01 October 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

It has somehow been seven years since this long-running Vienna trio last surfaced with 2016's stellar On Dark Silent Off, but they seem to have spent that time diligently dreaming up innovative new ways to be amazing. In a general sense, Radian's vision is not a far cry from the austere, jazz-adjacent post-rock of their celebrated labelmates Tortoise. The magic of Radian, however, lies in the band's singular attention to detail and their quixotic compulsion to continually turn sounds upside-down in imaginative feats of dynamic sorcery. The overall effect is akin to that of dub techno being made by an incredibly tight live band, but the live aspect is quite illusory, as Distorted Rooms presumably sounds almost nothing like what the band originally recorded (in fact, the band themself note that one piece "eliminates nearly all traces of the original performance"). While many of the sounds do remain present in one form or another, Radian revels in celebrating and amplifying the barely audible and non-musical bits while also eliminating or burying the louder, more traditional "rock" tropes like chords and melodies. Obviously, The Dead C have made a fine career out of similarly deconstructing and inverting rock music, but Radian are the gleaming, precision-engineered opposite of Dead C's own shambling, spontaneous, and blown-out vision.

Thrill Jockey

The opening "Cold Suns" was also the album's first single, but it is unclear if it was chosen because the band believed it to be one of the most perfect distillations of their vision or if they merely thought it was one of the album's more immediately gratifying pieces. I suspect the reason may be the latter, as the album's second single "Skyskryp12" features a similar level of comparatively heightened drama. For the most part, however, "Cold Suns" offers a fairly representative first impression of Radian's current direction: gently stuttering loops, killer drumming, and a remarkably minimalist palette of guitar sounds. Unlike many other songs on the album, however, it eventually coheres into a brooding and tense chord progression, which lands the piece in somewhere near the post-punk revivalism of Moin (at least until the bottom drops out for a lengthy outro of distorted vocals, smoldering distortion, whimpering synth quivers, and broken, skeletal drums). "Skyskryp12" has a roughly similar aesthetic, but with one key difference: after it collapses upon itself, it kicks back into gear and builds towards a darkly cinematic crescendo. While both pieces are admittedly enjoyable and satisfying, however, the album's strongest pieces tend to be the ones with a bit of a lighter touch.

My personal favorite is "Stak," which also happens to be the piece in which Radian obliterated their original performance almost entirely. In place of that erased performance, Radian conjures a wonderfully seething groove of quietly thumping kick drum, skittering cymbals, insistent bass throb, and a host of subtle guitar and amp noises. To my ears, it sounds like a refreshingly novel strain of dub techno in which the omnipresent warm, hazy synth pads are jettisoned entirely for a lean, muscular and industrial-damaged groove enhanced with a host of subtly echoing and psychotropic creaks and gurgles. Unfortunately, I am not sure anyone else could replicate this particular strain of dub, as Martin Brandlmayr's virtuosic "quiet storm" drumming feels like an absolutely essential ingredient. The other big highlight is "C At The Gates," which opens in a deceptively entropic state, but gradually coheres into a pleasantly broken and jazz-inflected groove of heavy industrial textures, sludgy seismic bass, and strangled feedback.

The following "Cicada" keeps that post-punk party going a little bit longer, albeit in somewhat more stomping and driving fashion, as it calls to mind an ingeniously remixed performance of someone like Ike Yard on an especially good night. The album then closes with a bit of a departure from that winning formula in "S at the Gates," but it makes for a fitting coda, as Radian stretches and breaks their groove into a fractured, sputtering, and dissolving state of suspended animation. That one purposeful exception aside, Distorted Rooms is one killer, exactingly realized hit after another, so it looks like I will remain a devoted Radian fan for the foreseeable future. By any metric, this is an excellent album, as the trio are masters at manipulating dynamic tension, ruthlessly carving away every trace of fat in search of taut perfection, and inventively transforming familiar instruments in unexpected ways. In fact, serious fans of sound design and studio technique may very well consider this album to be a masterpiece of sorts, as this is one of the most fascinating examples in recent memory of how radically a performance by an ostensible rock band can be transformed into something sleek and futuristic through creative mic placement and unconventional mixing decisions.

