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Swans' guitarist Norman Westberg’s second solo release for the increasingly essential Hallow Ground label continues the temporally disorienting 2016 hot streak begun with MRI (which was recorded at least four years ago).  Though there is a fairly wide gulf separating the two recordings time-wise, they both stand apart from some of Westberg’s other solo work by effectively balancing his warm and dreamlike guitar-drone tendencies with the added heft and menace of well-placed dissonance.  In short, this is yet another wonderful album.
Like most recent Westberg releases, The All Most Quiet consists of two long-form pieces of similar lengths.  The first side of the record is devoted to the title piece, which opens with a stark and ominous thrum.  As the piece progresses, however, ripples of obsessively repeating loops begin to percolate though the foundational drone.  The most immediately obvious impact is textural and dynamic, as the loops take over the foreground and weave an elegantly blurred and gently pulsing tapestry.  The piece gets quite a bit more compelling, however, once Westberg begins to play with harmony, as unexpected dissonances slowly blossom and dissipate.  Listened to casually, "The All Most Quiet" definitely works as a very likeable foray into shimmering ambient drone with some passing dark clouds, but its true depth does not reveal itself without some serious attention to detail: Westberg's unique genius as a solo artist is very much an understated and deeply nuanced phenomenon.  While he works within fairly familiar stylistic terrain in a larger sense, much of Westberg’s most impressive artistry tends to lie either in the periphery or just under the surface.  In this case, my favorite moments are almost exclusively small-scale touches like the way loops slowly fall out of phase with one another or the way he uses delay to leave hazy afterimages that mass together.
The second side’s "Sound 2" is considerably less subtle with its dissonance, opening with a very insistent and somewhat shrill alarm-like loop that Westberg gradually transforms with the addition of vibrato and a churning undercurrent.  That "alarm" motif turns out to be the piece’s primary foundation throughout, but Westberg takes it in a number of unexpected and ambitious directions, as it sounds completely disembodied from its surroundings at one point, then is later enveloped by a gorgeously rich and sinister web of ugly, pulsing harmonies.  The overall mood is surprisingly fluid as well, as "Sound 2" dips its toes into quasi-industrial territory, menacingly gnarled harmonies, and hallucinatory otherworldliness before resolving into a complexly layered and lushly oceanic interlude of rippling piano-like tones.  Naturally, there is a lot going on at the microcosmic level, but "Sound 2" offers considerably more overt appeal than its more static predecessor, as its many transformations are all effective and intriguing.  Also, it gets remarkably heavy at times.  That said, however, the best parts still tend to lie in the details, particularly in how Westberg makes notes cohere into a sickly swarm of horror, then allows the dissonance to almost invisibly dissipate until there is no trace of darkness to be found at all.  I was also impressed at how "Sound 2" feels so epic, yet is so beautifully condensed.  In lesser hands, it would take an entire album to get from the opening to the closing of this piece, but Westberg does not waste a single second or allow any single movement to overstay its welcome.  That is an impressive achievement on its own, but the fact that he makes it all feel so natural and unhurried makes it doubly so.
Amusingly, I was taken aback by how wonderful MRI was when it when it was reissued by Room40 earlier this year and I am now taken aback yet again by the greatness of The All Most Quiet.  While both albums scale very similar heights, this latest release is the more uniformly strong of the two.  There is not a misstep or lull anywhere to be found here.  Also, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (or a loop-based solo guitar performance), The All Most Quiet reaffirms everything that I have already observed about Westberg's relation to the modern classical/minimalist tradition.  Granted, Westberg is just a guy alone in his room with a guitar and a bunch of pedals and I suspect a lot of what he does is improvised and intuitive, which is certainly very different than composing for an orchestra.  The differing paths do not make the end result any less impressive though.  In a broader sense, Westberg’s grasp of harmony and dynamics places his work at a level far beyond that of just about anyone else working in the drone and guitar improv spheres: Norman Westberg is basically the Morton Feldman of solo guitarists (albeit considerably more accessible than that intended compliment would imply).
