27 October 2019

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Albums and Singles

As you lay on your back in the deep grass on a shadowy late-summer afternoon…tracing the outlines of patterns on the inside of your eyelids illuminated in translucense beneath the sun….ruminating, drifting in and out of sleep. Your dreams flirt with the irrational fears of the dark, of being left alone, of infinity…of being lost in corn fields reaching taller than the sky, of the comfort of feet dangling in a cold lake and splinters from running on a sun-dried summer dock. The world once felt new and alive…now through a haze, lost from the opacity of time.

Ohio is a new project from of 12k founder Taylor Deupree and long-time label-mate and collaborator Corey Fuller. The genesis of Ohio, besides the desire to work on a full album together, was them realizing they were both born in the US state of Ohio, not far from each other, and spent their earlier years crafting young memories there before moving away. This ended up being a simple, but interesting point of departure for the project because these early, hazy memories provided compelling conceptual roadmaps for the album as well as become inspiration for the song titles.

With no lack of irony the project started with a playful cover of singer/songwriter Damien Jurado's "Ohio." Deeply loved by both Deupree and Fuller, covering this song liberated them from working in their traditional "ambient" comfort-zone, challenging them with new structures and new directions. Their version of "Ohio" slowed the song down and explored acoustic and electric guitars, vocals, harmonies, pop-centric song structure, field recordings and a plethora of subtle studio fun (the looped clicking motor of a Roland RE-201 Space Echo being used as a "hi-hat" of sorts) and layers.

The project expanded from there and moved gradually as they very much felt working in the same physical space was important to its core. Writing, overdubbing, mixing and editing continued as the two found time to make the journeys between Tokyo and New York to share a studio. Each visit the songs would become more refined and be pushed into new and unexpected directions. A cathartic intensity found its way into the music echoing the intensity of life but at the same time remaining grounded.

The four years spent creating Upward, Broken, Always resulted in an album that engages the dichotomy between ambience and intensity. The hazy reworking of Jurado's "Ohio," or the duet for acoustic guitars recorded in the woods outside of Deupree's studio contrasts with the surprising, beautifully intense swells of overdriven guitar. Faraway drums and Fuller's ghostly vocals further expand the sonic image.

During one of their final editing sessions, with the accidental muting of musical tracks, the interludes at the end of each LP side were born. Fragments of preceding songs, stripped to a ghostly minimum like those distant Ohio memories.

Upward, Broken, Always is released in online formats and as a limited edition of 125 double 12” LPs. The LP art features an aerial photograph of the state of Ohio as well as the barn from Deupree's childhood home inside the gatefold jacket. There are 3 sides of audio on the release with Side D of the 2nd record being a full-side graphical etching of a topographical map.

More information can be found here.

27 October 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This Swedish composer earned a lot of attention with last year's blackened drone opus Kontrapoetik, but Horn has been a significant figure in European underground music circles for quite a while (she co-runs the XKatedral label with Kali Malone, for example). On her latest album, however, she seamlessly slips into somewhat different stylistic territory than I expected, as Epistasis is shaped by some very intriguing and inventive compositional techniques (one of which draws its inspiration from Arvo Pärt). And much like Pärt (and Malone), Horn has found a unique way to use traditional classical instrumentation that does not bear much resemblance to the current classical/neo-classical milieu at all. There are still some lingering shades of Horn's darker, heavy influences to be found as well, but the most striking creative breakthrough on the album comes in the form of the tender, twinkling, and intricately arranged two-part piano suite "Interlocked Cycles."

Hallow Ground

The heart of Epistasis, "Interlocked Cycles," was originally composed for a larger audiovisual work that premiered last year at Stockholm's Royal College of Music.Sadly, I have not yet figured out a way to sync up the lights in my apartment to recreate the full multisensory experience of that night, but the music is nevertheless quite beautiful in decontextualized form.Curiously, the two halves of the piece are the album's bookends, so they are presumably intended as discrete entities.They were composed using roughly the same ideas though: Horn used a computer-controlled piano to achieve a steady escalation of both tempo and density.There is also some phase manipulation involved.In more practical terms, the opening "Interlocked Cycles I" resembles an ingenious, large-scale music box: it opens quite simply with a lone, somber arpeggio, yet steadily becomes warmer, brighter, and more lovely as more moving parts are triggered and lock into place.By the end, it is a complex lattice of intertwined, rippling melodies and it is absolutely heavenly, though subterranean drones and eerily whining electronics provide enough unease to ensure that a subtly haunted mood still gnaws at the fringes of the idyll.That same structural arc repeats for the closing "Interlocked Cycles II," but it takes a considerably different shape, as there is a steadily intensifying sense of drama and grandeur in the underlying chord progression.While it is not quite as strong as its predecessor on the whole, the final moments achieve a mesmerizing level of quiet intensity after the chords fall away.I also appreciated the added textural flourish of rattling, muted notes (presumably from piano strings covered with foil or something similar).

