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Australia’s excellent Preservation label has quietly resurfaced with a pair of cassette/digital releases, my favorite of which is the latest from this Finnish composer.  Muova draws its inspiration from both old New Age tapes and William Basinski, which certainly provides a rough summary of Aarni’s aesthetic, but does not convey how wonderfully and thoroughly he manages to transcend those influences.  While I do love both Basinski and distressed tapes, I am not at all predisposed to either vintage synthesizers or New Age revivalism, yet Aarni has managed to use those unpromising threads to weave something quite beautiful and unique.
This is the first Olli Aarni album that I have heard, but he has quite a prolific back catalog of cassette releases behind him, so I may be a little late to the party.  In fact, he even has two other releases on Preservation under different guises (Nuojuva and Ous Mal), though neither sound much like Muova ("Plastic").  Having a shifting moniker has proven to be a historically excellent way to elude my attention.  In any case, Muova seems like a bit of a one-off stylistic divergence, though Aarni seems to be an especially game fellow when it comes to trying new things (2013's Koittaa aika is composed entirely of found sounds, for example).  This particular cassette consists of two 15-minute pieces built from a handful of simple synthesizer motifs.  While the aforementioned Basinski influence is amply apparent in approach, Aarni does not encroach upon his stylistic territory.  Rather, he just seems to have been awakened to the possibilities inherent in simplicity and endless repetition.  He also seems quite enamored with exploring the hissing and crackling textural wonders of old tapes, though he avoids using escalating degradation as a compositional tool.  Basinski and Aarni both use similar tools and start from very similar places, but they ultimately lead to very different aesthetics: Basinski's obsessively looping symphonies of melancholy and Aarni's hallucinatory and warmly beautiful floating stasis.
On the opening "Kirkas vesi" ("Clear Water"), Aarni creates a wobbly and shimmering reverie of looping synth swells, squiggles, and whimpers.  While very loop-centric, the loops are either long enough or spaced far enough apart to dissipate any sense of obsessiveness or forward motion.  Instead, all of the various components drift along in a gorgeously languorous pointillist shimmer.  I am particularly enamored with Olli's attention to texture, as the piece is so beautiful largely because it feels so quaveringly fragile and blurred.  Also, I loved how the more radiant and pastoral New Age motifs were balanced with a very effective and understated touch of bittersweet sadness.  There is a dark undercurrent at work that differentiates Aarni's work from its somewhat toothless inspirations. "Kirkas vesi" also works quite well dynamically, as its dreamy bubbling is made considerably more vibrant by its unusually swaying and see-sawing feel.  The second piece, "Tyhjä tie" ("Empty Road"), wisely avoids messing with that hugely successful template.  Much like its predecessor, "Tyhjä tie" endlessly repeats a handful of shaky, soft-focus motifs for the entirely of its duration with no obvious arc or evolution, settling instead upon a gently hissing, undulating, and dreamlike haze.  It is much less conspicuously synth-based, however, as its central theme resembles a slowed-down and pitch-shifted harp arpeggio.  Also, tape noise makes a bold step to the foreground as well: Aarni’s arsenal of hisses and crackles are every bit as important as the melodic components, giving the piece a strong inhalation/exhalation pulse and artfully masking/transforming the backdrop of field recordings.
While it is clear that Muova was intended as a somewhat modest release, it is something of a minor masterpiece of simple, understated beauty.  Superficially, these two pieces are composed of very little and just basically appear and disappear without much in the way of change or evolution, but making something this static and minimal work this effectively is a deceptively Herculean task.  Such a feat requires both delicate balance and an incredible lightness of touch, as the various loops need to be vibrant and compelling enough to hold my attention, yet unobtrusive enough to not get annoying when they endlessly recur (strong melodies do not work, but fragments do).  In that compositional regard, Aarni succeeded admirably with both pieces.  His real success, however, goes much deeper, as he was able to imbue his wobbly loops with both tender fragility and genuine emotion.  That is a very special thing indeed and Muova is a very rare achievement: the kind of album that I could happily listen to in an infinite loop for hours.
 
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This is the debut album from the restlessly evolving Mark Van Hoen’s latest project, a duo with the Touch label's Mike Harding.  Recorded in LA during a particularly sweltering day, this single longform piece is quite divergent from any of Van Hoen’s previous work that I have heard, beautifully blending organ-like synthesizers with menacing throbs, crackling shortwave radio ambience, and mysterious field recordings.  Drøne are definitely onto something wonderful here, finding a niche that is simultaneously sublimely melodic, gently hallucinatory, and ominously unsettling.