 
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The Legendary Pink Dots have been in the midst of a creative renaissance for years now, fitfully releasing some of the finest work of their career amidst the unending and distracting tide of solo projects, reissues, live albums, and archival discoveries.  The lion's share of Edward Ka-Spel's best ideas, however, have definitely been winding up in LPD's more abstract and experimental work.  I am personally perfectly fine with that, as that is the side of the Dots that I have always preferred anyway.  I suspect that most longtime fans were initially drawn to the band by their songs though and they have presumably been suffering through quite a long dry spell in that regard.  Pages of Aquarius is an album for them, as it is a solid, concise, and hook-heavy collection of industrial-tinged songs that harken back to the Dots of earlier times.  In fact, if I did not know better, I would have guessed that this album was recorded in the early '90s.  I am not sure if that is necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, but there are a definitely a handful of instant classics here regardless.
For better or worse, the opening "Mirror, Mirror" is a near-perfect song that sets an almost impossibly high bar for the rest of the album.  While the distorted power chords definitely feel like a retro-throwback of sorts, the band is nevertheless at the height of their talents, as Edward Ka-Spel's lyrics are wry and biting; his melodies are strong; the clattering drum programming is unconventional and dynamic; and the more psychedelic touches build the song to a crescendo rather than derailing its momentum.  As far as hookiness is concerned, "Mirror" is Aquarius's pop zenith and sets the template that most of the following songs try to follow.  They may not always succeed, but they all at least fulfill some role in unfolding whatever cryptic narrative arc Ka-Spel has in mind and offer some scattered delights along the way.  While the album's lyrical content seems to have a loose and somewhat inscrutable astrological/techno-dystopian theme, the overall thread linking these eight pieces together musically is quite a bit clearer, as there is a definite formula of propulsive drum programming, buzzing synthesizers, memorable hooks, and comparatively tight songcraft running throughout Aquarius…at least for a while, anyway.  Things definitely get quite a bit more abstract near the album’s end.  The star of the show is largely the drum programming though, which simultaneously calls to mind the poppier strains of '90s industrial while still being lively and unusual enough to elevate the surrounding material.  The rolling sex groove of "D-Train" is admittedly a bit much (and certainly does not benefit from an interlude of proggy bombast), but the vaguely Latin rhythm in "The Greatest Story Ever Told" is great and the deeply wrong-sounding lounge groove of "Touching the Forelock" is even more striking.
Of course, the problem is that there are initially not many occasions besides "Mirror, Mirror" in which everything is going well at once.  For example, a few songs are derailed by maddeningly insistent sing-song melodies that resemble nursery rhymes ("The Greatest Story" is heavily indebted to "The Alphabet Song").  Elsewhere, Ka-Spel errs on the side of shrillness or the band lets their more indulgent psychedelic impulses overstay their welcome a bit.  Nevertheless, Aquarius is ultimately a very listenable and enjoyable album due to its strong rhythmic component, even if it does not scale particularly impressive heights at times.  There are a handful of notable exceptions though, particularly the understated and slow-burning ballad "Prodigal," which boasts a great vocal melody, elegantly minimal synth accompaniment, and a dub-wise percussion backdrop of quietly escalating intensity.  I am not certain that it needed to stretch out for almost 9 minutes, but it never stops being great, so the extended duration is not a problem at all.  The extended three-part closer "Don't Go There/Page Aquarian/Jacob’s Ladder" is yet another highlight, weaving a simmering and complex groove of burbling percussion; buzzes and beeps; and fake brass before taking a deep and prolonged plunge into far more lysergic territory.  Again, all of it is great, but the fact that it sprawls out for over 17 minutes might make it a tough sell for those not fully indoctrinated into LPD’s fluid understanding of time.  To my ears, it is a journey well-worth taking, as Ka-Spel and company build to quite a wonderful crescendo of mind-warping abstraction mingled with interludes of haunting melody.  It is absolutely the perfect way to end the album, but the digital and 2xLP versions toss in yet another kaleidoscopic descent into the rabbit hole of Ka-Spel’s mind in form of the 20-minute "Weight of Water." Most fans will not want to miss that bonus track, as it is probably substantial enough to have warranted its own EP.
