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Much of Milwaukee artist Climax Denial’s previous work has drawn heavily from that fetish tinged sleaze aesthetic that has been prevalent in the genre since its inception decades ago. However, divorced of all that, Dehumanizing Environments is a complex, varied work that emphasizes both disorder and structure, coming together in a nuanced, diverse approach that results in a high water mark for aggressive electronic music.
Climax Denial’s harsh predilections are never far away on Dehumanizing Environments, of course.Distortion, belligerent analog electronics and a sense of unpleasant darkness pervades through all four of these pieces.Those features do not define the record though, which is exactly why it is so commendable."The Womb as Vestibule" may open the album with a deep rumble and a synth passage with all the subtlety of a buzzsaw, yet significant depth lurks around the harshness.Icy tones pass through with a sense of melody, and through the harshness there lies open passages and an overall song-like approachof structure and composition.
The following "Fingering Dead Ashes as Evidence" may have a more crude title, but the music is the opposite.Combining rumbling low end and less abrasive mid-range passages of electronics, melodic sweeps drift in an out over the noisier moments.CD continues expanding and evolving the sound, blending beautiful tones with ugly noise, building to a heavier, denser conclusion.The lighter synths that introduce "Morning Following Dried Blood" make for a bit of a false start, as harsher passages are added.Between the overall dark and dour mood and violent, stuttering electronics, the piece is an unsettling, yet extremely captivating.
The penultimate piece, "Environments for Paranoid Necrotic Masturbation", besides sounding like a Carcass b-side, is the already strong album's high point.Glassy, vibrating drones set the stage, along with an extremely loud bass-heavy passage that is physically intense, testing the limits of any good subwoofer.Vocals appear for the first (and only, as best as I can tell) time on the album, and rather than the expected violent and processed screaming it is instead calm and spoken.While the effects render the actual words nearly impossible to decipher, it is that calmness that makes them all the more disturbing. This small snippet of humanity, lurking behind and orchestrating all the bleakness and darkness that surrounds the album, makes it all the more terrifying.
Given the paraphilliac subject matter and sense of pervading malignance throughout Dehumanizing Environments, the more open moments conjure a greater sense sense of impending doom or tension than any sort of peaceful release.But rather than being an album of rote distortion and canned violence, CD crafts a more diverse approach and actually composes, rather than just blurting out guitar pedal blasts of noise.This unexpected depth, coupled with the unsettling overall mood, comes together as an exceptionally strong record.
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A wonderful, imaginative, insightful and comprehensive book written by my friend Jeanette Leech has just been published. It is highly recommended by me! I asked Jeanette to write something for the Coptic Cat website, which follows: David has offered me the opportunity to introduce my book, Seasons They Change: The Story of Acid and Psychedelic Folk. It’s a long narrative of the innovations in folk music from the 1960s to the present day, covering the artists often called ‘acid folk’, as well as the wider story of experimental attitudes to folk music over the decades. I interviewed over a hundred artists for the book including David Tibet/Current 93, and many with whom David has collaborated – Shirley Collins, Clodagh Simmonds, Bill Fay and Simon Finn. Other artists covered include Comus, Vashti Bunyan, Espers, Pearls Before Swine, Dredd Foole, Stone Breath, Devendra Banhart, The Tower Recordings, Incredible String Band, Alasdair Roberts, Donovan, Holy Modal Rounders, C.O.B., Pat Kilroy, Mark Fry, Josephine Foster, Islaja, Tim Buckley, The Sun Also Rises, Joanna Newsom, Fern Knight, Marissa Nadler, Simon Finn, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Perry Leopold, Sonja Kristina, Trader Horne, Bread Love & Dreams, Linda Perhacs, Trees, Sharron Kraus, The Owl Service, Mellow Candle, Will Oldham, Circulus, Jane Weaver, Vetiver, Forest, Susan Christie, Dr Strangely Strange, Lau Nau, Spires That In The Sunset Rise… and many, many, many more. The book can be bought from major booksellers across the UK and US, online retailers, Rough Trade and other record shops, and can always be ordered from your local independent bookstore. And below is the official press release by the publishers: In the late 60s and early 70s the inherent weirdness of folk met switched-on psychedelic rock and gave birth to new, strange forms of acoustic-based avant garde music. Artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan, Pearls Before Swine and Comus, combined sweet melancholy and modal melody with shape-shifting experimentation to create sounds of unsettling oddness that sometimes go under the name acid or psych folk. A few of these artists – notably the String Band, who actually made it to Woodstock – achieved mainstream success, while others remained resolutely entrenched underground. But by the mid-70s even the bigger artists found sales dwindling, and this peculiar hybrid musical genre fell profoundly out of favour. For 30 years it languished in obscurity, apparently beyond the reaches of cultural reassessment, until, in the mid-2000s a new generation of artists collectively tagged ‘New Weird America’ and spearheaded by Devendra Banhart, Espers and Joanna Newsom rediscovered acid and psych folk, revered it and from it, created something new.
