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This second installment of Blank Forms' ongoing Christer Hennix archival series is quite a radical departure from the wonderful Selected Early Keyboard Works, which is a hell of a surprise as both albums originate from roughly the same period (Stockholm, 1976). The key difference is that Keyboard Works was composed of (mostly) solo rehearsal tapes made during the Dream Music Festival, while Hegikan Roku captures the ensemble's actual public performance. In fact, it was to be The Deontic Miracle's only public performance, as Hennix wryly notes that the trio were "the most rejected band ever formed in Sweden." While that is somewhat heartbreaking, it is easy to see why this project was not warmly embraced: challenging art is often described as being "ahead of its time," but The Deontic Miracle must have seemed like they existed outside of time altogether. Even by today's standards, an amplified Renaissance oboe and sarangi trio playing dissonant, Just Intonation drone music would likely clear a room instantly (as would a lot of other albums that I like). As such, this is definitely one of Christer Hennix's most difficult releases, but it features some very bold and uncompromising work indeed. It is wonderful to see it finally surface.
Catherine Christer Hennix was first inspired to form The Deontic Miracle by La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, which she encountered during her time in NYC.Young would prove to be quite an influential figure in Christer Hennix's life, as would Pandit Pran Nath.She first met both at a festival in 1970 and would later study extensively with each.Roughly a year after that meeting, the first incarnation of The Deontic Miracle was born in Sweden.Unfortunately, the ambitious endeavor was cursed right from the start, as the dozen jazz musicians Christer Hennix enlisted did not adapt to Just Intonation well at all.Exasperated, she completely gutted the ensemble until it was just herself, her brother Peter, and Hans Isgren.I am not at all surprised that the hapless jazzmen had so much trouble wrapping the heads around Christer Hennix's radical vision though, as she is an accomplished mathematician and complex mathematical ideas have always played a central role in her work.Moreover, her musical inspirations at the time were probably so far out as to be nearly incomprehensible to most musicians: the NYC avant garde scene and Hindustani raga influences were probably as close to the mainstream as she ever came, as she was similarly fascinated with Japanese Gagaku music and the thirteenth-century vocal music of Perotinus and Leoninus.In hindsight, it is legitimately remarkable that she was able to find two people who were even aware of all of those disparate threads, much less interested in helping her combine them into radical new forms.
To my ears, the two lengthy pieces that comprise Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku most closely resemble the uncomfortably harmonizing drones of Japanese imperial court music–the Gagaku influence is definitely the most powerful guiding force here.After its initial flurry of fluttering and trilling oboe virtuosity, the opening "Music of Auspicious Clouds" coheres into a heavy, slow-moving fog of endlessly shifting, buzzing, and nerve-jangling drones.I suspect the underlying thrum originates from the sine wave generator and the "electronics" credited to the trio, but I am not sure what kinds of sounds Isgren could conjure from an amplified sarangi.The heart of the piece, however, lies in the clouds of ugly harmonies that converge and dissolve in an eternal ebb and flow of simmering tension.The following "Waves of the Blue Sea" is initially a bit less harrowing, as the trio allow a bit more space into their oboe eruptions.It favorably reminds me of Terry Riley’s great "Poppy Nogood" at times, though Riley's trilling and overlapping flurries of saxophone sounds considerably more meditative and indebted to Eastern drone than Christer Hennix’s similarly trilling flurries of oboe.Before long, however, that reverie curdles into a grinding and uncomfortable miasma of otherworldly harmonies quite similar to that of "Auspicious Clouds."The two pieces on Hegikan Roku may start somewhat differently, but the ultimate destination is very much the same every time.
It is amusing that two pieces inspired by such normally pleasant and calming tropes (clouds and the blueness of the ocean) can feel like a sensory assault or plunge into deep existential horror in Christer Hennix's hands, particularly when contrasted with the similarly Zen-inspired but distinctly not-terrifying work that Peter Hennix recorded over the course of his own career.Notably, this album even explicitly borrows its name from a 12th century book of Chinese Buddhist koans ("Blue Cliff Record," in English).Unrelenting tension and intense discomfort are not traditionally sensations that I normally associate with Zen Buddhism, which makes Christer Hennix's interpretation an especially fascinating one.My working theory is that she heard these pieces very differently than I do, finding a reassuring mathematical order at the heart of the cacophonous entropy.I would be curious to learn how much the actual form and structure of these pieces was deliberately engineered though, as it seems like the focus is almost entirely on harmony.That central focus has not changed much in the ensuing four decades, but I do feel like Christer Hennix eventually got a bit more interested in framing her harmonic experiments in a tighter and more satisfying compositional arc.While it is entirely possible that I am imagining/projecting that, her early work definitely feels like it relied very heavily on sheer audacity (I include The Electric Harpsichord in that statement, which was also recorded in 1976). 
