17 January 2021

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Albums and Singles

Debuting in 1988 as a self-released 8xCassette boxed set, Chapter Eleven collects the solo recordings (1976 - 1987) from one of the earliest members of the US Industrial Noise scene, coalescing a wide swath of influences and culling experimental techniques into inventive new terrain. Carefully remastered from the original tapes, this deluxe reissue is a long-awaited rescue from obscurity.

"Turman seemed to have taken over where the last of the great synth based kraut artists left off in the '70s, infusing the spiritual meditation music with his own brand of loop hypnosis, slowly moving drones, industrial patterns, guitar fuzz, and even some in-your-face 80's style synth work" - IMPOSE Magazine

More information can be found here.

17 January 2021

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

The main reason that I follow Marc Richter's career is simply that he keeps releasing great albums, but he deserves a lot of credit for being one of the most restlessly creative and consistently adventurous artists in the electronic music underground. In keeping with that theme, this latest Black to Comm side project is arguably another experimental playground akin to Jemh Circs, yet Mouchoir Étanche's first full-length unveils a surprisingly focused vision best described as "somewhere between a chopped & screwed opera and a fever dream about an imaginary Dario Argento film set in a cathedral."

Cellule 75

The delirious intensity of the opening "Enter Mirror Hotel" is probably the perfect distillation of this latest direction, but it has some tough competition from a few other pieces deeper in the album, such as "Sécheresse," which brings together an achingly gorgeous descending organ theme with an evocative host of found sounds (children playing, ringing metal chimes) that overtake the original motif and transform into a smeared nightmare. "Le rêveur illimité" is yet another favorite, as overlapping layers of a woman speaking in French tumble over each other while eerie drones mass and slowly undulate beneath. It sounds a hell of lot like what would happen if Félicia Atkinson decided to create her own alternate soundtrack to Suspiria (which I sincerely hope she someday does). Admittedly, some of Une fille pétrifiée's other pieces are occasionally too indulgent for my taste, but Richter is generally in fine form, as he sustains a unbroken mood of haunted and bleary hypnagogic ambiance while still playfully stretching and twisting samples far beyond recognizability. In theory, Richter's finest work will always wind up on his more formal and "composed" Black to Comm albums, but he clearly has too many excellent ideas for just one outlet and some of those ideas work quite beautifully in this more spontaneous and collage-inspired incarnation.

Samples can be found here.

13 January 2021

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Albums and Singles

Impedance, an entirely instrumental album spanning 4 sides, contains powerful rhythmic sequences, heart-beating frequencies and hypnotic loops that are paradoxically encapsulated in carefully crafted compositions which are full of secret passages and hidden doors. Kalancea's work creates ungraspable sonic experiences, which take us over, immersing us in powerful and mind altering soundscapes.

There's no quick payoff on Impedance. This is the sound of new, patient electronic music full of depth and substance.

Alina Kalancea is a Romanian sound artist and composer based in Modena, Italy. She has studied sound design and synthesis with Enrico Cosimi and collaborated with producer Alex Gamez, and artists Julia Kent and Raven Bush.

More information can be found here.

13 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As darkness falls, once familiar territory is rendered alien and foreboding; full of weird and terrifying possibilities. These are Night Lands.

Cardinal Fuzz are proud to present Night Lands, the new album from Dead Sea Apes.

Recorded live in the rehearsal room last December, the newly expanded 4 piece Dead Sea Apes lock into spooky nocturnal grooves, augmented by Nik Rayne (The Myrrors) who was over in the UK for the month.

Night Lands is comprised of 3 off-the-cuff improvised jams, where Dead Sea Apes effortlessly mind meld with Rayne to head off into parts unknown.

Night Lands by Dead Sea Apes is released on vinyl and ltd CD by Cardinal Fuzz.

Out February 7, 2020.  More information can be found here.

13 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

"Sunburned Hand of the Man might be the last of the great American free rock collectives. There was a time, not too long ago, when every region of this great republic could boast of its own visionary troupe of seekers and improvisers, thrumming at the frequency of the illuminated world. There was Pelt in the south and Jackie-O Motherfucker in the Pacific northwest, No-Neck Blues Band in New York and the iridescent Jewelled Antler out in the Bay Area. And up in the New England wilds, there was The Sunburned Hand of the Man.  David Keenan of The Wire memorably called it the New Weird America. It felt to me like the mystical democracy of Walt Whitman. It was never arch or jittery or wiry; it sprawled like the continent and massed like the seas. It produced some of the most singularly thrilling performances that I ever had the privilege of witnessing. Most of those groups have since gone dormant—disbanded entirely or decomposed into smaller units and solo projects. But the Sunburned Hand of the Man remains.