Thanks partly to this new movement, many original acid and psych folk artists have re-emerged, and original copies of rare albums command high prices. Meanwhile, both Britain and America are home to intensely innovative artists continuing the tradition of delving simultaneously into contemporary and traditional styles to create something unique.
Seasons They Change tells the story of the birth, death and resurrection of acid and psych folk. It explores the careers of the original wave of artists and their contemporary equivalents, finding connections between both periods, and uncovering a previously hidden narrative of musical adventure.
Author
Jeanette Leech is a writer, researcher, DJ and music historian. She writes regularlyfor Shindig! magazine, and as part of the B-Music collective she has DJ’d throughout the UK, including at the female acid folk events known as ‘Bearded Ladies’ and the Green Man Festival. She writes extensively in the health and social care fields. Seasons They Change is her first book about music.
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Perhaps a little bit too superfluous, being a little bit different from more droney music albums, which maybe a good thing, but in this case, it works against itself.  This is an experimental improv album featuring an out of place Madonna sample, not once, but twice on two separate tracks. The samples seem to be random and kind of annoying sometimes and it makes the listener turn their heads, as if almost saying, "Was that Madonna I heard between the blips and bloops?"
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This third album from J.R. Robinson’s shifting ensemble is primarily based upon the life and work of Carlo Gesualdo, a radical and visionary early composer of sacred music who is much more famous for murdering and mutilating his wife and her lover.  A second and shorter piece is additionally included that draws inspiration from the brutal prison death of Boston priest and prolific pedophile Father John Geoghan.  Both thematically linked stories are certainly fertile ground for a very wild and disturbing album, but Night of Your Ascension unexpectedly falls a bit short of Robinson’s previous albums.  There are certainly still plenty of highlights, but Robinson seems to be in a bit of a rut, repeating his previously successful formula with increased predictability and diminished returns.
In classic Robinson fashion, Night of Your Ascension again enlists an improbable line-up of Chicago underground music luminaries from several different scenes.  There are also a couple of inspired surprises welcomed into the fold, such as Marissa Nadler and Einstürzende Neubauten's Alexander Hacke.  Still another surprise is that the album’s title piece is ostensibly a loose reworking of one of Gesualdo's madrigals ("Ahi Dispietata e Cruda").  That seems like quite a quixotic undertaking, as Robinson chose that piece for its microtonal properties, which seem like they would be hopelessly lost amidst the full-on extreme metal bombast that "Night of Your Ascension" gradually becomes.  At first, however, that choice definitely makes a lot of sense, as the opening third of the piece is a timelessly beautiful reverie of Nadler’s ghostly vocals, eerily dissonant church organ (or harmonium), and Mary Lattimore’s celestial harp.
Gradually, the heavenly opening movement segues into still more neo-classicism, as Nadler and the organ are displaced by a melancholy string ensemble, then a remarkably convincing sacred chorus of female voices. The choral interlude is short-lived, however, as "Night" soon erupts into a predictable doom metal transformation around the halfway point.  Granted, I am not much of a metal fan, but I am hard-pressed to understand why Robinson thought this was a good idea.  There just is not much happening: a glacial drum beat and a simple, heavily distorted chord progression.  Then it explodes into a sudden, unearned crescendo of crash cymbals and unintelligible, heavily reverbed male chants and moans.  I suppose it all works as a show of force, as it is certainly loud and there are some cool drum fills, but it all seems arbitrary and meaningless to me.  As does the next crescendo, which throws some distorted black metal howling into the mix–plenty of fury, minimal content.  Admittedly, there are some neat things happening in the periphery at times, but the second half of "Night" basically sounds like a competent metal band with too many members and too few ideas, which is very disappointing from a mind like Robinson's and this pool of talent.
