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Neutral's seminal LP, Grå Våg Gamlestaden, is widely considered ground zero for the explosion of creativity that has transpired in the Swedish Underground ever since. It is the noisy experimental rock album that opened the door and welcomed in so many artists working behind the scenes. Gothenburgers Dan Johansson (Sewer Election) and Sofie Herner had previously made music together in the band Källarbarnen when they started discussing a new methodology and a fresh sound for recordings in 2013 under a new name as a duo.
After witnessing Sofie and Dan's live performance in an artist’s studio in the spring 2014, Gustaf Dicksson, who was running the Omlott record label at the time as well as performing under his own moniker, Blod, offered to release an album by Neutral on the spot.
Sofie recorded most of the instruments and voice, Dan worked on manipulating the recordings, experimenting with reel-to-reel techniques. The title of the LP translates as "Grey Wave Gamlestaden" and was chosen as an inside joke about the neighborhood Gamlestaden where Dan and Sofie lived. A major theme on the recording is a certain kind of bleakness but with a wry smile closely identified with the spirit of the neighborhood.
In the fall of 2014, Grå Våg Gamlestaden was released, limited to 200 copies, and sold out quickly without many copies making it outside of Sweden. Around the same time, Dan & Sofie joined forces with other underground artists in their widening circle to form a sort of Gothenburg supergroup making music together as Enhet för Fri Musik.
Grapefruit's reissue of Grå Våg Gamlestaden is the first time Neutral's masterpiece has seen the light of day since it sold out quickly in 2014. Our vinyl-only gatefold reissue is limited to 300 copies.
More information can be found here.
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"Fantas" is the epic opening track on Caterina Barbieri’s acclaimed 2019 release Ecstatic Computation. The original "Fantas" laid out a magical path of patterns leading the listener on a journey into the sound itself. Fantas Variations maps out eight new potentials sprung from this initial path as constructed by a diverse mix of artists lending to a wide spectrum of new works extrapolated from the original work. For this project Barbieri invited friends and long time collaborators from a variety of musical backgrounds to create a more sustainable and inclusive landscape in terms of stylistic, geographical, gender and generational balance. The results are a diverse array of approaches and instrumentation which blur the boundaries between the acoustic and electronic.
Fantas Variations embraces a platform for mutual exchange and support between like-minded artists, where active and collective re-imagination is prioritized over the traditional model of remixes, which is often strategic, functional and more passive.
Longtime friend and collaborator Kali Malone rearranged "Fantas" to a slowed-down, austere and eerie version for two organs. Evelyn Saylor created a piece for a vocal ensemble consisting of her, Lyra Pramuk, Stine Janvin and Annie Garlid, joining forces to express the choral, psychedelic and vitalistic nature of the piece. Barbieri's former guitar professor at the Conservatory in Bologna, Walter Zanetti, composes "Fantas" for electric guitar, by translating every single gesture of the original electronic piece into a personal, nuanced and detailed interpretation. Bendik Giske's reinterpretation for saxophone and voice captures the atmospheric essence of "Fantas" and its psychic meteorology. Longtime collaborator and along with Barbieri the other half of the outfit Punctum, Carlo Maria, resynthesizes "Fantas" for TR808 and MC202, bringing a more club-oriented dimension of the piece to life whilst unveiling the sonic continuum between rhythm and pitch through a sensitive timbral approach. Jay Mitta's Singeli reinterpretation of "Fantas" transpires with pitched-up percussion and turbo-fast poly-rhythmic patterns unleashing the frenetic, shifting, transformative matter within the piece to a higher plain of euphoric dance. Baseck's variation is a rave fantasia, where the prismatic trance of the original is channeled into fierce, uncompromising hardcore, whilst Kara-Lis Coverdale's take is a phantasmagoria for piano that gently, yet inexorably, captures the relentlessness chimerical qualities of the original, unveiling its spectral backbone.
More information can be found here.
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Originally initiated for the Merzbow, Kelly Moran, Prurient USA tour (representing three generations of heavy electronics), this archival recording is finally released as Chain Reaction At Dusk.
Moran and Prurient first met in 2018 and the two bonded over an unlikely composite of piano, drone and noise synthesis (Moran from John Cage, while early Prurient tapes cut-up Erik Satie).
