Kyle Bobby Dunn's first physical release since 2014's And the Infinite Sadness is a warm, albeit compressed, sequel to that universally acclaimed 3xLP. In "The Searchers", the Canadian composer's sidelong composition is still set adrift in a sea of infinite nostalgia and reflections of past selves but with an ascending lightness that gleams at the contours of Dunn's most personal and affecting work. "The Searchers," named after the John Ford film, meditates on the way in which the imposing expansiveness of the American West worked upon the minds of its inhabitants who fought, lost and did terrible things to each other in their attempt to claim it. The West, like the slipstream of the course of events in a life, offers no resolution and shakes off any narrative that attempts to define it.

Wayne Robert Thomas is an Indianapolis based musician who composes drones like sculpting in wet cement, each movement turning slowly upwards while simultaneously being locked into time and space. His first appearance on vinyl, Wayne Robert Thomas's deeply felt composition "Voyevoda" utilizes processed electric guitar to fill all available space with lofty and spacious tones that lose nothing of their clarity as the float up to the rafters before settling back down to the nave. A stirring counterpoint Dunn's composition, "Voyevoda" keenly examines one's fidelity to unconquerable nostalgia.

Out May 1st.  More information can be found here.

"It was the most beautiful summer of my life."

Memories — places, vacancies, allusions — are fundamental characters in Mary Lattimore's evocative craft. Inside her music, wordless narratives, indefinite travelogues, and braided events skew into something enchantingly new. The Los Angeles-based harpist recorded her breakout 2016 album, At The Dam, during stops along a road trip across America, letting the serene landscapes of Joshua Tree and Marfa, Texas color her compositions. In 2017, she presented Collected Pieces, a tape compiling sounds from her past life in Philadelphia: odes to the east coast, burning motels, and beach town convenience stores. In 2018, from a restorative station — a redwood barn, nestled in the hills above San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge — emanates Hundreds of Days, her second full-length LP with Ghostly International. The record sojourns between silences and speech, between microcosmic daily scenes and macrocosmic universal understandings, between being alien in promising new places and feeling torn from old native havens. It's an expansive new chapter in Lattimore's story, and an expression of mystified gratitude. A study in how ordinary components helix together to create an extraordinary world.

Chapel Perilous exists whereby the supernatural converges with the everyday - whatever one's definition of reality, this psychological realm serves to prove it endlessly subjective and changeable. Robert Anton Wilson may have laid claim to the modern use of this phrase - as in his 1977 tome Cosmic Trigger - yet there can be few musical outfits in the here and now more worthy of carrying on its tradition than Gnod. In more than a decade on the planet, this singular Salford-birthed entity have married intrepid musical exploration with psychic fearlessness - not to mention a tendency to leave any tag or bracket one attempts to place on them utterly redundant.

In a sense, the latest adventure bearing this title evolved both from the lengthy European tour that the band embarked upon in the wake of their stripped-down and paint-stripping 2017 opus Just Say No The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine. Yet recording in Supernova studio in Eindhoven under the auspices of Bob De Wit, the band found themselves free not only to lay down two tumultuous tracks that they had been honing and hammering into shape on the road - the pulverizing fifteen-minute opener "Donovan’s Daughters" and the bracingly brutal "Uncle Frank Says Turn It Down" - but to sculpt more abstract material, utilizing dubbed-out repetition, furious riff-driven rancour, bleak soundscapes and off-the-map experimentation to create an intimidating and invigorating tableau of dystopian dread and unflinching intensity.

Always working purely on their own instincts and co-ordinates, Gnod's pathway into unchartered territory continues to move firmly on with nary a care for the sanity of anyone in their surroundings. Chapel Perilous is a still more indomitable chapter in a transcendental travelogue from an iconoclastic institution that only gathers momentum with the passing of time. Wherever Gnod go in 2018 and beyond, expect reality to be reinvented anew, whatever the consequences.

Out May 4, 2018.  More information can be found here.

Cavern Of Anti-Matter return for their third studio album on their own Duophonic label. Hormone Lemonade sees the band heavily utilising the sounds of modular synths and home built drum machines, yet still keeping the loose, improvised sound familiar to fans of their first two albums, with minimal guitar melodies and live drum kit helping to build hypnotic layers of texture.

The albums genesis was in the self-constructed rhythm machines of band member Holger Zapf, the Taktron Z3 and Taktron Z2, being recorded to tape during three one-hour sessions. These sessions also included the use of 70s Hohner and Eko drum machines. Holger played his parts in a free-form way and the bpm varied wildly as it was not possible to sync it to any outside controllers.