I normally spend very little time wondering where and when an album was recorded, but in the case of Reversing into the Future, the oppressively hot Los Angeles environment goes a long way towards explaining the resultant atmosphere of simmering dread and buzzing ominousness.  Divided into two halves of a single longform piece ("This Strange Life"), Future is a slow-burning fantasia that feels like half existential horror, half Blade Runner-style dystopia.  For much of the first half, Van Hoen’s modular synthesizers are little more than a murky, seismic force, as layers of out-of-sync throbs weave an impressive air of smoldering menace.  Eventually, however, they are fleshed out by some stuttering drones before unexpectedly blossoming into hauntingly elegiac chord progression.  Once everything is finally in place, the piece achieves a creepily beautiful Davis Lynch-esque grandeur, like I am drifting over LA at night in a helicopter fitted with especially loud and sinister-sounding blades.  Eventually, the chords fade away and the first half of the piece closes with a multilayered miasma of densely throbbing, buzzing, stammering, and twinkling synth patches.
The second half of "This Strange Life" slowly creeps back to life with a flurry of pinging, arrhythmic sonar-like tones and something that sounds like a blurry, relentlessly skipping fragment of a classical music record.  The piece soon takes a strange detour, however, dissolving its momentum into a thickly buzzing interlude populated with grinding washes and a hollow-sounding, "locked-groove" riff. That lull is the only time the album ever completely betrays its somewhat improvisatory origins, as the piece quickly regains its footing by downshifting to a threatening, quivering simmer.  "This Strange Life" then slowly begins to build back up to its second peak, as echoing, unintelligible voices gradually bleed in and everything plunges into gently burbling and surreal submerged ambiance.  The music does a lot of shapeshifting over the course of a few minutes, but the chattering, cryptic shortwave voices remain a constant, imbuing the piece with a disorienting air of mystery.  At times, the second half of "This Strange Life" even verges on noise, as Van Hoen unleashes distorted rumbles of sound and something that sounds like a distant fire alarm.  As it nears the end, however, the piece blossoms into unexpected beauty once more, as slow, heavy, and overloaded washes of bass are joined by a wandering, disjointed church organ motif and buried shouting.  It is glorious.
My sole quibble with Reversing into the Future is that it definitely feels rooted in improvisation and correspondingly has a few more lulls than would be ideal.  The flip side of that, however, is that there is also a more unpredictable and organically evolving arc than a meticulously edited composition might have yielded.  That said, the album’s greatest qualities lie in both its execution and its vision.  Reversing is remarkably richly textured and visceral, as Van Hoen proves to be a wizard at layering thickly pulsing drones for maximum gravitas and tension.  This is a surprisingly heavy and eerie album.  Also, even though the only "real" instrument is Van Hoen’s battery of synthesizers, Reversing into the Future does not sound at all like a "synthesizer album," which I hugely appreciate.  Admittedly, those synths do a lot of the heavy lifting, but many of the more memorable parts are either due to Harding’s shortwave radio transmissions or a more general collision of textures or juxtaposition of motifs.  The beauty of Reversing into the Future is that everything bleeds together so effectively and egolessly to evoke a sustained atmosphere of buzzing, throbbing disquietude.  I sincerely hope that Drøne is much more than a one-off collaboration, as Harding seems to be quite an excellent foil: this is easily my favorite Mark Van Hoen album since 2012's The Revenant Diary.
 
 
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Raime’s second album, Tooth, arrives June 10, 2016 on 2xLP, CD and digital formats. The widescreen melancholia of their 2012 debut, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line, gives way to an urgent and focussed futurism, in the shape of eight fiercely uptempo, minimal, meticulously crafted electro-acoustic rhythm tracks. The DNA of dub-techno, garage/grime and post-hardcore rock music spliced into sleek and predatory new forms.
No let-up, no hesitation. Needlepoint guitar, deftly junglist drum programming, brooding synths and lethal sub-bass drive the engine. The production is immaculate, high definition. No hiss, no obscuring drones or extraneous noise: the music of Tooth is wide-open and exposed. The seeds of its supple dancehall biomechanics can be found in the self-titled 2013 EP by Raime side-project Moin, an ahead-of-its-time synthesis of art-rock and soundsystem sensibilities, but Tooth pushes the template further, binding the disparate elements together so tightly that they become indistinguishable from one another.