Or rather, we might say that the Sunburned Hand has returned. The sudden appearance of the phenomenal Headless in late 2019 felt like something of a resurfacing. There had, of course, been a steady trickle of obscuro cassettes and CD-Rs over the years, filling out an already bewilderingly immense and impossible to master discography. But Headless felt like their first proper album since the release of the Kieran Hebden-produced A on Ecstatic Peace! all the way back in 2010. It appears that it was no one-off.

The thing that one has to remember about Sunburned Hand of the Man is that while they were no less committed to vast, ritualistic summonings than their siblings in the American free rock underground, they were perhaps uniquely capable of channeling that cosmic funk. There’s a throb and a groove to Sunburned's music that made it as much body music as head music. This is a different kind of American weirdness than that which conjures ghosts and threatens to tear down the veil between worlds. This is “free your ass” weirdness that chugs and bounces. It makes us want to get out of our heads where we’ve all been trapped these past months and drive on the freeway or bop down the street or loaf like Walt Whitman in the stoned sun. Like the man said, it makes us want to taste the campfire. Pick A Day to Die. Sure, but definitely not today."

--Brent S. Sirota--

More information can be found here.

13 January 2021

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The debut full-length from ambient-electronic composer Rachika Nayar, Our Hands Against the Dusk, is both kaleidoscopic and inventive, but far from cerebral. In mid-2019, the Brooklyn-based artist chose the cover image (a video still of her hands entwined with a friends') from an old collaborative project. Along with its title lifted from a Richard Jackson poem, the image of "touch" references deeply (inter)personal experiences that animated the album over the four years it was written: not just caress, but encounters and collisions.

Her compositional process similarly begins with a moment of touch: her fingers on the fretboard. Songs are built from guitar loops that are then digitally processed into endless new shapes as they are combined and threaded through multiple genres and emotions.

Nayar grew up exploring musical worlds ranging between modern composers, Midwestern emo, uplifting trance and beyond. The diverse influences are visible on longer tracks such as "Losing Too Is Still Ours," which extends from rippling guitar figures and keening vocals to methodic, marching strings. The song title stems from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem of great personal import. Other songs wind through their own images and cultural iconography, forming a poetic web. The ghostly hazed "Aurobindo," for one, references an Indian yogi at whose Pondicherry ashram a family member had a moment of Hindu "darshan."

For Nayar, the album's fluid but always deeply felt form is thus a way of translating that which could never be summed up with static names, words, or feelings. It is her way of navigating the many communities, musical and human, through which she’s passed as a trans feminine Indian-American. Rejecting the easy reduction of her project to an "identity politics narrative," though, she takes that understanding as one of many in a stream of perspectives that shapes her life, and her music suggests the same.

To that end, Our Hands Against the Dusk mines the flux and discontinuity of experience as fertile ground. Nayar's debut invites us to join alongside it in thinking beyond metanarratives, as musical and emotional histories touch in its twilight space and refract into a multifaceted whole. In that endeavor, Our Hands Against the Dusk is an embrace and a hope.

More information can be found here.

27 December 2020

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Albums and Singles

With three albums in as break_fold, Tim Hann’s approach to complex, yet catchy electronic music has become even more diversified. Sure, the dense production and processing alongside heavy programmed rhythms can be found throughout these eight compositions, but there seems to be an expansion to the ambient elements of his work, balancing the more aggressive and commanding moments adeptly with space and mood.

Cathedral Transmissions

Rich, ambient synthesizer passages drift over the mix on opener "22_12_18_Pt1" but the buzzing, distorted electronics are not far away in the mix.The beats are slow and spacious, but there is just enough grime to the sound to keep it from being mundane.The understated melodies take the forefront on the following "22_12_18_Pt2," where they share the focus with prominent rhythms, sounding like a cleaner reiteration of the previous part of the song.

There is a similar sense to "Gaps_in_The_Mesh_(Remix)" (a remix of ambient artist Ten’s work) with its focus on slower tempos and rich synths as opposed to the intense production and distortion found in much of Hann’s other work.There is a more noticeable balance in the sound of "13_11_19," in which a restrained rhythm is coupled with shimmering synthesizers and otherwise less discernible rhythmic pulsations.He shifts the noisier elements into more melodic passages, with the result being a comfortable sounding work, but not a forgettable one.

I have always favored the noisier side of break_fold’s work, and that is certainly here as well.There may be some light synth pads throughout "15_11_19," but the punchy drums and dirty basslines balance out the equation exceptionally.While "29_04_18" may be a bit muted in comparison, the low volume distorted hum and idiosyncratic drum sounds give extra depth that is magnified even more with the constant changing and shifting structure.