Tim Gane edited these initial jams into useable chunks and proceeded to overdub each new rhythmic “chunk” with some basic musical ideas, keeping in tune to the hum of the machines and retaining the “feel” of the inherent pulse. Joe Dilworth arrived to lay down a beat over these minimal backing tracks, going with the flow as best he could.

In the following months the music was fleshed out using various synths and sequencers from Roland, Arp, Oberheim and Holger’s modular synth set up. As well as many of the bass and sequencer parts the modular also supplied the chords by tuning each one of it’s five oscillators to specific notes and intervals.

The results of these experiments, improvisations, and refinements, are Hormone Lemonade, which will be released as LP, CD, and Digital Download in March 2018.

The Blue Sleep is a brand new studio album by Blaine L. Reininger, the Colorado-born composer and founder member of avant-garde music group Tuxedomoon.

Written and recorded by Blaine in 2017, the album was mixed in his adopted hometown of Athens by noted electronic music producer Coti K. Like most of his previous solo projects, The Blue Sleep combines vocal songs with atmospheric instrumental tracks, three of which (Lost Ballroom, Jacob's Ladder and Odi et Amo) were written for Caligula, a theatre production.

"These days the music plays me," explains Blaine. "The unifying principle behind the songs on Blue Sleep is the method of composition. I apply fine old aleatory techniques - John Cage, William Burroughs, Tristan Tzara - and filter these through my instinctive knowledge of melody and harmony. Lyrics are generated algorithmically (I work with programs which assemble phrases according to mathematical rules) and then edited by me, with phrases suggested by the random output. That's pretty much my modus operandi in the 21st century."

10 track CD. Cover image by George Terzis.

Tracklist

1. Public Transformation
2. The Blue Sleep
3. Lost Ballroom
4. We're Tearing Out
5. Dry Food
6. Camminando Qui
7. Jacob's Ladder
8. The Dull Sea
9. Molecular Landscape
10. Odi et Amo

Available on CD and digital download (MP3). Mailorder copies are delivered in a special Crépuscule slipcase.

Les Disques du Crépuscule

Rendered guitar musings from a Lyttelton room. Outside inside out.

Recordings by Peter Wright.

Lyttelton, Aotearoa, April 2010-October 2017.

More information can be found here.

Inexplicable Hours is the sequel of the successful six-CD boxed set Elapsed Time, also released by Sonoris in 2017. The first LP documents a new direction in his music, with some of his last electroacoustic experimentations with audio generators, field recordings, and various electronic devices. The second one explores the same ambient/drone territories as the boxset, with tracks less static and more complex than it appears on the first listen. And as always with recent Kevin Drumm's music there's a sense of majesty, of mystery and a melancholic beauty that is uniquely his own.

More information can be found here.

from kranky:

Not long after recording her 10th album, Ruins, Liz Harris traveled to Wyoming to work on art and record music. She found herself drawn towards the pairing of skeletal piano phrasing with spare, rich bursts of vocal harmony. A series of stark songs emerged, minimal and vulnerable, woven with emotive silences. Inspired by "the idea that something is missing or cold," the pieces float and fade like vignettes, implying as much as they reveal. She describes them as "small texts hanging in space," impressions of mortality, melody, and the unseen – fleeting beauty, interrupted. Grid Of Points stands as a concise and potently poetic addition to the Grouper catalog.

from Liz Harris:

Grid Of Points is a set of songs for piano and voice. I wrote these songs over a week and a half; they stopped abruptly when I was interrupted by a high fever. Though brief, it is complete. The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs lyrics speak more directly of. The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column, missing.

Out April 27th.  More information can be found here.

October Language is the debut album by New Orleans-based duo Belong, comprised of Turk Dietrich and Mike Jones.

Since its release in early 2006, Belong's debut masterpiece has accumulated a dedicated cult following, with comparisons to the work of Christian Fennesz and Gas, with some claims that it plays like My Bloody Valentine's Loveless sans the songs. While these comparisons are useful for filing this album into a particular bin in the record shop, time has proven that October Language is a unique album which remains unmatched by its contemporaries.

Despite the warm and welcome accolades of the album's arrival, there was no vinyl pressing until 2009, of which a limited one-time pressing vanished immediately. Spectrum Spools is pleased to present a pristine vinyl cut to go with reimagined album art for the definitive edition of this legendary classic.

More information can be found here.