A leader in the realm of prepared piano, Kelly Moran quickly drew attention for her massive and seamlessly complex juxtapositions of plucked icy melodic sequences and deep sub bass compositions, culminating in a stunning 2018 LP, Ultraviolet.
With 3-tracks of continuous intertwining melodic tension, Moran continues her juxtaposition of crystalline single note attacks upon a bed of massive low end prepared drones.
Shattering genre, Moran culls from a broad palate of classical, post-minimalism, ambient and other forms to free the piano from convention pushing high and low frequencies through electronic pairing and coupling. Recorded at her home in fall 2018, Moran’s split side showcases the composer’s prepared piano treated with delays and granular synthesis over a heavy wash of droning, arpeggiating synthesizers.
Similarly, Prurient returns with a side parallax-view vocal barrage complimentary to Moran’s fractal modes. Composed at Guy Brewer's (Shifted) former Berlin studio, Fernow accessed a cache of pristine analog synthesizers and sequencers while finishing the process with Kris Lapke in New York with layers of crude telephone dictation manipulation, resulting in surrealist vocal cut-ups - and "exquisite corpse" static.
Kelly Moran speaks of her music and as movement on the psychedelic path and the interior, while Prurient's noise derives nearly exclusively from dissociative and nightmarish imaginations.
This is the meeting of psychedelia and anxiety disorder, but the opposing morphosis is ultimately one creation of "classical doom electronics."
More information can be found here.
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- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Much like the prolific music criticism on his Touching Extremes website, Massimo Ricci's first ever recordings to be released are a unique combination of ambiguity and pure no-bullshit bluntness. Consisting of material sourced from 1984 and heavily reworked in the four decades that followed, there is a purity in his approach that makes bleak, repetitive structure all the more fascinating.
Tracey Feels Worse is a single 35 minute piece that structurally remains constant throughout: wave-like swells of indeterminate sound come and go hypnotically, with consistent, though microscopic, changes occurring throughout. Ricci opens with metallic low-end sweeps with slow evolution apparent from the start. He expands the sound with reverberations liberally applied throughout and increasing over time. There an overall bleakness throughout, but never does it come across as overly depressive or plodding. The sound becomes more enveloping, the intensity builds, resulting in an excellent sense of disorientation. The change seems so slow at first but by the end the difference seems dramatic. Not to draw too many comparisons to other artists, but the purity of sound and the approach to repetition is not so far removed from some of David Jackman’s more recent works.
From his style of writing and the sound and presentation of the disc, I do not believe the ambiguity that runs throughout Tracey Feels Worse is necessarily intentional, or at all essential, to the album. It strikes me as being a work of pure sound exploration, without any sort of hidden theme or social commentary or conceptual intent. Given that approach to sound rarely exists outside of the world of harsh noise, it is refreshing to hear it in something more understated and nuanced. Of course I had natural curiosity throughout of what the source recordings were, how they were being processed (since no loops or samples were used), but in the end that knowledge is in no way needed to justify or appreciate the work.
Samples can be found here.
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- Creaig Dunton
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With only a handful of releases so far (as Rrill Bell and as The Preterite), the American born, German based composer Jim Campbell and his arsenal of various tape machines, is already doing amazing work. Layers of processed field recordings, various incidental tapes, and who knows what else come together in these two extremely dynamic and complex compositions that at times seem like completely alien, yet utterly fascinating worlds.
Campbell opens "Like Heavy Honey…//Wie Schwerer Honig…" with a mass of stacked erratic electronics; complete with bent (at times melodic) tones and abrupt tape stops and starts. He balances the denser, heavier segments with calm, peaceful passages of gentle field recordings punctuated with birds and other inviting bits. There are even some hints of melody, albeit subtle, that seem to be generated from live tape manipulations. Some of the sections have a ghostly feel via echoing empty spaces, and others resemble submerged, aquatic excursions. Closing with a bit of menace and bizarre wet echoes and subtle crackles, it never stays in one place too long.
On the other side, "…From the Hollow Comb//…Aus Den Hohlen Waben" begins with a significant amount of open space and heavy reverb. What obviously sounds like field recordings (though what they are actual recordings of remains a mystery) fill in that space, resulting in a bit more of a foreboding vibe. Campbell generates some synth-like pulses and shimmering, crystalline sounds, but the sense of menace never fully relents. Towards the end he does an excellent bit of juxtaposition balancing manipulated Morse Code like beeps with crackling analog textures.