Notably, the album's description mentions John Coltrane as one of the major reference points for this performance, which was a comparison that I initially found perplexing.After listening to it fairly deeply on headphones, however, I began to see that it made perfect sense: Christer Hennix and her brother regularly unleash fiery, Coltane-esque squalls of notes on their oboes, but the Just Intonation tuning of the instruments makes them sound more like an extradimensional insect swarm than jazz.In fact, just about everything about this performance still sounds jarring and alien to ears conditioned to Western modality, which is quite an impressive feat: though they were not appreciated for it, The Deontic Miracle were absolutely visionary in their complete rejection of conventional form, melody, and harmony.This performance would have blown minds in the right time and place, but Sweden in 1976 was neither of those things, so this one show was like a bright and beautiful star spectacularly burning out forever.Or at least close to it, as it would be another roughly 35 years before any of Christer Hennix's singular compositions saw any public release.Happily, the first work that eventually surfaced was the stunning The Electric Harpsichord, which made a hell of an impression and instantly created an audience for other lost works from one of the 20th century's most radical and innovative composers.Among those, Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku admittedly stands as the most challenging endurance test, making a truly rough entry point for the curious.For the already converted, however, it is yet another landmark Christer Hennix release that is quite unlike anything else on earth.
Samples can be found here.
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This latest release from Lea Bertucci ambitiously follows in the footsteps of Pauline Oliveros' landmark Deep Listening album (1989), though site-specific performances are certainly nothing new for the NY-based saxophonist/composer. In this instance, the site was the Marine A Grain Elevator at Silo City in Buffalo, which NNA Tapes describes as a "silent, hulking concrete corpse" that stands 130 feet tall. Unlike Oliveros, Bertucci chose to make her celebration of extreme natural reverb largely a solo affair, using the 12-second decay of the cavernous enclosure to create a rich haze of sustained drones and ghostly harmonies. After the initial performance, however, she reworked the material with the aid of some collaborators, so the final album is a bit more complex and layered than a solo sax performance might have been. Not much more though, as Resonant Field's primary appeal lies in those original performances, making it a very different animal than its more composed predecessor Metal Aether.
It is convenient that Deep Listening is the most obvious reference point for Resonant Field, as deep listening is exactly what is required to fully appreciate the nuance and intent of Bertucci's work.In fact, it is an intriguing challenge to try to figure out which unexpected sounds originated from site-specific acoustic phenomena and which were later studio additions.Given that Bertucci set out to "to excite and activate the space by playing certain pitches and extended techniques," the resonance of the silo undoubtedly supplies some distinctly non-saxophone sounds.The opening "Wind Piece" is the simplest piece to deconstruct, as the only post-silo interventions seem to be Robbie Lee's flute, some occasional scraping metal textures, and some well-placed ripples and distortions.The timing of unusual sonic phenomena likely provides the clearest clues, as the deep, slowly undulating drone in "Wind Piece" vanishes as soon as Bertucci stops amassing a ghostly cloud of trilling, fluttering tones around the same frequency range.Similarly, when she switches to a more forceful and repeating melodic fragment, the reverberations vibrantly ring out as a somewhat transformed shadow image.
As cool as the natural reverb and resonance of the silo can be, however, Resonant Field is definitely an album with an extremely constrained palette.As such, three of its four pieces unavoidably feel like variations on the same theme (a solo sax improvisation that alternates between sustained tones and rapid flurries of notes).The title piece is an imaginative and compelling departure from the rest of the album though, as the languorous initial sax melody is subsumed by rolling, panning, and reverberating drum samples and a rich tapestry of chirping, hissing, and flapping field recordings.At its peak, it resembles a nightmare set deep in a hallucinatory jungle, but Bertucci eventually tamps down all that roiling, primal chaos to clear the way for more saxophone licks.Thankfully, those layers of strange and evocative sounds never completely go away, so the piece becomes a compelling push-and-pull between "nocturnal mindfuck jungle" and "silo jazz."I think the jungle ultimately triumphs, which is great, as I prefer Bertucci's sound art side to her more instrumental one.Given all that, "Resonant Field" is very much the album’s centerpiece and probable raison d'etre, but the other longform piece "Warp and Weft" has some flashes of inspiration as well, as does the all-too-brief closer "Deliquescence."Of the two, I prefer the latter, as guest double-bassist James Ilgenfritz unleashes a wonderfully squirming and supernatural-sounding storm of harmonics and bow squeals.Ilgenfritz also provides the set piece at the heart of "Warp and Weft," as Bertucci's steadily accumulating haze of slowly dissolving sustain is unexpectedly joined by some wonderfully subterranean-sounding groans and shudders.      
