A collaboration between G. Stuart Dahlquist (formally of Burning Witch) and prolific French composer Philippe Petit is sure to elicit some dark, disturbing imagery, and on that front, Empires Should Burn definitely does not disappoint. With guest vocals from Edward Ka-Spel, Jarboe, and Bryan Lewis Saunders, the resulting album is a dark, though not impenetrable slab of metal hued experimental sound collage.
A relatively new solo project out of Canada, Bryan W. Bray's discography is currently brief, but with releases such as this, I hope to see that list grow dramatically in the near future. Hints of drone metal, pure harsh noise, and unclassifiable experimentalism abound on this all too brief tape.
Having been around since the early part of the 1990s, this duo of Lino Monaco and Nicola Buono seem as if they took their cue from that periods isolationist movement, that darker, bleak spin-off of ambient that had a short, but brilliant life. Heavily effected loops, guitars, and synths float together in an inviting dissonance throughout this album's six tracks.
Æthenor’s En Form for Blå was one of my favorite albums of 2011, and it was the first time Stephen O’Malley and Steve Noble collaborated on record. St. Francis Duo documents their second meeting, a pair of live performances at London’s Cafe OTO recorded over two nights in August, 2010. With only guitar, percussion, and some distortion, O’Malley and Noble punch out over an hour of very raw and dynamic improvised music. Like their work together in Æthenor, it hews closer to the rock spectrum than to jazz or other kinds of improvised music, but it is their quieter interactions that make this album so satisfying.
Once again a remaster job with meticulous attention to detail along with a set of bonus material and copious first-hand accounts have allowed me to appreciate a release much more than I originally had. Sugar's last album can still be a difficult listen but I think I'm ready to love it.
With both albums out of print for a number of years, Michael Gira has (somewhat surprisingly) not only saw fit to present these two in their original forms, but as a deluxe vinyl box set (or less deluxe CD), expanded with a disc of period-specific rarities and outtakes. What was originally a drastic departure from what everyone expected from Swans is now somewhat less so, and with almost an additional 25 years since White Light from the Mouth of Infinity, their place in Swans' impeccable catalog makes perfect sense. Even removed from that, however, they are an exceptionally strong pair of American folk influenced albums that have lost none of their force or impact to this day.
The length of time elapsed between Kannon and the last Sunn O))) album proper, Monoliths and Dimensions, is over six years and the longest gap in the band’s career. This pause is unsurprising given the grandiose stylistic decisions the last album reached as far as production goes: choruses, strings, and horns made for an artistic peak that stopped just short of crossing that fine threshold between epic drama and self-absorbed pretentiousness. Kannon in some ways is a reboot of the project, returning back to the foundational sound of Greg Anderson and Steven O'Malley and their massive wall of amps. But rather than a cliché "back to basics" move, it is a record informed by their legacy, as well as their recent collaborations with Ulver and Scott Walker, that displays strong and significant artistic growth and development.
Roberto Opalio's latest solo opus is an intriguing companion piece to My Cat is an Alien's recent Abstract Expressionism for the Ears, achieving its own uniquely altered state in a much more spontaneous, stripped-down, and (comparatively) brief fashion. Although it also contains a shorter piece built around Roberto's processed voice, the clear raison d'être for Aurora Coelestis is the 30-minute title piece, a shimmering, dream-like tour de force birthed from perhaps the least likely of sources: a glockenspiel.  Aurora is certainly a more modest effort than anything that MCIAA has been up to lately, but it is unquestionably its own strange and unique entity with its own pleasantly warped reality.
Every once in a while, a familiar artist takes me completely by surprise. One Sunday night, I was making the long drive home to Dublin from my then fiancée’s place in Northern Ireland. On the radio was the weekly contemporary music show on the national classical music station. This particular edition was dedicated to a work in progress by Roger Doyle; different segments being played with an interview with Doyle interspersed between them. I have always been fond of Doyle’s music but listening to parts of what would eventually become Chalant was a revelation. Built around old answering machine messages, Doyle weaved his own past through his music and combined bittersweet memory with an overreaching arc of life’s progress and the construction of the artist’s cannon. Throughout the next few days and weeks, the music and themes of the work resonated within my head. This was a deeply moving and thought-provoking composition and I could not wait to listen to the album properly.
After last year’s Ways of Meaning, I have a hard time hearing Kyle Bobby Dunn the way I once did. There was something dark and deceiving about that record, something that didn’t show up in the music so much as it did in the subtext, but which changed the way the music felt nonetheless. On his latest album, a two disc set with over two hours of new music, Kyle continues to complicate his message. His ascetic approach is intact and as beautiful as ever, but the same enigma that haunted his last album is all over this record, too, and it’s even more noticeable.
This three track EP given to attendees at a live performance in Germany earlier this year, is now available for those who did not attend. Each of the legendary artists contributes one piece to this all-too-brief release, which comes together just as brilliantly as if it were a stand alone release.
Köner's solo work has always been characterized as having a definite cold, frigid quality to it, both sonically and through the imagery he has employed. This new work is no different, titled after a Russian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean where nuclear testing occurred. His his approach to the sound is as desolate, but fascinating as ever.
On his third full length release, Paul Thomsen Kirk continues his modernized take on the late 1990s/early 2000s electronic music that is as much about dissonant textures as it is captivating beats and rhythms. It perfectly balances that sense of familiar and fresh, and it helps to renew my faith that electronic dance music can still be artistically relevant.
Daniel Menche discussed on his now infamous blog how his attendance at a Karkowski show was a major inspiration and motivation for his now prolific career in sound art. I would imagine that for that reason he would have some sense of intimidation working with his hero, but this live in the studio collaboration shows no sense of trepidation, just two masters shaping sound into frightening and fascinating sculptures.
A new Comus EP has been on the cards for a few years as the group reinvigorated itself with a number of successful reunion shows. New songs crept into their set and finally a mini-album of fresh material has made it out into the wild. Not only that, the three studio recordings are bolstered with a bootleg recording of a 1972 performance of "The Malgaard Suite," their aborted second album (not to be confused with 1974’s To Keep from Crying). Overall, it does not reach the dizzying heights of First Utterance but it is a worthy return for such a legendary group.
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When this EP first came out it made little sense to me. The six songs were recorded during the same session as Copper Blue but the sound was completely different. The sound was rather grim, there were no happy singalongs, the vocals were buried (if present at all), and I didn't quite understand if it was attempting to be religious statement or not. Nineteen years later, a cleaned up master and back story makes a world of distance as it almost completely makes sense now.
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