The two pieces in the middle of the album take divergent paths of their own.On "Epistasis," for example, Horn replicates the roiling grandeur of black metal with a double string quartet and some overdubbed guitar noise.It is quite a sweeping and cinematic piece that evokes sinister castles on windswept crags, which normally tends to be the sort of thing that does not appeal to me very much.To her credit, however, Horn almost wins me over to her brand of orchestral doom with the occasional curdled note and an undercurrent of more nuanced emotions.Thankfully, the following "Konvektion" resonates with me on a much deeper level, recalling the sublime organ minimalism of Horn's longtime collaborator Kali Malone.Horn differs significantly from Malone in her approach, however, as she works her harmonic magic out in the open and seems far more amenable to lushness and layering.The two artists are very similar in their compositional inventiveness and rigor though.Case in point: "Konvektion" was written for two organists (sharing an instrument) using Arvo Pärt's "tintinnabuli" approach, but with the twist that the chord durations are dictated by the breathing patterns of each individual performer.In Horn's hands, tintinnabular music is less fragile and melodic than it is in classic Pärt fare like "Spiegel im Spiegel," yet "Konvektion" achieves something similarly appealing with its enhanced harmonic depth and languorously organic arc.

With Epistasis following on the heels of Malone's excellent The Sacrificial Code, this is shaping up to be quite an impressive year for Stockholm's experimental music scene and I am now very curious about what the rest of duo's regular collaborators have in the pipeline (Malone and Horn are part of a quartet that also includes Ellen Arkbro and Marta Forsberg).In the hyperconnected cultural landscape of the internet age, it is truly rare for a regional scene to blossom with its own distinct character, yet something quietly radical and exciting has unquestionably taken shape from such an improbably smart and idiosyncratic bunch of artists all playing together and exchanging unconventional ideas.I cannot think of any other milieu that an album like this could have emerged from.With Epistasis, Horn has made the impressive leap from "fine drone artist with some cool conceptual ideas" to "formidable composer that other artists will absolutely try to emulate."This album's success goes deeper than just great ideas and skillful execution though, as Horn has found a near-perfect balance between the soulful and the cerebral and applied it to classical instrumentation in a way that is appealingly melodic, timeless, and distinctive.I am properly floored by the rapid and wonderful evolution that Horn's work has undergone since just last year: Kontrapoetik was a strong album, but this one is on an entirely different plane altogether.

Samples can be found here.

27 October 2019

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Albums and Singles

Randall Taylor has quietly emerged as one of the most talented and distinctive tape loop artists in the world over the last few years, steadily releasing a prolific flow of cassettes on a variety of labels. Remarkably, however, Between Distant and Remote is his first vinyl release, which I suppose makes this an auspicious occasion career-wise. It is also the first time I have personally delved seriously into his oeuvre despite my general predisposition towards warbly loops and obsessive repetition. I suspect the reason Amulets has eluded me until now is that Taylor uses tapes as a compositional tool to craft warm, dreamlike reveries of processed guitar ambiance rather than making the tapes the focus. Of course, the tapes very clearly are the focus in Taylor's process, but the finished compositions that ultimately emerge could easily be mistaken for the work of an ambient-minded guitarist with a passion for lush layering. If Taylor were a lesser artist, that approach would disappoint me, but Between Distant and Remote scratches a similar itch to classic shoegaze-damaged drone artists like Belong (and it gets there in an impressively inventive way).

Beacon Sound

The opening "Process of Unlearning" is quite a beautiful and effective statement of intent, as it begins with a loop of an enigmatic squelching noise and slowly builds into a roiling sea of lovely soft-focus guitar noise.Plenty of other artists do guitar-based ambient drone quite well, yet Taylor shows a strong intuition for finding interesting and effective ways to make his work stand out as particularly distinctive.I am especially fond of the wobbly, stuttering tape sounds that become the heart of the piece, yet the more impressive mastery lies in the piece's thoughtful, subtle, and effective dynamic arc.To his credit, Taylor was not content to simply craft a pretty swirl of shimmering and quivering guitars, as an undercurrent of distorted, sizzling chords steadily drives the piece towards something that feels genuinely epic by the end of its four-minute duration.I cannot think of any other artists working in similar stylistic territory that share Taylor's knack for constant forward motion and endless subtle shifts in emotional shading, as there is a definite tendency in the genre to linger in a state of floating or submerged bliss.The latter unquestionably has its appeal, but it is refreshing to encounter such a lull-free addition to the canon.Moreover, that sense of unwavering purposefulness brings me to the most curious aspect of Amulets: Taylor essentially uses tape loops to make himself a one-man rock band and he does it very well.He also uses his tapes to give his sounds a warbling and frayed texture that I very much enjoy, but I am struck by how modestly he employs his arsenal of walkmen: almost every loop is designed to seamlessly blend into the quivering haze rather than assert itself.It feels like Taylor just wanted to make languorously lovely multilayered guitar music that he could play live and the tapes are merely the ingenious way he found to make that work.