Listen here.

17 September 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

As someone who has loved Cécile Schott's work since 2003's Everyone Alive Wants Answers, I have long been fascinated by the various twists and turns that her vision has undergone over the years. While there have certainly been stretches in which she has lingered upon a vision for more than one album, Schott's creative restlessness invariably steers her into adventurous and unfamiliar territory eventually. As a result, Colleen's small discography is divided into an impressive number of distinct phases (the sample-driven collage era, the viola da gamba years, the synthesizer years, etc.). In a general sense, this latest full-length (her ninth) is a continuation her recent synthesizer phase, but it is also a significant break from her previous work in that vein: Le jour et la nuit du réel is seven-suite double album of minimalist vignettes exploring how a motif can be significantly transformed through the manipulation of synthesizer settings alone. Given the fundamental constraints of that vision, the album admittedly feels a bit less substantial than several of Colleen's previous releases, but connoisseurs of nuance and elegant simplicity will find much to love.

Thrill Jockey

The album's title translates as "The day and the night of reality," which is a nod to both the album's structure and its primary inspiration. The "reality" bit is a reference to how "subtle or radical" changes to synth settings can completely transform how the same melodic phrase is perceived by the listener, which Schott likens to how new information can transform our feelings about a person or situation (i.e. our perception of reality). In keeping with that theme of transformation, the album is divided into "day" and "night" LPs and the first LP concludes with a suite entitled ""Be without being seen," which is intended to function as a "twilight transition zone." According to Schott, the "day" pieces feature "more friction, tension, and abrasive timbres" in order to channel the "invigoration of daylight," while the "night" pieces feature "slower, more melancholy textures and longer trails of delay." Being a longtime fan of both melancholy and trails of delay, I personally prefer the album's second half, but both sides of the album share a hell of a lot more common ground than they do differences: every single piece on the album is essentially a simple melody unspooling over a shifting bed of arpeggios. Schott's gear was similarly stripped down, as the entire album was recorded analog-style with just a Moog Grandmother synth and two delays (Roland RE-201 Space Echo and "her trusted Moogerfooger Analog Delay") and "no additional digital production." Interestingly, this album is the first entirely instrumental album that Schott has recorded in well over a decade, but it began its life as an "an album of songs with lyrics in the style of her previous album," so Schott's muse definitely led her quite far from where she originally intended to go (and I suspect this new vision must have been considerably more challenging to realize than what she originally had planned).

For me, the centerpiece of the album is the five-part "Les parenthèses enchantées" suite, which Schott named for a French idiom that means "a beautiful moment destined to end soon." The suite is certainly beautiful and ephemeral enough to justify its title, but its duration (around 20 minutes) actually makes it the longest suite on the album by a significant margin. Lurking within those 20 minutes are both of the album's most sublime highlights. In the first, "Movement I," Schott delves into decidedly Satie-esque territory, as an understated melody quietly unfolds over a simple arpeggio pattern with appropriately wistful results (and the occasional trilling and fluttering flourishes leave behind a lovely vapor trail of hazy delay). Unsurprisingly, "Movement III" shares a similar mood, but features considerably more flickering and stuttering in its central melody, which gives it an unusually spontaneous, vibrant, and unpredictable feel.

