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After nearly a decade-long recording hiatus, iconic force of nature Diamanda Galás has resurfaced with pair of themed albums of characteristically dark covers and interpretations.  Linked by two different versions of the traditional "O Death," the partially studio-recorded All The Way revisits the familiar territory of classic blues and country while the St. Thomas the Apostle live performance delves into the even more familiar subject of death.  Both albums have their moments of brilliance, but the St. Thomas performance is arguably more accessible, if only because Galás's demonic operatic flourishes  feel a bit more at home in her own arrangements of poems and texts than they do when all that firepower is directed at, say, a Johnny Paycheck song.  Also, it is quite a bit looser and more varied.  Accessibility is quite relative with an artist as simultaneously beloved and polarizing as Galás though, as even the sultriest, sexiest jazz standards can erupt into primal, window-rattling intensity with absolutely no warning.
All the Way kicks off with the studio-recorded title piece, a song that I best remember via Frank Sinatra.  All similarities to Sinatra are strictly limited to the lyrics though, as the sometimes dissonant and erratic avant-jazz piano and Diamanda's alternately hissing and snarling vocals makes the song feel like a bitter and threatening warning from a wronged woman who is probably on her way to go repeatedly stab a happy couple.  Curiously, it gradually becomes somewhat less threatening and a bit more conventionally melodic as it progresses, which is almost more disturbing, as it could mean that menace is slowly becoming mingled with better memories or just that the narrator is prone to unpredictably shifting moods.  In either case, it is quite an unsettling piece and a prime example of the sort of disturbing twists on the torch song genre Galás excels at here, as she subverts the expected kittenish seduction into something that feels a lot more like being mesmerized by a succubus...then being ferociously ripped apart.  Much like the rest of the album, "All the Way" is essentially just Galás alone at a piano (raw and undiluted), though it does offer some rare and subtle studio embellishment in the form of well-placed echoing after-images.
The hot streak that began with "All the Way" continues uninterrupted for the entire first side of the album, as the smoldering "You Don’t Know What Love Is" is especially electrifying.  Galás also returns to the Chet Baker chestnut she so harrowingly interpreted on Malediction and Prayer ("The Thrill is Gone"), but plays it fairly straight this time around, taking a tender and mournful tone rather than a feral one…initially, at least–it takes a hard turn towards the cathartic, maniacal, and obsessive near the end.  I suppose that unpredictable trajectory, aside from her prodigious vocal range and power, is what makes Diamanda's interpretations of these standards so unique: I never know when a Pandora's box of howling anguish is about to be unleashed.  The following foray into Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight," however, is an unexpected aberration to that trend, as Diamanda gives her throat a brief rest to showcase her mercurial piano virtuosity.  "Round Midnight" proves to be the calm before the storm though, as Galás plunges into the album’s bizarre and eccentric centerpiece, "O Death."  It is a piece that she seems singularly fixated upon, as it appears in live form on both of her new releases in addition to its previous appearance on 2008's Guilty Guilty Guilty.  I suspect it is exactly the kind of piece that separates the serious Diamanda fans from the more faint-hearted dabblers like myself, as its simple piano blues erupts something that sounds like an entire musical theater production or one-woman show condensed into a disorienting 10-minute tour de force of howling, shrieking, and ululating.  I truly do not know what to make of it, as the high points are absolutely face-melting, but it makes for a thoroughly unsettling and challenging listening experience as a whole (Galás even seems to be speaking in tongues at one point).  It feels embarrassingly lazy to observe that Diamanda sounds "possessed," but that is exactly how she sounds during the more unhinged and explosive moments of "O Death."
In theory, that demented freeform hurricane should be an impossible act to follow, but the coda of Johnny Paycheck’s "Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone to Kill" feels weirdly appropriate.  Naturally, it does not sound at all like the original, as Galás inventively transforms it from vaguely "outlaw country" territory into something resembling a rapturous gospel piece.  It also has an almost conversational tone in places, as if she is cheerfully explaining the liberating pleasures of murdering one's former lover  to a roomful of rapt (yet understandably somewhat confused) children.  After the harrowing eruption of "O Death," nothing could be more perversely welcome.
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Galás has made no secret of her love of Maria Callas, so it is fitting that her St. Thomas the Apostle performance opens with a dose of relatively pure opera in the form of her own adaptation of a text by Cesare Pavese.Although it roughly translates as "Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes," it is not nearly as terrifying as some of Galás's jazz standards, opting instead for a kind of ghostly beauty.  Much like All the Way, the Pavese piece and the seven other songs that follow all feature Galás alone at her piano, which suits the material just fine.  This album feels a bit more loose, improvised, tender, and informal though, as if I am listening in on Diamanda playing late at night in her living room after a couple glasses of wine (rather than listening to her channel an intense parade of murderous seductresses and spurned lovers).  That casual charm extends to the eclectic nature of the selections as well–though death is the unwavering theme, Galás effortlessly shifts languages and moods from song to song.  For example, "Anoixe Petra" sounds like a rousing Greek wake, while her cover of Albert Ayler's "Angels" sounds like a meandering gospel piece that intermittently erupts into atypically joyful upper-register vocal pyrotechnics.  It is nice to hear some major chords every once in a while, as darkness needs contrast to make its full impact.
