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The first two LPs in this box set compiles all the Nurse With Wound tracks from the Scrag, Mi-Mort and Nylon Coverin’ Body Smotherin’ cassettes. These recordings provide a fantastic alternative history of Nurse With Wound as Stapleton included works in progress and alternative versions of tracks that would make up his classic albums on these albums. Some of the pieces appear here more or less as they would end up, such as “Nylon Coverin’ Body Smotherin’” which would end up becoming “Brained by Falling Masonry.” However, other pieces like “Someone Others Aquarium” which would end up as “Phenomenon of Aquarium and Bearded Lady” on Gyllensköld, Geijerstam and I at Rydberg's demonstrate how much Stapleton tinkered with his creations in order to get to the finished work (although considering how much he recycles his source sounds, when is a work considered finished down Cooloorta way?).
Miscellaneous compilation tracks are collected on the third LP and these provide a further insight into how the early Nurse With Wound albums came to be. Another version of “Phenomenon of Aquarium and Bearded Lady” makes an appearance and a couple of Chrystal Belle Scrodd tracks are also included (but both of these are easily available on the Belle de Jour CD reissue). The real items of interest on this part of the compilation are the pieces that never made it beyond the compilation tape. “Smooching with the Sacred Cow of Om” and “Mystery Track No. 2” both show very different sides to Stapleton’s approach to music compared to the other early recordings included on Flawed Existence. Both of these tracks are from the tail end of the 80s and show that Stapleton was moving towards the more varied (and more musical) sound that defined Nurse With Wound in the 90s much earlier than I thought.
The fourth LP is given over to recordings from Nurse With Wound’s short foray into live performances in 1984. The Current 93/Nurse With Wound split release NL-Centrum Amsterdam was originally released on tape in 1985 but quickly deleted due to both David Tibet and Stapleton not being happy with the final product. It has been one of those releases that has evaded me for years so I am delighted to finally hear it. Violent and dangerous sounding, Diana Rogerson dominates the performance and her vocals have rarely sounded this unhinged. The chaotic sounds emanating from the speakers are much busier and more frenetic than those Nurse With Wound unleash in the studio. The sensation of not knowing what is going on (and the feeling that the band don’t either) runs through the live recordings, capturing the same creative germ that gave the world Chance Meeting....
The other side of the LP contains the original version of Live at Bar Maldoror including the untitled piece that never made it onto the CD reissue. Less boisterous than NL-Centrum Amsterdam, it sounds more like the Nurse With Wound found in the studio. The performance is more tempered, there is less going on and a greater emphasis is placed on atmosphere. The music has a creeping dread underlying it that gets under my skin. It puts me in the same unsettling place that Insect and Individual Silenced does and, like that album, I cannot understand why both these live recordings have remained out of print for so long (Stapleton’s bad memories of the whole experience aside).
The item of most interest to Nurse With Wound collectors is the 10” which contains two unreleased pieces called the Destroyed Piano suite. Recorded in 1983, these two pieces are quite unlike Stapleton’s other works from that time; they do not rely on studio trickery at all. Instead, the scraping sounds (of a piano I am guessing) seem to be recorded as they were. The different sound textures are captured so vividly and seem so much larger than life that it is possible to imagine Stapleton inside a giant piano, scraping strings and rubbing the great wooden walls with various objects.
Most of the LPs have far more than the expected amount of music packed onto each side, the average being about half an hour. Therefore I was apprehensive as to how Flawed Existence would sound. However, at no point was there undue distortion or noticeable degradation in sound quality. In fact, all of Flawed Existence sounds great and it is a vast improvement on the original releases (even though most, if not all, the music was mastered from the cassettes). For convenience, I would have gone for a CD collection of this material but overall, it is impossible to fault this box set for its completeness and quality.
This release is currently vinyl only so unfortunately no sound samples at this point in time, apologies!