Ballad of the External Life has such an amazing sense of depth and complexity that it is hard to fathom that this is his first full length vinyl release. This is all the more impressive knowing that this is almost exclusively manipulated cassettes and processing. Jim Campbell’s ability to generate such variations in tone and texture from tape manipulation is rather impressive, and that constant flow from one section to the next without ever really staying in one place too long manages to stay engaging without seeming in any way unfocused. It is an album I immediately loved, and listening to it more unveiled even more depth and variety.
Samples can be found here.
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- Anthony D'Amico
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The latest album from this enigmatic Serbian composer is a significant departure from his previous work, as these five pieces were primarily composed on an old upright piano during lockdown. While the usual synthesizers are conspicuously relegated to a background role, In Immobile Air is nevertheless still very "Mogard" in both its central theme (memory) and its meditative and melancholy mood. It admittedly took me a bit longer to warm to this side of Mogard's artistry than usual (the piano is not my favorite instrument), but a few pieces capture him in especially inspired form and feel like significant breakthroughs in the manipulation of harmony and overtones. The other pieces are intriguingly adventurous as well, inhabiting a murky shadow realm somewhere between Harold Budd and blackened, desolate dronescapes.
Partially inspired by an unnamed Italo Calvino story, both the song titles and the general mood of In Immobile Air evoke the bleak grandeur of a rocky beach on an overcast day. For the most part, Mogard paints the album's various somber scenes with a balance of gently rippling minor key piano melodies and deep, brooding drones, but that balance can shift quite a lot between songs. The darkly beautiful title piece is probably the most equal balance of the two elements, as a sad, tumbling piano motif lazily repeats over a gnarled and heaving backdrop of synth swells. The following "Clouds," on the other hand, abandons any recognizable piano in favor of dense, blown-out, and downright seismic waves of drone. Nevertheless, it is an unexpectedly melodic piece, as the roiling miasma cyclically resolves into a repeating bass tone. As befits the title, "Clouds" calls to mind a sky full of dense black clouds that periodically breaks to reveal faint rays of warming light. It is quite a mesmerizing piece, but it is later eclipsed by the album's centerpiece "Sand." Like "In Immobile Air," it is centered upon a tender, minor key piano melody, but the brilliant bit slowly emerges from the background, as massive, buzzing oscillations swell from the murky swirl of lingering decay to steal the spotlight. The album's two more drone-based pieces are a bit less memorable, but In Immobile Air's highlights are impressive and unique enough to make it a strong album.
Samples can be found here.
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- Anthony D'Amico
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I can think of few other artists in the midst of a hot streak quite as wonderful as the one Chuck Johnson is currently enjoying, as nearly everything he has released since 2017’s Balsams has been downright revelatory. In keeping with that theme, his return to solo work is yet another sublime stunner and a strong contender for his finest album to date.  While Johnson wisely does not depart much from his winning Balsams aesthetic, he does subtly expand his palette with some help from Sarah Davachi, a small string ensemble, and an endearingly exacting approach to reverb.  For the most part, however, everything beyond his swooningly gorgeous pedal steel playing is merely icing on an already perfect cake: virtually no one crafts warm, achingly beautiful soundscapes better than Chuck Johnson and he seems to only get better at it with each new release.
The album opens with an absolute masterpiece in the form of "Raz-de-Marée," which poignantly combines a lovely descending organ theme with a lazily shimmering haze of pedal steel heaven. Everything about it is damn near perfect, from the melodies to the textures right down to the bittersweetly beautiful mood. It is frankly an impossible act to follow, which makes the more vaporous "Serotiny" pale a bit by comparison, though its floating dreamscape is still a very pleasant place to linger. The strongest pieces tend to be the ones that anchor the sliding, liquid bliss of the pedal steel with something more solid though, as the instrument can start to feel a bit weightless on its own. On "Constellation," that solidity is initially provided by a repeating pattern of warm bass tones, but the structure eventually gets fleshed out further by some reverberant piano chords courtesy of Davachi. The following "Red Branch Bell" is the album's most adventurous and unexpected delight, as Johnson fades into the background while a churning string theme steadily builds in visceral intensity, then reappears to finish the piece with a languorously psychedelic coda. The closing "The Laurel" feels similarly epic, marrying an elegiac string motif with some achingly beautiful pedal steel that evokes vivid steaks of color in a slow-motion sunset—a fittingly great end to a near-perfect album. Johnson hits the mark on nearly every possible detail with The Cinder Grove, but my favorite facet (aside from the songs themselves) is just how incredibly wonderful it all sounds, especially the way the sharper textures of the strings tear through the soft-focus swirl of dreamily sliding melodies. This album is going to be in heavy rotation here for a long time.