"Run Priest Run" is about half as long and lacks anything quite as striking and wonderful as the opening movement of "Night," but it somehow works a lot better as a whole.  For one, it is considerably less heavy-handed and considerably more unusual, as the metal elements are not the focus.  In fact, they are heard through a rhythmic wash of static and my attention is consumed mostly by the piece’s drifting, hallucinatory, and angelic vocals.  Eventually, the female vocals are replaced by howling and distorted male vocals from The Body's Chip King, but this time the transition works much better, as Wrekmeister’s lumbering doom metal is increasingly embellished with roiling electronic chaos.  Unlike "Night," which clumsily transitions from motif to another, "Run Priest Run" is just a long steady build and is all the better for it.
Assuming that Robinson’s deep love of metal is not going anywhere, "Run Priest Run" seems to be the way forward for Wrekmeister Harmonies, as it uses metal drumming and heavily distorted guitars to add heft to themes that are much more unusual and abstract rather than as an end unto itself.  That is dramatically more effective than basically just flipping an "ok, we’re a metal band now" switch midway through a song.  Also, a lot of the appeal of metal lies in its songcraft and riffage, neither of which Wrekmeister offers–and even if they did, there is no shortage of other bands already doing that quite well.  The world does not need one more middle-of-the-road metal band, particularly from someone who is demonstrably much more adept at making drone music or channeling Arvo Pärt.  I appreciate Wrekmeister Harmonies for their dissimilarity to other bands, not for their ability to play power chords.  It is the abstract, inventive, and artistic aspects of this project alone that appeal to me, but Wrekmeister's dubious desire to rock is at odds with that on "Night."  Hopefully, Robinson will soon find a better way to balance those two sides of his vision ("Priest" is certainly a good start).  All grumbling aside, however, at least half of Night of Your Ascension is quite good, so it is not a complete misstep or disappointment by any means.  It is, unfortunately, the weakest of Wrekmeister's three albums to date though.
 
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Turntable artist Philip Jeck has a long history of crafting rich and absorbing albums with a very distinctive style, so I was very much looking forward to hearing a new opus from him, especially given that he has not released anything particularly substantial since 2010's excellent An Ark for the Listener.  Sadly, Cardinal is not quite the album I was hoping for, as it is not so much a painstakingly composed masterpiece as it is a unconventional catch-all for a bunch of unreleased live highlights, soundtrack commissions, and stray home-recorded material.  Some of the pieces are quite good, so I have no qualms at all about the album being released, but Cardinal is necessarily a much more fractured, disorienting, and exhausting experience than any of Jeck's recent proper albums.
Given its wide-ranging origins, Cardinal is a surprisingly cohesive album, covering several years of performances spanning an impressive swath of the Western world (Austria, England, North America, Greece, etc.).  A large part of that success is presumably because Jeck did a lot of re-editing and reworking of the material, but these 13 pieces nevertheless feel weirdly like they belong together.  Not in the expected way, however, as Cardinal feels a lot like a deliberately misassembled jigsaw puzzle.  That seems to have been a curious and intentional move on Jeck's part, as none of pieces that are related to one another are presented together or in their original order.  For example, the live soundtrack for Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend at the Knee is included as a Part One and a Part Five with three unrelated songs between them.  Consequently, the "Bends the Knee" pieces are not just separated from their original context, they are also decontextualized from each other and recontextualized to serve the sequencing of Cardinal.
That intentional jumbling is a very bold and counterintuitive move, which I can certainly appreciate: Jeck's strength has always been the thought and cohesiveness that goes into his compositions.  Cardinal gutsily goes in an opposite and uncharacteristically kaleidoscopic direction, which unsurprisingly yields mixed results.  On the one hand, Cardinal is a wildly unpredictable, vibrant, and varied album, as any given piece is equally likely to feature warmly crackling drones; warped experimentation; or harsh, nightmarish cacophony.  On the other hand, that means that the ground is constantly shifting under my feet as a listener.  I certainly enjoy surprises and challenging listening experiences more than most people, but one thing I have never been able to embrace has been rapid transitions between disconnected themes.  If anything can happen at any time, nothing can have much meaning.