While the whole album is quite good, I most prefer the pieces where Taylor balances dreamlike beauty with ragged edges and gnarled textures.In that regard, "North Coast, Falling" steals the show, as its lazily rippling arpeggios are embellished with a stammering and dissolving melodic loop that feels simultaneously grinding and strangled.And then a snarling and sputtering tide of guitar noise slowly rises up and threatens to consume everything.In less assured hands than Taylor's, that is exactly what would have happened, but the noise ultimately dissipates to make way for a tender and lovely coda.Elsewhere, "Where The Land Meets the Sea" casts a delicately lovely spell with a woozy two-note pulse and a chiming, music box-esque melody before erupting into a seismic crescendo of dense and sizzling power chords.The following "No Signal," on the other hand, largely eschews Amulets' usual beauty in favor of something that sounds like a howling and mournful guitar catharsis accompanied by roiling static and ringing buoys.It is quite a quietly incendiary piece, displaying a passion and rawness that I would not normally associate with either tape loops or guitar-based ambient.Remarkably, that hot streak lasts right up until the end of the album and each piece manages to have its own distinct character.In "Feigning Night," for example, exhalation-like washes of tape hiss and backwards melodies gradually blossom into a densely shuddering mass of layered guitars, rumbling bass drones, and distantly twinkling piano motifs.Later, the closing "Like Warm Air (We Rose)" feels like I just unexpectedly tuned into an angelic radio station as the earth shakes and burns around me.

As I listen to Between Distant and Remote more and more, I keep finding new details and nuances to love, so I am hard-pressed to find much to gripe about: there are seven songs on this album and every single one is wonderful in its own way.That said, I do wish Taylor had used non-musical loops a bit more frequently and prominently than he does, as some buried voices and environmental sounds would have made the album a more mysterious and complex experience.That is not exactly a shortcoming though–merely an observation about how a great album might have become a somewhat greater one.Truly iconic artists do not just make music that sounds good–they have something extra that gives their work an instantly recognizable personality and soul.For example, Ian William Craig works in similar stylistic terrain, but transcends other artists because his voice brings a human tenderness and vulnerability into his soundscapes.Taylor, for his part, transcends other artists through sheer craftsmanship and unerring songcraft instincts alone.For someone working in the experimental music milieu (and with tape loops, no less), he has a truly exceptional knack for hooks, concision, and textural dynamics.While it admittedly took me a few listens to fully appreciate the depth and vividness of the Amulets vision and see Taylor as a uniquely talented loop wizard rather than an unusually good ambient/drone artist, I got there eventually and can now fully appreciate Between Distant and Remote as the understated masterpiece that it is.This is one of the year's finest albums.

Samples can be found here.

26 October 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

A 10-cassette anthology housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring:

Kleistwahr
Neutral
Pinkcourtesyphone
Alice Kemp
She Spread Sorrow
G*Park
Relay For Death
Francisco Meirino
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project
Himukalt

The collection stands as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, plunging through the depths of post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, and existential vacancy.

Curation and fabrication by Jim Haynes
Audio mastering by James Plotkin
Liner notes by Drew Daniel, Emily Pothast, Jim Haynes, and Donna Stonecipher

Release date: November 22, 2019

More information can be found here.

20 October 2019

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Albums and Singles

Following up the limited 2015 release of her solo debut Surfacing, Faith Coloccia’s (also of Mamiffer) latest work is in some ways a continuation of that, but also something new entirely. With recordings dating back to 2015, Here Behold Your Own captures not only an artist, but a person in transition: the material was recorded before and mixed after Coloccia gave birth to a son with her Mamiffer/SIGE partner Aaron Turner. Like revisiting a photo album from many years past, she creates a perfectly somber, yet pleasurably nostalgic mood.

SIGE

The two halves of the record delineate two distinct works, each broken into multiple parts.While they certainly compliment one another, "A New Young Birth" is the warmer one, with more distinct instrumentation and Coloccia's gentle vocals, many of which are based on lullabies she was singing to her son at the time.The other half, "Sangre de Cristo," emphasizes the more abstract elements of her work, heavily steeped in analog effects and treatment.The entirety of the record, however, is steeped in a warm, enveloping sense of time’s past via the production that casts everything in a layer of distortion akin to old, time worn cassette recordings.

Right from the first segment of "A New Young Birth" the overall mood and sound is established.Her piano work is prominent but it is filtered through a heavy layer of analog distortion and tape decay, perfectly capturing the sense of revisiting old memories and experiences.The second segment carries over much of the same sound, but shifts the focus from piano to Coloccia's gentle vocals that, combined with the processing, make for an extremely soothing and inviting piece of music.