Samples can be found here.
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- Anthony D'Amico
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In characteristic fashion, Andrew Chalk quietly released this cassette last fall and it is damn near impossible to find out anything about it other than the fact that it compiles pieces recorded between 2008 and 2016 and features regular collaborators Timo von Luijk and Tom James Scott on one piece. All outward signs suggest that Incidental Music was intended as a modest and minor release, so it was quite a pleasant surprise to find that it is actually one of the stronger Chalk releases from the last few years, roughly approximating the slippery, shivering, and floating bliss of 2015's A Light at the Edge of the World in more bite-sized form. While there is enough variety to periodically remind me that this is indeed a collection of orphaned songs rather than a focused and complete new statement, the quality of these treasures from the vault is high enough to make such a distinction feel quite irrelevant.
The album immediately dissolves into sublime impressionist heaven with the opening "Fallen Angel," which captures Chalk at the height of his textural and harmonic powers. It is the sort of piece that people tend to describe with terms like "ambient drift," but it makes me think of water droplets quivering on a gently swaying spiderweb: there is an underlying structure, but the true beauty lies primarily on how the individual notes linger, shiver, and bleed together. It also highlights Chalk's singular talent for making extremely nuanced and sophisticated music feel organic and effortless, as "Fallen Angel" feels loose and spontaneous, yet delicately shifts moods while deftly avoiding any straightforward melodies or chords at all. While several of the following pieces return to roughly the same aesthetic with varying degrees of success (perfectly fine by me), the second half of the album is a bit more diverse and offers some more unexpected and rare pleasures. While I am still not entirely won over by the warm synth reverie of "Solas," I absolutely love "Sparkled in My Eyes," which sounds like a fever dream organ soundtrack to some masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema a la The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Elsewhere, "From Mountain Tops The Dusky Clouds" crafts a languorously undulating fog with gentle drones and subtle wah-wah effects, while "To Many A Harp" conjures a wonderfully haunted and tender scene with a slow-motion melody of wobbly sustained tones.  At least two or three of those pieces are stone-cold gems, but the entire album sustains a wonderfully immersive and absorbing spell.
Samples can be found here.
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Colleen is an aboundingly inventive composer and artist. For two decades, Cécile Schott as Colleen has crafted welcoming, enchanting, and bewildering music. The multi-instrumentalist and vocalist’s timeless compositions make use of carefully selected tools to mold memories into transcendent splendor. The Tunnel and the Clearing finds Schott at her most vulnerable and confident, invoking contemplative and swirling organ processed through analog electronics, steady drum machine syncopations and her distinctive voice to embody breaking through the nexus of compounding transitions. On an album centered on processing the complicated washes of emotion through tribulations and revelations Colleen presents a vision of breathless clarity.
The Tunnel and the Clearing was developed over a period of transformative change. Colleen began work on the album in 2018 only to be met with extreme fatigue from a previously undiagnosed illness that all but halted her work. The following months and years of treatment and adjustment eventually led to relocating to a new home and studio in Barcelona, which was soon followed by lockdowns and ultimately the dissolution of her longtime partnership. The impact of deep reflecting on these cumulative experiences found Schott completely reimagining her compositional practices through her enduring gift for reinvention. Schott spent months in near complete silence apart from composing and ruminating on her newfound perspective through her music. Says Schott, "Never before had I felt so profoundly the power that music has, through harmony, melody, rhythm and sound itself, to express the whole range of human emotions." The resulting seven pieces investigate the complex, at times contradictory relationship between excitement and fear, anger and understanding, struggle and triumph, all focused on a reconstruction of the self.