While Resonant Field is quite enjoyable for what it is, there are some inherent caveats with any album documenting a site-specific performance.The first is quite obvious: the acoustics of the original site are very different from those of any home-listening experience and the recording process itself cannot capture the full, surround-sound richness of the performance.As such, an album is a necessarily "flattened" version of the experience, which places much more emphasis on the melodies and harmonies than was originally intended.Less obvious is the fact that the space itself dictated the shape of these compositions: certain motifs are sustained and repeated solely because of how they interacted with the resonant frequencies of the building, not because they were an integral part of a deliberate compositional arc.I suppose it is a nice surprise that there is a deliberate compositional arc at all though, as it is impossible to "compose" in advance when the whole point is to inventively and intuitively interact with the acoustic environment.Still, I cannot help but wish Bertucci had gone a bit further in her post-performance enhancements, as the reverb of the space is expected to do a lot of heavy-lifting here and it is not nearly as satisfying as what she could have achieved with a greater emphasis on her field recording and textural sorcery.Consequently, Resonant Field is more of a solid one-off departure rather than a worthy successor to Metal Aether, though the title piece unquestionably ranks among Bertucci's finest work to date.
Samples can be found here.
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Carla dal Forno announces her second full-length album, Look Up Sharp, on her own Kallista Records.
The London-based artist enters a new era in her peerless output pushing her dub-damaged DIY dispatches to the limits of flawless dream-pop. In a transformative move towards crystal clear vocals and sharpened production, Look Up Sharp is an evolutionary leap from the thick fog and pastoral stillness of her Blackest Ever Black missives, You Know What It’s Like (2016) and The Garden EP (2017).
Three years since her plain-speaking debut album, the Melbourne-via-Berlin artist finds herself absorbed in London’s sprawling mess. The small-town dreams and inertia that preoccupied dal Forno's first album have dissolved into the chaotic city, its shifting identities, far-flung surroundings and blank faces. Look Up Sharp is the story of this life in flux, longing for intimacy, falling short and embracing the unfamiliar. Dal Forno connects with kindred spirits and finds refuge in darkened alleys, secret gardens and wherever else she dares to look.
In her own territory between plaintive pop, folk and post-punk, dal Forno conjures the ghosts of AC Marias, Virginia Astley and Broadcast through her brushwork of art-damaged fx and spectral atmospheres. The first half of the record is filled with dubbed-out humid bass lines, which tether stoned hazes of psychedelic synth work as on "Took A Long Time" and "No Trace." These are contrasted with songs like "I'm Conscious" and "So Much Better" that channel the lilting power of Young Marble Giants and are clear sequels-in-waiting to dead-eyed classics like "Fast Moving Cars."
The B-side begins with the feverish bass and meandering melody of "Don't Follow Me," which takes The Cure's "A Forest" as its conceptual springboard. It's the clearest lyrical example since "The Garden" of dal Forno's unmatched ability to unpick the masculine void of post-punk and new wave nostalgia to reflect contemporary nuance. Look Up Sharp reaches its satisfying conclusion with "Push On" - dal Forno’s most explicit foray into an undiscovered trip hop universe between Massive Attack and Tracey Thorn. The album's last gasp finds personal validation in fragility: "I push on / I'm the Place I'm Going," a self discovery lifted by reverberant broken beats and glass-blown vocals.
Adding further depth to Look Up Sharp are the instrumentals, which flow seamlessly between the vocal-led pieces. "Hype Sleep" and "Heart of Hearts" drink from the same stream as The Flying Lizard's dubbed-out madness and the vivid purple sunsets of Eno's Another Green World. While "Creep Out of Bed" and "Leaving for Japan" funnel the fourth-world psychedelia of Cyclobe's industrial-folk into the vortex of Nico's The Marble Index.
Conceived as a whole, Look Up Sharp is a singular prism in which light, sound and concept bend at all angles. A deeply personal but infinitely relatable album its many surfaces are complex but authentic, enduring but imperfect, hard-edged but delicate. A diamond. Look up sharp or you’ll miss it.
More information can be found here.
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Composed during Vietnam's monsoon season and propelled by the composers' fear of drowning, Degradation is inspired by flooding, torrential rain and the ocean.
Over three tracks Rắn Cạp Đuôi, an international music and visual arts collective based in Saigon, take us on a journey from breaking waves to inundated landscapes, and underwater horrors.