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This album has actually been out for a while, but was just reissued several months ago (with a bonus track). It is hard to see how I managed to miss it the first time around: this is one of those rare underground albums that has such immediate, broad appeal that even Spin and Rolling Stone liked it, yet White seamlessly appeared alongside Current 93 and Six Organs of Admittance on Cam Archer’s Wild Tigers I have Known soundtrack. As such, Dark Undercoat went out of print remarkably fast. I’m glad it is back.
It is hard to avoid mentioning Cat Power when discussing White’s music, as that is the most obvious touchstone and seems to wind up in every review (PJ Harvey and Hope Sandoval make occasional appearances as well). I suspect it is laregely due to the fact that White is both husky-voiced and quite melancholy, but it nevertheless alludes to her primary flaw, which is the fact that she does not yet have her own completely distinctive voice. However, I am not an especially big Cat Power fan, yet I like this. I think that might be because Emily seems to channel a heavy influence from Southern Gothic literature by folks like Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers as well. Dark Undercoat evokes lonely country roads, decaying Americana, crumbling houses, and heartbreak in a way that is uniquely her own, despite any superficial similarities with other singer-songwriters.
There is a lot of material on this album that, while competent, doesn’t move me at all (particularly the piano songs). However, the handful of songs that I do like are all rather achingly beautiful. The bittersweet and languorous “Dagger” accompanies White's world-weary vocals with hauntingly chiming arpeggios, while the heartbroken resignation of title track is darkly captivating. Notably, aside from the aforementioned “Dagger,” White and her backing band wisely avoid using much electric instrumentation, giving the songs a timeless and understated feel that nicely accentuates her powerful vocals and literate lyrics. The album’s original closer (“Two Shots to the Head”) is a particularly stunning track that displays this nicely, as the sparse instrumentation places the focus squarely the slow-burning intensity of White’s throaty, downcast narrative.
Actually, on a related note, I suppose I have one other minor grievance, which is that Dark Undercoat is pretty uniformly bleak in tone. Obviously, White is damn good at bleakness, but a few more lively moments like “Hole in the Middle” or the bluesy shuffle of “Bessie Smith” would have been welcome breaks in the unrelenting darkness (comparatively, anyway- they are still far from cheery). That said, this album shows an enormous amount of promise and Emily is already a better songwriter than some of her influences. Dark Undercoat’s follow-up (Victorian America) is already out in Europe and I am looking forward to hearing how she has evolved in the last year or so. Based on the title, I don’t think I need to worry about any change in her aesthetic.
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Perhaps it’s not that absurd of a proposition, given that the short lived Happy sublabel channeled Deupree’s love of Japanese pop music, but the more organic (and vocal based) material here is a bit different than I’m used to hearing from the collective. Now, different is good, and I must say that while normally this may not be my cup of tea, it is so well done that there’s few complaints I could have.
Songs like “Daisy” combine the two worlds of acoustic and electronic music seamlessly, with ethereal, breathy female vocals from Rie Yoshihara delicately floating alongside swirling keyboards and stripped down beat boxes. “Hikari No Hana” is similar in approach, but the it shifts from acoustic pop to electronic ambience very subtly, when it fully locks into one extreme it begins to change its spots again.
Other songs stay more directly in the acoustic realm: “Hideaway” is a melancholy track that features chiming guitar and some extremely sad accordion playing that is lightyears away from the squawking polka sounds that is usually associated with the instrument. “Amaoto” takes a different feel, with Spanish guitar melodies and melodica working together, with almost no digital technology in sight.
“Life,” however, is squarely in the realms of electronic pop, with keyboards and drum machines becoming almost dance friendly, but staying extremely restrained, allowing the sparse textures to be heard. “Lemmy” (doubtfully referring to Mr. Kilmister) also focuses more on the world of technology, using skittering electronic tones and rudimentary synthesizers with warm Wurlitzer and accordion, a combination that, in this track, constantly changes and varies while sounding cohesive.
While it has elements from both complex electronica and delicate chamber pop, it never fully commits to any genre, which is an asset in Small Color's case. Far away from the world of so-called “J-pop,” In Light is a beautiful little album that is perfect for a rainy day or any relaxed, intimate setting.