That said, there are plenty of promising and enjoyable pieces throughout Cardinal, but they all feel like false starts or mere oases in a sea of chaos.  It is impossible to get absorbed in a piece when I know that it is doomed to never truly evolve or develop.  For example, three minutes of the cavernous and throbbing drone of "Saint Pancras" is certainly wonderful, but it would be a lot better if it segued into the rest of Jeck's St. Pancras Church performance rather than a shuddering, moaning, and ominous excerpt from the Full of Noise festival.  Jeck's music offers little in the way of rhythm, melody, or harmony, so taking away a couple of the few things that it does offer (depth and immersiveness) is bound to cause problems.  Cardinal basically feels like restlessly channel-surfing through all of the cool sounds that Jeck can create.
I recognize that such an aesthetic has its appeal (people sure seem to like Oneohtrix Point Never), but it largely leaves me cold.  I still mostly like Cardinal though, albeit in a cerebral rather than gut-level way.  Jeck definitely tried to do something different here, as this is neither another predictably stellar Philip Jeck album nor is it a mere compilation.  It is something in-between and it is also compelling art, despite its significant weaknesses as a pure listening experience.  I would probably have loved it if Jeck had made Surf, Part Two instead of Cardinal, so it is admirable that he opted not to repeat himself and chose instead to make a disorienting, precarious hall of mirrors of an album that no one saw coming.  I can respect that Cardinal is primarily an interesting experiment and a curious window into some of the artist’s darker, noisier impulses.  It may not rank among his finest releases, but the consolation prize is that it at least deepened my appreciation for Jeck's artistry and willingness to attempt some bold new twists this deep into his career.
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Just as good, if not better than, his Kranky output, Keith Fullerton Whitman's latest full-length is a prismatic burst of field recordings, tape manipulation, and synth wrangling via Pierre Henry and Kraftwerk. Disappearing behind elaborate electronic processes, Keith gives in to chance and lets his machines churn out two side-long pieces of frequency manipulation, helicopter rhythms, runaway melodies, and plenty of noise. Few things released last year are as thrilling as side two is: the five years Keith put into hatching it definitely paid off.
Keith's description of this record at Mimaroglu reads like a technical manual for aspiring composers, but it serves as an excellent introduction to the music. Utilizing a Nagra mono tape recorder, contact mics, modular synth, his own live recordings, and other varied gadgets and processes about which I know very little, Whitman pieces together a coherent half-hour of haphazard, absolutely electric audio in tribute to his favorite aleatoric and automatic sounds.
Anyone who has been to his live shows in the last couple of years will be familiar with Keith's modus operandi, at least in part. Nearly all of the first side's frequency burps, echoes, low-end rumbles, and reverberated voices are improvised into existence, not composed. Sounds happen, but they've been tied together in a knot. For a little while, the music is the sound of that knot coming undone. Voices, cars, street noise, metallic crashes, and a symphony of other vibrations collide with one another in accidental fashion until, around half-way through, the sensory overload gives way to patterns. Whether by accident or by design, clusters of acoustically-related noise are stretched and warped into a series of busy crescendos, each of which concludes with a sudden dynamic shift. These shifts are typically from loud to quiet, or from manic to calm, and they help mark out each of the piece's varied passages. The effect is sometimes comedic, like someone burping after a homily, and sometimes jarring, like a car wreck that wasn't seen coming. Either way, passive listening is discouraged, because the little details are as important as the big, structural ones. Things are shaken up as synthesizer tones are slowly introduced and Whitman segues from musique concrète to mutant concrète.
The album's second half features a steady mechanical rhythm, blasts of broken chords, and an assortment of noises that serve to compliment both. In one way it is the opposite of the first side's seemingly chaotic movements: there are melodies, a steady pulse, and forward movement, which creates a sense of imposed structure, illusory or otherwise. In another way it is the synthetic companion to side one: it continues a theme established on the first side, the melodies are as irregular and broken as the tape sounds are, rhythms converge only to deviate, and I have yet to discover any kind of purposeful structure in the proceedings, aside from the infectious pulse. "Disingenuousness" unfolds as if by chance. Listening to it is like watching an impossibly complex, naturally occurring Rube Goldberg machine unfold spontaneously in time: someone must have made such a thing possible in advance, but discovering that someone in the machine itself is almost impossible.