After Ayler, Galás shifts to German, giving voice to a text by poet/radical Ferdinand Freiligrath, which is an intriguing journey through rumbling low-end piano flourishes, dissonant chords, tender lyricism, lovely ascending melodies, and a crescendo of blood-curdling banshee howls.  French poet Gérard de Nerval turns up to the party as well, as Diamanda transforms his ode to Artemis (the huntress and protector of womankind) into a snarling lament.  Apparently the French language is an especially fertile ground for musings on mortality, as a pair of Jacques Brel pieces make the cut as well ("Fernand" and "Amsterdam").  His chansons are an especially good fit for Galás's aesthetic, as their inherent melodrama and theatricality make her biting and snarling divergences a comparatively short trip up the intensity dial.  Brel's "Amsterdam" is especially delightful and spirited, as Diamanda seems to be channeling a boisterous, fast-talking prostitute and having a wonderful time doing it.  I daresay I would even describe it as "fun," albeit in a "macabre show tune" kind of way.  Less overtly fun is yet another incarnation of "O Death," which is the lengthy centerpiece of this album as well.  I definitely like this version a lot better than the one on All The Way though, as its freewheeling sassiness and cackling bluesiness is considerably less shrill than its sister version.  Of course, Galás still hits her share of unearthly peaks and bestial screeches and howls, but they feel more natural and ecstatic here.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I was actually at one of the two Harlem shows, I did not have particularly high expectations for At Saint Thomas The Apostle, as I generally find live albums extraneous and indulgent.  More importantly, watching Diamanda perform live is a singularly mesmerizing and profound experience–one that I knew could not possibly be approximated by a mere recording.  This album offers quite an appealing and surprisingly intimate consolation prize though, as Galás feels less like An Important Artist Creating Important Art and more like a charismatic creative supernova unselfconsciously and joyously burning through all of her favorite songs for a church full of devoted fans.  Naturally, Galás's more terrifying, intense, and iconic work will continue to be her legacy, but Saint Thomas the Apostle is probably the best entry point to her singularly uncompromising oeuvre that anyone could ever hope for…aside from, of course, attending one of her actual performances: anyone who can walk away from one of those unmoved is categorically dead inside.
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I have an unfortunate tendency to take Sarah Lipstate's work for granted, as if it is somehow not enough that she is one of the most distinctive and inventive solo guitarists currently active.  Part of that is her own fault, as she periodically produces work so beautiful and sublime that she transcends her role as guitarist and instead seems like one of the most compelling artists around.  Those are the moments that I am always chasing and I have not experienced one since the title piece on 2013's No Dreams.  Happily, Pink Sunset manages to floor me once more with "Deep Shelter."  There are a few other memorable moments on this solid and likeable album as well, but not quite enough to disabuse me of my belief that Lipstate is gradually accumulating the material for an absolutely stunning greatest hits album at a rate of one fresh masterpiece every few years.
Pink Sunset boldly opens with the aforementioned "Deep Shelter," which is an absolutely lush and gorgeous swirl of dreampop heaven.  Lipstate does absolutely everything right, chiseling a perfect gem of languorous shimmer, cool harmonized guitars, and delirious eruptions of striking melodies.  While it admittedly sets the bar impossibly high for the rest of the album, it also sets a compellingly eclectic template that yields intermittently wonderful results.  For one, Pink Sunset seems to be a compositional leap forward from the transitional-seeming Fantastic Planet, as Lipstate has now fully left the more abstract drone/soundscape aesthetic of her past behind in favor of more tightly structured "songs" with hooks.  As "Deep Shelter" shows, she undeniably has an impressive talent in that regard, but there is also something deeper and stranger going on in these songs than mere skilled songcraft: Lipstate seems to be a preternaturally gifted sonic magpie, casually appropriating tropes from eclectic and more difficult genres and seamlessly working them into her own Romantic pop concoctions.  Pink Sunset is littered with moments that sound like an alternate reality Cocteau Twins where Robin Guthrie was a massive prog, classical, and Iron Maiden fan.  Similarly, Lipstate deftly avoids the navel-gazing, indulgence, and melancholy that dog so much material in this vein, replacing mopery with cool confidence, clarity, and focus.  From a compositional standpoint, I love the tight structure, brisk pace, and complete lack of clutter, though a bit more snarl and grit would have been quite welcome.