Naturally, the other six suites have their own character and beautiful moments as well (the two-part "The long wait" being another favorite), but Schott's larger achievement lies in how masterfully she manipulates her synth and delay settings to seamlessly move between moods ranging from dreamy calliope to glassy murmurs of feedback to something resembling laptop-ravaged banjo (as well as quite a few other places that elude easy description). I was briefly tempted to observe that the album's other caveat besides Schott's aggressively minimal "nothing but a synth and some delay played in real-time" vision is that several pieces are far too brief to leave a deep impression, but I ultimately decided that she intuitively knew when to end each piece before it started to overstay its welcome. Also, it does not matter if there are six or seven 1-minute pieces if the album itself adds up to a substantial and dynamically satisfying whole (which it does). Consequently, the only real caveat here is that Schott achieved something both wonderful and highly specific, so how much one loves this album is entirely dependent on how much one appreciates her craft and virtuosic attention to detail: other Colleen albums may have more memorable or more moving songs, but no Colleen album can boast stronger performances or a more focused vision. It remains to be seen whether or not Le jour et la nuit du réel will someday become one of my own favorite Colleen releases, but I do feel confident in stating that is a gorgeously realized work of art, as I can think of very few other artists who could weave a few simple melodies, patterns, and arpeggios into a unique and quietly mesmerizing tour de force of perfect, uncluttered elegance like this one.

Listen here.

10 September 2023

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

Well known for his time in Dead World, as a member of synth trio Nightmares, and his deactivated power electronics project Deathpile, Jonathan Canady has long been a pillar of the American noise world. Now working under his own name, he has recently entered the world of soundtracks and participated in an extremely limited collaboration with legendary artist John Duncan. Suffering and Defiance is his latest purely solo, purely audio work, and it loses none of the harshness he is known for, yet makes it clear his work is anything but harshness for the sake of harshness.

Old Europa Café

There is no question what the album is going to be like from the opening moments of "Suffering and Defiance Part I": woozy, overdriven noise loops appear immediately, pushing the whole mix into the red. However, there is much more going on beyond just noise. The second part of the title piece appears later on the CD, a rumbling crunch with sustained, sizzling buzz that demonstrates an excellent use of layering and audio textures.

"Invincible Crisis" is similar, but even with a blasted out later of distortion the depth is evident, and with sputtering, wet noises added, the complexity is fascinating. There is less of an apparent loop structure, and oddly enough the more expansive dynamic gives an almost pleasant, welcoming feel to the otherwise unwelcome mood. "Overcome by Catastrophe" (both Parts I and II) go back to more rhythmic, looping structures, but the more apparent droning synth that permeates both segments are excellent standouts.

Of course, there are moments where pure onslaught is the intent, and "Continuously Abused" is one of those moments. Overall, there is a looser, more raw structure, with lots of noise blasts and bursts. The panned helicopter-like noise layers adds complexity, but brutality is obviously the intent. As a whole, Canady focuses more on structure and depth on the disc, such as the sputtering rhythms and heavy stereo effects throughout "Conflict Operation Indicator" where the abrasiveness is apparent, but there is a lot more going on simultaneously.

The CD ends with two lengthy (just shy of 15 minutes each) compositions that were originally recorded separately and released as the digital only Present Shock EP from 2020. With both being live to two track recordings with limited gear, the overall feel is rather different from the album proper. "The Immediate Future" is an expansive of echoing reverberations, with fragments of voice popping up here and there, and eventually chugging noises that stutter and fade away. "Violence Today" drones and swells, with heavy tape echoes leading to an uneasy ambience. Synths sweep and clang as the piece eventually relents to an overdriven crunch to end the disc.

Superficially resembling an aggressive noise record, Jonathan Canady does so much more with those rudimentary elements on Suffering and Defiance. Not in the sense of a massive wall of noise obscuring details, but instead he mixes and layers the elements beautifully. Taking those rudimentary layers of sound and constructing something with so much more depth, it makes for a carefully nuanced mix that can still blow out speakers if someone isn't careful with that volume knob.

Listen here.

10 September 2023

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

This is a weird one. Billed as a film soundtrack—although I cannot seem to find any evidence of the film actually existing—this tape from enigmatic UK artist Grey Windowpane is all over the place as far as styles go. Free improvisation electronics, bedroom pop numbers, and random interludes are all scattered about this cassette. The lo-fi sound and production serve as a unifying factor on these 11 songs, giving an slight sense of continuity within the chaos.