The two concluding pieces are the one that especially stood out for me, however.The up front synth and drums of "01_07_19" are instantly engaging, and the use of synth arpeggios and other bleeping rhythmic arrangements make for a distinct and active dynamic throughout.Album closer "JP" is another complex work propelled by snappy drum machines, multiple layers, and heavily varied production.As the song goes on, Hann adds more melodic elements to flesh things out, but the final product is as singular sounding as anything break_fold has done thus far.

For his third album as break_fold, Tim Hann seemingly leans into lusher, ambient sounds more than the previous two.That is not to say that there are no heavy electronic rhythms or dense, complicated production, but there is a generally calmer sound throughout this self-titled disc.As is a general rule for me with electronic music, I favor the more dissonant, challenging works on here, but Hann demonstrates his ability to cover wide swaths of the genre’s spectrum while still leaving his unique mark on whatever he does.

Samples Available Here

27 December 2020

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Compared to the funk tinged sound of the seminal Liquid Liquid, founding member Dennis Young’s solo trajectory has been notably different in sound, and extremely difficult to compartmentalize. While some of his previous works have continued the use of rhythm and percussion, Bella is a substantially different beast from start to finish. There are no beats or loops or even electronic instrumentation here, it is entirely a work of solo guitar excursions that feature enough pedal usage to give it variety, but never losing focus on the instrument at hand.

Elevator Bath

Bella was borne out by pure happenstance:Young had just purchased a new guitar pedal and at the point of just testing it out, he became inspired by the sound and immediately began recording the results.Each of the songs here are just electric guitar and a tasteful amount of effects, but consistently grounded in his compositions, improvised or otherwise.

For some of the songs, his performance is rather pleasant and conventional.The opening "Daybreak" leads with twanging guitar layers and echoing passages.Both his playing and the tone itself are more musical than pedal manipulation, but it is just off kilter enough to give a distinct sound and demonstrate Young’s creative approach to the instrument, which continues into the dense note clusters that appear towards the end of the piece.This leads into the chorus tinged sound (a nod to his post-punk days I am sure) of "City & the Stars."Within these distinct notes he constructs additional waves of sound that surge in and slowly dissipate, giving an amazing sense of depth.

This oceanic dynamic is also prominent on "Park & Ride," which features an overall more rhythmic structure but with the emphasis on echoing tones swelling over the rich and nuanced background layers to then subtly withdraw.Chords give a sense of rhythmic structure to "Die Glocke" as well, but as an anchoring layer to the swarms of guitar and noisier outbursts that Young adds more up front in the mix.With his use of muted strings,"Tightrope Tandem" features an almost percussive quality to it, but that overtaken quickly by squealing notes and bent pitches that lean more into chaos.

Some of the most memorable moments of Bella occur when Young combines these more difficult elements with the more conventional ones."Submerged" is a beautiful combination of gentle, expansive tones with the occasionally jarring harsh outbursts.The entirely of the piece takes on this ghostly, abnormal hue that is made all the more fascinating with the complexity of the song ‘s structure."Weightless" is also a high point, where Young blends spectral high frequency sounds with lower, heavier moments.Enshrouded in a sizeable amount of reverb, the disparate layers blend together beautifully.

Bella is, on the surface, a simple sounding work:just guitar and effects.However, Dennis Young’s performance and compositional skills result in an album that is so much more than the sum of its parts.The mood varies significantly from piece to piece, yet there is a clear sense of cohesion.From the delicate introspective moments to the commanding, forceful outbursts, it is enchanting from beginning to end.

Samples Available Here

14 December 2020

Administrator

Albums and Singles

COVID-19 has torn people apart and brutally impacted lives. Having lost his father to the disease in April, Apart is Scott’s musical release of his grief entwined with the natural tumult of a much-loved nature preserve spent traversing in youth with his father. These protected wetlands house species that are slowly disappearing, comprising a distinct sonic environment that changes with its inhabitants’ demise. By capturing his current environment as part of his grieving process, Scott harnessed his awareness of temporality in all things as a musical expression to allow him to heal. Scott captures ten representations of this ephemeral world through field recordings centered around a piano, with electronic treatment to achieve an expressive and emotional musical ride.