Rắn Cạp Đuôi, whose name translates to 'snake bites tail', are comprised of members Phạm Thế Vũ, Đỗ Tấn Sĩ, and Zach Sch. Additional collaborators include: Lý Hà Trang, Đỗ Hoàng Tuấn Anh, Bjorn Bols, Colton Cox, Josie Turnbull, and Trần Duy Hưng.
More information can be found here.
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Every now and then, I plan to have a productive evening, get sucked into a Bandcamp rabbit hole, then wonder where the hell my night went. I first encountered Paw Grabowski's √∏jeRum project during one such plunge last year and quickly fell in love with 2018's Selected Organ Works tape. Notably, Grabowski does not seem to share my time-management issues, as he has released roughly ten more albums since then (three of them in the last month). Needless to say, he is a difficult man to keep up with and tracking down which releases are especially inspired is a legitimate challenge. These two recent ones are quite good ones, though they take very different directions. The stronger one is arguably the newer Alting Falder I Samme Rum, which intermittently contains some of the most beautiful examples of Grabowski's blurred, slow-motion vision. Forgotten Works, on the other hand, is exactly what the title implies: a collection of unreleased songs spanning nearly a decade. It is quite a well-curated one though, as the Vaknar label unearthed some surprising gems that had miraculously eluded release up until now.
Alting Falder I Samme Rum (roughly "everything falls into the same room") consists of six numbered pieces that loosely alternate back and forth between guitar and organ/synth, but any details beyond that are in short supply.Grabowski is an enigmatic fellow and his shifting aesthetic is kind of a tough one to nail down, though "minimalist" is definitely an apt descriptor.I suspect øjeRum albums will be eternally categorized as "drone" or "ambient" for lack of a better term, but Grabowski's vision is fundamentally a melodic one at its core.William Basinski and his decaying tape loops spring to mind as the closest kindred spirit, as both artists compose pieces from obsessively repeated melodic fragments and the subtle dynamic and textural shifts within those fragments are every bit as important as the actual notes.However, while loops admittedly play quite a central role in øjeRum, there is a considerable amount of nuanced interplay between those loops and Grabowski's live instrumentation and the line between the two is an extremely blurry one.In fact, "blurry" is essentially where øjeRum lives, as melodies unfold so slowly that it almost feels like they are in a state of suspended animation.They are far from static, however, as they dissolve and leave lingering trails like curls of smoke.When it works, it yields sublimely beautiful results, evoking a kind of languorous, ghostly dance. When it does not, it just feels kind of sleepy and melancholy.Both sides appear on Alting Falder I Samme Rum, but the strength of the best pieces is enough to weigh the balance in a favorable direction.  
For the most part, it is the spectral, dreamlike guitar pieces that steal the show on the album.Lamentably, there are only two, but they are both absolutely gorgeous.The first, "II," is a fairly brief and hauntingly sad piece, resembling something like an lovesick and undulating supernatural mist.A lingering sadness still clings to the lengthier "IV" several songs later, but it is a bit warmer and more contemplative, recalling some of Benoit Pioulard's more drone/ambient work in the way the shivering guitar swells sound like they were recorded on a wobbly blank tape that has been endlessly reused since the mid-'80s. The remaining four pieces are more conspicuously loop-driven, though the amount of heavy lifting that those loops do varies quite a bit from piece to piece.My favorite is the tenderly lovely and slowly pulsing "V," as its repeating organ motif is quite a poignant and hypnotic one.Moreover, it is one of the more unpredictable and dynamic pieces on the album, as Grabowski embellishes the central theme with lazily tumbling harp-like melodies that leave lingering trails of quivering delay.The epic closing piece ("VI") is a highlight as well, though it is an extremely slow-building one.The main theme is essentially a melancholy and gently rippling arpeggio that endlessly repeats, accumulating a haze of slowly dissolving afterimages.Gradually, however, a lazily flickering synth swell emerges from the miasma of hiss and delay and the nuanced interplay of the two themes and their vapor trails coheres into soft-focus heaven of overlapping ripples.It evolves a bit too slowly to be an unqualified triumph, but four great or nearly great songs out of six is a damn good ratio.
Samples can be found here.
The Vaagner/Vaknar label has only been around since 2018, but it has quickly established itself as imprint with an impressively focused aesthetic, both musically and visually.Given that Grabowski is himself a visual artist with a distinctive aesthetic, it is no surprise that he and the label have such an affinity or that he would trust them with sifting through his archives to pull together an ambitious collection like Forgotten Works.After all, Vaknar was the label that previously released the great Selected Organ Works, which was similarly a collection of unreleased material spanning several years (albeit one with a considerably narrower focus).