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Fjordne is the solo project of Tokyo’s Shinichiro Fujimoto, who is also a member of Starke. While still quite young (he is under 30), he has taken his music to some rather avant-garde places with The Setting Sun. He remains little known outside of Europe and Asia, but his previous three releases contained some rather impressive and well-regarded forays into dreamy electronic ambiance. His early work betrayed little hint of the neo-classical leanings to come, however. I suspect he has been listening to some Phill Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine, or LaMonte Young as of late, but there is no indication of any direct or clumsy imitation.
While Fujimoto certainly has not abandoned his love of reverb, he has shifted his vision into much more organic territory. The primary instruments on The Setting Sun are pianos, strings, and acoustic guitars (though they are often heavily treated). More importantly, however, is what Fjordne does with them: most of the material on this album constitutes a prolonged and gutsy high-wire act in which Shinichiro manages to completely avoid any melodic movement or progression while still maintaining enough vibrancy to keep listeners mesmerized. The are a few instances where lazily repeating chord progressions appear, such as on “Trees See All,” but they merely cycle endlessly and gently and avoid any escalation. Most of the time, sounds inventively quiver, burble, skip, drift, and harmonize around a single central chord (the opening “Collide” is an especially excellent example of this).
Of course, none of that ambition would matter if this album wasn’t good, and it happens to be stunningly beautiful. Fujimoto’s floating, fractured haze of skipping loops, backwards pianos, and guest vocalist Fuyu’s wordless atmospherics evokes a bittersweet and sun-dappled heaven. Also, the gentleness and subtlety with which he weaves the innumerable tracks together is quite deft and entrancing. It is difficult to find fault with anything on the album, but the strongest pieces seem to be those in which some sounds are sharp enough to cut through the blissed-out, amorphous fog and rouse me from the pleasantly narcotizing effects of the reverb (such as the field recordings of birds in “After You” or the acoustic guitars and lazy, shuffling beats in “Torn Out” and “Last Sun”).
I imagine listening to The Setting Sun while driving would probably cause me to plow into a truck or something, due to its hypnotically static and edgeless nature, but it is the perfect soundtrack for late year hibernation. Notably, Kitchen’s packaging of this album is nearly as impressive as the music itself, as the CD is housed in a six-fold accordion photo album featuring mysterious, nostalgia-soaked art by label-mate aspidistrafly’s April Lee.
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The drolly amusing title of this project gives a rather unsubtle hint at Grégoire’s aesthetic inspiration: This Immortal Coil, like Ivo Watts-Russell’s This Mortal Coil before it, is a shifting and eclectic assemblage of underground luminaries united for the purpose of covering a bunch of obscure songs. Of course, Ivo had the unique good fortune of being able to call in folks like Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins to lay down some tracks, whereas things were probably a bit harder for this small French label. I guess they weren’t quite hard enough though, as Stephane further complicated his task by deliberately seeking out artists who were previously unfamiliar with Coil in order to capture the thrill of discovery. Luckily, there were some pretty talented musicians around who that description quite nicely.
The most immediately odd thing about an album of Coil covers is that John Balance and Peter Christopherson are not primarily known for their songwriting. While generally quite weird and wonderful, they were most certainly stylists: Coil songs were generally good because Coil was playing them. Despite recording together for almost a quarter of century, the bulk of their extremely varied output was (quite obviously) wordless ambiance and sound experiments, so there are not many “songs” to choose from. That being the case, The Dark Age of Love skews quite heavily towards the band's early days (particularly 1991’s classic Love’s Secret Domain). In fact, Matt Elliott (Third Eye Foundation) and renowned soundtrack composer Yann Tiersen (Amélie) actually tackle the title track of that album twice here (one as an ambitious, roiling misfire and the other as an excellent, albeit somewhat skeletal, marimba-based piece). That killer duo is also responsible for one of the album’s highlights in the epic and creepy “Red Queen.”