"Deep Shelter" aside, Pink Sunset mostly feels like a gauzy, 4AD-damaged hall of mirrors, unfolding as a series of dreamy, delicate interludes that occasionally blossom into something with a bit more heft.  While it is easy to forget that Lipstate is primarily a solo guitarist with an experimental bent when she is at her best and most transcendent, Sunset is still unsurprisingly populated with a number of guitar-centric vignettes.  The title piece is one of the more striking works in that vein, as its gentle and pretty foundation of limpid arpeggios unexpectedly explodes into thick, distorted chords and a muted haze of dissonant and hallucinatory pedal-abuse.  I personally prefer some of the more adventurous later pieces on the album, however–particularly "Trails and Trials," which sounds a lot like Emeralds covering the baroque pop of Kate Bush.  Lipstate does an especially fine job with orchestration and balancing dynamics and textures that piece, embellishing her dense, distorted central melody with a vibrant backdrop of ringing arpeggios, complementary melodic motifs, and well-timed stabs of strings.  The brief and ghostly "Corridors" is yet another minor classic, as a subtly muted and minor key motif unfolds beneath a spectral haze of harmonics or feedback.  It has a very neo-classical feel, but intriguingly subverts that with a strong chorus and some wonderfully ragged-sounding string-bends.  The best part is definitely the spectral haze though, as "Corridors" is a master class in nuanced coloration and shifting mood.  The elegantly warped closer "Emergence" is yet another stand-out, weaving a woozy reverie from a disparate battery of alternately fat, artificial-sounding tones and rippling layers of fragility.
Trying to assess how Pink Sunset fits into Lipstate's oeuvre is a bit tricky, however.  On the hand, it feels like a major creative breakthrough and "Deep Shelter" is easily one of the finest Noveller songs ever recorded (and probably one of the finest songs anyone at all will release in 2017).  On the other hand, most of the album is merely pleasant and misstep-free and Lipstate's increasing shift towards meticulously crafted crystalline perfection is pulling her away from my personal aesthetic and closer to wider accessibility.  That is great for Lipstate, as catering to my taste would ensure a life of poverty and obscurity, but I still prefer more abstract and immersive earlier albums such as Glacial Glow.  That said, I am delighted that Lipstate is taking risks and restlessly evolving rather than repeating herself, especially since she is doing it so distinctively and with such an intuitive grasp of songcraft.  As such, Pink Sunset is both essential for fans and an appealing gateway for the curious, as it is a Noveller album like no other.
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I have historically had a complicated relationship with Michal Jacaszek's music, as I love his aesthetic and he consistently releases deeply immersive and intriguing albums, yet he has an uncanny knack for stylistic quirks that subjectively rub me the wrong way (harpsichords, a penchant for gloom and somberness, etc.).  Consequently, I was more or less just waiting around for an album to finally surface that was a bit more to my taste and KWIATY is that album. One one hand, Jacaszek mostly sticks to his familiar territory of dark, hiss-ravaged neo-classical fare, but the new twist is that he enlisted a trio of female vocalists to give voice to the metaphysical poetry of 17th century Englishman Robert Herrick.  While such a conceit admittedly sounds very arcane and high-concept on paper, it reveals itself to be quite beautiful in execution, often resembling an eerie, crackling, fractured, and otherworldly strain of dreampop.
One of the most appealing aspects of Michal Jacaszek's art, for me anyway, is how effortlessly pure and anachronistic his music seems.While he is ostensibly a modern classical composer, he crafts melancholy and Romantic chamber music in a way that suggests he is stylistically indifferent to the last few hundred years of trends. As if that were not enough, Jacaszek further blurs the lines of reality with an elegant patina of hiss and distortion and artful infusions of field recordings. In the realm of texture, Jacaszek is a true master, bringing his groaning strings and simple melodies to vibrant life with a mixture of visceral graininess, ghostly afterimages, tape distress, and decay.He also has an impressive intuitive talent for spacious, uncluttered arrangements, conveying a lot with a minimum of moving parts.At his best, Jacaszek essentially sounds like a broken music box playing in a haunted snowglobe.My only real sticking point is how monochromatically bleak that vision can be, which is why KWIATY is such a revelation: with vocalist Hania Malarowska, Jacaszek has found the ideal foil for transforming his deep melancholy into something darkly sensual.Jacaszek has not so much changed as simply found the one piece that was naggingly missing from his otherwise perfect puzzle. While Malarowska is the album's clear centerpiece, she is also joined by Joasia Sobowiec-Jamioł and Natalia Grzebała to form a trio of ghostly Sirens cooing through the crackling, psychotropic murk of Jacaszek’s otherworldly dream.