Unlike its processor, Forgotten Works celebrates the full range of√∏jeRum's vision, even including directions that have long since been abandoned (I think).I would love to make an insightful metaphor here about how the album mirrors Grabowski's non-musical work as a collage artist, but it is far more apt to view these sixteen untitled vignettes as a kind of mosaic: given the lack of titles and the sprawling nature of a double-cassette release, the cumulative whole is arguably more of a significant statement than any of the individual pieces.At least, that was probably the intention.In reality, however, several pieces emerge from the somber, hiss-soaked haze to assert themselves and I am glad that they do.In the case of the first two pieces, which I will call "A1" and "A2," it is frankly astonishing that they remained unreleased for this long.
I suppose "A1" is essentially built on a slow and lovely succession of strummed acoustic guitar chords, but the spaces between them are beautifully filled with alternately plinking, ringing, and lingering tones.The overall effect is quite a blissfully sublime one, approximating a kind of enchanted antique music box that can slow down time.I believe guitars also provide the shimmering ambient backdrop of "A2," but the heart of the piece is a wobbly, bittersweetly lovely synth motif that endlessly see-saws across a warm, dreamlike landscape.The remaining two pieces on that first side are quite good as well, but the hit parade becomes somewhat erratic after that point, with gems like the quavering, meditative synth reverie "B4" and the blearily tumbling piano arpeggios of "C1" interspersed with more somber, atmospheric fare that leaves less of an impression.The album finishes quite strongly, however, as a trio of stellar pieces appear on the final side.
The first ("D2") is a lazily cascading autoharp piece in which the sharpness of the plucked notes beautifully cuts through the haze of their slowly dissolving decay.In the following piece ("D3"), Grabowski beautifully intertwines two shimmering and pulsing motifs to craft a sensuously quivering nirvana.That late-album hot streak extends all the way through a perfect closing farewell, as the album ends with a half-hopeful/half-sad organ mass of sorts that somehow uses tape hiss to evoke the illusion of a beautiful empty beach at sunrise (empty except for the inexplicable presence of an organist in an especially soulful and introspective mood, anyway).If Forgotten Works has a flaw, it is only that it accidentally transcends its intended purpose–had it not been planned as a deep-dive retrospective of orphaned songs, the best seven or eight of these pieces could have easily been released as a uniformly great new album.Instead, this album is more comprehensive than distilled, but I was legitimately caught off-guard by how wonderful the strongest moments were.
Samples can be found here.
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Fad Gadget
The Best Of released on Silver Vinyl
RELEASED 6 SEP
CELEBRATING 40 YEARS SINCE
THE DEBUT FAD GADGET 7” RELEASE
AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME ON VINYL
“Under the moniker Fad Gadget, Frank Tovey pioneered a genre of electronic music which is now part of the mainstream.” – The Independent
“Never before or since has an artist captured the awkwardness, the strange humour, the revulsion and prurient joy of (especially British) sexuality and human physicality quite as effectively as Tovey” – The Quietus
“Proto-techno “pop” perversions” – Pitchfork
“Enchanting synth-pop brilliance” – Dangerous Minds
Mute have announced a double silver-vinyl release of The Best of Fad Gadget, out on 6 September 2019. Available here for the first time on vinyl, part of the ongoing MUTE 4.0 (1978 > TOMORROW) campaign, the release marks the 40th anniversary of Fad Gadget’s debut 7”, the double A-side single, ‘Back to Nature’ / ‘The Box’.The original 2001 CD was the last release before the untimely early death of Frank Tovey aka Fad Gadget in 2002. The track listing, his personal selection, was designed to be both a concise retrospective of the Fad Gadget years and an introduction to his work for a new generation as he embarked on Depeche Mode’s Exciter tour as their special guest.
Fad Gadget was Mute’s first signing and the groundbreaking debut 7”, ‘Back To Nature’ / ‘The Box’ (Oct 1979), recorded using a drum machine and a synthesiser, was the second release on the label. Alongside Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, Throbbing Gristle, Soft Cell and The Normal, Frank Tovey was at the forefront of the British electronic movement of the late 70s/early 80s and his live performances, drawing on his art school background and interest in performance art, were intense, spectacular and innovative.The Best of Fad Gadget features the classic singles ‘Ricky’s Hand’, ‘Fireside Favourite’, ‘Collapsing New People’ and ‘For Whom The Bells Toll’ (featuring Alison Moyet), b- sides and tracks from his celebrated albums, Fireside Favourites (1980), Incontinent (1981), Under The Flag (1982), and Gag (1984) as well as ‘Luxury’, taken from 1986’s Frank Tovey release, Snakes & Ladders.