The other striking aspect about The Dark Age of Love is the level of musicianship, which is frankly disorienting. Much of the instrumentation is dominated by Belgium’s DAUU, who have a rather perverse and accordion-heavy tendency to make everything sound very traditionally French. I certainly appreciate how organic and intricate and downright musical they make everything, but it can be weird and distracting at times (like hearing industrial music reenvisioned by a particularly talented group of Parisian buskers). On a similar note, Matt Elliott transforms “Teenage Lightning” into a bizarrely Spanish-tinged approximation of David Byrne’s solo work. Israeli pop songstress Yaël Naim, on the other hand, turns “The Dark Age of Love” and “Tattooed Man” into smoky cabaret jazz, which is a neat trick. Some of the other feats of transformation aren’t so impressive though, as Sylvain Chauveau and Nicolas Jorio turn “Amber Rain” into fairly dour and straightforward singer-songwriter fare.
Despite my minor grousing about the rampant and perplexing professionalism on display, the gang does occasionally get a bit wild. In fact, when the balance between musicianship and exuberance is just right, the results are stunning. In “Ostia” for example, DAAU’s strings and snaking clarinet provide the perfect foundation for Christine Ott’s haunting ondes Martenot and Will Oldham’s harrowing, strained vocals (they sound like the world’s most unhinged, acid-damaged chamber music ensemble). DAAU’s expert musical backing succeeds again in the absolutely mesmerizing “Blood From The Air,” in which Dälek’s Oktopuss whips up a mind-melting cacophony around the menacing accordion backdrop that actually rivals the original.
The Dark Age of Love is definitely a fascinating listen and worth checking out, but several songs yield rapidly diminishing returns after the initial surprise wears off. Coil’s blasphemous, twisted songs bristle a bit at being interpreted in such a restrained and reverent way, but the stronger material is some of the more inventive and intense music that I have heard this year. No Coil tribute album could hope to please everyone, of course, and I think Stéphane has every reason to be quite proud of this odd and idiosyncratic project.
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Pure wildness is a difficult aesthetic to grasp. In rock, attempts to evoke it often devolve into tribal kitsch. On their sixth album, OOIOO negotiates that subtle distinction with skill and integrity. Despite some lapses into tedium, the band remains impressive, both in natural musicianship and in the complete absurdity of their art. Armonico Hewa satisfies and frustrates in equal measure and ends up succeeding by blurring the difference.
 
Superficially, OOIOO is not a particularly difficult band.Yet their music is enough to drive many listeners away, even fans of the band’s parent group, Boredoms. Perhaps the answer lies in the perverse way the band forms their songs. Most often they’re built on extreme repetition. Groups from Neu! to Stereolab to Boredoms themselves use the same method but OOIOO differs because their riffs aren’t meant to sooth. Listening to them is a kind of anti-hypnosis.In "Uda Ha," a shrieking tone emerges mid-song, goading it forward, as if a fire alarm had gone off in-studio.Yet the band will not move on, working the effect until all novelty is bled from it, and not stopping a moment sooner.As they stack chords on top of chords, the song becomes charged with a precarious tension. Each new repetition threatens to spoil the it, but that never quite happens. When change finally arrives, it bursts forth like air from a slashed tire.
Sometimes repetition is more a burden than an asset, especially with the band’s vocals.Armonico Hewa is saturated with sub-lingual chatter.The band gasps, chants, and babbles, throughout the entire album.Sustained over the course of a six-minute song, it can be exhausting.In "Irorun," they prolong a series of hoots and gurgles until it becomes torturous.Relief seemly comes when the song ends, but that it is short-lived, and the band reprises the vocal pattern in the following song, "Konjo."Either OOIOO must delight in tormenting their audience, or sheer endurance must be its own reward for them. Both tropes cease to be novel very quickly. Coordination and stamina should be lauded, but more restraint is needed to really show-off the band’s talents.