Only 500 copies of Disingenuity/Disingenuousness were made. When it sells out, I hope a second edition will be pressed. This is easily one of Keith's best works, and it deserves a much larger audience. Of course, I doubt the second edition will have such beautiful packaging. Pan obviously went to great lengths assembling this LP: the heavy vinyl and and silk-screened jacket definitely contribute to the record and make it feel extra substantial.
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For their seventh full length, the Wizard have opted for a more hard rock focussed style. Scummy biker riffs are pushed to the front; the pummelling smoked doom is still present but has become less overt. Overall, I am not sure if the shift has truly paid off but I cannot deny that this is still a decent album once I allowed myself to become totally immersed in it.
With Witchcult Today and their side of the split with Reverend Bizarre, I was beginning to think that Electric Wizard were in danger of becoming the most unholy, heavy and brilliant metal band on the planet. Their earlier albums are unimpeachable but Witchcult Today represented a perfect musical alchemy; their mix of sleaze, occult references, drugs, metal, and '70s heavy rock coming together in a fantastic orgy of obliterating sound. Therefore, my first time listening to Black Masses was with high expectations and at first I must admit I was underwhelmed. What always had impressed me about Electric Wizard was how full the band sounded and something about this album felt flat to me. The drums and the bass, particularly on the opener "Black Mass," did not have the same oomph as before and Jus Oborn’s guitar tone has undergone a change. However, after a few play-throughs of the album, it began to cast its evil spell over me.
Evil is definitely the most apt word to describe Black Masses, Oborn’s lyrics drip with the kind of imagery that should be hokey and cringe worthy in any other setting but comes alive with horror with Oborn’s singing and the backing of the rest of the band. "Venus in Furs" (not a Velvets cover but a reference to the film of the same name) comes closest to the classic Electric Wizard formula but has a killer sing-along chorus that lifts the music to a new level. The buzzing, psychedelic guitar solo that rips out of the song is the final element I needed to hear to decide that yes this is a great album and my only real problem with it is that I expected something else from the group.
The album does tread water a little but it changes with each listen as to which songs I feel are sub-par, suggesting that it might be just my moods that are off. However, there is not a huge amount of variety here aside from the monster, space-time continuum crushing closer "Crypt of Drugula" which completely departs from the rest of Black Masses. A lot of the other songs are interchangeable; songs like "Patterns of Evil" do not do a whole lot more than fill out the disc. Elsewhere, songs like "Satyr IX" and "Turn Off Your Mind" do a much better job of conjuring up the kind of vibes I feel the band are reaching for throughout the album. "Turn Off Your Mind" will easily be regarded as classic Wizard with its perfect blend of rotten psychedelia and phenomenal riffing.
Black Masses may not be Electric Wizard’s best effort but it certainly does not do them an injustice. It may well represent a transitional period for the group and I am interested to hear how the songs sound live and what might come next. In the meantime, I plan to give Black Masses more of my time as Electric Wizard always improve with more exposure.
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I haven't been paying too much attention to Acid Mothers Temple for quite some time, as their formula of tripped-out, burbling maximalism started to yield rapidly diminishing returns for me after a few albums.  Still, I often find Kawabata's periodic departures from his core sound to be pretty enjoyable and this is one such case: a pair of hypnotically repetitive and largely acoustic solo pieces.  It is always enticing to hear what Makoto can do when he is not rocking out beneath an electronic maelstrom of bloops and whooshes.
The first half of this album is devoted to its 20-minute title piece, which is based upon an unexpectedly languid and melodic finger-picked acoustic guitar loop.  As it lazily unfolds, something that sounds like a distant and forlorn-sounding French horn emerges to weave a sad and simple melody while a number of other distant moans and whines begin to drift in and out to provide color and passing harmonies.  Shortly after the 7-minute mark, Kawabata steps in to accompany the lonely moans with his own wordless vocals, but soon launches unexpectedly into a half-sung/half-chanted actual verse (aided by a heavy dose of reverb).  At some point during his vocals, the underlying guitar part is surreptitiously (and seamlessly) reversed and a sitar-like buzz becomes more prominent, which is a pretty neat trick.  Soon after, Kawabata's vocals cohere into a lazily repeating refrain of sorts, which he artfully doubles with some sarangi to make it sound like he is being accompanied by a delayed and higher-pitched second vocalist.  The sarangi doppelganger gradually subsumes Makota’s own voice and lulls the song to a fading close.  It's ultimately a likable piece, but it hard to put my finger on exactly why it works, as it is rather amorphous and Kawabata's brief singing interlude seems both anomalous and puzzling.  Even so, it manages to be sleepily mesmerizing and the interplay between the various elements is inventive and well-arranged.  It certainly feels somewhat sketch-like, but the sketch is a promising one.