This pattern repeats with the fourth segment, where her vocals appear largely unaccompanied other than the treatment and effects.Organ melodies are at the forefront of the third section, and while distinct and melodic, share the focus a bit more with heavier distortion and effects.The same holds true for the sixth section, which is overall a bit cleaner in production.The first half has a distinctly rich, lush flow to it, but there is a shift to heavier, more grinding sounds in the latter moments.

The second side, "Sangre de Cristo," has amped up noise and distortion elements that were somewhat more prominent in the first half, but Coloccia gives them the focus.The second section, for example, is almost all hissy tape noise and rotting crunch.It may not be harsh in the conventional sense, but it sounds as if it was constructed solely using the sounds of tape decay.The fifth section features her throwing in a bit of what sounds like standard feedback or pedal distortion within the analog haze.Here there are more melodic elements buried deep in the noise, and slowly these rise to the surface to take center stage.

On the fourth segment it even sounds as if she brings in some bass or guitar, meticulously distorted, to stand out within the heavier bass sound, giving the piece an entirely different feeling.However, some of the calmer elements from the other side seep in, such as the prominent piano on the third section, and the closing part again showcases her lullaby like vocals that are eventually subsumed by the decaying analog production, ending the album on an excellent approximation of the sound of a cassette being played for the final time.

As an album that is capturing a turning point in her life, the dynamic between fondness and melancholy works extremely well, because it truly does feel like revisiting old memories, both happy and sad, with the awareness that those feelings will never be experienced again.With that perfect ending note of decaying cassette distortion, it makes for a perfect encapsulation of the mood she set out to create.

Samples Available Here.

20 October 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Compared to the first release I heard from Australian composer Todd Anderson-Kunert, Conjectures is a significantly different piece of work. A Good Time to Go, from 2018, was an excellent tape of that drew from all different forms of abstract electronic sound art, from elements of rhythm and heavily processed sounds to more conventional synthesizer expanses. For Conjectures, he takes a more reductive approach. Using only the massive Moog System 55 modular synthesizer, the result is a very focused, yet dynamic work that showcases both the instrument and the artist.

Room40

As a fan of electronic music in general, I will admit I have some questionable feelings about modular synthesis.It is a fascinating technology that shows the extent of what hardware can do, and in a way very different than laptop DSP software.In the wrong hands it sounds like an unfocused mess of blips and squeaks that are less about any sort of artistry and more a showcase of how many esoteric modules a person can buy.Conjectures, however, demonstrates none of that.

Instead, Anderson-Kunert’s work is sparse, but in a deliberate manner.Focusing on using the one complex beast of an instrument, he coaxes out the variety of sounds it is capable of in two slow building, side-long pieces of introspective sound."I See What You Mean" first features clean, heavy low frequency tones that vibrate whatever speakers being used quite nicely.To this he adds a tasteful amount of white-noise tinged buzz to contrast the smooth with the rougher and uglier sounds.

The piece develops at a deliberate, but distinguishable pace.Electronic pulsations increase the sense of movement, balancing out the slow creep of the heavy tones.New elements are introduced, such as electric-like crackles and passages of what sounds like radio interference.By the end, however, he has carefully weaved in gentle melodic elements that, even with the occasional errant buzz, make for a rather beautiful conclusion to the first side of the record.

Everything takes on a darker sheen on "It Feels Right," however.From the onset the synthesizer takes on a bleaker timbre:a heavy rumble that is out of focus just enough to be menacing.Some lighter, shimmering layers of synth seep in akin to the occasional sunbeam briefly penetrating the dark sky, but the sound stays rooted in murkier spaces.There is a prominent cyclic structure and sense of repetition throughout, keeping things grounded, never becoming self-indulgent, and staying nicely diverse.Melody appears once again, but in a grimmer, funereal context, before Anderson-Kunert ends the piece with the sort of sub bass that opened the record.

The combination of Todd Anderson-Kunert's ear for structure and mixing, with the specific focus on one synth and none of the modular masturbation, results in Conjectures being a beautifully nuanced, amazing work.I imagine the multitude of knobs and patch bays on the Moog he used may have been tempting to go a bit wild with, but that is anything but the case.The level of attention he pays to the individual tones and sounds carries over quite well, and being able to focus my attention on all the fine details made for an excellent pair of compositions.

Samples Available Here.

20 October 2019

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Albums and Singles

Bill Orcutt's career admittedly had quite an abrasive and chaotic start with Harry Pussy, but it has always been abundantly clear that he is one of the more idiosyncratic and explosive guitar stylists on the planet. It was not until he started releasing solo albums, however, that I began to feel like he was some kind of outsider genius rather than a room-clearing noise maniac (though I imagine it was impossible to convey any emotion more subtle than "baseball bat to the face" with a human volcano like Adris Hoyos behind the drum kit). In any case, Orcutt's late-career shift to more intimate, melodic material has been nothing short of a revelation and 2017's self-titled studio album was the brilliant culmination of that evolution. With this follow-up, Orcutt occasionally hits some similar highs, but Odds Against Tomorrow is more of an intriguing transitional album or lateral move than another instant classic, as he mostly dispenses with playing standards to focus on his own compositions and some very promising experiments with multi-tracking.