If Quarter Turns was an album that confronted total loss and self-destruction, even longed for it, then Tooth is the sound of resistance and counter-attack: cunning, quick, resolute; calling upon stealth as much as brute-force. At a time when so many pay lip service to experimentation without ever fully committing themselves or their work to it, Raime return from three years of deep, dedicated studio research with a bold and original new music: staunch, rude, and way out in front.
More information can be found here.
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Having completed a preliminary round of work on their eponymous 2015 album at Rockfield Studios, Wire found themselves with 19 tracks. Among them, there was a critical mass of 11 aesthetically unified songs. In typical Wire fashion, however, the remaining material was something other: it had the sound of a band already moving in a different direction, beyond the album project in which they were engaged at that time. These tracks were the basis for Nocturnal Koreans.
The difference between the two clusters of work birthed at Rockfield has its roots in discrete approaches to the studio process itself. “The WIRE album was quite respectful of the band,” explains Colin Newman, “and Nocturnal Koreans is less respectful of the band—or, more accurately, it's the band being less respectful to itself—in that it's more created in the studio, rather than recorded basically as the band played it, which was mostly the case with WIRE. A general rule for this record was: any trickery is fair game, if it makes it sound better.” Nocturnal Koreans emphasises studio construction over authentic performance, using the recording environment as an instrument, not just as a simple means of capturing Wire playing.
More information can be found here.
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The long-awaited album is now available for pre-order.
Dark Fat is a celebration and documentation of 10 years of NWW shows, but to call it a live album is far too simplistic. It is an entirely new recording constructed by combining the most interesting moments of the past decade into unique tracks. We have M.S. Waldron to thank, as he is archival commandant of the NWW oeuvre and since 2006 has recorded everything and we mean EVERYTHING. He has recorded all the live shows, sound-checks, rehearsals, off-stage events and even covertly recorded the private conversations of the band. These recordings have been studiously and lovingly crafted into a unique sonic tapestry by Waldron and Stapleton with delicate embroidery and filigree added by Liles and Potter. Listen in the Dark and soak up the Fat.
More information can be found here.
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Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje (1973) is quite a remarkable musician, singer, improviser and composer and Crepuscular Hour is quite an extraordinary piece of music, written as it is for the unusual line-up of three choirs, three pairs of noise musicians and church organ. It is a one hour piece to be performed in a cathedral or similar with musicians surrounding the audience. The room will be filled with sound in an intense and dramatic, but also hypnotic and meditative hour, where the voices blend with the distortion, the noise sometimes taking over, and the organ eventually hoisting the music to a new dramaturgic level. The piece is inspired by the phenomena ‘crepuscular rays’, which is when rays of sunlight stream from one point through gaps in clouds or other obstacles. The visual design of this concert is a play on the phenomena, with the light being filtered by the obstacles and musicians in the room. All texts are from the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of thirteen ancient books with over 18 texts that were discovered in upper Egypt in 1945. These texts have provided a major re-evaluation of early Christian history. Crepuscular Hour was premiered at the Ultima Festival in Oslo in 2010, and the next realisation of the piece was at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2012, where this recording was done.
The concert was beautifully filmed and directed by Kathy Hinde and can be found on the DVD that comes with both the CD and 2LP editions. This also includes a 5.1 surround sound option.
More information can be found here.
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For more than 12 years, Marissa Nadler has perfected her own take on the exquisitely sculpted gothic American songform. On her seventh full-length, Strangers, she has shed any self-imposed restrictions her earlier albums adhered to, stepped through a looking glass, and created a truly monumental work.
In the two years since 2014’s elegiac, autobiographical July, Nadler has reconciled the heartbreak so often a catalyst for her songwriting. Turning her writing to more universal themes, Nadler dives deep into a surreal, apocalyptic dreamscape. Her lyrics touch upon the loneliness and despair of the characters that inhabit them. These muses are primal, fractured, disillusioned, delicate, and alone. They are the unified voice of this record, the titular "strangers."
Out May 20th. More information can be found here.
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There is a distinct sense of nostalgia running through this newest Luciernaga release. Fitting, since the entire work was inspired by Joao Da Silva's hometown of Santiago, Chile, and is even released by a hometown as a limited edition cassette. His work has always had a sense of personal intimacy amidst the sonic abstraction, and this is no different. Sic Transit Gloria is an emotionally rich, and extremely diverse piece of complex ambient music.