But what OOIOO lacks in restraint, they easily recoup in adventurousness. In Armonico Hewa, it’s possible to hear everything from Acid Jazz to Balinese monkey chants. Even the title is eclectic, the phrase being a Spanish-Swahili hybrid meaning "harmonious air." Those who stew themselves in culture theory might find this influence raiding questionable, but OOIOO has a refreshing lack of obvious method. In other words, they defy easy analysis. Multiple influences are plausible for any given song. They could take as much from Taiko drumming as they could from Afro-beat, but ultimately the music might come from none of those sources. OOIOO easily evade being boxed in with their influences. Modern rock is saturated with artists who aggressively proclaim their influences. At this level, appreciation for "world music" tends devolve into collegiate irony or backpacker mysticism. Thankfully, OOIOO create such a singular racket that it renders concerns about appropriation purely academic.
Despite their flexibility, OOIOO seem caught between two audiences. On one hand, their virtuosity and bright, colorful sound falls somewhere within rock music. On the other, their awkward rhythms, nonsense vocals, and excessive minimalism nudge the band towards the avant-garde. They present a radical compromise that provokes both crowds. This is a good thing. Too many bands aim to incite audiences by affecting some insular aesthetic. OOIOO incite because they are bold and vibrant, which is infinitely more charming.
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Temporal Bends is culled from five long years of recording sessions and improvisations between these two Amal Gamal Ensemble band mates. While finishing only four songs in five years, the pair nevertheless seemed to have been quite creatively fertile. There is probably nothing here that will surprise any Cyclobe fans, but Stephen and Daniel have certainly crafted a mindfucking monster of a debut.
The bulk of the running time is split between the lengthy titular four-part suite and a somewhat shorter (but similarly dense and deliberate) “Six Fabulous Mutilations” (the title of which perhaps betrays Stephen Thrower's other career as a horror film scholar). The album is rounded out by two more minor pieces that seem a bit less composed, the second of which features guest vocals by Danielle Dax (who also contributed the cover art).
“The Temporal Bends” starts off somewhat tamely with eerie, rather artificial-sounding guitar and synthesizer atmospherics and a deep, pseudo-industrial squelching rhythm that reminds me strongly of Musick to Play in the Dark-era Coil, which turns out to be an extremely deceptive touchstone. The piece soon plunges into an unrelenting black hole of suffocating disquiet and jettisons anything rhythmic or song-like for an abstract and cinematic unfolding that follows only the logic of nightmares—a tone that remains firmly in place for the entirety of the album with little relief.
While all the tropes of the dark ambient genre are on full display (cavernous drones, dissonant harmonies, bleak sustained guitars, endless ebbs and swells, etc.), the duo is quite inventive with their textures and instrumentation. Stephen plays saxophone and clarinet and I am fairly certain that there are digitally mangled recordings of kittens in two tracks. Thrower’s macabre saxophone impressionism cuts through the heavily processed surrounding maelstrom quite nicely and the constantly shifting and warping trajectory of the material is much more reminiscent of grotesquely twisted modern classical than the stark, more static existential horror of artists like Lustmord. “Six Fabulous Mutilations” is probably the most successful of the four works, as it expertly blends coldly disembodied spoken word, dystopian Tangerine Dream-style space music, white noise, shuddering processed vocals, and a host of unpleasant squirming and echoing noises into an unsettling whole.
The two shorter pieces are both pretty odd and warrant discussion as well. The somber lounge jazz of “Nautilus” again recalls Coil (albeit only indirectly), as it shares their tendency to inhabit weird non-genres and/or pervert existing ones. Of course, Thrower and Knight quickly throw a wrench into the works, as the piece is buffeted with spaced-out vapor trails of synthesizers and flayed by distorted squalls of impassioned saxophone before abruptly taking a permanent detour into infernal abstraction. Danielle Dax’s aberrant “Jack Sorrow,” on the other hand, is surprisingly concise and devoid of stylistic detours. Instead, it is just plain creepy: Dax breathily coos a brief morbid nursery rhyme over a bed of heavily processed meowing to end the album on a paradoxically bedtime story-esque note (given that all that preceded it closely resembled a particularly mind-ruining nightmare).
The unambiguous mood of the album is one of disorientation and submerged horror and I was not at all surprised to later learn that the material was recorded along the English coast or that water was a deliberate inspiration. Temporal Bends is exactly the sort of music that I would expect to hear if I was rapidly losing consciousness in a pool of my own blood aboard a haunted submarine (a compliment I rarely give). This is an impressively ambitious, harrowing, and complex album.
