19 November 2016

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Albums and Singles

"Demdike Stare return with their first album since 2012’s Elemental, a feral, loose-limbed and angular rave odyssey wrecking Dancehall and Jungle templates via found sounds, Ambient and exotic spaces.

Wonderland plays the full breadth of the duo’s wide open aesthetic, taking their Testpressing series of dancefloor lashes - issued on 12” between 2013-2015 - as the diving board for an innovative, reverie-like album forming a parallel dancefloor narrative where the spirits of mid ‘90s jungle and digital dancehall are made plasmic, malleable, and syncretised with industrial and ambient techno sound design.

Rooted in record collecting and the art of DJing, and in line with Demdike’s atypical style and pattern, Wonderland veers across styles and temporalities, forming wormholes between Hardstyle and submerged jungle in the curtain-raiser, "Curzon," and going in like Slimzee slicing up grime dubs with jungle in the crackden atmosphere of "Animal Style," whereas the eleven-minute "Hardnoise" catches them at full stretch, tumbling from head-rinsing noise to a dank, sublow techno mission framed by unsettling ambience somewhere between Prurient’s Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement episodes and a mutant variant of classic Exotica, before coughing you up someplace else.

At the album’s epicentre, "FullEdge (eMpty-40 Mix)" obliterates distinctions between dancehall and techno as you’ve never heard, an edit that re-laces their formerly mutually exclusive ligature in a belly-tightening and brilliantly messed-up new mutation, before "Sourcer" prangs out like a cyborg calibrating itself to ragga jungle arrhythmia, and the psychoacoustic nose drip of "Fridge Challenge" dissipates into the ‘static thizz of "Overstaying" at the LP’s perimeter, like some DJ Sprinkles cut paused at mid-flow and delayed, re-shaped into a tense burner.

It’s probably the most enjoyable and loose-limbed hour of music in their catalogue, or that you’ll likely hear in these weird, angst-ridden times."

-via Boomkat

19 November 2016

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Albums and Singles

ETERNAL BEYOND is a collaborative project set up by brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio aka MY CAT IS AN ALIEN (MCIAA) and JOËLLE VINCIARELLI (Talweg, La Morte Young).

All began in Spring 2015, when outsider instantaneous composers MCIAA traced a new magic triangle on a map between their hometown Torino, their current "Alien Zone" secret base in Western Alps, and the mysterious area over Nice’s hills known as Le Village Nègre.  Not far from there, in the small and private recording studio of French underground queen Joëlle Vinciarelli, MCIAA recorded and produced a long session of instantaneous compositions where the duo’s otherwordly sounds and Roberto’s eerie wordless vocals melted with Vinciarelli’s unique, underwordly voice. An antique upright piano soundboard, self-made wooden string instruments, modified electronic devices, an old pendulum clock mechanism, bells and an old trumpet were played during the 4-day recording session. The result, purposely bypassing the present, builds a bridge between the archaic and the future, leading the way to what can only be defined as a groundbreaking ETERNAL BEYOND.

Releases November 30, 2016

More information can be found here.

19 November 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As foretaste of My Cat Is An Alien’s 20th anniversary in winter 2017, their new LP "RE-SI-STEN-ZA!" well represents the summa of the duo's music activity, from their early space toys-era to the latest self-made electronics and string instruments outputs. Featuring two of the duo's longest compositions, the album reaches 18 minutes of NEW ALIEN MUSIC, that My Cat Is An Alien claim to be "the complete communion between Alpha and Omega." How to "resist?"

Instantaneous compositions performed, recorded and mixed by My Cat Is An Alien in their secret Alien Zone HQs in Western Alps.

Releases November 30, 2016

More information can be found here.

19 November 2016

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Albums and Singles

Rashad Becker's new full length album, Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II is a newly developed continuation and exploration of work since his highly-acclaimed first volume.

Incorporating more instrumental-sounding components, the record moves through both fluid and dissonant sounds which take on different structural and sculptural challenges through carefully-layered compositions. Following Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I, the new album expands in various elements, distorted and warped, focusing in on the tension and energy of synthesized sounds that appear to exist hauntingly physical.