This release is the first stage of Mute’s celebration of Frank Tovey’s work, to be followed by a career-spanning box set in early 2020 marking the 40th anniversary of his first album Fireside Favourites.
The Best of Fad Gadget tracklisting
Side A
1. Back To Nature
2. The Box
3. Ricky’s Hand
4. Handshake
Side B
5. Fireside Favourite
6. Insecticide
7. Make Room
8. Lady Shave
Side C
9. Saturday Night Special
10. King Of The Flies
11. Life On The Line
12. 4M
13. For Whom The Bells Toll
Side D
14. Love Parasite
15. I Discover Love
16. Collapsing New People
17. One Man’s Meat
18. Luxury
https://www.instagram.com/fadgadgetofficial/
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Sound In Silence is happy to announce the return of Sweeney, presenting his second album Human, Insignificant.
For about twenty years Jason Sweeney, now based in Eden Hills, South Australia, has been composing and recording either solo, under the alias of Panoptique Electrical, Other People’s Children and Simpático, or with friends in various musical projects like Pretty Boy Crossover, Sweet William, School of Two, Luxury Gap, Par Avion, Great Panoptique Winter, Mist & Sea, Winter Witches, GIRL and many others. He has also been directing and creating interactive works for the internet, experimental films, projects for galleries and theatre spaces and has collaborated with some of Australia’s leading performing arts companies and organizations.
Human, Insignificant is a wonderful collection of eight new emotional songs about brokenness and fragility. With a total duration of something more than 26 minutes, it’s a brief, quiet and melancholy album, written, recorded and produced by Sweeney with the help of his collaborators Zoë Barry and Jed Palmer who played and recorded cellos respectively. Centered on Sweeney’s fragile vocals and elegant piano melodies with the addition of string arrangements of cinematic cellos and layers of other odd sound artefacts and noises, Human, Insignificant perfectly merges songwriting, modern classical, evocative atmospheres and ambient soundscapes.
Human, Insignificant is a breathtaking album with a feeling of meditation, highly recommended for devotees of Scott Walker, David Sylvian and Anohni.
More information can be found here.
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Sound In Silence is happy to announce the return of Wil Bolton, presenting his new album Surface Reflections.
This is his second release on the label after the highly acclaimed, and already sold out, album Whorl back in 2014.
For more than fifteen years Wil Bolton has been making predominantly sound-based artworks for both music releases and installations, often enhanced with video or photography. His work has been shown in many exhibitions and festivals and has also worked on projects with video artists, choreographers and dancers.
He is co-owner of the electronic label Boltfish Recordings and has also released several albums and EPs under the moniker of Cheju. From time to time he has also collaborated with other soundlike musicians on projects like Ashlar, Le Moors, Anzio Green, The Ashes Of Piemonte, Wil & Tarl, Biotron Shelf and others.
Under his own name he has offered many releases, which gained high worldwide praises, on labels such as Home Normal, Hibernate Recordings, Eilean Rec., Dronarivm, Dauw, Fluid Audio, Time Released Sound and many others.
Surface Reflections consists of five long-form tracks of warm ambient, with a total duration of about 44 minutes. Blending layers of field recordings, recorded in Hong Kong and focused on everyday sounds, with delicate loops of guitars and synths, manipulated and edited with effect pedals and laptop processing, Bolton creates one of his best albums to date.
Surface Reflections is a sublime album of emotive melodies, hypnotic soundscapes and mesmerizing textures, carefully mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave) and highly recommended for devotees of ambient pioneers such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd and Steve Roach.
More information can be found here.
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In stark contrast to his role in The Holy Circle, Terence Hannum's Brutalism project clearlydraws from noise and black metal, but the end product is distinctly different. The fact that the name is referencing his interest in Brutalist architecture and not the violence associated with various metal genres makes it clear that he is not aping genre clichés but instead using some of those signifiers to create something entirely fresh with The Charged Void.
Manning guitar, bass, organ, drum machine, and vocals, it is obvious Hannum is going for the one man band ethos for The Charged Void, and certain elements of the production carry that same influence.The emphasis on the middle and high frequencies give the album that traditional lo-fi sensibility, but with added depth not usually found in black metal.This is very well recorded however, not the "microcassette recorder running in the bathroom above the basement rehearsal space" sound of so many of these records.Yes, the music is chaotic and it can be difficult to discern instruments at times, but there is still an excellent sense of complexity to the overall arrangements.