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The oft repeated phrase “more than the sum of its parts” comes to mind listening to this album but in this case, “exactly the sum of its parts” is more fitting. Shrinebuilder may be the name on the sleeve but it could easily be The Hidden NeurOmVins too. While it is a good album, it does not sound like there was much exploration in the studio to come up with something more than a chimera of the foursome’s various other bands. However, considering the main recording session for the album only lasted three days it is impressive enough for them to come up with such a solid album when they could have either rested on their laurels and put out something very average or spent a long time in the studio coming up with something overegged and bloated like most so-called supergroups.
Throughout the album the music shifts its focus continually, sounding like each of the individual members’ day jobs. This shifting even occurs within songs such as in the initially Neurosis-like “Pyramid of the Moon” which gives way to ominous monk-like chants in the middle before developing an amazing groove. At this point Cisneros takes over at the mic to turn the song into a more fleshed out version of Om. “The Architect” is pure Wino, even when Kelly joins in on vocals. It sounds like the better parts of Wino’s recent solo album Punctuated Equilibrium. The only person who does not get much of a look-in is Crover. Granted his drumming is recognisable throughout (it would be a crime if he was there just to keep time) but little of his musical character is evident beyond the drums.
“Blind for All to See” is where Shrinebuilder finally comes together and begins sounding like a band who have been together for a long time. The more complex arrangement on this song hints at what the future might hold; its layered guitar explorations (not exactly solos) are hypnotic and expressive and they dance above a rhythm section that almost makes me weep with joy. Kelly takes the lead vocal, intoning the lyrics with a gravity that makes me sit up and pay attention. Should Shrinebuilder continue beyond this album and the few live dates that are currently planned, hopefully this is a prediction of what course they will take.
There is one caveat to this review: the last song of the album is not included on the promotional version of the album so I cannot be held responsible for it being a stinker but will claim responsibility if it is awesome.
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As the fourth in their long standing domestic activity collaboration series, Marhaug’s harsh noise penchant meets Ratkje’s nuanced and bizarre collaborative techniques to create an album of random cutup sounds, occasional harsh noise blasts, and everything plus the kitchen sink instrumentation that rivals the absurdity of the Schimpfluch Gruppe crew in the best possible way.
The opening title track makes the intent of the album known immediately, with squawking cut up sounds, wheezing, feedback, and what could be balloons being rubbed together.Lasse’s noise penchant is present, though reigned in to focus more on the collage sounds."Complaints Won’t Help" begins with randomly dialing through an antenna-less radio, which becomes a rudimentary noise loop to provide the rhythm.Above this, a full chorus of meowing cats becomes the focus of the track, providing the complaints referenced in the title.I have yet to audition this track for my own two feline terrors, but I’m expecting some confused faces.
Not to be exclusionary, "Call In The Dogs" literally lets the canines have their say, constant barking over fragments of music, piano banging, and cartoon sound effects.The cartoon sense continues into "Merry Go Round Circus In Town", which throws in some cartoon jazz stuff while adding in ringing bells and random electronic chaos.
"Sound Check" makes more concessions to traditional music than anything else here, opening with what sounds like the lost theme song to some 1970s game show, mixed with junk loops and flatulent white noise blasts before ending with actual "music" while people have conversations over it.
Marhaug seems to seize the reigns for the latter two tracks, infusing both with a greater sense of the harsh noise he is known for. "Stuck In The Roundabout" showcases his electronic shards of sound far more than the prior ones, but still allowing pieces of melody and the random cutup here and there to come in to mediate things.The closer "Like A Prayer" ups the ante with shrill, piercing squeals and overdriven bass frequencies, moderated a bit with cut up music and burbling sounds before falling apart into pure noise hell.
Having not heard the previous volumes of this collaborative series, the spastic randomness of what I’ve heard here makes me want to track those down.It has the sheer Dada of Sudden Infant and Komissar Hjuler & Mama Bar down quite well, but with a greater sense of composition, in the loosest definition of the word.It also is more than happy to infuse a good dose of old fashion noise into the weirder parts of the proceedings, which is a good combination.