Palilalia

It is both remarkable and amusing that the most radical change to Orcutt's aesthetic on Odds Against Tomorrow is that he allowed himself the luxury of multi-track recording on three songs (he is closing in on three decades of recording at this point).In a sense, that decision marks the end of an era, as one of Orcutt's more appealing traits has always been his no-frills spontaneity and devotion to raw, undiluted expression.He might be a solo guitarist with a fondness for The Great American Songbook, but a strong case could be made that he is also the last No Wave artist standing, as he remained devoted to visceral, unpolished passion long after everyone else had moved on.While certainly admirable, such an approach admittedly has extreme limitations, as a dazzling technical performance does not always translate into a great album: the world is littered with disappointing records that proudly proclaim that they were performed live with no overdubs or studio enhancements.Conversely, there are even more albums where artists suck the life out of their work through misguided perfectionism.The trick, of course, is to find a balance between those opposing impulses that best suits the material. I do not think Orcutt is in any danger of becoming hopelessly enthralled by the limitless possibilities of modern recording techniques anytime soon (he recorded this album in his living room rather than returning to a studio), but he definitely shows a strong intuition for making the most out of overdubbing.In fact, my favorite two pieces on the album are ones in which Orcutt accompanies himself.

The first highlight is the opening title piece, which has a lazily lyrical melody that harkens back to the standards cannibalized on Bill Orcutt.It is an elegantly simple piece with an appealingly casual feel, as the second guitar provides a languorously unfolding backdrop of chiming chords and arpeggios for Orcutt to solo over.The solo itself is similarly unhurried, spacious, and quietly lovely, but there are occasional eruptions of violence where the melody is fleeting transformed into strangled, scrabbling snarls of notes.It is a perfect illustration of what makes Orcutt's recent work so striking and uniquely beautiful, as he has found a way to sound both sublimely poetic and unpredictably prone to flashes of slashing violence.Consequently, he manages to avoid ever lapsing into mere prettiness, as there is always a fiery and primal soulfulness ready to tear viscerally through even the gentlest melody.Moreover, such eruptions always feel appropriate and fully earned when they happen.For the most part, the difference between a great Bill Orcutt song and a decent Bill Orcutt song lies solely in the melodic strength of the piece that is being deconstructed and ripped open, which is why exploring timeless, familiar melodies has served him so well in the past.The only real nod to such evergreen standards this time around, however, is a brief, tender, and quaveringly chorus-heavy rendering of "Moon River."It is a strong piece, but it is an anomaly.In fact, just about all of the best pieces on Odds Against Tomorrow are anomalies, as the album description notes that it is "a rock record — almost."I would describe it more as "a blues record — almost" myself, as pieces like the slow-burning "Already Old" and the Elmore James-inspired "Stray Dog" are explicitly blues-based.Such pieces are the core of the album, but they are quite a far cry from Tomorrow's second highlight, the pulsing Glenn Branca-esque minimalism of "A Writhing Jar."

On balance, there are more inspired pieces than lulls or misfires on Odds Against Tomorrow, but the inclusion of "Stray Dog" illustrates the sometimes uneven and perplexing nature of the album: it is essentially just a standard blues vamp with standard blues scale soloing (albeit played on a four-string guitar).It reminds me of a critique I once read which stated that a band was great before they had completely figured out what they were doing, but disappointing once they actually became competent enough to successfully imitate their influences (which is what they were subconsciously trying to do all along).A straight homage to classic blues is not particularly interesting and can be readily found in small-town biker bars all over the US.Hearing classic blues pass through the filter of Bill Orcutt's vision to emerge in razor sharp and unrecognizable form, on the other hand, is wonderful.After hearing the latter, it is very hard to embrace the former.On a related note, I find Orcutt to be quite a fascinating enigma, as he seems perversely and almost exclusively fixated on cultural phenomena that occurred before he was born: this album borrows its name from a 1959 film noir, Elmore James died in 1963, and the double-tracking was purportedly inspired by a 1952 John Lee Hooker single.And, of course, the golden age of The Great American songbook was already waning in the '50s (though "Moon River" managed to belatedly sneak in in 1961).How Orcutt manages to translate a nostalgia for both the dark side and the cheery illusion of the 1950s' American Dream into something so vital and bracingly contemporary is beyond me, but I am damn glad he figured out a way to do it (either consciously or otherwise).While Odds Against Tomorrow is an imperfect album, it is an imperfect album by a legitimate iconoclast who remains one of the most compelling guitarists around.

Samples can be found here.