Hannum also does an exemplary job at capturing the hidden melodies that often appear below the murk on these recordings, but giving them a bit more space.There is a wall of nasty, noisy distortion throughout "Fervent Avoidance of All Light" that is punctuated with hollow drum machine and his demonic screams, but there is an organ melody that still manages to shine through.The same holds true for "Stairs Turn Inward Toward Oblique Shadows," where menacing spaces and ghostly howls open things up, but a funeral organ dirge becomes the focus.
At other times the overall feeling is more electronic in nature even if Hannum is using mostly organic instrumentation on The Charged Void.Droning melodies appear deep down on "Infinite Sequence of Extended Spaces," but the song is overall much more about the heavy distortion and ugly vocals.There are tones drifting through all of the cacophonous blasts and feedback, but they are mostly masked by the shrillness and jarring outbursts of harsher sounds and vocals.
The lengthy conclusion "The Grid-Like Mass" ties everything together brilliantly.Ghostly whispers and morose electronic-tinged layers lead things off in a slow, dramatic opening.Soon everything erupts into a dense wall of noise, but all the varying layers and sounds are discernible, never just blurring together into a monochromatic murk.Vocals echo throughout, and clear organ melodies snake through, casting the whole composition into a bit of haunted house ambience.
Having followed much of Terence Hannum's work since the earlier days of Locrian, I have always appreciated the way in which he subverts genres.For example, Locrian's perversion of metal and prog rock, The Holy Circle's unique take on synth pop, and the staunchly antifascist power electronics of Axebreaker being just a few.Admittedly I am not the biggest fan of black metal in its traditional forms, but I can easily appreciate how, with Brutalism, he is building from those components associated with the genre but casting them into a new and differing context, making for yet another unique project in an already impressive resume full of them.
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On their most recent release, it would seem that The Holy Circle—Erica Burgner-Hannum (vocals, synths), Terence Hannum (also in Locrian, synths), and new member Rob Savillo (guitar) taking the place of drummer Nathan Jurgenson—are refining their sound into something more unique. The gauzy, lush synth production and vocals are still prominent, with a sound rooted in the traditions of early dark synth pop, but Sick With Love sees the band drawing from a wider variety of influences, making for their most accomplished work to date.
With this new EP, The Holy Circle have been describing themselves as "goth mom rock" and, while somewhat facetious, is not far off the mark.This is largely the result of Burgner-Hannum’s vocals becoming more diverse and nuanced.Her style and delivery are not far removed from a multitude of female fronted mid 1980s adult contemporary pop, while the music remains anything but.For example, the vocals on "Free and Young" would fit in on any mainstream radio station circa 1987, but the primitive drum machine and Hannum's buzzing synths, the whole is a lot different.Once Savillo's processed guitar hits, which by the end gets an anemic distortion that would fit nicely on The Cure's Pornography, and there are lot of disparate styles that still manage to work well together.
Another unlikely tinge to the overall sound of Sick With Love is contemporary Christian rock, which comes through more subtly via the vocals and arrangements.Having grown up in the same region of deep Central Florida as Burgner-Hannum, I know how ubiquitous the stuff was and probably still is (even though I always avoided it as much as possible), so it was interesting to hear it pop up in such an unexpected context.
The trio offers up variations on this formula, with the same elements being heard throughout the tape's all too brief six songs.For example, the vocals on "Lovely One" are not only a bit lower in the mix, but also closer to a more conventional style with regard to the music.Atop a snapping drum machine, the lush synth pads and reverb drenched guitar trade off the focus, and the entire mix has a rawer edge to it.Comparatively, "Glass" is more on the experimental spectrum, with a more ambient mix and unconventional drum programming.With the ambient electronics and chorus heavy guitar, there’s a distinct early 4AD sheen to it, while overall staying completely contemporary.There is a similar mood to "Fever Break", with lowercase drum sounds and far away guitar and synth pairings, which contrast nicely with the up front vocals and melodic synthesizer appearing at the end.Bookended by two short pieces, "Moorland Loneliness" with its shimmering synths and prominent vocals, and "Midnight Hush" being a wall of sound and distortion, the whole cassette has a brilliant sense of structure and flow.
While I certainly enjoyed The Holy Circle’s first EP and full length, Sick With Love comes across as the band solidifying their sound and identity.By adding guitarist Rob Savillo, their sound is becoming even more fleshed out and diverse.What I found especially entertaining was that juxtaposition of styles, with synth heavy gothic influenced material being what I listened to mostly in my middle/high school days, and the adult pop sound being what I was trying to avoid hearing at the time (and admittedly do not necessarily love today, but I have a greater appreciation for it).Given the band members and I are roughly the same age, I do not think this was at all coincidental.But personal experiences aside, Sick With Love is an exceptionally strong EP of memorable melodies nicely balanced with experimentation and abstraction, and its too-short length simply has me looking forward to whatever comes next.