The only real flaw with Pages of Aquarius is just that there is just too damn much of it and that not all of it is wonderful.  The presents a problem when all of the best material occurs at the beginning and the end: Aquarius could have been an absolutely perfect album if all of the breezier pieces in the middle had been culled.  While almost every song in that lull boasts at least a few things I can appreciate, the cumulative effect is that it is kind of a slog to get to the part of the album where things start to truly catch fire.  There are certainly far worse problems to have than a massive surplus of fully formed ideas, however, so it would be a shame to dwell on that.  Rather, the important thing is that Pages of Aquarius boasts at least three absolutely stellar songs.  In fact, I would even say that it is easily one of the Dots’ finest albums, as they are certainly at the peak of both their songwriting and hallucinatory powers.  Granted, this absolutely wonderful single album has the editing misfortune of being buried within the format of an exasperatingly overstuffed double album, but that is nothing that an ambitious listener with access to iTunes cannot easily fix.
 
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This intriguing and wildly divergent pair of unreleased performances provides a fascinating window into the curious evolution of Hennix's singular artistry.  The newer and more listenable of the two is credited to her current Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage project and enlists a trio of vocalists to weave a mantric, quasi-devotional Eastern drone reverie for 80 minutes.  Far more intriguing, however, is the remarkably heavy and nerve-jangling 1976 performance from her earlier just-intonation ensemble, The Deontic Miracle.  In retrospect, it now makes perfect sense to me why it took so long for Catherine Christer Hennix's work to be fully appreciated, as there is absolutely no way that the world was ready for such radically dissonant drones forty years ago.
Live at Issue Project Room documents a 2014 live performance of a recent piece entitled "Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis." Characteristically, the piece is based upon just-intonation tuning, yet it curiously does not sound nearly as distinctive and revelatory as some of her other work.  The reason for that is quite simple: this is definitely not one of Hennix's more adventurous compositions.  Instead, it feels like a straight-up homage to the work of her former mentor, the late Hindustani vocalist/hugely influential supernova Pandit Pran Nath.  Stylistically, it will probably be almost indistinguishable from classical raga for most casual listeners, which understandably makes it a less than essential release, akin to watching a favorite punk band launch into a spirited set of Ramones' covers: it certainly has its pleasures, but it is not quite what drew me here.  In any case, the stars of this set are unquestionably vocalists Imam Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer, Amir Elsaffan and Amirtha Kidambi, who weave an impassioned spell of soulful chants and wails over a bed of buzzing tambura drones and brass swells for well over an hour.
It would be unfair and reductionist to say that this piece is entirely traditional, however, as Hennix and her ensemble definitely tweak the raga formula in a number of subtle and inventive ways.  The most immediately obvious is the addition of the aforementioned sustained brass tones, but attentive ears will also note the use of electronics to create hazy afterimages and layered vocal drones.  Also, in a compositional sense, the piece features a few surging undercurrents of menace that are not at all native to raga.  Equally impressive and unexpected are the occasional massed brass reveries and the passage where it all fleetingly dissipates into quivering feedback.  Judged solely on its own merits, this is certainly an impressively nuanced, sustained, and mesmerizing performance by a reverent ensemble that has clearly mastered the form and shaped it to meet their own deep drone impulses.  In the context of Hennix's larger oeuvre, however, it is merely a likeable minor release.  An album like The Electric Harpsichord sounds like nothing else on earth, whereas this just sounds like a particularly skilled channeling of an aesthetic with a long and storied lineage.  Granted, I probably would have been floored if I had witnessed the actual concert, but without the forced focus of a live performance, the lulls between the rare crescendos feel like legitimate lulls rather than the simmering potential that they are meant to be.