Known for his unrivaled attention to sonic detail across his work, Becker’s unique techniques and expressive manipulations of sound are laid bare in an exhilarating new form, stylistically distinctive and uncompromising.

The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring artwork by Bill Kouligas.

More information can be found here.

19 November 2016

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Albums and Singles

Yally is a new project from Raime, designed to "explore Bass Futures indiscriminately.” The release inaugurates 12 x 12,  a new series of one-sided releases from Boomkat Editions which will run over the next few months. We’ve asked twelve of our favourite artists (old and new) to contribute a release each to the series, the first installment featuring two scudding, killer steppers productions from Raime’s expert bladesmen, Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, moonlighting here for the first time under a new alias on a rare away-day from Blackest Ever Black.

With a deep blue, skunked-out appeal right on the lip of late ’90s garage and early ’00s grime, London’s dankest duo compound, reflect and relieve the choking intensity of their recent 2nd album Tooth on the paranoid bruiser "Burnt" and its dread inversion "Sudo," making up their most ‘floor-dedicated session in more than five years of operations.

Toeing a line in the shadows between nervy but enervated, crushed and high, both cuts transpose the indelible impression of raving in a very different London landscape - pre-smoking ban and extreme financial bifurcation - with a patently shocking sense of economy and pressure that feels as vitally subversive as ever in the face of current capitalist realism.

Drawn from muscle memory of 2-step’s transition from champagne-soaked knees-up into paradoxically dense but spacious, stoned and impending sound designs, they form a sort of coming-to-terms with that epoch’s innovations in much the same way that their Moin releases firmly grappled with inextinguishable influence from the studio genius of Steve Albini and This Heat.

"Burnt" pins us by the windpipe with Stanley shanked hi-hats and ratty claps whilst cavernous, amorphous subs bruise flesh and dislocated yelps of pleasure/pain break thru rictus jaws. Think El-B or Hatcha echoing out of a graveyard slot on pirate radio circa ’03. With "Sudo" they pronate on the tightest, simmering halfstep; harnessing illicitly overloaded, vintage Air Max PSI allowance with shoulder rolling organ motif and nerve-tying ligature, perhaps imagining the pre-echoes of earliest Hyperdub or a Black Ops joint that even Jon E Cash was too shook to issue.

More information can be found here.

19 November 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

"Over the last 12 months Lee Bannon’s transition into Dedekind Cut has yielded some of the most curious, immersive electronic music from the USA. His transformation now appears to be complete with the strikingly spacious and absorbing ambient sound designs of $uccessor, the NYC-based artist’s debut album in this guise.

It feels as though Bannon's previous releases, American Zen for Hospital Productions, and the scything torque of R&D with Rabit, were cleverly planned stepping stones into this brave new world, where he establishes a dream-like topography of diaphanous ambient pads pitted with the shrapnel of grime and trap, ultimately revealing a simulated, otherworldly environment deeply personal to the artist.

His amalgamation of layered ambient dimensions with haunting harmonic figures nods to early ‘90s AI and electronica from FSOL to Coil via the antecedent spheres of modern sci-fi and computer game soundtracks, whilst also existing in a history of North American computer music and noise that connects to the spirits of Prurient and Carl Stone.

We’re parachuted in like an avatar in "No Mans Sky" to the lush levels of "Descend From Now," streaking across the iced out sino-eski zones of "Instinct" to the heart-rending eight minutes of "Conversations with Angels" and the perpetually elusive rhythms of "Fear In Reverse," before the hyaline harmonies of "☯" makes his most faithful, explicit nod to Coil, and "Integra" reaches to more optimistic New Age planes before culminating in the aching chamber figure, "46:18."

It's telling that the album is brought to you via two highly individual labels such as Non and Hospital Productions -  this meeting of worlds provides a context for the music itself, making for an album that we'd recommend as much to those of you who have enjoyed recent outings by Chino Amobi, Rabit or Arca, as much as followers of Prurient or, indeed, Dominick Fernow's Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement project."