Amusingly, I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out who Malarowska’s vocals called to mind, before finally realizing that it was Sade.That goes a long way towards explaining why gorgeous pieces like "To Perenna" sound like they were recorded by an erotic ghost on a windsweptbeach.Curiously, despite his hazy and diffuse aesthetic and the fact that he is borrowing his words from a 17th century poet, Jacaszek proves to be an astonishingly great songwriter.If "To Perenna" had been handed to a producer less unswervingly focused on evoking a bleary, hallucinatory, and achingly romanticpast, it is not inconceivable that it could have been a soulful R&B smash.  "To Violets" is another favorite of mine, as it boasts similarly strong melodies and sensuous vocals, as well as an absolute beautiful theme that sounds like a warbling gramophone recording of an angelic chorus.  As for the rest of the album, Jacaszek and company occassionally allow themselves to blossom again into fully formed song ("kwiaty" translates as "flowers," incidentally), but the primary emphasis is upon mood and atmosphere.KWIATY does not feel like a suite of discrete and structured songs so much as it feels like mysterious and flickering transmission from a lovesick apparition from an imagined past.The melodies and arrangements are wonderful, but they are largely secondary to the immersive and transcendent illusion that Jacaszek is expertly weaving.If I found an mysterious old Victrola record in the dusty attic of a ruined mansion and a sexy revenant seemed to be bleeding into a cracking, hissing, and distressed recording of a string ensemble, the last things on my mind would be chord changes and harmonies.  The same is true of KWIATY.
The sole wobble in Jacaszek's otherwise perfect vision comes near the end of the album with the duet "To Blossoms," as the straightforward acoustic guitar, male-female duel vocals, and subtle electronic bloops make it feel like a cover of a Trembling Blue Stars song rather than a half-remembered dream of an enigmatic and beautiful otherworldly tableaux.  Admittedly, it is a perfectly fine and well-crafted song, but it is a bit too structured and conspicuously contemporary to avoid breaking through the sustained soft-focus unreality that wonderfully pervades the rest of the album.Aside from that, I love absolutely everything about KWIATY, as Jacaszek displays an unerring gift for mood, dynamics, melody, texture, nuance, depth, and mystery.This album is a sublime masterpiece, revealing just enough soul and exquisite melody at the surface to instantly lure me in, but elegantly obscuring an ocean of unknown depth beneath.
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I am only a casual Wolf Eyes fan, so the bulk of their endless tide of releases passes by me unnoticed.  Every couple of years, however, they unleash something big to remind everyone that they are just as relevant as ever and continuing to tirelessly evolve.  The latest salvo in that vein is ostensibly this one, which also happens to be the inaugural release for the band's new Lower Floor Music imprint.  Stylistically, the two bookend pieces share a lot of common ground with the better moments of 2013's No Answer : Lower Floors, eschewing noise for something resembling deconstructed rock music that has gone sick and wrong.  When it sticks to that template, Undertow is quite good, but the more abstract and sketchlike material separating its two highlights makes for a somewhat uneven whole.
There are a lot of esoteric strains of underground music colliding on Undertow's opening title piece, but none of them feels particularly like noise.  That is neither a good nor bad thing, but James Baljo-era Wolf Eyes can seem an awful lot like a rock band (or at least a "trip metal" band, as they would describe themselves).  Structurally, "Undertow" is basically just a simple and slow stoner metal bass line endlessly repeated beneath Nate Young's deadpan, misanthropic, and existential dread-filled monologue ("I count every deceit as they repeat like receipts of doom").  There is some distinctively un-rock activity happening in the periphery, however, like subtly buzzing electronics and reverb-soaked howls from John Olson’s self-built wind instruments.  Still, for the most part, the piece essentially feels like a skeletal Black Sabbath jamming with a terminally depressed beat poet and a heroin-impaired saxophonist.  That is perhaps not an aesthetic that many are clamoring to replicate, but it works just fine for Wolf Eyes: though Young’s vocals probably verge on (possibly intended) self-parody, their blasé cool fits well with the broken, stuck-in-neutral feel of the groove.  Also, in a weird way, the piece is a lot hookier than most of Wolf Eyes' deconstruction-happy contemporaries such as The Dead C.  It is almost like they could casually toss off catchy songs if they felt like it, but are not particularly happy about it at all.
Of course, the next three pieces show that Wolf Eyes are even more adept at tossing off non-catchy non-songs.  Clocking in under two minutes, "Laughing Tides" is little more than a forgettable interlude of strangled whines and creaking strings over a random-sounding backdrop of whooshes and squelches. It is hard to believe that they did not have anything stronger that they could have included instead, but it is probably just a space-filler necessitated by the vinyl format.  Still, the following "Texas" is roughly more of the same, though it is twice as long and at least throws in an eerie flute-like melody.  It kind of sounds like a rotting orchestra of the undead tuning up for a performance that never starts.  Remarkably, the perplexing trend of false-starts continues unabated with "Empty Island," which sounds like a Jamaican dub producer who willfully set out to do everything as wrongly as possible: the groove is sluggish and gutted, the percussion is non-existent, and Olson’s ghostly haze of horns occasionally duels with Baljo's anachronistic metal-damaged noodling and shredding.  Exasperatingly, none of those pieces are particularly derivative, uninspired, or indicative of a lack of vision.  Rather, they all just kind of stop before developing into anything substantial enough to be rewarding.