- Live at Issue Project Room (excerpt #1)
- Live at Issue Project Room (excerpt #2)
- Live at Issue Project Room (excerpt #3)
Conversely, the considerably smaller and more minimalist Deontic Miracle managed to sound like a sickly, quivering, and slow-burning nightmare with just a couple of Renaissance oboes (shawms?), a sheng (a Chinese pipe instrument), and some sine wave generators.  As anyone who has heard The Electric Harpsichord can attest, just-intonation lends itself remarkably well to tense, sinister-sounding dissonance and there is plenty of that here.  I can almost hear Werner Herzog in my head ranting about how the mathematical patterns found in nature are inherently corrupt and infernal and that humanity transformed entropy to harmonious order with the invention of Western tunings.  In any case, the titular central palace sounds like quite a singularly disquieting place.  Occasionally, a trilling melody will strike a tone that feels both ancient and regal, but the effect is invariably curdled by the dissonant harmonies that shift and swell beneath it.  Rather than being the central motif, the rare instances of exotic fluttering melody merely serve as fleeting oases in an unending, slow-motion tide of eerie discomfort.It is hard to say whether any of the darkness that I attribute to the piece is actually intentional, as it is subtitled "From 100 Model Subjects For Hegikan Roku," which seems to be an allusion to The Blue Cliff Record, a collection of Zen koans dating from the 12th century.  As such, it is highly unlikely to have menacing aspirations of any kind.  It certainly has teeth and gravitas to spare, but it could just as easily be inspired by water if the world is viewed with clear enough eyes and a deep enough understanding: people always think of gentle waves and sun-dappled lakes and not the dangerous undercurrents and elemental power.  In any case, it would take someone with considerably more command of Buddhist literature and teachings than me to figure out where Hennix was coming from or what she was hoping to convey.  If Central Palace Music has a flaw, it is merely that is deeply uneasy listening that could easily be considered one-dimensional by ears unsuited to sustained dissonance.  I would be very curious to know what the audience at Sweden's Moderna Museet thought of this performance, as it seems to like it probably would have had Merzbow-grade room-clearing power by mid-70s standards (few contemporary experiences could have been more outré than getting one's face melted by some Buddhists wielding ancient oboes).  To my ears, however, this is a deeply absorbing and visceral album that masterfully maintains an ebb and flow of deliciously shifting tension for 45 glorious minutes.  Happily, this is allegedly just the first entry in a planned series of archival Hennix releases from Important, so this is hopefully just the tip of a woefully underheard, harmonically visionary iceberg that will delight me for years.
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2016 version. Pressed using the original New Backwards plates approved by Peter Christopherson.
Scheduled to ready in July.
The New Backwards, created in 2007, was originally included in the Ape Of Naples box set released on Important in 2008 and was constructed by Peter Christopherson using material from the Backwards sessions, recorded in the early 90's for a planned release on Trent Reznor's Nothing Records label. The New Backwards, like Ape Of Naples, is an intense fan favorite and an essential part of of the Coil catalog.
More information can be found here.
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2016 version. Pressed using the original Ape Of Naples plates approved by Peter Christopherson.
Mailorder color copies are transparent red - the same color Peter Christopherson chose for the original Ape box set.
Scheduled to ready in July.
The Ape Of Naples is Coil's highly celebrated final album completed by Peter Christopherson following the tragic death of Jhonn Balance in 2004. Often noted for being a fan favorite, The Ape Of Naples uses Balance's final recordings and material recorded at Trent Reznor's studio in New Orleans to create a deep, heavy masterpiece.
This first printing of 2000 copies is packaged in a heavy duty case wrapped, tip-on style jacket with Ian Johnstone's original artwork coated in a custom spot gloss. Each LP is house in a printed inner sleeve and side D contains all three original etchings. Ape's lyrics are spread across the gatefold.
CD version is packaged in a heavy duty digipack with additional spot gloss printing to match the LP edition.
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Eight of the densest ambient and meditative music pieces since the dawn of music!! Sounds both extremely of this time, and of no time whatsoever. Monolithic and stark but extremely warm, intensely personal, and for every one in every which way. We are very happy to present to you “For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have),” an album by Huerco S.