The second side consists solely of the similarly epic "The Looking Glass Love," which begins with a tense and endlessly repeating acoustic guitar loop and essentially sticks with that as the backbone of the song for its entire duration.  It's a gambit that works quite well, as the endless looping guitar quickly sucks me into the song's pulse and provides a solid foundation for whatever Kawabata feels like throwing at me for the next 20 minutes, which in this case sounds a lot like an darker, unplugged version of AMT's signature spaced-out mindfuckery.  Well, not entirely unplugged, as there is some unrecognizably processed electric guitar involved, but Makoto also employs an eclectic array of other instruments ranging from hurdy-gurdy to tambura.  He seems especially fond of creating buzzing discordant harmonies between multiple droning notes, which nicely enhances the already ample tension and evokes a palpable sense of dread as well. Gradually, the drones threaten to steal the foreground from the guitars and drag the piece towards something that resembles a submerged and warped bagpipe ensemble, but they never quite succeed.  The endless tug-of-war between the song's central guitar motif and the queasy droning and late-song electronic burbling keeps things pretty compelling and makes for a somewhat nerve-jangling but satisfying composition.  Of the two pieces, it is by far my favorite, largely due to its unsettling edge and more engaging pace and structure.
White Summer of Love Dreamer is a pretty likable and unusual release for Makoto, but it is also a somewhat minor one.  However, the album art is quite stunning (a photograph of a particularly desolate and rocky stretch of beach) and fits the music perfectly, so I am happy to keep this around despite its mixed success.  I would love to hear some more work in this vein, but it ishopeless to try to anticipate what Kawabata will do next: this could be a stage in an evolution towards a fruitful organic and drone-informed future or merely a temporary digression.  I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
 
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This unique husband-and-wife duo only existed for a few short years, but during that tragically brief window, they managed to record and release such a staggering avalanche of material that even Masami Akita might raise an eyebrow at their tireless pace.  As such, navigating their sprawling discography of mostly limited edition releases is a daunting and complicated task, particularly since the difference between great minimal drone and not-so-great minimal drone is very blurry and difficult to articulate.  Thankfully, this (one of their rare few vinyl releases) provides an excellent starting point.
The works here were culled from recordings made by Will Long and Dani Baquet-Long over an 18-month period ending in July 2008, about a year before Dani unexpectedly died from heart failure.Althoughpresumably absent from the mixing and assembling of the finished album, Baquet-Long's presence remains quite prominent, as she posthumously provides many of the album's most vibrant elements through her field recordings from Nepal and her perversely festive cover art. Also, of course, she is responsible for a lot of the music, though it is nearly impossible to tell which instruments are being played at any given time (or by whom), as the Celer sound is heavily blurred and processed.  Their closest stylistic kin is probably Disintegration Loops-era William Basinski, as both artists have a propensity for repetition, haziness, and slow-motion drifting, but there are some considerable differences as well.
In characteristic Celer fashion, each side of this release is essentially comprised of just one lengthy piece, but given multiple titled sections that are quite difficult to isolate. The music itself is essentially drone in the most "drone" sense possible, as the pair employ their arsenal of pipe organs, strings, and tapes to create a vaporously shifting bed for a host of swelling and shimmering other indistinct sounds to emerge from and disappear back into.  Such an aesthetic has the potential to be a bit on the dull side, but Celer wisely intersperse their narcotic reveries with untreated field recordings of boisterous crowds from Dani's stay in Kathmandu (as well as a particularly poignant old movie snippet).  The overall effect is like being in an alternately warm and eerily desolate dream, but sometimes drifting back into semi-consciousness to find a somewhat unfamiliar world.  It can be a bit disquieting and sad, but it can also be quite absorbing.
While some of this material was recorded as much as four years ago and has mysteriously avoided being released by a duo that that has historically had no problem in hitting double-digits for releases within a single year, Long has succeeded in shaping the orphaned pieces into a very coherent and satisfying whole.  I am by no means a Celer completist, but Vestiges of an Inherent Melancholy does not fall far short of my current favorite Celer release (2009's Capri) and offers the added perk of not being out of print (also, the glossy cover art is rather striking too, for people who like pretty things).