-via Boomkat

19 November 2016

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Albums and Singles

"Seventeen (count ‘em!) years since their split side with Techno Animal, Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner’s legendary Porter Ricks shores up on Tresor with three cuts of brand new material as immersive as any of their '90s dub techno classics.

Since that last release in 1999, Mellwig has busied himself with Experimental Audio Research alongside Kevin Martin, Pete Kember and Kevin Shields, whilst Köner has continued to pursue a dark ambient zeitgeist deep below the surface, before the two remerged for a sublime remix of Ryo Murakami in 2014.

Shadow Boat dials in the duo’s first material since then, and they’ve patently not lost their lust for total dancefloor immersion. The title cut is a lushly visceral demonstration of techno at its most enigmatic, effective, diffracting beautifully elusive melodies and haunting harmonics thru silty black, subaquatic bass dynamics that leave us reeling, before the crushed, acidic chug of "Bay Rouge" stretches out on a more elastic sort of acidub grind punctuated with killer woodblock, and "Harbour Chart" comes up for air with a bad case of the bends emphasized by glitching rip-currents sure to mess with the dance."

-via Boomkat

19 November 2016

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Albums and Singles

Billy Gomberg is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist whose past work has been published on labels such as and/OAR, Digitalis and Sunshine Ltd. In addition to his solo output, he operates in a variety of collaborative settings (including Fraufraulein, a duo with fellow label alum Anne Guthrie) and, over the course of the last five years, has carved out a niche for himself at the crossroads of electro-acoustic improvisation, ambient, and minimalist music. Slight at that Contact is a beguiling album that brings to mind both the bucolic electronica of Microstoria and the expansive arrangements of Mirages-era Tim Hecker. "Medial" opens the record with a sea of vaporous, blooming tones set against an array of delicately percussive clicks and cuts. "Acute" further develops this motif, conjuring a cinematic atmosphere that recalls perhaps a train station in some ruined, futuristic metropolis. Over the course of eight understated but nuanced compositions, Gomberg cultivates an intoxicating aural topography, a deep, expressive collection that offers considerable rewards to the attentive listener.

More information can be found here.

19 November 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This Dutch pianist first crossed my path as part of the murderers' row of unusual contributors to Current 93's I Am The Last of All The Field That Fell, an event that would easily be the high point of most musicians' careers.  In Van Houdt's case, however, it was merely the most recent of a long string of interesting and provocative ventures, as his prominent role in the avant-garde community has led to participation in all kinds of important premiers and work with titans such as Luc Ferrari and John Cage.  As such, it is a bit surprising that his first solo album would surface on the rather post-industrial-centric Hallow Ground imprint.  That was quite a bit less surprising when I actually heard it though, as Van Houdt largely casts aside his background as a classical pianist to explore the darker electronic fringes as well as tortured theatricality a la Scott Walker.  Naturally, some veins are more compelling than others, but Paths of the Errant Gaze is certainly a strange and fascinating journey.

Hallow Ground

One immediately striking aspect of Paths of the Errant Gaze is that Van Houdt seems to have quite a restless muse, as it is quite difficult to discern a consistent stylistic thread running through these seven pieces.  For example, the wonderful yet all-too-brief opener "Atopic Radio" is a densely sizzling and throbbing collage that sounds like a pile-up of distorted numbers station transmissions filtered through a nightmare. Had the album continued in that vein for longer than two-and-half minutes, I suspect I would play it to death.  Instead, however, the following "Fabric of Loss" is a blearily dissonant and distracted-sounding piano reverie embellished with some ominous subterranean throbs, resembling nothing less than a Lustmord remix of an imaginary Morton Feldman piece.  It gets quite a bit more interesting once it segues into "Orphic Asylum," however, as cellist Simon Lenski contributes some beautifully strangled string work and Van Houdt starts disrupting the proceedings with a host of wild and gnarled musique concrète flourishes.  Somehow, it all gradually coheres into a vaguely "industrial" drum machine groove beset by all kinds of electronic cacophony, before wrong-footing me yet again with another segue into an eerily subdued drone piece ("Vessel") of hazy, choral-sounding vocals and reverberant creaking strings.