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It is fair to say that Robert Crouch has injected some major conceptualism into A Gradual Accumulation of Ideas Becomes Truth. The overarching theme, outlined in the title, is how locations can develop histories that never existed based simply on someone's insistence they happened, a process akin to that of meaning devised by method of symbolic interactionism. That concept applies appropriately to the recorded material as well: a series of compositions based upon modular synthesis that largely avoids the now cliché bleeps and bloops and instead results in lush passages of electronics that form their own little worlds.
The conceptual linkage of the idea to the composition appears in the way in which Crouch created recordings via his modular synthesizer, but purposely only captured them via digital stereo recordings.Rather than making notes of the setup, he instead devised the patches and performance in such a way that he could not recreate them, and thus had only the final product to work with.Much like the architectural concept, he had only the final ideas to base the "truth" of this recording on.
The results of these ephemeral synth arrangements run the gamut from gentle to raw and significant ground in between."Hohle Fels" is one of the more placid pieces; beginning with gliding tones and light wisps of air painting a warm, open landscape.The tones slowly become lower register, casting a darker shadow, as the piece drifts to its conclusion.The warm tones are reprised on "Limbo Town (Croatoan)", but Crouch melds this darker drift with lightly crackling textures.The dissonance builds, and is eventually replaced with dour electronics that sound like a clearer passage from an old MB record.
"3184 Pullman, Costa Mesa, 1974" features Crouch working with more texture than tone.A bit of dissonant buzz and icy, frozen sheets of sound creep through like glaciers.Noises of what could pass for radio interference appear, with an almost rhythmic quality to them that contrasts the static and cold done very well."Bellona(Version 0-375-70668-2)" has Crouch employing a more overt bitcrusher-like effect to excellent effect.Its idiosyncratic distortion adds to the oddly intersecting layers.Eventually it is transitioned back to a rich, full-bodied sound, but for a period it sounds as if it is emanating from a deep, dank basement.
The concluding "Potbelly Hill" begins with what could almost be mistaken for a droning electric guitar, sustained and frequently processed.It is an extremely dynamic piece, even though it is largely built around that shimmering tone.Crouch builds the intensity and then scales it back, blending together abstraction with almost melodic passages, closing the album on a gentle, peaceful note.
There is an odd mood throughout A Gradual Accumulation…; a sound that is ominous, but never off-putting.Coupled with Crouch’s use of spacious tones and subtle layering, he definitely achieves that architectural effect he was aiming for.The depth and mood conveyed in each of these pieces results in a theme, or almost a field recording, for a space that may have never existed.
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David First has been active as a composer for a multitude of years, never allowing his work to draw too heavily from just one style or technique. Many of his pieces feature elements of everything from folk to noise to classical drone, and almost everything in between. Because of that, the self-imposed limitations of the four part Same Animal, Different Cages adds additional depth by stripping much away. Etudes for Acoustic Guitar is exactly as its title implies: 12 performances utilizing only a Guild D-40 acoustic guitar, and the final product is diverse, compelling, and at times challenging, but a resounding success.
The expected styles we in the Western world associate with First's instrument of choice can be heard throughout this record, unsurprisingly.Folksy strumming and country twangs appear throughout "Etude #4" and "Etude #7", respectively.However, it is First's approach to creating these overly familiar sounds that makes this record what it is.On the former, he applies just enough pitch bends (I assume by adjusting string tension) to result in an uneasy, "not right" feeling, defying what is expected of regarding tone and tuning.For "Etude #7", he applies the twang effect to an almost comical extreme, resulting in a cartoon-like "boing" spring sound that adds a bit of playfulness to the piece.
"Etude #15" features a blues like progression that, again, with his unconventional approach to pitch and tone results in a very unique sound due to its inherent off-kilter-ness.First is happy to defy expectations many times on this record, which is a significant asset.Scattered throughout the album as a whole are sitar-like tones and frequencies that present a definitively Eastern influence to the otherwise Western-centric instrument and overall sound.