20 October 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Earlier this year, Maurizio and Roberto Opalio debuted an ambitious new phase of their long-running My Cat is an Alien project with Spiritual Noise. Vol. I. Appropriately, this sequel is a continuation of that vein, but there is no such thing as a predictable linear progression in the Opalios' universe: each fresh album is like a veil being pulled back to reveal an otherworldly and deeply hallucinatory vista quite unlike anything anyone else has ever recorded. In fact, this project calls to mind a lonely satellite that just keeps drifting deeper and deeper beyond our solar system, sporadically sending back increasingly haunted and alien images that have no earthly analog. Naturally, music this unapologetically outré is an acquired taste that can challenge even the most adventurous ears, as there are no recognizable reference points or even nods to Earth-bound modality, but the closing "Silver Glimpses of Infinity" is the closest that the duo have come to comparative accessibility in years…probably. It is equally likely that listening to so many MCIAA albums has irrevocably rewired my brain at this point and I am now fully desensitized to the more queasy and reality-dissolving elements of their aesthetic. Either way, it is still quite an amazing piece.

Antigravitational

As is established tradition, this latest installment of Spiritual Noise documents a series of "instantaneous compositions" performed at the Opalios' studio in the Alps.If My Cat is an Alien were a more conventional project, I would translate that as "improvisations," but "channelings" feels far more apt in this case.I do not get the sense that the two brothers are consciously playing off of each other's contributions (no one would mistake this for jazz), yet there is an uncanny sense that Maurizio and Roberto achieved some kind of shared trance state and that their actions were unconsciously in harmony because they tapped into the same cosmic vibrations or ur-mind.I suppose that is quite an accurate summation of the duo's appeal in general, as each of their albums is essentially a dispatch from an altered state that only the Opalios have managed to achieve and the sheer otherness of it can be absolutely mesmerizing.The shape, scope, and emotional contours of that hallucinatory landscape can vary quite a bit from album to album, however, even though the Opalios' palette consists largely of just Roberto’s bleary and disorienting cooing, some space toys, and a small arsenal of homemade or repurposed gear.With this album, the driving force is an uncharacteristically rhythmic one, as Roberto plays a "modified analog drum machine."In fact, the art edition of the album includes a bonus track that is essentially a clicking, popping, and phase-shifting rhythm experiment that feels like a weirdly hypnotic and infinite vinyl run-off groove.

The three pieces from the regular album have a similarly clattering and rickety backdrop, but they are vibrantly fleshed out with Roberto's unsettling vocal haze, buzzing electronics, and a disorienting host of lysergic effects.Maurizio is credited with playing a "self-made double-bodied string instrument" as well, though I am hard-pressed to tell which sounds are coming from that and which ones originate from the duo's electronics.Of course, trying to figure out where each individual sound comes from is generally a fool's game with My Cat is an Alien, as everything swirls together into a smeared, twinkling, and uneasily dissonant miasma by design.Each of these three pieces actually feels like a variation of the same mind-warping, cosmic miasma, in fact, but each one is an ingenious deconstruction akin to heavy outsider dub.

The central motif in each case can be best summarized as a buzzing bass throb slowly moving through a supernatural fog of eerie vocals and queasy sustained tones that evoke glimmering, malevolent stars.The opening "Rage and Beatitude of Pain" is the most visceral of the three incarnations, as its phantasmagoric reverie is enhanced with distorted bass tones, roiling swells of tape hiss, and reverberant metallic clangs.The lengthier "As Meteors Before Disintegration" then strips away all of the bottom end and sharp edges to leave only a sustained floating nightmare of dissonant harmonies.The final piece, "Silver Glimpse of Infinity," lies somewhere between those two divergent poles, slowly converging into a slow-motion rhythm of corroded, stuttering bass thrum and a looping melodic fragment of electronic buzzes.It is quite a wonderfully hypnotic and slow-burning piece and the Opalios make the most out of its potential by enhancing it with a host of gibbering and fluttering sounds that resemble field recordings from an extra-dimensional jungle.

While the sheer otherness and boundless imagination of MCIAA's vision is the primary draw, there is a second (and arguably more substantial) appeal in the immersive, reality-distorting vividness of the spell that the Opalios cast with that vision. As such, there is an endless push and pull between focusing/distilling their deep space lysergia for maximum impact versus expanding it into an epic mind-melting plunge into sustained sensory saturation.Both sides can be wonderful, but I am especially fond of the latter, as experiencing an album like Psycho-System feels akin to stumbling out of a sweat lodge after experiencing a divine revelation.As a result, the Opalios' recent run of shorter albums tend to leave me wanting more, but they offer a different kind of pleasure that does not consume a significant chunk of my day.Which, of course, means that albums like Spiritual Noise, Vol. II are considerably better-suited for repeat listening than their more sprawling predecessors (and presumably much less intimidating for the unindoctrinated as well).In that regard, this installment of Spiritual Noise makes a fine addition to the Opalios' current hot streak and adds one more stone-cold classic to their oeuvre in the form of "Silver Glimpse of infinity."