12k

Comprised of ten tracks named "Apart A" through "Apart J," much of the album feels like an experiment, but one with a powerful purpose: to map out genuine grief against a bewildering new reality, the loss of a loved one balanced with a real need to come to terms with the everyday. As might be expected, this takes the listener through a series of peaks and valleys. The sound of skylarks, loons, flies, overhead aircraft, and passing vehicles permeates much of the music. Scott uses it to bring the listener in touch with a very active and vibrant daytime soundscape, both natural and human-made, before dipping into darker and contemplative moments. "Apart D" guides the listener into a more reflective mood with an evening theme, filled with the sound of crickets, flowing water, and owls, populated with minor chords and elongated drones.

"Apart E" opens into the daylight again, natural sounds subdued by atmospheric electronics, but "Apart G" with sounds of crying loons and a distant thunderstorm offer more complicated emotions, depending on one’s interpretation. "Apart H" seems to distort church bells, dissolving into a screech and abruptly yanking the listener to a darker place with "Apart I." Incorporating harsher mechanical sounds alongside a drifting piano piece, "Apart I" feels the most despairing track of the album, perhaps due to what sounds like an electronic wailing banshee.

I wanted very much to come out of this dark place and out of that valley with closing track "Apart J," but this isn’t where I landed. This album has enough emotive delivery for another listener to come to a different conclusion. Art is undoubtedly subjective, and the key for Scott was to craft a personal guide through his emotional wasteland. An artist choosing to share that vehicle with others reveals bravery, knowing that no listener will come to the same destination as Scott’s own journey.

Sound samples available here.

 

29 November 2020

Administrator

Albums and Singles

With obviously no dearth of source material or motivation, Locrian and The Holy Circle’s Terence Hannum has released a third album this year as his solo anti-fascist power electronics guise Axebreaker. Dense with rage, frustration, and noise, They Wear the Mask and Their Face Grows to Fit It does not stray drastically far from his previous albums, but continues his growing legacy of anger and nuanced aggressive electronic arrangements. A combination of catharsis and complexity, Hannum's work is as conceptually narrative as it is purely visceral.

Black Ring Rituals/A Red Thread

Hannum's description of Axebreaker as a power electronics project makes sense, but I do think that sells it somewhat short.I completely respect the motive behind it:as a genre I can appreciate a lot of artists who fall under that umbrella, but there are many more that either flirt with fascist imagery without clearly endorsing or decrying it, or at worst wearing it like some sort of badge of honor.However, regardless of the political affiliation it tends to be a one-note genre:distorted analog synths, shouted/screamed vocals buried under layers of flanger and delay, and murky lo-fi production.

Like his previous works, They Wear The Mask differs from that framework in a multitude of ways.Sure, there is a lot of distortion, noise, and screaming, but the sounds are rich and the arrangements nuanced, and the album is structurally varied and carefully considered.The five pieces included blend not just these elements, but also field recordings (likely from in person recordings as well as televised protests) and hints of lush melody that add an additional layer to the proceedings.

The opening "A Strategy of Tension" is titled perfectly, emerging from what sounds like sustained car horns and field recordings that slowly grow denser and denser.Under this, Hannum constructs a foundation of expansive synthesizers that, when combined, results in a growing sense of unease and aggression simmering just below the surface.Besides the fact that this makes sense given the underlying concepts behind the project, it also works exceptionally well as an album device building tension, although it never fully releases.

This tension erupts on the following "Receptive to Extremist Ideologies" via echoed, yelled vocals atop a hollow warehouse like ambience.The vocals eventually succumb to a heavier burst of subsonic bass and noise that capture anger and frustration perfectly.However, the combination of a constantly evolving dynamic, and some melodic synthesizers distant in the mix make for a standout work in depth and nuance.

With the brief rattling noise and creaking metal of "Patriot Prayer (Retribution)" bridging the two, the title piece makes for the other major work here.Building from slow, menacing electronics, Hannum keeps a synth soundtrack passage beneath the mix as he throws in outbursts of noise and distant screams.Though there are significant amounts of distortion and overdriven noise, again he keeps the entire thing active and dynamic, never falling into a simplistic or repetitive rut.With the closer "Defeat Forever" increasing in harshness from a motor-like drone into an ending of rioting and breaking glass there is no real sense of relief, however.

They Wear the Mask and Their Face Grows to Fit It is not a radical departure from Hannum’s previous Axebreaker works over the past three years, but it does not need to be.It is again an excellent encapsulation of present day rage and frustration that thankfully is anything but focusing on peace and tolerance.While Hannum’s project was likely motivated by Trump taking the US presidency beginning in 2017, I do not see the change coming in 2021 leading to any decrease of inspiration given how things are post-election and pre-inauguration.Next year could be a four album Axebreaker year, and I have no doubt all of them will be of the utmost quality.

Samples Available Here