Half-a-Million Records

Loose, drifting noises are a constant from piece to piece: they underscore the crusty organ of "C.E. Last Hurry CUF," the precursor to the churning loops of "Manny Soaked My Arm in There," and as part of the open space and random voices of "Jubilee." There are other, more chaotic pieces, such as the clattering thumping collage of the aforementioned "Manny" feature hints of musical tones and melody, but never quite get there.

The biggest highlights on this tape for me are when Grey Windowpane makes overtures towards conventional music. The layered vocals and stiff beat of "Oh, Here's My Skull" is pure bedroom four-track aesthetics, but the chiming melody is infectious to say the least. "Barnie Bewail" is also straight-ahead synth pop demo track work, with an insistent drum machine and raw vocals extremely up front in the mix. Closing "In a Fantasy (Livin')" brings that feel back to end the tape, all overdrive keyboards and gauzy, processed guitar melodies fleshing things out.

Whether an actual or an imaginary soundtrack, Barnie Bewail is an enjoyable piece of strangeness. With little information available on the artist or their other works, the mystery just adds to the off-kilter vibe throughout here. Unpredictable, bizarre, but totally fun, the sprawling aversion to genre boundaries are what solidifies this tape as a great one.

Listen here.

20 August 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

I enjoyed Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf's gnarled, doom-soaked debut Big Other (2020) quite a bit, but I enjoyed it in a casual way and failed to truly grasp the full extent of his singular and ambitious vision. While that situation has thankfully been remedied by this latest opus, the music of Internal Return is just one piece of a much larger and more complex ambition that incorporates Jewish tradition, artificial intelligence, video art, and a uniquely disturbing visual aesthetic that resembles a vivid sci-fi nightmare that blurs together several dystopian cinematic futures at once. Curiously, when taken by itself, the music of Internal Return is more elusive and ambiguous than its more crushing and epic predecessor. When combined with Rosendorf's AI-created videos, however, Internal Return transforms into a viscerally unsettling mindfuck that will probably haunt me for weeks. As Rosendorf himself puts it: "It is not a comfortable place to be in, at least not exactly; like being adrift in an imageless dream, it produces monsters of a kind that, once they are receding into memory, we get the sense they were not actually terrifying, just... strange." Hopefully, those monsters will recede into memory for me soon, as I am still very much lingering in the "terrified" stage for now.

Negative Capability Editions

As was the case with Big Other, Rosendorf enlisted an eclectic array of talented guests to help him realize his vision and Tzadik/Davka alum Daniel Hoffman kicks off the album with a fiery klezmer-informed violin solo over a roiling bed of doom-inspired drones. As Rosendorf sees it, Hoffman's violin acts as "a furious, yet frail guiding voice in a void" while "the music treads a path that you cannot follow, one that arbitrarily narrows down, twists and turns whenever you're certain you have it right." He also compares the underlying music to a series of depth charges and "an apocalypse in miniature," which sounds about right to me. Without the accompanying videos, Internal Return feels like being trapped in a crumbling and haunted fun house: it approximates a labyrinth of darkly surreal scenes that feel more like fleeting, enigmatic impressions than compositions with a deliberate dynamic arc or cathartic payoff. There is one exception, however, as the album's smoldering final drone epic ("Immer Besser") tags in Liturgy drummer Greg Fox for a ferociously volcanic crescendo of sludgy doom metal chords and machine-like blast beats. That piece is the closest thing that Internal Return has to a single, as the remaining pieces are too deconstructed to make a deep impact outside their intended context (musically, at least).

Within the context of the album, however, there are a number of other compelling pieces to be found. In particular, I am especially fond of some of Rosendorf's piano pieces, such as the understated noir jazz of "Shûb" (gradually consumed by a howling void) and the seething melancholy chamber music of "Heave" (ripped apart by a howling maelstrom of feedback). Elsewhere, the tender "Rückkehr" reprises the noir jazz mood of "Shûb," but uncharacteristically avoids being ripped apart, blown out, or otherwise ravaged and provides an unexpectedly pleasant late-album respite of sorts. Conversely, "Tacheles" is pure glorious ruin, landing somewhere between burning planes falling from the sky in extreme slow motion and the hull of a cavernous empty spaceship bending and warping as it is dragged into a black hole.

