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My appreciation of Spencer Yeh has increased in recent years due to his clear disinterest in re-covering familiar and expected territory.  Nowhere is that creative restlessness more conspicuously on display than here, an entire album of charmingly ramshackle left-field pop.  As it turns out, Yeh has been concealing a knack for songwriting all these years, as Transitions is a legitimately excellent and charismatic effort that makes me wish he had been doing this all along.  These are some of the most instantly likable songs that I have heard all year.
Sometimes, an artist sticks to a style even though they have done it to death but lack the vision to move on from the one idea that they briefly got right. Then there are artists who take this one idea and make it work, over and over again. A Place to Bury Strangers fall firmly into this second camp. They continue to sound as fresh as they did on their debut, which is impressive, considering the musical coffers of My Bloody Valentine and Jesus and Mary Chain should be well and truly bare by now. A Place to Bury Strangers have created a magnificent and charged work that demonstrates they have plenty of fire still to be unleashed.
Initially a work inspired by Cage's 100th birthday this year, this album began life as a soundtrack to his One11 film. However as those recordings progressed, Australian composer Lawrence English began to develop a wider body of pieces that were inspired, both directly and indirectly, by the legendary artist, and take on a life of their own.
Locrian has spent the better part of the last four years distinguishing themselves from the also-rans of the post-Sunn O))) drone scene, crafting their own distinct sound and identity amid many less engaging acts. While much of their recent work has been focused on the deconstruction of metal symbolism, paired with a more conventional rock bent, here the trio go back to their dissonant, abstract roots, with help from legendary audio and visual artist Christoph Heemann.
My life was never the same after hearing Fushitsusha for the first time. The second live album was a gargantuan asteroid of free rock headed straight for the center of my brain. The group has undergone many line-up changes and periods of inactivity but on this first album in about a decade, and the first since Yasushi Ozawa’s death in 2008, Keiji Haino is rejoined by Ikuro Takahashi on drums (Takahashi having previously filled the drum stool for Fushitsusha as well as other stalwarts of the Japanese psych scene like High Rise, Kousokuya, Aihiyo and LSD March) and by bassist Mitsuru Nasuno (a long-time collaborator with Otomo Yoshihide and former member of Ground Zero).
While 2010's excellent Endless Fall was a bit of a curve-ball, Scott Morgan has historically not been a man prone to surprises or grand gestures.  As a result, Sketches from New Brighton sounds almost exactly like I would expect a new Loscil album to sound.  There are certainly some minor evolutions and thematic changes, but Morgan is more or less covering very familiar territory once again (lush, pulsing, aquatic-sounding soundscapes).  Fortunately, I am quite fond of that territory.
It seems like any American city (or even large-ish town) has at least one local noise band. Perhaps it is the ubiquity of the Internet or a handful of Wolf Eyes and Merzbow albums that received some significant hype and distribution, but what was once a style that was baffling to most is on par with punk or hardcore as far as local representation goes. Manchester Bulge, hailing from Fargo, North Dakota, preceded this American noise band explosion (or sloppy outburst, depending on perspective) though, dating back to 2001. This collections captures a band at the forefront of what somehow managed to become a scene and makes for an excellent window into one town’s premiere noise project.
New York based composer and pianist Kelly Moran has been quickly developing a body of work that rich and complex with not just piano and electronics, but also her exceptional and nuanced approach to production and sound design as well. The instrumentation of Optimist may seem basic: all nine songs feature piano (prepared and unprepared) and some additional synthesizer and electronics, but the finished product has so much more depth than it would seem. It comes together as a fully realized, gorgeously diverse series of compositions.
There are a number of great labels unearthing and breathing new life into forgotten treasures these days, but it is truly rare for anyone to match Dust-to-Digital when it comes to presentation and sheer comprehensiveness. Each major release feels like an event years in the making, certain to send at least one circle of obsessive music fans scavenging for additional extant releases from an eclectic array of previously unknown or obscure artists. This latest opus is an especially big hit with me, collecting a remastered trove of '50s East and Central African rumba recordings by South African/English musicologist Hugh Tracey. I had no doubt that these recordings would be unique and historically important, but I was legitimately blindsided by how incredibly fun these songs can be, often resembling a raucous, inebriated, and Latin-tinged street party where everyone knows all the words to every song and nearly everyone seems to have inexplicably brought along a kazoo.