The most fascinating moments are the ones in which his background as a minimalist composer (in the classical sense) shines through the most."Etude #17" is full of cyclic playing and bits of improvised percussion, blending guitar plucks and strums into hypnotically repetitive motifs.Appropriately, however, he changes up the tempo a few times with brilliantly jarring effect.For "Etude #5", First locks his playing into a buzzing, insistent throb that does not relent.The psycho-acoustic properties of this cause the sound to resemble anything but a guitar, and the buzzing of the strings themselves seems to become a different instrument.The final "Etude #31" comes from a similar compositional tactic, and by the end it sounds more like a pulsing synthesizer than a mere acoustic guitar.
Throughout Etudes for Acoustic Guitar, David First works in some clear bits of playfulness and at times difficult moments of sound.His use of the tuning pegs to bend the pitches of strings results in an occasionally uncomfortable edge, and his intentional shifting of rhythms and tempos mid-performance leads to things sounding a bit "off" at times.However, it is for these reasons that the album shines, being a rather unique, creative take on such a ubiquitous instrument.The remaining three "cages" he has chosen to lock himself into for the remainder of the series (synthesizer, harmonica, and sitar) are a diverse enough array that, given his idiosyncratic approach, should make for three more excellent records.
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I gave up trying to make sense of Nurse With Wound’s sprawling, self-cannibalistic, and absolutely inscrutable discography quite some time ago, but it definitely seems like it has been a very long time since Steven Stapleton has released anything that meets my not-particularly-stringent "this is an actual, legitimate new album" criteria (excellent Graham Bowers collaborations aside, of course).  Consequently, I was hoping Dark Fat would be the album to end NWW's long and perversely prolific silence (it was explicitly billed as "long-awaited," after all).  Alas, it is not exactly the bold new artistic statement that I was hoping for.  Instead, it is a sprawling collection of "live" recordings ranging from rehearsals to sound checks to actual gigs.  Despite its dubious hodge-podge origins, however, Dark Fat actually feels an awful lot like a studio album–quite a damn good one, even.  While longtime NWW fans will probably experience many flickers of recognition over the course of these two hours, Stapleton and his collaborators have so thoroughly reshaped and recontextualized everything that it all feels fresh, vibrant, inspired, and appropriately disorienting all over again.
The best way to summarize this album is to say that it feels like Steven Stapleton assembled an entire village-worth of like-minded artists for a very abstract and cavalier traipse through some of NWW’s greatest hits.  In a way, I suppose that is exactly what he did, but the twist is that it was a very fitful, slow-motion, and "revolving door" process that spanned six years.  In any case, aside from the core group of Stapleton, Colin Potter, Matt Waldron, and Andrew Liles, Dark Fat features a head-spinning roster of avant-garde luminaries in cameo roles ranging from Jacques Berrocal to Stephen O’Malley to James Blackshaw.  As if that were not enough, it also features some unwitting contributions from Klaus Schulze, Michael Schenker, and Cream’s Jack Bruce (if the roll call during the final untitled track is to be believed).  Clearly, even the deceased were clamoring to get in on this party.  Naturally, that deranged eclecticism extends to the instrumentation as well, covering everything from Hawaiian guitars to saxophones to cornets to smoke bombs.  Given all that, it is unsurprising that Dark Fat is a deliciously difficult album to wrap my head around, as it is massive, freewheeling, and kaleidoscopic in the extreme.
Lamentably, I do not have total recall of NWW's entire back catalog (does anyone?), so the only real "hit" that jumps out at me is "Rock’n Roll Station," which turns up twice in impressively mangled form.  On "Rock n Rolla 1959," the original groove is transformed by the addition of a laid-back bass line and a bizarre, stream-of-consciousness monologue from Jacques Berrocal.  Later, on the untitled album finale, the band reprises the song in more recognizable form, but stretches it out into a lazy 9-minute jam peppered with squalls of wah-wah guitar, hard rock shredding, stage banter, and bouts of extreme noise chaos.  If any one piece can be said to represent the entirety of Dark Fat in microcosmic form, it is undoubtedly that one, as a recurring theme throughout the album seems to be hallucinatory abstraction coupled with amusing nods to conventional rock tropes.  The lion’s share of the album, however, just feels like an amorphous and unpredictably evolving collage of everything NWW does best: ominous ambience, garbled vocal cut-ups, odd juxtapositions, snatches of old exotica records, and a host of electronic blurts and squiggles.  The sole significant exceptions are "Devil Dreamin’" and "Devil is this the Night," as Huffin’ Rag Blues vocalist Lynn Jackson returns for a satanic pair of blearily soulful noir-jazz numbers that actually feel like legitimate songs.  In addition to being the album’s finest moments, the Jackson pieces highlight yet another recurring theme that pervades this collection, which is inventively recalling the spirit of a previous NWW highlight rather than just explicitly reprising it.  Consequently, much of Dark Fat feels simultaneously new and familiar, like hearing some lost outtakes from a favorite album.