Colleen's albums are unified by their employment of distinct and personal instrumentation to tell their story. From albums built around music boxes or viola da gamba to albums built around electronics, her music remarkably shares a dreamlike modern quality. From the early stages of working on The Tunnel and the Clearing, Schott restricted herself to using analog electronic instruments like the Elka Drummer One, the Roland RE-201 Space Echo and Moog Grandmother synth, coupled with Yamaha organ keyboard and select Moog effects. This limited instrument selection was inspired by years of listening to Jamaican and African recordings where musicians were pushed to maximize their creativity with minimal tools. A magnitude of atmospheres are summoned from deceptively simple combinations, from the meditative pulse of "The Crossing" to the frothy cascades of title track "The Tunnel and the Clearing." Pieces like "Revelation," or the brisk-paced "Implosion-Explosion" respectively showcase the most diverse use of harmony and the most incisive application of production technique in all of Colleen's catalog. Stunningly, Colleen achieves the rich emotional intricacy and the lush density of textures on The Tunnel and the Clearing through almost entirely live performance and processing.
The detailed and affecting compositions of The Tunnel and the Clearing mirror Colleen's grappling with her own psyche. Schott elaborates "I found direct correspondences between my internal discourse, its obsessive, frantic attempts at making sense of what I could not understand, and the music I was making, with motifs functioning as questions and answers, doubts and assertions." Clicks, hums, warbles and throbs emulating our evolving internal worlds, an "emotional noise." A musical journey through the tunnel toward the clearing at its end. An ending which is also a beginning. "The clearing is what is always out there: a vast expanse of space, light and possibilities," says Schott. The Tunnel and the Clearing is a work of lucid reverence, a constellation of marvels suspended in air.
More information can be found here.
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Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Julian Ross to its roster of artists, presenting their new album Fadeaway.
Julian Ross is the ambient/post-rock duo of Ettore Di Roberto, co-founder and still member of Port-Royal, and Andrea Comotto, former bassist in a local blues band, based in Genoa, Italy. Formed in 2016, Julian Ross released their debut album Retrospective on Silent Flow netlabel in 2018, representing the meeting of two different visions of music naturally blending one into each other.
Fadeaway, Julian Ross’ second full-length album, consists of five long-form tracks with a total duration of 35 minutes. Blending layers of mesmerizing synth pads, hypnotic bass lines, loops of delicate acoustic guitar arpeggios, subtle beats, electronic glitches, lo-fi samples, field recordings and indistinct voices from various speeches, Julian Ross create a wonderful album that perfectly mixes warm ambient, gentle electronica and minimal post-rock.
Mastered by Emilio Pozzolini, also member of Port-Royal, Fadeaway is an impressive album, highly recommended for devotees of Labradford, Tim Hecker, Fennesz and of course the quieter moments of Port-Royal.
More information can be found here.
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Sound In Silence is proud to welcome Hotel Neon to its family, presenting their new album Moments.
Hotel Neon is an ambient trio, geographically spread between Philadelphia, Baltimore and Virginia Beach, USA. Formed in 2013 as a duo by twin brothers Andrew and Michael Tasselmyer, Hotel Neon expanded into a trio when Steven Kemner joined them in 2015. To date they have released five albums on labels such as Home Normal, Fluid Audio and Archives, a 10” vinyl split with Endless Melancholy on Thesis, and a single on Past Inside The Present. They have also self-released a remix album, two tour cassettes and four singles, two of which collaborating with Slow Meadow and one with Blurstem. Hotel Neon have toured with the likes of Benoît Pioulard, Lowercase Noises, Slow Meadow, Loscil, The Sight Below, Marcus Fischer and Christopher Tignor, filling a variety of performance spaces from galleries to cathedrals with their densely layered walls of sound, while all three members have also been active either as solo artists or in groups and projects such as The Sound Of Rescue, Gray Acres, Solidarity Hymn, Mordançage and Transient Sounds.
Moments, Hotel Neon’s sixth full-length album and first for Sound In Silence, consists of seven evocative tracks with a total duration of something more than 36 minutes. Recorded in the span of just eight weeks and done remotely, Moments is definitely one of the more minimal and textural albums Hotel Neon have ever made. Proving that they avoid repeating themselves with every album, on Moments there is certainly a stronger presence of more orchestral sounds than on their previous albums. Widening their sound palette with more swelling strings, moving orchestral elements, and subtle piano melodies, along with their usual textured layers of hazy guitars, glassy drones, soothing pads and field recordings, Hotel Neon offer one of their best albums to date.
Mastered by Taylor Deupree, Moments is a truly touching masterpiece which appeals to all fans of artists such as Stars Of The Lid, Hammock and A Winged Victory For The Sullen.
More information can be found here.
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