The entirety of this cassette is sourced only from guitar and autoharp, although it is at times difficult to believe given the diverse array of sounds Da Silva creates here.It is only really in the opening piece, "11:00 AM 9/11/73" where the instrumentation sounds most apparent, save for a few other scattered moments. Here he generates an expansive web of droning strings, most closely resembling bowed autoharp strings. While there is a significant amount of layering, the piece overall sticks to only the essentials, which is more than enough to sustain the subtle beauty he creates."Mi Memoria Obstinada" is of similarly sparse construction.Expanding tones of an unclear nature stretch out, carefully intertwined together and wavering slightly enough to create a noticeable change and development in the sound.As a whole, Da Silva does an exemplary job of creating a piece of an extremely delicate nature, yet one that is surprisingly strong and powerful in its understated complexity.
There is significant variation throughout these pieces, however, and "Respiramos" features a different side of Luciernaga's sound, with humming electronics and what sounds like distorted guitar loops paired with clean, untreated guitar playing that blends brilliantly, but is disappointingly brief."Te Desvaneces" has Da Silva going in a different direction, here with electronic-like high frequency loops and reversed guitar parts both running through effects.The insistent radar beacon like loops feature heavily as light puffs of guitar sound are pushed through, with the whole piece becoming looser and more improvised sounding in its conclusion.
The final two compositions, however, are the strongest and most diverse on this tape. "Aire Negro" is largely made up of unidentifiable sounds in a complex mix.Rhythmic bits of scraping and banging-like sounds are weaved in and out with clouds of guitar passing over.Even with this complex, at times dizzying array of sounds being utilized, the dynamics are kept soft, so it never becomes overwhelming.The 15 minute closer "La Tragedia Que Es Chile" ends this release on a somewhat harsh note.With an opening that sounds like synthesizer through a battery of distortion pedals, there is a noise tinge covering the whole piece.The harshness is kept in check, but there is a lot of forcefulness in this piece, blending ugly electronics processing and shimmering melodies together, building to an almost piercing, feedback-laden conclusion.
Sic Transit Gloria is yet another strong addition to the always impressive Luciernaga discography.At this point, it just further solidifies my opinion that Joao Da Silva's horribly underrecognized as the brilliant sound artist he is.His ability to create such a diverse array of sounds from only limited sources is unparalleled, and his skill at knowing just how much processing and post-production to utilize without a composition dissolving into a monochromatic dull roar is impeccable.Hopefully his notoriety will soon grow proportional to his skill, and then I can pull the "oh I was into his stuff years ago" card that so many of us music nerds are fond of doing.Sarcasm aside, this is a powerful and beautiful piece of music that demonstrates his continued brilliance.
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Following their 2012 self-titled debut release, this Austin trio largely return to the sound that made that album so strong: namely dissonant synthesizer work, slow and stiff drum programming, and unsettling, yet gripping vocal work. That is not to say that Graphic is more of the same, but rather a development and refinement of the sound they did so well previously, culminating in an infectious, yet dour and dark piece of music.
Near the beginning of this album, the title song quickly establishes the style and mood that will follow.Taking the pace of a funeral dirge, distorted rhythms and slow, pulsating synthesizers lead the way.While the sound may be awash in cavernous reverb, that never fully obscures a strong melodic underpinning.While the piece may be slow, it never relents, and Amber Goers' vocals start far away and echo heavy, but eventually culminate in a terrifying horror film scream to conclude the song.
A song such as "Not Here" is a comparably lighter affair.With more of a synth pop like opening and a more stripped down mix, the sense of tension and oppression is less pronounced.Goers’ vocals are also calmer and gentler in delivery, and while they build in drama, the piece stays more beautiful than frightening."Nothing"sees the trio going back to their colder roots, with the clap-heavy analog drum programming driving buzzing electronics, and a vocal approach that shifts from aggressive to coldly disconnected.
The strongest moments of Graphic are saved for its conclusion, however.The penultimate piece, "Sundowner" begins with Goers' grimy bass guitar leading the way, as dissonant, snappy beat boxes come together with a heavy sense of chaos.With an overall jerky, stop/start structure, great energy, yet frightening use of electronics, it makes for the high point of the album.
It is closely followed (both in strength and album sequencing) by the lengthy "Torch", which features the trio using its eight-plus minute duration to construct and destroy various arrangements.What begins with sawtooth-heavy synthesizer patches and minimal rhythms, a more aggressive, thudding beat falls into place and the synth leads convey an epic sense of drama.The tempo shifts, and the intensity builds, ending the record with an intense vocal performance by Goers that fits both the tension and darkness of the music perfectly.