For me, however, Rosendorf's most striking and impressive achievement is "Wave Offering." On the album, it does not necessarily stand out all that much from the surrounding pieces (a gently undulating drone gets slowly consumed by a nightmarish squall of noise and distortion), but it becomes a mind-wrecking tour de force of psychotropic horror when combined with the accompanying video (shapeshifting fungal landscapes, grotesque hands, all-enveloping spore clouds, mysterious obelisks, eerie golden light, etc.). In fact, it feels more like an exceedingly dread-filled and prophetic dispatch from a (mostly) post-human future than a mere music video and Rosendorf impressively transforms AI-generated art's limitations into an asset, masterfully wielding the uncanny valley of the almost real for maximum unnerving discomfort. If I had seen that video in the middle of the night when I was an adolescent, I would probably still feel traumatized and unsettled by it today. Notably, that is not the case with most other sci-fi dystopias that I have encountered (aside from possibly the first two Alien films), so Rosendorf is definitely onto something wonderfully fucked up and profound with his disturbingly ungraspable and impressionistic nightmarescapes.

Listen here.

20 August 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

It is immediately clear from the opening piece "Preludio" that this is music composed with an unusually clear sense of structure and direction. As a classically trained pianist, Francesco Gennari has a solid grounding in music theory and he applies this knowledge to modular synths, with an authentic desire for experimentation and some serious chops; he can play. What elevates this debut recording even further is his ability to develop complex pieces from simple themes, while injecting energy and a sense of aggression and dynamics into his music.

Important

Having grown up during the prog rock heyday of the early 1970s, knee deep as we were in the truly awful and the absolutely bloody magnificent, I hesitated to refer to Gennari as "classically trained." Back then, and particularly when applied to guitarists or keyboard players, this phrase became almost a code word for impressive speed and an elite technique almost inevitably leading to impressive dullness and top notch overcomplexity. No such pitfalls with Frammenti, though, and there is not a dull moment on this entire album. It smacks of a brilliant sci-fi soundtrack. In fact if I were Ridley Scott I'd redo Blade Runner, keeping the best bits of Vangelis, erasing all traces of the white dove, and liberally applying some Frammenti. (Then I'd also demand that Dennis Villeneuve recall and destroy all copies of Blade Runner 2049 but that's another story).

Among the many highlights I hear an abrasive delicacy in "Ardere" with its shockingly brilliant expanding and splintering crescendo. "Mimosa" exemplifies how Gennari can hone in on sleek repetition and then stick to his guns, by all means deviating simple patterns but never losing the plot by doing so too wildly. "Rifugio" is mind blowing good—as if crystalline drips of hyper sound are bouncing off the skin of an alien surface stretched tighter than a drum. The piece has amazing textures and a lush, aching, sonorous quality.

There is an algebraic quality to all these compositions, as Gennari uses counterpoint and harmonic development to extrapolate his fairly simple chosen melodic and rhythmic themes. There are also emotional elements too. Frammenti has a near-perfect balance of winning restraint, with experimentation and textural distortion enjoyed but not allowed to obliterate or even obscure these rather thrilling and affecting tunes.

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23 July 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

These two singular artists have been fitfully playing together for roughly a decade now and they have released a number of albums documenting their incredible duo performances. Notably, their most recent union was for 2021's absolutely killer Made Out of Sound album, but that one was a bit of an aberration for the duo, as it was a studio creation crafted remotely. Happily, Play at Duke captures the pair back together on stage where they belong. The stage in question was unsurprisingly at Duke University, but the album's prosaic title omits a rather significant detail: the performance in question closed out Three Lobed Recording's 21st anniversary festival in appropriately riveting fashion. While both artists rank among my favorite musicians and have truly incredible chemistry as an improv unit, some performances are undeniably better than others and Play at Duke feels like an especially inspired night to me. Moreover, Orcutt and Corsano make a virtue of brevity as well, as there is not a single wasted note or even a hint of a lull in this 25-minute tour de force.