Thankfully, that trend is reversed with the closing epic "Thirteen," which gamely revisits the slow-motion groove and spoken-word aesthetic of "Undertow," but stretches out for almost 14 minutes.  Instead of a strong bass line this time around, there is a wobbly and gnarled repeating chord, yet otherwise the template is the same.  The sole significant difference is merely that Olson, Young, and Baljo actually hang around long enough to use their groove as a jumping off point into something more.  In this case, the "something more" is increasingly distorted and warped vocals and an almost free-jazz degree of howling and echoing horns from Olson.  Disorientingly, Baljo sometimes seems like he is playing a completely different song when he is not laying down murky slabs of power chord sludge, which adds nicely to the escalating sense of wrongness and disquiet.  At its zenith, it sounds an awful lot like a flock of drugged geese circling a malfunctioning tape player, an aesthetic I very much enjoy.  In fact, pieces like "Thirteen" are exactly why I keep buying Wolf Eyes albums.  I just wish there were more of them here.  In fact, I wish there was more of anything here, as Undertow is under half an hour long and almost half of it feels like filler thrown together in an afternoon.  I suppose that is the fundamental caveat with Wolf Eyes though:  they could not have churned out 300 releases if they made a habit of lingering on ideas long enough to bring out their full potential.  As a fan, my expectation is merely that an occasional gem will sometimes surface from the endless messy torrent spewing forth from Wolf Eyes’ bleak and disturbed collective psyche.  With "Thirteen" at least, they have added one more to the pile.
 
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I truly never know quite what to expect from erstwhile Starving Weirdo Brian Pyle, as his Ensemble Economique project has covered plenty of shifting territory with varying results over the last decade.  His albums are certainly always intriguing and often deliciously aberrant, but I have not been truly knocked sideways since 2011's Crossing The Path, By Torchlight.  With In Silhouette, his 12th album, Pyle steps away from his recent forays into darkwave to plunge back into the unapologetically hallucinatory and warped terrain that I love best.  He has not entirely jettisoned his dark pop instructs though, as In Silhouette's deep psychedelia is enhanced by host of whispering and mysterious female voices.  While not every piece quite captures Pyle at his zenith, In Silhouette is cinematic in the best sense of the word, as it feels like being plunged completely (and uncomfortably) into a noirish and Lynchian world of shadow, menace, and dark sexuality.
The opening epic "In the Clear Blue Water of Memory" instantly makes it clear that In Silhouette is going to be quite an unnerving, sinister, and challenging mindfuck of an album.  Joined by Editions Mego artist Jung an Tagen, Pyle unleashes a roiling miasma of breathy, backwards female voices; ghostly "horror movie" choral touches; evocative field recordings; and nervously stuttering and skittering synthesizers.  Stretching out for over 20 minutes, "Clear Blue Water" is a complexly layered and shifting haze of eerie moods and sputtering textures that often sounds like a séance being fitfully drowned out by an apocalyptic plague of extra-dimensional crickets. Other times, it feels like a bad dream set in a vast empty factory or deserted boatyard.  In either case, there is no respite to Pyle's gleefully blackened onslaught of bad vibes.  If the piece has a fault, it is only that Pyle is content to amorphously drift and undulate for the duration rather than ever blossoming into something more structured or melodic.  It still works though, as there is a compelling dynamic arc in its endless ebb and flow and a truly bewildering amount of activity.  It somehow manages to be simultaneously nerve-jangling and completely immersive, which is quite a tricky feat to pull off.  I am very much the target demographic for disturbing uneasy listening in this vein, of course, but an entire album of it would be absolutely exhausting and overwhelming, so I was somewhat relieved that the remaining four pieces dialed back the deranged intensity a bit.  Visiting a nightmare is always preferable to living in one.