The album's second half commences with an unexpectedly haunted and moaning dirge ("Gaussian Veils") that showcases guest vocalist Paul Amlehn. I am rather perplexed by its inclusion, as it absolutely screams "Scott Walker" (or at least Black to Comm's Earth) and bears little resemblance to the rest of the album.  Objectively, the simmering underlying music is fairly inspired, as Van Houdt's dissonant, impressionist piano ripples are nicely enhanced with some menacing throbs and a disquieting harmonic haze, but Amlehn’s "opera of the damned" vocals understandably steal all the attention.  Sadly, the appeal is hopelessly lost on me.  Admittedly, I am not a huge Scott Walker fan either, but there is a substantial difference between feeling like I am eavesdropping on a demonic possession and feeling like some kind of undead creature clawed its way out of the grave to share its poetry with me.  "Gaussian Veils" errs on the side of the latter.  Thankfully, the piece catches fire a bit near the end, as it unexpectedly erupts into buzzing, sizzling, and hissing snarls of electronic noise. Curiously, the spectre of Amlehn disappears completely as the piece morphs into "Transfinite Spectre," a lengthy eruption of cut-up harsh noise that sounds like someone dropping the needle on a different spot of a Merzbow album every five seconds or so.  To his credit, Van Houdt does harsh noise quite well–I just do not understand why he felt the need to, as a classically trained musician of his caliber has a limitless number of less oversaturated creative avenues open to explore.  Perhaps the appeal is just that it is so violently different from the modern classical fare that he plays in his daily life as part of the MAZE ensemble.  In any case, once the cacophony eventually dies down, Van Houdt closes the album with a very brief yet beautiful coda of eerily oscillating drones, tape hiss, and tinkling piano ("Vapours").  Much like the other bookend, it is both wonderful and maddeningly ephemeral.

I suspect that some of my frustration with this album is probably due to the very high expectations that I had from the samples that preceded its release, but there are also a handful of moments such as "Atopic Radio" that easily exceed those hopes.  My real issue is simply that Paths of the Errant Gaze has a puzzling lack of focus, as if Van Houdt is trying on one guise after another hoping to find one that completely fits and feels natural.  I have no idea if he ever found it.  Also, the amount of time spent on each theme is weirdly self-sabotaging and seemingly arbitrary, making me wonder if this is more of a collection of experiments and odds n' ends that Reinier had lying around than a deliberately composed and sequenced whole.  The counterargument to that theory is that nothing here feels even remotely half-baked: Van Houdt's commitment, exactitude, and instincts are beyond reproach.  However, the counter-counterargument is that I do not understand why so many of the most inspired ideas end so quickly while the foray into howling white noise extends for almost half of a side.  Grumbling aside, however, this is still a very enjoyable album, as Van Houdt unquestionably has both excellent taste and the necessary talent to channel his disparate influences into visceral and evocative new forms.  For now, this is merely promising and enjoyable, but Van Houdt has the potential to be quite a formidable voice if the distinctiveness of his vision someday catches up with his abilities as a composer and musician.

Samples:

• Atopic Radio
• Gaussian Veils
• Vapours

 

19 November 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to finally acknowledge the sublime brilliance of Vancouver-based polymath Ian William Craig, but he certainly has not made it easy, as every album that I have heard from him seems to showcase a new facet of his elusive aesthetic (classical pianist, distressed tape experimenter, instrument builder, the next Tim Hecker, hallucinatory hymnal composer, etc.).  Also, much of his best work was quietly released in limited vinyl editions on Sean McCann’s Recital Program imprint (and the stellar Heretic Surface does not even appear in Discogs), so it was easy to miss.  With his latest release, however, Craig seems poised to breakthrough to a larger audience.  At the very least, Centres is certainly a creative breakthrough, expertly weaving together several different experimental and esoteric threads into an excellent batch of actual songs with hooks.  If it is possible to make a largely guitar-free classic shoegaze album, Craig has done it with Centres.