Palilalia

The performance feels like an unusually joyous one right from its first rolling toms and major chords, which makes sense given that the performance was the culmination of a three-day festival in which Orcutt and Corsano were surrounded by great music, a host of their peers, and a sizable audience of receptive fans waiting to be properly blown away. It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment in which I was blown away myself upon hearing the album, but I am confident that it occurred some time during first of the performance's three sections, as the duo quickly strain toward the transcendent and ecstatic (Orcutt's wordless vocal howls tend to be a fairly reliable indicator that a particularly incendiary performance is underway). Naturally, there are plenty of killer licks and technically dazzling drum fills throughout the album, but the true beauty lies less in what Corsano and Orcutt play than it does in how they play it, how they interact with each other, and how they feed off the volatile spontaneity of live improvisation.

Stylistically, the terrain on Plays at Duke will be quite familiar to Bill Orcutt fans: a freewheeling blend best described as sort of virtuosic No Wave blues, though there are occasionally some Hendrix-y touches that feel like a fresh development. I was far more struck by the sheer visceral ferocity of Orcutt's playing, however, as he frequently unleashes fiery frenzies of wild bends, violent twangs, snapping open strings, convulsive riff deconstructions, and rapidly scrabbling fretboard runs. Notably, however, those expected firestorms are beautifully (and seamlessly) balanced with more tender and melodic passages where Orcutt will linger on a single note or chord. While I tend to prefer the more intense passages as a whole, those more feral passages are able to make a deep impact over and over again primarily because Orcutt and Corsano share a virtuosic intuition for effectively manipulating dynamics: intensity waxes and wanes, attacks and decays vary, and a soulful array of other moods are touched upon far beyond "ecstatic volcano." Both Orcutt and Corsano are in peak form on Play at Duke, as it feels like I am hearing two incredible solos at once that are organically intertwined, thrillingly spontaneous, and much, much more than the sum of their parts.

Listen here.

23 July 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

The Heartwood Institute creates memorable hauntological radiophonic doom-synth library folk music wherein traditional instruments from autoharp to zither are warped beyond identification, and blended into a barrage of synths and samplers, with film dialogue and nature sounds sprinkled in. Witchcraft is the subject matter of Pendle, and the album has a suitably spellbinding atmosphere, albeit one with the sense to emphasize grime and poverty. That's not to say there are not layers of sound which suggest cloudy pseudo-romantic myth, misty obscurity, and even smoke billowing up from a hexastein into some corridor of eternal purgatorial uncertainty where no one can hear your appeals for help, your moans or wails.

self-released

Mist Over Pendle is music inspired by the book of that name by Robert Neill and both are depictions of the events around the Pendle witch trials of 1622; amongst the most infamous such trials in English history. The album has an appropriately eerie density. We hear crows cawing, muffled human cries, incantations, repetitive electronic thuds, the occasional eye scratching curse and air cracking screech, foreboding synths, brooks not so much babbling as blabbing confessions during a water boarding session, and snippets of dialogue in archaic dialects lifted from an obscure 1976 television drama The Witches of Pendle.

Of the ten witches from Pendle who were eventually hanged, six came from just two families, so it is fitting that two tunes here are titled after the two octogenarian matriarchs of those—Demdike and Chattox—families. "Mother Demdike" is absolutely great, in particular the heavily distressed flute sample. The piece hits a bitter sweet spot, as does "Lancaster Assizes" named for the location of the trial (or assizes). "The Two Familiars" has a dark tone with submerged sounding piano and slurred sludge-like synchronized bass. The term "familiars" by the way refers to the devil himself or to evil spirit helpers of witches, often in animal form as a black or brown dog.