 
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Since leaving Slowdive in the early ‘90s, Simon Scott has been a fairly busy fellow: he has founded a record label (Kesh Recordings), collaborated with folks like Machinefabriek and Jasper TX, and been a member of two other bands (Seavault and Televise). Nevertheless, he basically fell off my cultural radar and I almost slept on Navigare as a result, as I basically only remembered him as a guy who played drums very slowly (but well) in a band I liked more than a decade ago. Upon hearing this, however, it seems that either his talents were grossly underutilized in Slowdive or Simon has undergone a stunning creative evolution over the last decade and a half. Most likely, the truth lies somewhere between the two.
While it is certainly difficult to completely pin down Miasmah’s aesthetic, Navigare is nevertheless a bit of an aberration from the spectral neo-classicicism with which the label is generally associated. Scott is certainly akin to many of his label mates in cultivating a haunted and shadowy atmosphere, but is unique in both the considerable density of his work and the incorporation of heavier, more “rock” influences. The most successful and obvious example of the latter is “The ACC,” which artfully melds hazy shoegazer guitars with a bass-heavy dub influence and murky repeating loop that reminds me strongly of some of Scorn’s better work. “Flood Inn” also mines quite similar territory, but shifts the emphasis from the rhythm section to the crackling, amorphous haze that surrounds it.
Simon employs a wide arsenal of instrumentation on this album that includes sitars, flutes, and strings, but it is all so warped and heavily processed (in a good way) that it is quite difficult to identify them. Of course, when a recognizable sound does surface from the billowing fog of warmth and hiss, it can be quite striking (such as the melancholy cello loop that eventually emerges in “Under Crumbling Skies”). Much more obvious is his fascination with warped field recordings, ruined and degraded loops, and tape hiss (though Scott himself sees Navigare as a “guitar album” in the Kevin Shields/Christian Fennesz sense). The shimmering, roiling ambiance of “Spring Stars” makes an excellent case for his treated guitar prowess, but his wider masteries of mood, sound-shaping, and layering are what truly make the album memorable.
The overall tone of the album is decidedly one of enveloping, drugged warmth mingled with a ubiquitous lurking disquiet. One of the conscious objectives for Navigare was to seem simultaneously fluid and scorched, a daunting feat that was largely accomplished (though some individual tracks occasionally plunge too strongly into dissonance or bleakness to maintain the delicate balance). Despite those very narrow aesthetic confines, Scott has achieved an impressive degree of variety and emotional depth, making Navigare a very strong and self-assured first album.
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This set of superficially disassembled songs has its roots solidly planted in structured rock genres, but the production lifts it into a gorgeous leftfield. The fake brown paper bag artwork and the abandoned camper van on the cover give the album a discarded look, which is partially true. This lost 2005 debut from San Francisco's Sic Alps (in their trio incarnation) has been thankfully pulled from limbo and abandoned in plain view for the world’s listening pleasure.
Swimming through thick and thin psychedelic atmospheres, these songs come to the fore of the record like rediscovered field hollers and wan white-boy blues. The majority of these twelve tracks come in too short, eagerly grabbing attention and then leaving too soon. These cooling furnace blasts of fuzzed distant verse and chorus music are buried way back in spluttering drums and wrenched warped guitar. Rooted in simple song configurations, the production keeps the bare bones afloat in wobbling hissy waves and scalped psychedelic guitar drones.
The opening "Battle of Breton Woods" is a cavernous Jandekian sounding minute long intro, bashed and trashed guitar leaking all over the place. Some of the music here skims the looser edges of NY noise rock, the best example of which is "Surgeon and the Slave" with its paint-flaying notes and mumbled vocals. The wind tunnel vocals of "Reconnection Land"s lethargic stomp open up the higher frequency channels for some Mary Chain buzz-pop white-out. There’s evidence of a lighter touch too in songs like "I Know Where Madness Goes", the fumblingly distant acoustic guitar and abandoned vocals summoning up broken hearts and strings. The simplicity of the vocal and piano (and hiss) cut "I am Grass" opens up a path for Sic Alps to sign up for some weird folk action in the future.
Not being aware of where they are now, this is a good place for a beginner like me to jump aboard the Sic Alps train. Time to hunt down the rest.
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