As a whole, Graphic does not feature Troller stepping too far away from the sound that defined their first record, but there was no need to.Working with a more conventional synth-pop type approach to music, but with a dark and unsettling spin placed on it was already an excellent formula.Graphic works then as a further refinement of this sound, polishing in some ways and others displaying a growth in songwriting and arrangement skills.Either way, it makes for a perfect complement to their already amazing first record.
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This latest release from Aranos is an especially unusual one (even within the context of his already singular discography), as it is a varied suite of songs exploring the twin themes of mortality and joie de vivre.  It has always been clear that Aranos knows a thing or two about living an interesting and vibrant life, but it is worth noting that he has also technically died once (and been resuscitated) as well, so he has some perspective on that side to offer as well.  While it is the subject matter than ostensibly brings all of these songs together, the most immediate and striking feature of Omen of Good Times is its prevailing mood of eccentric, cockeyed fun: there are few shades at all of Aranos's more experimental leanings here, just a one-of-a-kind raconteur/performer channeling everything from Eastern European folk music to religious spirituals to swinging Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grappelli-style string jazz.
Like most people, I first became aware of Aranos though his early collaborations with Nurse With Wound, though that awareness did not go much deeper than noting that Acts of Senseless Beauty had some violin on it.  Neither that album nor Santoor Lena Bicycle made me particularly curious about Aranos's solo work might sound like.  Both albums were good, of course, but I casually attributed that success to Steven Stapleton's imagination and collaging abilities.  Much later, however, I wound up hearing some of Aranos's solo albums.  I also saw him live and was pleasantly bewildered to discover that he is quite a mesmerizing character and a legitimate iconoclast.  Knowing what I know now, it actually seems crazy that Aranos is best known for his experimental, abstract collaborations: the raw, spontaneous, and undiluted Aranos is far more strange, memorable, and unpredictable.  For better or worse, I consistently have absolutely no idea where Aranos is coming from or what his latest album will sound like.  The twist is not that he is making unimaginable, otherworldly sounds, but rather that he seems superhumanly sincere and unselfconscious, as well as blissfully unstuck in time.  Case in point: aside from one song, Omen of Good Times could easily have been recorded in the 1930s.  As far as his relation to contemporary trends in music is concerned, Aranos may as well be from another planet.
Perversely, I tend to like Aranos's actual music the most when he is in "Gypsy violinist" mode, such as on the jauntily lyrical waltz "Dring of Stars" or the more sadness-tinged "Hawthorn Blossom."  That is not where Aranos is truly unique, of course, as I probably could not walk a block in Romania without tripping over another violinist equally well-versed in similar fare.  Rather, Aranos's more substantial musical gift lies in how many different styles he has absorbed and how effortlessly he seems to filter them through his own skewed sensibility.  Sometimes the results can admittedly be a bit perplexing, as on the almost-barbershop-esque/Triplets of Belleville-like crescendo of "Going Downhill" or the near-musical theater "dig a hole, dig a hole, dig a hole" interlude in the otherwise beautiful "Build Me a Coffin."  The latter is an especially fascinating example of Aranos's chameleonic artistry, as he also veers into croaking torch song and an elegiac falsetto chorus of multitracked voices (all his) along the way.  Elsewhere, he delves into spirited tango ("Contact Penumbra") and a number of bouncy Reinhardt-esque jazz forays with varying degrees of eccentricity and unexpected eruptions of vocals.  The true heart of Omen of Good Times, however, lies in its two fully formed songs, "Just Around the Corner" and "Good News."  While certainly charming and catchy, both are far more significant for their lyrical content: Aranos genuinely wants to make life better and offers plenty of helpful advice in that regard. Also, he thoughtfully reminds us all that we are divine in the lurching, tender, and fluid closer. That is quite a rare feature for an album to offer.
While it is not perfect by any means, Omen of Good Times is unquestionably quite ambitious in what it sets out to achieve and quite wonderful and singular when it achieves it.  At its worst, it is merely entertaining and a little confounding.  For example, I do not understand why an abstract experimental piece like "Bread Machine" wound up here, nor do I entirely understand why some songs end abruptly or spontaneously erupt into vocals.  Aranos can certainly be an enigma, albeit quite an endearing and irascible one.  In fact, he seems a lot like an archetypal character that belongs in old grindhouse Kung Fu films, something like a laughing monk that initially seems like comic relief, but who is ultimately revealed to be the wisest person in the entire town.  As such, he can be quite inscrutable, somewhat scattershot, and a bit hammy, but he never boring and he is always very much himself.  As cliché as it sounds, Aranos's life is the real art and Omen succeeds primarily because it offers one of the clearest windows into that life.  As such, Omen is best viewed as something akin to a freewheeling and anachronistic one-man cabaret show, passing through some weird detours and tonal shifts along the way, but cumulatively adding up to a powerful, guileless, and sometimes moving portrait of a truly unique artist.