I believe that the opening piece "The Curse of Pendle" alludes in part to the religious and political backdrop to the Pendle case; including the fact that nine year-old Jennet Device was a key witness for the prosecution (something that would not have been permitted in many other 17th-century criminal trials had King James not argued for suspending the normal rules of evidence for witchcraft trials in his Daemonologie). Jennet's testimony sent her mother, sister and brother to their death, and years later she herself would be accused of witchcraft and imprisoned. Another song refers to the first victim, John Law, allegedly made lame for refusing to sell or give pins to Alison Device of the Demdike family. "Alice Nutter" also shows up, in a relatively humdrum piece (I would have liked even more sampled dialogue from the TV drama on this piece and throughout the entire album). To some extent the mists of time will always shroud this episode from English social history, but a picture has emerged of two families clashing, both desperate to make a living from begging, healing, extortion, and superstition; both willing and eager to accuse the other of witchcraft, and dooming themselves in the process. Back then there was money to be made by posing as a witch and also by threatening to expose witches. Both these families played with fire and got burned and even worse they unwittingly brought into being the accursed witchcraft- related tourism trade hundred of years later. There is even a statue of Alice Nutter now.

The Heartwood Institute is Jonathan Sharp, a prolific artist who lives in the Lake District and has clearly taken to heart the maxim "write about your own backyard." His previous works include "Calder Hall: Atomic Power Station" an album length musical ode to the world's first atomic power station, and the brilliant Hedges - inspired in part by the Ladybird book series. The cover art for Mist Over Pendle shows actress Cathryn Harrison as Alizon Device in the 1976 television program.

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23 July 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Electronic Designs was originally released in 1977 and it retains a weird and wonderful retro-futuristic atmosphere. By turns bizarre and swinging, wild and smooth, these recordings have a depth and an edge not always achieved in so-called library music. Younger glitch merchants can only hope to get close to the swing that Italian master Gianni Safred effortlessly knocks off on "Elastic Points." Then again, he did play with Django Reinhardt. This is a killer release with calculated, almost architectural, quality oozing out of every track. The cosmic melancholy of "Spheres'' is not unlike some of Basil Kirchin's more poignant compositions, such as "I Start Counting" while the frankly stunning "Planetarium" has Safred gradually unleashing an array of textural flourishes, as if imitating meteors or shooting stars amid a galaxy of stars and planets.

Four Flies

I was attracted to this album because of Larry Manteca's "Ufo Bossa/Intergalactic Porno Scene" (released in March on the Four Flies label) from the previous recording Mutant Virgins From Pluto. That breezy ultra-lounge electro-cocktail 7" sent me scurrying through the Four Flies catalog and landed me here. The cover art of Electronic Designs - with interlocked squares, parallel lines, images from maps or pseudo-astronomy, and oblongs which resemble circuit boards - gives away some of the compositional structure and feel which Safred coaxes from his Polymoog and ARP Odyssey. It's all about functional experimentation, relaxed and catchy, hypnotic space-age swathes of melody floating over well-grounded grooves.

Not that Electronic Designs is a dry intellectual affair in the slightest (remember the swing background) but Safred really knows where he is going with this music. As well as a clear sense of navigation, the album has a geometric logic. It fits together as well as if it had been composed by someone with logarithmic superpowers. Or perhaps as if Safred were a reincarnation of John Napier: the Scottish mathematician who developed a forerunner of the slide rule (a set of rods called Napier's Bones) and in 1614 published his discovery of logarithms. Truth be told I could have been reading about such concepts since 1614 and be absolutely none the wiser, yet just listening to the snakelike top melody and easy beats which Gianni Safred puts into "Poe's Clock", or the slow spiraling descent and echoing electro-swirl of "Sacred Interlude" somehow makes me feel much smarter, not to mention a good deal looser in the region of my hip bones.

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16 July 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

While I am a fan of both DJ Python (Brian Piñeyro) and Ana Roxanne, a collaboration between the two is not something that I would have ever foreseen happening due to the substantial gulf between their styles. Unusual circumstances can lead to unexpected places, however, and the two mutual admirers found themselves both adrift and living in NYC in 2020 ("well-loved albums aside, no one was playing shows, and a general listlessness and disconnection prevailed"). As a result, the two finally met in person and soon began working on new music together ("studio experimentation was the instinctive extension of a friendship finding its feet"). Before they could finish an album, however, circumstances changed again and Piñeyro returned to the European club scene, while Roxanne toured the world and moved back to California.