Actually, the following "Battle Cry" might be even more malicious in intent, but it is at least mercifully shorter.  Built upon a thick and menacing synth motif and a tense backdrop of howling winds, ominous crackling, and dissonant howling harmonies, it sounds like it belongs over the slowly panning opening shot of an absolutely soul-scorching horror film.  Curiously, "Gonna Get Right With God" sounds like a thinly veiled variation on the exact same motif, but with a somewhat different mood due to the emphasis on an echoing female voice (French?) and the muted, erratic pulse of a drum machine.  In a way, Pyle seems to be embracing a very post-melody aesthetic, as large swaths of In Silhouette feel like the fruit of a monomaniacal obsession with the same one or two chords.  Those chords admittedly sound impossibly dense and harmonically rich, so I cannot blame him–especially since their menacing foundation is so skillfully embellished with swelling, flanging, and undulating dynamics and dissonant harmonies.  Appropriately, however, "I Can See The Light" breaks the spell to let in a small amount of light in the form of an ascending flute-like theme.  Naturally, a dark undercurrent remains, but it is more of a melancholy and mysterious darkness than a "a John Carpenter soundtrack has come to life and is standing over my bed with butcher knife" darkness.  Given the surrounding material, I think that counts as a respite.  The closing "You in the Horizon"is also a bit of a comparative oasis, as Pyle grabs the microphone to accompany more snatches of French femme fatale movie dialogue.  Given that there is singing, a groove, and a structured chord progression, it is tempting to say that it is an actual song, but it is the type of blurred, drugged, and creepily sexy song that might be emanating from a radio in an abandoned car in Twin Peaks at 3am.
With In Silhouette, I have finally come to grasp that Brian Pyle is one of the most singular and truly bizarre artists currently active in the experimental music milieu.  The perverse dearth of actual melodic foundation on this album is quite radical, as is how much Pyle is able to do with so little.  He seems to be a minimalist composer sharing the same body as a maximalist producer, as it certainly feels like he just took maybe one strong melody and a couple of cool chords and painstaking built them up into a sustained psychosexual plunge into a rabbit hole of hallucinatory horror.  As such, I have some minor mixed feelings about this album, as I have certainly heard stronger music from Pyle before, but In Silhouette is such a striking vision coupled with such a tour de force of production genius that it almost renders the actual music at the core irrelevant.  In fact, I think this might be an uncategorizable outsider masterpiece of some kind: I do not necessarily love it from start to finish (it is far too prickly), but there is nothing else quite like it and it certainly leaves one hell of a strong impression.
- In The Clear Blue Waters of Memory
- Gonna Get Right With God, Right After This Next Cigarette
- You in the Horizon
 
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WRITTEN AND RECORDED
August 31st to Dec. 6th, 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments, her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper, looking out the same window.
Why share this much? Why open up like this? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? Our little family bubble was so sacred for so long. We carefully held it behind a curtain of privacy when we’d go out and do our art and music selves, too special to share, especially in our hyper-shared imbalanced times. Then we had a baby and this barrier felt even more important. (I still don’t want to tell you our daughter’s name.) Then in May 2015 they told us Geneviève had a surprise bad cancer, advanced pancreatic, and the ground opened up. What matters now? we thought. Then on July 9th 2016 she died at home and I belonged to nobody anymore. My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea leftover from a more self-indulgent time before I was a hospital-driver, a caregiver, a child-raiser, a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known.
"Death Is Real" could be the name of this album. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That's why.
- Phil Elverum
Dec. 11th, 2016
Anacortes
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Last year, Mary Lattimore's At The Dam marked a watershed moment for the classically trained harpist. While over the past decade she had recorded and performed with notable talents like Kurt Vile, Sharon Van Etten, Steve Gunn, Jarvis Cocker, Meg Baird, and Thurston Moore, Mary’s acclaimed third solo full-length (her first long-player for Ghostly International) saw her own music deservedly embraced by a wider audience. It was certainly no small feat coming from a beguiling album of improvised, processed harp pieces that had been recorded during stops along a road trip across America – all funded by an esteemed fellowship that she received from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Out April 14 on cassette and digital, Collected Pieces is a gorgeous counterpart to At The Dam, featuring six tracks previously available only as a download and/or streaming off Mary's Bandcamp and SoundCloud pages. Recorded at her old home in Philadelphia between 2011 and 2016 and mixed by longtime collaborator Jeff Zeigler, Mary is reflective when describing this album-length compilation. “It’s me opening a box filled with 12 years worth of memories made while living there, with lots of beauty and sorrow, as well as total sunshine, blurriness, and some darkness all housed within.”
Throughout Collected Pieces, she conjures a mesmerizing range of colors and emotions from her 47-string Lyon & Healy harp along with subtle augmentations of effects and processed electronics. Dedicated to Mary’s favorite beach town, Ship Bottom, NJ, 10-and-a-half-minute opener "Wawa By The Ocean" gently unfolds like a daydream, with the song’s delicate refrain slowly dissolving into a light wash of delayed plucks and sun-kissed countermelodies. "We Just Found Out She Died," however, takes a more celestial turn as her airy vocal harmonies shimmer underneath the meditative flutter of her harp. (The chimeric atmosphere is befitting of the song’s inspiration: Twin Peaks actress Margaret Lanterman, a/k/a the Log Lady, who sadly passed away shortly after Mary had seen her speak at a library in Philadelphia.) From the sweet yearn of "The Warm Shoulder" to the flickering drift of "Your Glossy Camry," Mary’s music is all at once intimate and inviting as she effortlessly balances her exquisite sense of melodicism with an inventive ear for experimentation.