FatCat/130701

The opening "Contain (Astoria Version)" is surprisingly radical statement of intent, as it not only places Craig's strong, classically trained vocals front and center, but it goes one step further and runs them through Autotune.  It is quite an unusual effect, as it sounds like a very sincere and melodic half-sung poem or a post-modern opera refrain filtered through contemporary pop music.  Or maybe like David Sylvian teamed up with Rihanna’s producers to try to break through to the teen market, but then ran out of money before anyone got around to adding beats.  That is only half the story though, as the surrounding music is a fuzzed-out ocean of hissing bliss, lush grandeur, and loops of angelic female vocals.  Somehow it manages to be simultaneously razor-focused and unrepentantly indulgent at the same time, as Craig never loses sight of the strong melodic hooks, yet perversely allows his perfectly sculpted avant-pop gem to dissolve, smear, and stretch into a ten-minute epic.  It is an audacious monster of a piece that sounds like nothing else that anyone else is doing.  It is also a fully formed synthesis of several stylistic strains that have run throughout Craig's career, somehow blending his quasi-operatic talents with blown-out Hecker-esque drone and wobbly, hissing tape manipulations without pushing any of them into the background.

To his credit, Craig does not attempt to replicate any similar feats elsewhere on the album, instead seeming restlessly hellbent on moving constantly forward into new vistas.  For example, the following "A Single Hope" is a left-field shoegaze masterpiece, as Craig's elegantly melodic vocals drift over a glacially slow bed of distorted chord swells to basically produce high-grade heroin for the ears.  "Drifting to Void on All Sides" follows in a similarly gorgeous and narcotic vein, unfolding as a wobbly chorus of angelic voices floating from a battery of malfunctioning tape machines.  The comparatively clean and accordion-based "The Nearness," on the other hand, sounds like fairly straightforward "pop classical," which makes sense given that Centres is a rare dispatch from FatCat’s classically bent 130701 imprint.  Despite its initial form, however, "The Nearness" still ultimately dissolves into crackling and hissing tape-ravaged heaven.  The recurring theme throughout the album time and time again is that of strikingly beautiful and serene melodies blearily drifting through a roiling maelstrom of hissing, stuttering, crackling, and quivering distortion and decay.  On the most immediately gratifying and memorable pieces, the structured melodies manage to heroically assert their dominance, but the pieces (such as "Set to Lapse") that just wallow in this bliss-storm are quite pleasurable in their own right.  In fact, an album of murkily hallucinatory and masterfully textured drone in the vein of "A Circle Without Having To Curve" would probably still be a lock for one of my favorite records of the year.

I suspect that Centres probably could have been condensed from a double-album to just a single LP if the more incidental/interlude-type pieces had been scrapped, but their presence feels crucial in maintaining the sustained and soft-focus altered reality of Centre's spell.  Also, the recurrent sea of artfully blurred abstraction seems necessary to ensure that each island of fully formed song makes a maximum impact.  Seven or eight great songs in a row would be wonderful, but probably also a little numbing: I definitely appreciate the surprise of a simple and pure masterwork like the quasi-hymnal "Purpose (Is No Country)" blossoming forth from the static quite deep into the album.  

Appropriately, Craig saves one last treat for the final piece, reprising the oceanic and fuzzy heaven of the opening "Contain" with just his voice and an acoustic guitar.  Naturally, it is wonderfully tender and beautiful, which illustrates exactly why this album is such an absolute goddamn masterpiece: most of these songs were already quite good before Craig unleashed his distressed-tape  sorcery and arrangement skills upon them.  And as far as texturally and harmonically rich sound art goes, it is amply clear that Craig can hang with just about anyone else around.  As far as I am concerned, Ian William Craig is creative supernova at this point in his career.  Centres is easily one of the few albums of 2016 that I can safely declare to be an instant classic without feeling dangerously close to hyperbole.

Samples:

• Contain (Astoria Version)
• A Single Hope
• Purpose (Is No Country)