Naturally, a two-hour retrospective of soundchecks and rehearsals is going to have some faults, but Dark Fat actually has far fewer flaws than I would have expected.  The worst offenses are probably just that a few pieces overstay their welcome and that the band was definitely in a very self-indulgent mood at times.  Also, the variations on "Rock’n Roll Station" are not nearly as good as the original, though the intent was clearly aimed towards gleefully pulling it apart and détournement rather than something as banal as improvement.  A far more fascinating subject is how Stapleton inventively makes a virtue of Dark Fat’s flaws, as this seems like a totally phoned-in album on paper.  In reality, however, this eclectic, free-form grab-bag is actually one of the strongest NWW albums in recent memory.  It is not definitely not new for high art, low art, homage, surrealist lunacy, impish humor, and just general dicking around to all coexist on a Steven Stapleton album, but it rare for them all to do so quite this effectively and naturally.  Dark Fat is essentially an unexpectedly brilliant editing tour de force, masterfully distilling a large part of NWW’s bizarre and wide-ranging legacy into richly textured fever dream of an album.
 
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Given a little context, a mathematician could tell you what circles and landscapes have in common. They could at least begin by telling you that circles are musical. Traveling counterclockwise around a circle, it is possible to plot the contours of a sine wave on graph paper using a right triangle and a trigonometric ratio, something that is easier to see than to describe. At the same time, circularity is one of those compound notions that can’t be thought all at once. There’s the circularity of arguing in a circle and the circularity of spinning your wheels or going nowhere fast. There’s the circularity of "Frère Jacques" and "Three Blind Mice" and Pachelbel's Canon in D Major, the sense of arriving back at the beginning, and, given a little latitude, the circularity that implies incongruity, the problem of "squaring the circle." All of this to say that there is more to the title of the latest Jürg Frey solo piano collection than abstract poetry. Wrapped up in Philip Thomas’s firm and buoyant performances are ideas about translating music and arranging it and a compositional focus that foregrounds harmony, intentionality, and the voice of one of the world’s most familiar instruments.
Credit should be given to Simon Reynell and everyone involved for the interviews posted to the Another Timbre website with each new album. In addition to being excellent resources on their own, they serve as exceptional liner notes, offering different perspectives on the music without forcing one interpretation or another down anyone’s throat. Gil Sansón and Jürg Frey’s conversation around Circles and Landscapes is a perfect example. In just a few words they complicate the idea of a solo piano record by opening up the writing process behind it. Frey compares composing for piano to composing for stones and leaves and then quickly moves to the question of translating ideas to music. What happens when a thought or an emotion is written down in eighth notes and pitches? Do the formal elements of a piece command an idea or is it the other way around? Is classical harmony a valuable tool or a hindrance that drags music-making into the patterns of the past?
Frey answers those questions in some of the same ways many composers before him have: his music is glassy, pleasant, sometimes eerie, and evocative. It’s emotional, almost romantic, like Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes are, and his sounds sometimes speak as if they contained latent narratives. Other answers come in the form of impenetrable repetitions and minor variations, stretches of music that float in a sea of even strokes and uneven spaces. The formal elements behind the music are difficult to ascertain in many cases because the music itself sounds like it could be improvised. And yet the use of repetition and the way Frey often limits himself to dyads and triads are the hallmarks of a rational process, of a mind that is putting the sounds where they belong. In each of his pieces, Frey balances a delicate combination of intuition and interest.