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- Albums and Singles
I definitely did not expect any more Black to Comm releases this year (or even next year), as composing and mixing the massive and wildly ambitious Seven Horses for Seven Kings likely kept Marc Richter very busy for a very long time. I woefully underestimated the volume of material birthed from that transcendent bout of inspiration though, as another album is already here and it is another great one. While the two albums originate from the same sessions, Before After is billed as a deliberately composed companion album rather than a collection of orphaned tracks. To my ears, however, it actually sounds like both (in a good way): given the exacting sequencing and arc of Seven Horses, it would make sense if a lot of great songs did not quite fit that particular vision. Most of these eclectic, stand-alone pieces are certainly strong enough to have made the cut for Seven Horses, but I am glad they ultimately wound up on Before After instead, as this album is closer to my preferred aesthetic of playfully experimental and hallucinatory collage.
If I had any doubts about whether Richter had enough legitimately great material left over from the Seven Horses sessions for yet another strong album, they were completely erased within the first minute of the truly infernal "États-Unis."The core of the piece is a nightmarish, sickly swirl of choral voices that phantasmagorically reverberate and smear together into ugly harmonies.Richter eventually grounds that floating horror with some brooding chords, but I am not sure he needed to, as he had already achieved a wonderfully disturbing "ruined cathedral of the damned" feel.I particularly enjoyed the crunching industrial noises, the strangled feedback, and the wonderful interplay of the various textures quite a lot, which illustrates the defining character of Before After: these eight pieces feel like a freeform playground for fitfully brilliant and compelling inspirations rather than a suite of meticulously crafted compositions.The blurting, screaming chaos of the following "His Bristling Irascibility (Mirror Blues)" is the most extreme example of that tendency, resembling a hyper-caffeinated Nurse With Wound in exotica mode having a complete psychotic breakdown.Such chaos and cacophony is the exception rather than the rule though, as Richter soon returns to warped beauty with "They Said Sleep," inventively transforming an early medieval folk song into a grinding, howling, and mind-obliterating maelstrom of ravaged angelic derangement.The first side of the album then unexpectedly winds to a close with a lovely and subdued piano piece that has an endearingly lurching and tumbling rhythm that resembles out-of-phase loops rubbing up against one another.
The album's second half opens with "Eden-Olympia," a wonderfully roiling sea of rapidly hammered piano tones that slowly accumulates hallucinatory layers as it builds towards a reverberating percussion crescendo.In keeping with Before After's unpredictably phantasmagoric trajectory, the following "Othering" takes a deep plunge into pagan/ritualistic-sounding heavy psych that sounds like a sinister hurdy-gurdy ensemble (it calls to mind Cyclobe's amazing Derek Jarman soundtracks as well)."The Seven of Horses" follows suit in a very similar vein, but the strangled bagpipe-like drones are strafed by blurting, splattering electronic noise and whines that evoke a sky full of fireworks (or, less desirable: falling bombs).Both pieces are absolutely wonderful and among my favorites on the album, as Richter does a stellar job of blurring the illusion of an ancient and exotic imagined past with gleefully gnarled mindfuckery.The album ends on a more subdued and sublime note, however, as "Perfume Sample" repurposes material from Seven Horses into a weirdly mass-like outro of half-ghostly/half-anthemic chords.It is the least substantial piece on the album, but it is an interesting and effective closer sequencing-wise: it feels like a well-earned glimpse of transcendence at the end of a series of bizarre and deeply unsettling nightmares.
Amusingly, I feel a vague, low-level sense of guilt for liking this album as much as I do, as Richter's last few albums as Black to Comm have been very ambitious, focused, and sharply realized artistic statements.Before After does not quite fall into that category, as it seems like Richter simply had a bunch of cool ideas and just let them unfold organically without much concern for their role in the larger whole.Even the individual pieces do not feel particularly "composed," as each one is generally devoted to a single theme that just kind of starts and stops at whatever point feels natural.Given the strength and imagination of Richter's visions, that casual, unpolished brilliance works quite well and this album never feels indulgent or half-formed (nor does it feel overwrought, obviously).It favorably reminds me of LPD's "Chemical Playschool" series, but if they were mercilessly edited until only the best parts remained.It is clear that Richter devote quite a bit of time into shaping these fascinating soundscapes into a coherent album with a thoughtful arc, even if that arc feels like an elusively shapeshifting series of darkly hallucinatory fever dreams.It might not be a sweeping and panoramic epic like its predecessor or 2014's Black to Comm, but the more modest pleasures of Before After are definitely inspired enough to belong in that company (and they occasionally surpass it).
Samples can be found here.
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