A Place To Bury Strangers have announced their new album, Pinned, coming out April 13th. Their fifth full-length finds them converting difficult moments into some of their most urgent work to date. It's their first since the 2016 election, and their first since the 2014 closing of Death By Audio, the beloved Brooklyn DIY space where founding guitarist/singer Oliver Ackerman lived, worked, and created with complete freedom.

Pinned opens with "Never Coming Back," a frightening crescendo of group vocals, vertiginous guitar work, and bassist Dion Lunadon's unrelenting bass. "That song is a big concept," Ackermann says. "You make these decisions in your life…you're contemplating whether or not this will be the end. You think of your mortality, those moments you could die and what that means. You're thinking about that edge of the end, deciding whether or not it’s over. When you’re close to that edge, you could teeter over."

A couple of years ago, A Place To Bury Strangers made one of those big decisions Ackermann speaks of on "Never Coming Back." They were in search of a new drummer and Lunadon met Lia Simone Braswell who was playing shows around Brooklyn where she had recently relocated from Los Angeles. After seeing her play, Lunadon was moved to ask Braswell if she'd want to come to a band practice sometime.

While not only cementing herself as the band’s new drummer, Braswell also contributes vocals on "Never Coming Back" and elsewhere on Pinned, opening up a whole new dimension in the band’s music. "As things go on, you don't want them to be stagnant," Ackermann remarks. "Being a band for ten years, it's hard to keep things moving forward. I see so many bands that have been around and they're a weaker version of what they used to be. This band is anti-that. We try to push ourselves constantly, with the live shows and the recordings. We always want to get better. You've got to dig deep and take chances, and sometimes, I questioned that. It took really breaking through to make it work. I think we did that."

It's a clear and honest statement of intent, not just for everything that follows, but for this band as a whole.

More information can be found here.

"When I sit down to write an album I will usually come up with a technical and compositional concept to help focus my writing. Whether it is a restricted palette of instruments or a specific way of approaching the writing, this practice has helped me explore different processes and helps keep the album focused.

My previous album Somi was such an album. Hyper-focused and very deliberate in creation. However, there are times where I want to be more relaxed and just write what comes freely. In a way Fallen is such an album. When I began writing it the only strong rule I put on myself is that it would be my first album centered around the piano as the main instrument.

There were times when I wanted Fallen to be an album for solo piano but the more I pushed and explored the more I was drawn to accompanying the piano with modular and Moog synthesizers, tape machines and the occasional guitar.

Fallen was supposed to be, after all, a relaxed album, one that would come quickly, off-the-cuff, and with little regard to any rules or restrictions. It, however, ended up being one of the longest albums for me to create; well over a year and a half, as it had coincided with a particularly dark and difficult time in my personal life.

As the album progressed the thoughts of a freer, solo-piano sound quickly faded as layers of disintegration and noise came to the foreground. Half-broken tape machines and plenty of ghostly echoes helped hide the honesty of the piano as I hid myself, and my music, away under the cover of abstraction.

In a way, I feel that Fallen is most like my album Northern. One that was intended to be more free-spirited but became very much about a particular place and time. "

- Taylor Deupree

Out now on Spekk/12k.

"Glass offers the sublime results of a collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), as performed and recorded at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut during the private opening to Yayoi Kusama's installation marking the 110th anniversary of Johnson’s birth.

Making sterling use of the landmark architectural work's pellucid dimensions, the pair fixed contact mics to its glass walls, which they effectively played as an "instrument," rubbing it with rubber gong mallets to generate delicate tones which they combined with a sympathetic palette of singing glass bowls, crotales, keyboards and mixers.

The seamless performance of floating, weightless tones and exquisitely quivering timbres is without doubt one of their finest. For the duration we're held static and spellbound by the pair's interplay of microtonal shifts and plasmic chronics, keening the listener thru hazes of digital dust and vortices of angelic harmonics to locate, alchemise and resolve a rarified, deeply mysterious spirit before the piece closes.

As the follow-up to their OST for The Revenant [2015] and the warbling keys of Summvs [2011] before that, the achingly lush tension of Glass is perhaps the purest testament to the clarity of vision and endless minimalist mutability of this highly revered duo."

-via Boomkat

Once you'll touch the sky you will never return to dust is a new 1-hour long instantaneous composition performed with a prepared mini-keyboard, a handmade shortwave receiver and Roberto Opalio’s patented alientronics and wordless vocalizations. It is a masterpiece of modern minimalism, an ecstatic voyage where time and space lose their meaning, thus glorifying the poetic lyricism of the "here and now," that "eternal now" that other visionary artists and vanguards of the past have always dealt with, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Muhal Richard Abrams. "Towards the Sun," headed Arthur Rimbaud. "Space Is The Place," asserted Sun Ra.