 
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As much as I love Swans, one of 2015's great mysteries for me was trying to figure out why some people liked Norman Westberg’s solo 13 album so much, as it just seemed like a very straightforward ambient-drone album in every way.  Consequently, I did not have especially high expectations for Room40’s second Westberg reissue, which compiles three even earlier pieces from his homemade, self-released CDrs.  As it turns out, however, MRI is a hell of a lot more compelling than its predecessor.  While the general aesthetic is basically the same (hazy processed-guitar soundscapes), MRI features considerably more in the way of subtle dynamic shifts and disquieting dissonances.  Aside from just being deeper, more complex, and more nuanced than what I had previously heard, this album is actually quite distinctive and unique as well.  I now completely understand why Lawrence English was so keen to unearth Westberg's largely unheard solo oeuvre.
The prosaically titled MRI ostensibly takes its inspiration from magnetic resonance imaging, which Westberg underwent when he discovered that he was experiencing uneven hearing loss.  However, the degree to which that experience shaped this album is quite hard to unravel, as the provenance of these recordings is a bit confounding.  Of the three pieces included here, one ("Lost Mine") is a new piece dating from 2015 and another ("410 Stairs") was the title track of its own self-contained 2012 release.  Also, the original "MRI" apparently surfaced in 2012 as well, but it is something of a phantom: it only appears in Discogs as part of a compilation pulling together Westberg's MRI, 410 Stairs, and Plough EPs.  Moreover, "MRI" is not particularly obvious in its nods to medical scanning technology, seemingly borrowing only the subtle cycling/pulsing sounds and perhaps evoking a bit of immersive unreality of being cozily inserted into the heart of a machine. Westberg thankfully did not derive any inspiration from the annoying buzzing sounds common to MRIs.
While Westberg used SoundForge to originally edit these newly remastered pieces, the originally recordings were done with a very stripped-down set-up that usually consisted of a just a guitar, some delay effects, and a couple of amps recorded to tape.  Also, "MRI" was essentially recorded "live" in one take.  Nothing on MRI sounds improvised or sketchlike though, as the overall effect is one of elegantly simple variations on a theme.  The theme itself is quite simple as well, as Westberg essentially just creates a warmly droning bed of guitar haze and tape hiss, then embellishes it with quavering rhythmic waves and shivering dissonances.  Working with such a limited palette proves to be very effective here, as each minor shift in pulse or harmony is able to make maximum impact because there is no clutter to hide behind and no melodies to grab the focus: just a beautiful, gently throbbing drift that gradually changes moods as the smallest changes engineer new oscillations and complex, unexpected harmonies.  On the opening title piece, the drones gradually become more shadowy and ominous, culminating in the brief eruption of an undercurrent that sounds legitimately gnarled.  The longer and more beautiful "410 Stairs" is not nearly as haunted-sounding, however, instead maintaining a consistent mood of bittersweet warmth that gradually builds in power with layers of jangling, bell-like waves.  The closing "Lost Mine" initially starts in a somewhat similar mood, but heads in a very different direction, as blurry, treble-heavy layers bleed into one another and drift in and out of sync to create a gently psychedelic blur.
Interestingly, Room40's Lawrence English describes Westberg's work as "embedded strongly in the American Minimalism tradition."  I am not sure who he specifically had in mind, but these pieces certainly do betray an affinity for patterns and repetition.  In any case, something transcendent is certainly happening: the tools and textures employed on MRI share a lot of common ground with what other experimental guitarists were doing around the same time, yet the best moments show that Westberg was operating on a much higher plane compositionally than his peers.  To my ears, MRI positions Westberg as a kind of a DIY/low-tech Eliane Radigue, attempting to distill drone down to its purest, most minimal form: a single sustained tone that comes alive as a number of small, controlled changes cumulatively create their own shifting pulse and harmonic arc.  On the gorgeous "410 Stairs" and some sections of "MRI," Westberg comes as close to reaching that state of drone nirvana as anyone.
 
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