Time and movement eventually come to the fore just as the title promises, or maybe it’s the lack of time and the lack of movement. Either way, Frey deceives with long passages of static chords and single notes, he deals in illusions by stretching phrases well past the limits of most memories, and he cuts happy resolutions out of the picture even as he conjures his most affecting melodies. Colors, moods, and senses become the dominant elements of the music as the ideas of progression and intent fall away into a drift of endlessly shifting notes.
As paradoxical as it seems, that drift feels like the subject of this collection. All of Frey’s "Circular Music" pieces are numbered, and there’s more than one or two of them extant. There’s "Extended Circular Music No. 2" and "Circular Music No. 5" and, if you look through the rest of his discography, at least six more pieces sharing the same or a similar name, and probably many more still without a recorded home. Some rotate like beacons turning in the night, others hammer away at the silence behind them like a chisel. What they share is more than a compositional sensibility. There’s something more in the way they turn on themselves, transforming from obscure and obtuse to open and permeable and then back again. Frey’s circular writing produces a music that turns dichotomies into spectra, ink and paper into space and time.
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Jon Mueller may be most often recognized as an exemplary and audacious percussionist, but even the most casual experience with his recent works makes clear the depth of his creativity. On this latest album, he draws influences from his other projects (Death Blues, Volcano Choir), as well as builds upon the stylistic developments of his other recent works, such as the heavy use of vocals, to reach an unparalleled depth and complexity of composition.
It is not hard to read into the multiple meanings of the title Tongues with regard to this record.Most evident is Mueller’s use of looped, wordless vocal passages as a primary source of sound, thus utilizing his own tongue as an instrument.While these two pieces are clearly propelled by his multidimensional drumming and percussion, the repeated vocals often take center stage.By extension, the wordless, otherworldly sounds created very much approximate the pseudo-religiousness of speaking in tongues.They are indecipherable but impassioned collections of sounds and syllables that, paired with the often primal and hypnotic drumming, come together as a religiously unspecific but fanatical bit of spirituality.
Tongues is a solo album, but Mueller is aided with contributions from Cory Allen (on harmonium, tanpura, and Amazonian ceremonial breath) and William Ryan Fritch (playing sarangi, and also a featured player on the last Death Blues recorded).The first half of the album, "How You Look When You're Not Looking" begins immediately with the faux tribal singing; layered and dense atop a simple, pounding drum line.Throughout its 15-minute duration, Mueller keeps the structure and sense of composition dynamic, layering vocal tracks while adding and subtracting instrumental passages.The balance is perfect, because he allows the different segments to repeat frequently enough to truly capture that hypnotic sense of ritualism, but never becoming too repetitive.Vocals change from sung ethnographic forgeries to deep, guttural chants.The second half especially begins taking on a lighter mood, buoyed by the more infectious handclap percussion that becomes more prominent.
The other half of the record, "What I Thought You Said" at first seems to show Mueller putting the focus of the composition back on his traditional percussive tendencies.First an interlocking passage of various chiming sounds, the piece is soon heavily defined by intense polyrhythmic percussion, with the initial vocal elements being dark but subtle accents.Soon, however, his voice appears again in the form of repeating mantras and pseudo-possessed babbling.Each element is a force to be reckoned with on its own, but blended together the piece becomes an intense, chaotic roar.Throughout its lengthy duration, however, the diversity in sound, instrumentation, and dynamics are entirely fascinating.
There are clear ties throughout Tongues to Jon Mueller's other most recent work:the cassette A Magnetic Center, which also featured him working with these same elements.While that release was no slouch at all, there seems to be a tighter focus here, almost a greater confidence in the inclusion of his voice in this style.Because of that, these two pieces have a complexity and richness that stand strongly amongst any of his previous releases.Recognition should also be given to the recording assistance from Shane Hochstetler, who captures every hit of a drum with a clarity and depth that is unrivaled, adding additional polish to an already shining release.
samples:
- How You Look When You're Not Looking (Excerpt 1)
- How You Look When You're Not Looking (Excerpt 2)
- What I Thought You Said
 
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