Samples can be found here.

13 October 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The downside to releasing a beloved and perfectly distilled EP like The Garden is that there will eventually have to be a follow-up to it and people will expect it to be every bit as good (if not better) than its predecessor. That is an unenviable level of creative pressure to be confronted with, but Carla dal Forno seems to have passed through it with grace and aplomb (and even managed to start her own record label along the way). To her credit, dal Forno was not at all interested in making The Garden II, though her subsequent cover album (Top of the Pops) seems to have provided a rough template, as she has clearly been thinking a lot about what goes into constructing a good and memorable pop song. Having internalized that, she then wrote a bunch of her own. In a broad sense, it is very apparent that dal Forno is heavily influenced by the classic minimalist post-punk/indie pop of Young Marble Giants and AC Marias, but the best songs on Look Up Sharp feel like an inspired update rather than a loving homage, as she strikes a truly elegant balance of pared-to-the-bone starkness, muscular bass riffs, casual sensuousness, and understated experimentation.

Kallista

Both dal Forno's new Kallista imprint and Look Up Sharp made their teasingly brief first appearances earlier this year with the "So Much Better" 7" single.As far as lead singles go, that half-lilting/half-biting break-up song was a solid pick, as it is an appealingly sincere and direct song that nevertheless packs quite a scathing sentiment in its lurching, slow-motion melancholy.While the explicit sentiment is very clearly "I am done with you and I am moving forward," the rest of the album seems to address love and heartache a bit more tenderly, sensually, and poetically, so I suspect "So Much Better" was one of the earliest pieces composed for this album. It would make sense if it was, as some of the other songs on the album elevate dal Forno's constrained palette of bass/drum machine/voice into something so much better than "So Much Better."In fact, barring a few instrumentals, just about every single song on Look Up Sharp could be a strong single.While her impressive knack for crafting tight songs with great hooks has been evident right from the beginning (see "Fast Moving Cars"), dal Forno has gotten much more skilled at weeding out her weaker material over the years.She has also evolved quite a bit from the comparatively bloodless, reverb-swathed murkiness of her ghostly early work.The end result of those two transformations is that the Carla dal Forno of 2019 has a truly impressive hit-to-miss ratio and her best moments make a much deeper impact than the more style-driven fare of You Know What it is Like.She has always had a very cool and distinctive aesthetic, but the songs at the foundation of that aesthetic now feel honest and open in a more meaningful way.

To my ears, there are at least two stone-cold, instant classics lurking among these ten songs.My favorite piece by a landslide is "Don't Follow Me," which is built from a lovely, multitracked vocal motif that feels almost like a choral hymnal.From there, it ingeniously blossoms into a lazily smoldering groove of corroded bass tones, a spartan kick/snare pattern, chiming chord stabs, and a shifting nimbus of lysergic swells and melody fragments.It is probably the most beautiful song on the album, but it also benefits greatly from the ramshackle, blackened accompaniment that relentlessly stomps forward beneath the floating, heavenly vocals.The contrast between those two poles is absolutely perfect, as dal Forno evokes angelic beauty in a ragged and ruined landscape (and then brings it all to a close with actual fireworks).The other highlight is "Took A Long Time," which skillfully combines a meaty descending bass line, a clattering drum machine shuffle, and great vocal hook, then gradually warms and fills with color as synth tones languorously undulate in the periphery.There is also second tier of songs that are nearly as great, such as the opening "No Trace," which augments a heavy, rolling groove with streaking, spaced-out splashes of synth color.Elsewhere, "I'm Conscious" unfolds as a wonderfully shambling meditation on longing and regret.Also, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the album's instrumentals are quite likable as well, even if they are mostly palette-cleansers to bridge the more fully formed pieces.I especially like "Hype Sleep," which marries a warm, ringing bass melody to a tinny, vaguely Latin drum machine groove.I actually wish dal Forno had explored that direction a bit more, as understatedly playful drum machine beats are an excellent counterbalance to her more introspective, hypnagogic side.

I also enjoyed the dreamily lush and melodic "Leaving For Japan," which is a side of dal Forno's art that I rarely get to encounter.To some degree, I would be absolutely delighted if she eased up her constrained aesthetic to allow for more pieces in that vein, but I suspect she is reluctant to record many songs that she cannot perform live with just a bass.Aside from that practical consideration, the extremely minimal instrumentation of dal Forno's work is admittedly an extremely effective approach artistically.There are a lot of ways to craft a great song, but dal Forno consistently challenges herself to do it in the hardest way possible at this point in her career: writing hooks and melodies strong enough to carry a piece even if all of the accompanying music, production touches, and arrangement flourishes were completely stripped away.That is what I admire most about Carla dal Forno's work.She is an excellent songwriter and has lots of creative ideas for fleshing out her simple, bass-driven pieces, but the larger achievement is that she is just a woman with a bass who is very intent on making a direct and undiluted human connection with listeners.I suppose such a fearless and assured avoidance to artistic distance and artifice would not matter much if Look Up Sharp did not also have great songs, but it has those too, which is why exactly Carla dal Forno remains one of the most compelling and vital songwriters in underground music.