Felix seem to approach the art of songwriting with an oblique playfulness similar to such groups as Slapp Happy or Hugo Largo, albeit with darker results. Minimal accompaniment frames Lucinda Chua singing meticulous and poetic lyrics, using everyday expressions and bizarre thoughts in a conversational style, touching on magical realism without sounding twee or trite. Oh Holy Molar is a convincing existential internal dialogue, by turns bleak, funny, honest, inspiring, sad, and wry.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that set it in motion are more than a year and half old this month. Ongoing cleanup efforts, which include removing contaminated debris and preventing further radioactive water from seeping into the ocean, will likely cost $15 billion over the next 30 years. As Otomo Yoshihide explained in his April, 2011 lecture, the residents of Fukushima face a difficult future, one made darker by the psychological and cultural impact the disaster has had. In response to that lecture, Presqu'île Records assembled this compilation, featuring superb contributions from the likes of John Tilbury, Greg Kelley, Michael Pisaro, Chris Abrahams, and Annette Krebs. Besides answering Otomo’s plea for a cultural response to the disaster, all funds raised from the sale of this 2CD set go to Japanese non-profit organizations.
An established drummer and improviser, Rosaly takes this background into a different direction, dissecting and reassembling his own improvised recordings into a structured, though intentionally chaotic composition. While the drums make for the most identifiable sound, the non-percussive elements are just as essential, resulting in an album that occasionally calls to mind the best moments Organum, but stands firmly on its own.
As half of the duo Solo Andata, Kane Ikin works heavily with treated and processed field recordings, shaping them into complex, sometimes shadowy organic compositions. On this solo outing he works less with nature, but uses practically everything else (synthesizers, drum machines, rotting vinyl, etc) to create an album of similar complexity, albeit a darker, more isolated sensibility.
Masami Akita and Maurizio Bianchi are without question amongst the pioneers of harsh, abrasive electronic music. Both of their careers began quite prolifically around the same time, and since Bianchi's return in the late 1990s have continued as such, with both producing a massive number of albums each year. These two albums act nicely as reference points on their long careers, with the 10" capturing pieces each submitted for the Mail Music Project compilation, here appearing unedited for the first time, and the LP being a recent collaborative work that stands amongst both artists' best material as of late.
An audio-visual collaboration featuring Evelina Domnitch, Francisco López, COH, and Asmus Tietchens (amongst others), Liquifed Sky is truly a synthesis of audio and visual, emphasizing the indisputably organic connection between fluid and light, as well as the physical effect of sound waves upon both. It might not be the most convenient release, being a data DVD, but is well worth the effort.
Amongst fans of dark, heavy music, James Plotkin is a name synonymous with work that defies categorization or genre boundaries in a slew of projects too numerous to list. Lesser known, at least perhaps in the USA, is drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, who may be working from a free jazz template but produces music that is similarly impossible to categorize. The two meet here for the first time on Death Rattle, the result of a four-hour improvisation recorded last year, and the result is as blistering and intense as expected.
Recorded over three days in Greece, Varvakios is an odd yet perfect sound travelogue of sorts. Cold, intense, monochrome, guitar-based instrumentals—some with an almost Balkan atmosphere—alternate with field recordings perhaps in markets or auctions. The overall feeling is of urban industrial-tribalism amid an exotic, humid, foreign landscape.
I know it will not last very long, but I am very much enjoying the current trend of noise artists turning their attention towards dance music and beats (something I definitely would not have expected when Masami Akita dabbled similarly a decade ago).  Along with Vatican Shadow and Pete Swanson, Ren Schofield's Container project is decisively leading the vanguard of that scene, though he almost slipped by me due to his association with the rather synth-centric Spectrum Spools label.  His latest effort is not quite as uniformly spectacular as last year's identically titled debut, but it definitely comes very damn close (especially the second half).
Back in 2010, this unusual shoegaze/drone duo released a truly mesmerizing CDr on Seattle's small Debacle Records label.  Sadly, not very many people noticed.  Fortunately, one of the few people who did notice was Barn Owl's Jon Porras, which eventually led to the requisite James Plotkin-remastering job, a high profile vinyl reissue, and a well-deserved second chance to share their dreamy choral gloom with the world.