"It's only in looking back that you realize how impermanent stuff always was, even though 12 years felt really long,"Mary explains. "The songs here have always been really special to me, and more so after bringing together these scraps and odes to memories of a burning motel, people from high school who are old now, or that Wawa convenience store on the Jersey shoreline which will probably always be there but is now so far away."
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Hundreds of releases and countless live performances littered the path that lead to 2012's Modern Jester, artist Aaron Dilloway's last major artistic statement as a solo artist and one his most well received documents since leaving Wolf Eyes, the prolific noise troupe that Dilloway co-founded in the late '90s with musician Nate Young. Within these pieces, we find a surreal treasure hunt that helps guide us through Dilloway’s obsessions, neurosis and influences while also developing a splintered maturity of someone with great complexity stumbling through a well thought-out, yet totally unplanned "long game" of an artistic career. Since then, Dilloway has been busy collaborating with the likes of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Jason Lescalleet, releasing various short form sketches and running his retail outpost, Hanson Records, while slowly working on his next major album, The Gag File.
Introducing itself with the cover image of a posed dummy ready for his yearbook portraiture, The Gag File pick up right where Modern Jester left off; its identity is directly tied to an absurdly uncomfortable head shot that stays permanently fixed in the listener’s mind whenever the album is summoned. The opening track, "Ghost," sets the heartbeat for the record. A rogue pulse that becomes lost in a disjointed, trapdoor loop but becomes even more unorthodox as Dilloway introduces himself through parable of jumbled, confused vocals and phrasing. Past this point, nothing in this record is typical or expected.
Sudden, crude cuts from one piece to another and psychotic jumps in fidelity make one rethink the ideas of confusion and desperation as something more abstract rather than visceral. "Karaoke with Cal" and "It's Not Alright" have an intoxicated sense of depression, taking in the world’s problems and regurgitating them back in hopes of finding some enjoyment. That enjoyment seems to be found in the non-music aspect of side B’s long form party field recording, that loops in on itself making sure you never really know when the party begins or ends, regardless of one partygoers claim.
Nods to Dilloway's recent live performances have been unusually captured as the song "Inhuman Form Reflected" doubles as a sound portrait of the artist’s internal struggle with hysteria, but suddenly breaks away from a recorded song into an accidental segue way of someone on the edge. Most hallmarks of Dilloway's signature are seemingly here but not firmly imprinted into the recording. Instead, Dilloway used his methods of vocal manipulation and frenzied reference to tell a completely foreign narrative, one that subjects himself to naked uncertainty, audible anxiety and discourse.
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UK shoegaze pioneers Slowdive are pleased to announce their self-titled fourth album, out May 5th via Dead Oceans, and the beautifully understated new single, "Sugar For The Pill," which follows the release of "Star Roving."
Slowdive’s stargazing alchemy is set to further entrance the faithful while beguiling a legion of fresh ears. These eight new tracks, simultaneously expansive and the band’s most direct material to date, deftly swerve away from any "trip down memory lane." They were birthed at the band’s talismanic Oxfordshire haunt, The Courtyard, and mixed at Los Angeles'famed Sunset Sound by Chris Coady (Beach House). Throughout, the group dynamic was all-important.
"When you’re in a band and you do three records, there’s a continuous flow and a development. For us, that flow re-started with us playing live again and that has continued into the record," notes principle songwriter Neil Halstead.
The video for “Sugar For The Pill,” product by in/out, takes its inspiration from the Slowdive album artwork, which is itself a still from Harry Smith’s cult classic animation Heaven and Earth Magic – the vast spiritual narrative that has influenced so many artists since it was originally released back in 1957.
Slowdive is Neil Halstead (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Christian Savill (guitar), Nick Chaplin (bass), Rachel Goswell (vocals) and Simon Scott (drums, electronics). Their debut album, Just For A Day, was released in 1991 by Creation Records, and was followed by the band’s now revered 1993 album Souvlaki and 1995’s Pygmalion before they disbanded. In the 22 years of their virtual disappearance, compilation albums have been released and the core members of the group have gone on to join other musical endeavors. In 2014, the band announced that they’d reunited and more new music would follow.
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For their first vinyl release, Rafael Femiano (guitars and electronics) and Felipe Pavon (drums and percussion) pulled out all of the stops on the most recent Oikos release. In this case, that metaphor may be a bit of a misnomer, since most of The Great Upheaval is much more about mood and ambience than full bore explosions of sound, although those feature here as well. The tasteful balance of the two, and the impeccable compositional structures, results in an album that is gripping in its intentional bleakness.