Mexican Summer

Fortunately, the pair were still able to meet up occasionally and eventually had enough material to convene in Los Angeles and Brooklyn to finish an album. Given the pedigree of those involved, it is no surprise that Natural Wonder Beauty Concept is a compelling project, but it takes some unexpected directions: while Piñeyro's recent collaboration with Ela Minus resulted in a poppier strain of DJ Python's "deep reggaeton," Roxanne's influence often steers Piñeyro's beats in a more vaporous and ambient-inspired direction.

This was an unusual album to wrap my head around, as it feels like Piñeyro and Roxanne's shared vision organically changed directions quite frequently. While the duo's varied influences (HTRK, Portishead, Bjork, Seefeel, Boards of Canada) offer some insight into the elusive character of that vision, the actual roots run a bit deeper than music, as both artists have spent a lot of time "reflecting on feeling too much and feeling nothing at all." That makes a lot of sense given the life of a touring solo artist ("You hurtle across the sky to spend a few hours in a dark club, behind the decks or on stage at the microphone. A brief grasp at transcendence, then the lights are on."). Fittingly, the shapeshifting tone of the album's ten pieces seems to mirror those two emotional extremes quite effectively.

For example, the opening "Fallen Angel" is a ghostly, flickering, and wordless fantasia of cooing vocals, distended beats, and subtle psychedelia, while Roxanne's untreated vocals on the closing "World Freehand Circle Drawing" feel soulful and direct (though the inherent poppiness of that directness is undercut by the vaporous and eerily nocturnal vibe of the underlying music). That balance between "ambient" and "pop" sides unpredictably seesaws back and forth throughout the album. In fact, only the title piece lands somewhere that might be considered a seamless blend of both, as Roxanne's hazily sensuous vocals are beautifully enhanced by a hyperkinetic jungle breakbeat.

That said, exploring different directions is not a crime (especially when you have plenty of good ideas), so there are a number of other fine pieces to enjoy throughout the album. On the more pop end of the spectrum lie "Sword," "Drive" and "III." "Sword" is the most dissolved and deconstructed of the trio, but Roxanne's swooping vocal hook is gorgeous and Piñeyro continually removes parts of the beat in interesting ways. Roxanne also takes lead vocals in the more brooding "Driving," which features a lovely wordless hook and a wonderfully shuffling, stuttering, and potentially woodpecker-inspired groove. Elsewhere, Piñeyro makes his vocal debut in the moody duet "III," which might be the album's biggest outlier, as it sounds like whatever the R&B equivalent of cloud rap would be called (somewhere between melancholy, anthemic, and stoned).

Notably, Roxanne and Piñeyro screened much of their "in-progress" material while driving around the LA hills at night and that seems like exactly the right context for this album, as the best moments perfectly evoke that elusive sense of feeling wonderfully alive in a hazy unreality of ambient melancholy and brooding shadows. I definitely need more of that in my own life, so maybe this will finally be the album that unintentionally makes my world collapse by awakening simmering longings and long-buried frustrations. We'll see, I guess. There are also a couple of more avant-garde inspired pieces on the album that veer into more overtly hallucinatory territory, as "Young Adult Fiction" suggests a digitized ghost haunting a slowed-down DJ Python beat, while "Veil II" resembles a gently psychotropic kalimba piece assembled from overlapping, out-of-sync loops.

While I have yet to fully warm to the first part of "Veil," just about every other piece would be a fine template for an entire album. Given the busy schedules and geographic distance now separating Roxanne and Piñeyro, I would be hesitant to bet on a follow up ever materializing, but the consolation prize for now is that this debut provides enough teasingly divergent glimpses of future possibilities that resourceful fans can simply let their imaginations do the rest of the work.

Listen here.