Out March 7th on Elliptical Noise.

Eliane Tapes is a new series on Moving Furniture Records. All the music in this series is dedicated and/or inspired by the works of Éliane Radigue.

With her groundbreaking work already in the late '60s and early '70s Éliane Radigue created a path for many other musicians in the field of minimalism and drone music.

To celebrate the amazing work she has done (and still does), we ask musicians to create works that are inspired by her work and as such are a dedication to her.

The first release for Eliane Tapes is by Kassel Jaeger.

For Retroactions, Kassel Jaeger created "studies" trying to extend the gesture Éliane Radigue did with feedbacks, with a different and more "hi-fi" setup than the one she used at the time.

In 4 studies, he experiments with different feedback setups: controlled, non-controlled, processed and non-processed. He worked with 6 microphones and 10 speakers, feedbacks.

Out February 19th on Moving Furniture.

The Sky With Broken Arms is a further step ahead into the realm of the unknown, where the music made of minimal, dreamy guitar chords and eerie wordless vocals over a dense layer of crackling noise comes out of a strong conceptual idea.

As Roberto Opalio’s foreword to the work reads "On a winter day two years ago, I found out that an entire section of my vinyl collection was completely ruined by an inexplicable oxidation process. [..] As a first reaction, I decided not to play those records ever again... and that I did, for a long time. 'Til one night, exhausted, I felt the absolute urgency to listen to one of those LPs whose musical content got buried by the vinyl surface noise. In that moment, the shocking epiphany: [..] slowly, I began to perceive that not only were the old, beloved sounds that I was used to still there, but the layer of ground noise obliged me to even more attentive and active listening; thus I was discovering very subtle sound details now claiming their own being and pretending their own space.  The idea of a new MCIAA album came out of this enlightenment.  A new concept concerning the representation of music on the one hand and its perception on the other.  A music so essential and precious as to be discovered by the listener little by little, because hidden by a blanket of crackling noise, which I obtained from the blank grooves of my damaged vinyls.  Thus, here we are: infinite spaces of disintegration and psycho-existential ecstasy… essentially, spaces of non-limited, non-stoppable Poetry."

Out March 7th on Elliptical Noise.

Northern California producer Fred Welton Warmsley III's solo work as Dedekind Cut (pronounced "dead-da-ken cut") has evolved from fractured industrial design into increasingly subdued and sublime ambient meditations across two years of dedicated activity. His second full-length collection, Tahoe – so named after the mountain lake town he now calls home – swells with widescreen grandeur, evoking vistas both inner and outer. There are echoes of his earlier, more tempestuous mode in tracks like "MMXIX" and "Spiral" but overall the album skews panoramic and pensive, muted synthetic mists contoured with choral melody, field recordings, and radiant drone. His compositional instincts feel alternately classical, contemporary, and conflicted, befitting an artist whose discography spans divergent labels.

Warmsley characterizes Tahoe as a "time peace," sifting through "the past, the present, future, and fantasy."

Out February 23rd on Kranky.

Editions Mego's 250th release continues its ongoing legacy of cross-pollinating and perverting various threads of radical 20th Century music whilst concocting and propelling further ideas into the nebulous region where we currently reside.

With Ex Nihilo, Editions Mego resumes its enduring relationship with long-term collaborator and stalwart representative of the labels aesthetic with a new release from London’s most charming deviant occupant, Mr. Bruce Gilbert (formerly of Wire, Dome etc..).

Gilbert's peculiar approach to sound over four decades has seen him engage with a wide variety of practice and performance always hovering amongst the grey area between his mind and the surrounding architecture. Ex Nihilo is another significant entry into Gilbert’s outre sound-book.

Inhabiting a murky zone between interference and trauma, Ex Nihilo is a daring and dark audio ride through a contemporary ketamine haze, one which haunts identifiable parameters whilst remaining too oblique to be truly quantified.  "Change and Not" teases discomfort, "Black Mirrors" embraces disorder, "Nomad" skirts the unsettling.

Whilst never quite resolving its own logic, Ex Nihilo invites the casual listener to join a devastating, peculiar, and somewhat paranoid fantasy (reality?).

Another effortless Gilbert classic.

More information can be found here.