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Admittedly, it is hard to listen to the opening moments of "Ravaged, Burned" without being reminded of Earth’s 21st century output.Oikos does a similarly excellent job at capturing that desolate Western expanse, like a Morricone soundtrack stripped to its barest essentials.However, it is really only the one part of atmosphere where the two seem similar.Oikos instead works more in change and variation, adding more dissonant and varied sounds to the mix in comparison, creating an effect akin to a camera shot widening to show the windswept dustbowl is not in the past, but a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the near future.
As the aforementioned "Ravaged, Burned" slowly expands with cymbal washes and clean guitar tones, the transition into the slow burning darkness of "Menace and Portent" (with David Cordero on additional guitar and synthesizer and Raul Perez on bass) strengthens both pieces.The previously clean tones take on more of a dissonant, vibrating quality, with an underlying sense of menace growing by the minute.The piece finally erupts with a satisfying distorted guitar chug and heavy, pounding drums that beautifully contrast the uneasy peace that preceded it.  The somewhat brief interlude "Joik" makes for a nice transition.The resonating and echoing guitar is blended with an all too brief passage of snappy rhythm (by High Aura’d’s John Kolodij), hinting at a more noise rock sound that never comes.Instead, the rhythms just as quickly fade out, a fleeting bit of uptempo sounds that instead fall back to the ambient desolation that is its own unique form of beautiful, with additional voices by Maria Gil.
This blends nicely into the other side's 10 minute "Marrow of Prayer," at first a lush sea of guitar tone that nicely expands with time.Even with its slightly sinister mood, there is a pleasant and beautiful sound to it.As the piece goes on, the light begins to fade and the mood turns bleaker, with the band adding in more dissonant layers of guitar (with additional contributions by Juan G. Acosta).What at first sounds like simple guitar drone reveals itself to be something much more complex; a contrast that becomes the piece’s strongest facet.The transition into the concluding "Arch" has Oikos continuing the same mood and space, but the subtle addition of drums is an exceptional touch.The rhythms are slid in carefully, and never do they upset the mood generated by the guitars.Finally, after the swell of bowed contrabass sounds (by Marco Serrato), the album ends on a weird dying motor type noise, a fitting conclusion for a sound that is so balanced between natural and man-made destruction and decay.
One of the greatest assets of The Great Upheaval is its mood and variation.Femiano, Pavon, and the guest artists do an amazing job at capturing the bleak emptiness of a wasteland and the decay surrounding it.But there is more to here than just mood, of course.Memorable melodies and rhythms appear all throughout, making for a strong musical counterpoint to the imaginary landscapes Oikos creates via their sound.The palpable desolation just makes for an additional layer to an already exceptional album.
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His last major release, Samoobrona (with Lukáš Jiřička) may have had Piotrowicz trying something rather different by scoring a radio play, but Walser is a step back into the conventional album format, even if it was originally intended as a score for the film of the same title. However, that motivation to try new things as far as instrumentation and composition goes (something that has been a distinct facet of his recent works) is not lost here. Electric and acoustic instruments blend together, making for perhaps his most diverse and complex work to date.
The dense synthesizer opening on "Oleh Rami Pohon" is appropriately dramatic, with a heavy arrangement that then is mixed perfectly with bowed double bass strings.Robert layers the electronics expertly, and with the addition of some rhythmic bits, makes for a complex piece of music that nicely vacillates between harsh darkness and pastoral spaces.The drama does not relent into the subsequent "Tingal," with its introduction of booming war drums and complex synthesizer passages.The unrelenting martial beat does not relent, while Piotrowicz takes the electronics into chaotic, at times frightening passages of sound.
The forceful rhythms reappear on "Utara," with additional percussive bits thrown in.The pounding drums, buzzing strings, and other bits come together very well, resulting in a piece of music that is more of an emphasis on the strings and percussion when compared to the electronics.Overall though, there is a nice creepy moodiness (or moody creepiness) that pervades the piece.The brief "Elok Pada Masa" is more of a transitional passage:the ominous hums are offset by lighter sounds, each of which slide in and out to keep things dynamic.
Things are not quite as dark for the entire record though."Automatu" opens with lighter, shimmering wind chime ambience that gives a more pleasant mood overall.However, the foundation of churning electronics low in the mix and the subtle addition of what sounds like heavily treated human voice keep a distinct creepiness to the sound overall.The concluding "Dimana" is more open and spacious, keeping the dark elements via a low frequency drone with abrupt swells and drops.The dynamic is less sustained and more erratic, with the occasional outburst of piano keeping this weird.The piano sound itself becomes stranger and less conventional sounding as it goes on, ending the record on a strong, if idiosyncratic note.
While I will always associate Robert Piotrowicz's output with his work for modular synthesizers, Walser is yet another step away from that and instead into more varied and complex composition.One of his darkest releases to date, however, his ear for diversity in sound ensures that it never becomes too mundane, and is yet another impressive entry in his already impressive body of work.Considering it was initially created in 5.1 surround, however, I wish there would have been an opportunity to hear it in that format though.
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