Samples can be found here.

13 October 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

No one can predict which trends or innovations will shape or define the experimental music of the future, but Emptyset's latest bombshell certainly feels like a gloriously bracing vision of one possible path: Blossoms is an album "generated entirely from the output of a neural network-based artificial intelligence system." While the duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas has always been extremely forward-thinking and experimentally minded, this is the first Emptyset album where it seems like the pair has actually leapt several years ahead of everyone else rather than merely taking existing ideas to unexpected (and sometimes fascinating) extremes. That said, Blossoms is also a culmination of the same themes that have obsessed Emptyset for years, as the source material comes from recent acoustic improvisations with materials like wood and metal as well as their backlog of more architecturally inspired recordings (though it all ultimately emerges in radically unrecognizable form). At its best, Blossoms sounds like little else that I have ever heard, evoking a kind of visceral, shape-shifting sci-fi nightmare.

Thrill Jockey

Imagine, if you will, a world in which the Transformers are not a ham-fisted and painfully stupid big-budget movie franchise but are instead both very real and very terrifying.And that, rather than morphing into childish nonsense like boomboxes or trucks, they instead transform into amorphous and phantasmagoric Lovecraftian horrors made from liquid mercury.On pieces like the grinding and churning "Bloom," Blossoms evokes exactly what I would expect such a half-organic/half-mechanized abomination to sound like.Then it goes one step further and seems to also warp and stretch both time and the fabric of reality.Needless to say, that is quite an impressive feat indeed, though it is not one that the artificial intelligence system can claim full credit for: the way the sounds unfold and interact is indeed gloriously radical and inhuman, but the seismic, world-shaking power is entirely due to the sound design wizardry of Ginzburg and Purgas.The importance of the latter cannot be understated, as composing an album in such a fashion has some significant limitations (much like those of chromatic, atonal, or noise music).Blossoms is an album that demands to be played loudly, as the sheer shuddering, explosive power makes the lack of conventional melodies, harmonies, or compositional arcs feel largely irrelevant.There are occasionally some moments where this album achieves a kind of alien beauty as well, but the more pervasive achievement is that it resembles some kind of massive metal organism in a constant state of awe-inspiring structural transformation.

That said, Emptyset's AI is far from a one-trick pony–it just happens to be exceptionally gifted at executing dazzling textural and dynamic feats, so those are the ones that initially stand out the most.In the opening "Petal," for example, the grinding and squirming cybernetic onslaught provides a framework for a fluttering melodic fragment at the piece’s heart.The weirdly lovely "Pollen" returns to that same theme with even greater success, as its lilting and wilting snatch of melody feels simultaneously tender and encased in a prickly exoskeleton.The other highlights head in significantly divergent paths though.For example, "Blade" feels like a warm and quietly lovely drone piece adrift on heavy swells of buzzing metallic shimmer, while "Axil" eschews any warmth at all to converge into a lurching and shuffling groove that unpredictably collapses and reforms as it moves relentlessly forward.My favorite piece, however, is probably "Stem," which slowly takes shape from deep subterranean throbs, then unexpectedly erupts into something that resembles a hallucinatory and time-stretched dance party for immense, wounded machines.

The closing "Clone" is a noteworthy piece as well, simultaneously illustrating both Blossoms' violent, unpredictable appeal and the one weakness that keeps Emptyset from quite becoming one of my favorite projects.The piece begins as a pulsing organ-like chord that gets ingeniously stretched, distended, and deconstructed for a brief and wonderful passage, yet everything is quickly consumed by a massive cosmic buzz saw that grinds and obliterates all other sound.It has such a promising start, but it is summarily destroyed rather than being allowed to evolve into something more.That has always been the rub for Emptyset: great ideas are regularly executed with brutal force and clarity, but their aesthetic begins and ends there.There are generally not "songs" or satisfying compositional arcs on Emptyset albums, just cool experimental vamps that appear and simply run their course for a few minutes before making way for the next piece.Admittedly, much of that is due to conceptual- or gear-related constraints, but that does not make it any less of a real and valid issue.Fortunately, Purgas and Ginzburg have found an ingenious way to transcend that shortcoming on Blossoms: just ratchet up the wonder and the elemental power until everything else is eclipsed.It feels weird to describe a solution that involved eighteen months of work with "an international network of programmers working at the cutting edge of sound synthesis" as a blunt solution to a complex problem, but the intricacy of the process ultimately resulted in a legitimately volcanic outcome.And a legitimately effective one.Blossoms is unquestionably a significant and bold leap forward in sound art, but it is equally remarkable in how it transforms the meticulous and the cerebral into something downright apocalyptic.

Samples can be found here.