency in Switzerland). I bring all this up because Image Langage has an unusually enigmatic and slippery aesthetic that blurs the line between songcraft and more abstract/outré fare. At times, the album can feel very “ambient,” but it is actually chasing something akin to impressionistic clairvoyance/clairaudience. While fully grasping the shades of meaning lurking within a Félicia Atkinson is often a tall order, Thea Ballard crafted quite an illuminating statement for the album’s description, noting that Image Langage evokes a visit to Atkinson’s seaside home in which we are “invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred.” In more practical terms, that means that the overall impression left by Image Langage is that of staying in a benignly haunted cottage populated by whispered voices, bleary drones, ephemeral flickers of piano melody, and hallucinatory manipulations of nature sounds. Unsurprisingly, I find that to be characteristically immersive and fascinating Atkinson territory, but Image Langage also has a handful of great individual pieces that transcend the baseline “ASMR-inspired ambient for well-read seaside ghosts” aesthetic. Amusingly, a case could be made that this is Atkinson’s “dub album,” as two of the strongest pieces share some common ground with artists like Pole and loscil.
My favorite piece is the album’s single, “Becoming A Stone,” which features a hushed monologue (“I believe that a fence will keep animals out, just outside the kitchen window") weightlessly drifting over a quiet bed of clicks, pops, a lazily repeating chord, and a wandering, bleary melody. Elsewhere, the more structured “The House That Agnes Built” is the loscil-esque piece, as Atkinson sensuously whispers over billowing, deconstructed dub centered around a sonar-like ping. Those subtle dub techno elements suit Atkinson’s aesthetic quite well, but there are a couple of drone-based pieces that are similarly strong. In particular, “The Lake is Speaking” is classic Atkinson, as it feels like a wandering piano melody is guiding me through a harmonically rich labyrinth of undulating dream drones. The title piece is yet another highlight, as hushed overlapping/doubled voices languorously bubble up from an uneasy backdrop of flute and/or harmonium drones. It all adds up to yet another wonderfully sublime album from a consistently compelling and endlessly evolving artist on a path entirely her own. Image Langage feels like getting a glimpse of someone’s most intimate journals, but only after an erasure poet got there first, leaving behind only a series of maddeningly enticing decontextualized fragments and a lingering sense of a beautiful mystery destined to remain forever unsolved.
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