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Sequenced across three tracks, with two short (around four minute) pieces around a 26 minute centerpiece, Oblivio Agitatum is more of a dramatic work rather than just a collage of electronic music. The opening title track begins with pulsing low end oscillations that are almost metallic in nature, scraping along until they eventually lead into more subtle territory. The shift goes from the abrasive sounds of before into calm tones that were always there from the beginning, but obscured underneath the surface by the obtuse scraping textures.
The long "Zeros" begins with a mix of processed buzz over softly rolling tones, each ebbing and flowing to alternatingly dominate the mix, as some dynamic low frequency rumbles like thunder across the night sky. The track is constantly moving, with the occasional alien stab or crackle off in the deep dark night. A sense of industrial menace is omnipresent, with mechanical and digital ambient noises all around but never fully perceptible. Various electronic squeaks and groans rise to resemble some sort of foreign language that is imperceptible, but still trying to express something tangible. The second half of the piece is more sparse, pulling away the more domineering sounds to let the quiet ones rise, leaving pieces to sustain on and on that otherwise were not as clear. Gently rolling tones and meditative passages are more characteristic of the closing half of the track, contrasting the dense, alienating mix of the first part.
The closing "Isopyre" is more aquatic in its delivery while the prior piece was more astral. Burbling water and slowly drifting passages mimic the sounds of sinking in a deep, dark ocean with nothing but most faintest glimpses of light to illuminate the darkness around, the occasional rush of the oxygen tank calmly punctuating the abnormal with the reassuring sense of normalcy.
Oblivio Agitatum proves that even with his long silence, Bruce Gilbert is still an expert at shaping mini dramas and landscapes out of the raw clay of electronic music. While I’ve been a fan of essentially all of his solo work, it is here I am most reminded of his 1980s music for dance such as The Shivering Man or Insiding, which have always been among my favorites in his discography. It is a perfectly encapsulated sonic audio drama that is only too short in its duration.
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Mark McGuire’s previous solo work has often followed the same path as his work within the trio of Emeralds: wide swatches of arching effects creating a blissful din of synth and barely recognizable guitar that coalesce into some unknown, yet familiar melody. It’s a talent that is hard to explain with a few hyperbolic adjectives but the phrase of the moment is hypnogogic pop or noise—neither of which does McGuire’s work service.
Solo Guitar Volume Two does not follow the same path as previous McGuire-involved releases. Rather, it’s a nearly stripped album of beautiful electro-acoustic tracks that not only deconstruct McGuire’s effects overload, but provide a deeper insight into his creative processes without textbook ennui or noticeable holes where John Elliot and Steve Hauschildt should fit.
Each side of the LP is a different glimpse into the creation process of McGuire. Side A falls in line with more traditional ragas and airs, finding McGuire delving into little to no effect in pursuit of guitar playing in its purest form. The three songs, “At First Sight,” “Vitamins,” and “Second Thoughts,” are bare—only McGuire’s energetic strumming. Some may be surprised at how poppy and full the sound is but the steely ringing of flesh striking string is a welcomed reprieve from McGuire’s indulgent loops and effect. Side B begins to delve into McGuire’s electronics, yet the results remain true to Side A’s stripped approach. “Front Porch” is a three minute flash in the pan, providing the necessary bridge between Solo Guitar Volume Two’s distinctive sides. Album closer “Burning Leaves” brings all of McGuire’s influences into a track of mammoth proportions, blending the electronic messes of Emeralds and McGuire’s previous solo recordings with building acoustic rhythms that bounce off each other, culminating in a track that reinvigorates the album and the acoustic guitar style with its simplicity among layered loops and delays.
McGuire captures the atmosphere in which he recorded and reproduces it in manners the din of Emeralds and previous solo material would never allow. Lowenthal’s stringed adventure is already paying off and I hope this isn’t the last time McGuire delves into the simpler sounds of guitar.
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