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Room40 is proud to continue the publication of a series of editions from American guitarist and composer Norman Westberg.
Best known for his work with the seminal outfit SWANS, Westberg’s output beyond that group is sprawling and restless. His name recurs and ripples through many interconnected micro-histories surrounding New York City’s music and art scenes. From appearances in film works associated with the Cinema Of Transgression, through to his participation in bands such as The Heroine Sheiks and Five Dollar Priest, Westberg’s name is woven deeply into the fabric of New York over the past three decades.
MRI is the result of Westberg’s encounters with the heavy medical scanning technology following his recognising diminished hearing. ”I started to notice a loss of hearing in my right ear,” Westberg explains, “and decided that it was high time that I had it checked out by a professional. The audiologist confirmed the uneven hearing loss and recommended an MRI. The purpose of the MRI was to make sure that there was not something other than my own aural misadventures causing the uneven loss.” This record is a coda to this experience. Recorded in 2012, it is a collection of reductive rolling guitar pieces that are embedded strongly in the American Minimalism tradition.
The newly mastered and post-produced edition also features a brand new piece, "Lost Mine," recorded in 2015 as an echo of the processes that led to the original recordings. It follows the reissue of 13 in late 2015.
From Lawrence English:
“Norman Westberg’s guitar playing with SWANS has influenced a generation of musicians across genres. I can personally attest to how his particular approaches to that instrument, in creating both harmony and brute force, have challenged and ultimately influenced my own sonic preoccupations.
What Norman has created with his solo works is an echoing universe of deep texture and harmonic intensity. His solo compositions generate an affecting quality that drives the listener towards reductive transcendence.”
More information can be found here.
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SN Variations is proud to announce the release of a new EP curated around the primordial and enigmatic music of Giacinto Scelsi.
Alongside a new recording of his intimate "Duo for Violin and Cello," the EP features a new work by Chris Watson inspired by Scelsi’s explorations of "pure sound" and a breathtaking shakuhachi honkyoku performance by Joe Browning.
Born into an aristocratic family in Italy in 1905, Scelsi's creative peak arrived in the 1960s after years of research into Buddhist chant and other aspects of Eastern spirituality. His work languished in obscurity for most of his long career, but its pioneering investigations of microtonality and pure sound have exerted a deep influence on contemporary composers and electronic artists including Mica Levi, Richard Skelton and Fennesz. Against the crowded polyphonies of much post-war academic modernism, Scelsi powerfully advocated for the primordial and the esoteric, for the acoustic interplay of pure frequencies.
"The Duo for Violin and Cello" dates from Scelsi’s most fertile period and was composed at the same time as seminal works such as "Anahit" and "Elegia per Ty." Despite a modest combination of just two instruments, the innovative use of double stopping and extended playing techniques creates a huge, vibrating microtonal form. In this new recording, Aisha Orazbayeva and Lucy Railton execute a meticulous performance of this complex score.
Chris Watson responded to the piece with sculpted field recordings of insects made originally on a boardwalk in the middle of the Borneo jungle. "Invertebrate Harmonics" imaginatively links the pure sound world of Scelsi to pure sound worlds found in nature. This piece is from a larger installation work "Notes from a Forest Floor," which was played first at the ICA last June as part of the event ‘MusICA –Exploring Sound and Authorship’.
Finally Chris records a traditional shakuhachi honkyoku piece - "Honshirabe" - one of the pieces forming the historic repertoire of the wandering Zen Buddhist monks known as the Komuso. This performance by Joe Browning is one of exquisite subtleties, resonating with Scelsi's mature work while pointing to its widespread historical antecedents.
More information can be found here.
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The Legendary Pink Dots are delighted to announce the forthcoming release
of their new album Pages Of Aquarius on Metropolis Records.
They promised us so much…
Naked hippies and soma fountains and patchouli rain from candy floss clouds and flowers and the summer that would never end. The Age of Aquarius.
The Age of Harmony and understanding and tolerance. Say it softly, like an Aquarian, The Age of ….Love. The Age of Love and HAIR.
Page One Aquarius. How does it look out there?
Bad hair, no hair. Covered up. Walls. And God is everywhere, splashed in red across those walls, And the fountains are dry, the ocean is full and they're dragging the lost from the depths of the sea and tying them up with wire.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Are we in for 2,160 years of this?
I’m an Aquarian. I believe in this crazy stuff and I visualise big old Pisces lying there, dying there. Huge, wounded, angry because no-one helps and every hot feverish cry brings a new storm, and every kick shakes the planet to it’s core. Big old Pisces. Huge but invisible so no-one sees him except the irritating baby that tickles his nose with an oily feather.
Page 2,000 Pisces, the end of the cycle and it hurts.
It can’t last.
Page One Aquarius.
The World is Beautiful. Blessed be. EK
Out April 22nd.
A teaser is available here.
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Box Records is proud to present the third full length album from Newcastle, UK noise-psych power trio Haikai No Ku.
Temporary Infinity continues the nightmarish bad trips that previous albums Sick On My Journey (Burning World Records) and Ultra High Dimensionality (Box Records) conjured. The patented Mike Vest (Bong, 11Paranoias, Blown Out) wall of gargantuan mild-altering damaged feedback is again present with the no- nonsense power of Sam Booth (Foot Hair) and Jerome Smith (Female Borstal, Charles Dexter Ward).
Haikai No Ku take no prisoners and show no remorse with their latest offering. Temporary Infinity is near 40 minutes of warped and disturbed hallucinogenic punishment. Their sound is not for the faint-hearted, but one that has seen them develop a cult following among those who enjoy their music twisted.
More information is available here.
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There are very few people around making better compilations than Analog Africa’s Samy Ben Redjeb.  For this latest treasure trove of newly unearthed obscurities, Samy teamed up with Teranga Beat's Adamantios Kafetzis, who tracked down Senegalese sound engineer Moussa Diallo back in 2009 and digitized his large archive of tape reels.  Remarkably, only five songs from that big score made it onto the album, so the duo must have made some very hard decisions in narrowing down Senegal 70 to its lean and consistently excellent 13-song song incarnation.  Happily, one of the songs that made the cut is a previously unreleased piece by the incomparable and woefully underdocumented Amara Touré.  Also present is the long-running and internationally successful Orchestra Baobab, but many of the lesser known artists shine just as brightly (if not more so), making this one of Analog Africa's stronger compilations to date.
As is so often the case with regions warranting a Soundway or Analog Africa compilation, Senegal's musical explosion was rooted in the good fortune of having a popular port (in this case, Dakar).  Unlike those in countries further from the coast, forward-thinking Senegalese musicians were treated to plenty of contemporary American and Cuban sounds in the '50s and '60s courtesy of some very hip sailors.  The first major band to successfully incorporate jazz, soul, and Cuban Son Montuno into the Senegalese aesthetic was Star Band de Dakar, which was formed in 1960.  Star Band is not included in this collection, however, as Redjeb and Kafetzis have chosen to focus instead upon all the great bands that formed in their wake.  Since I am lamentably not an ethnomusicologist, I cannot comprehensively pick apart where each influence bleeds into another (nor would I particularly want to).  In general, however, the formula seems to be a combination of driving Latin percussion; funky soul bass lines; and wonderfully spidery, clean guitar lines.
More important than the individual components, however, is the elegantly laid-back and sultry vibe that so many of these songs share.  There is also a recurring trend towards simplicity and hypnotic repetition that has aged quite well and matches my personal sensibility nicely.  There is also a very appealing feeling of casual professionalism pervading this collection, as so many songs manage to feel relaxed and loose while effortlessly keeping the grooves tight and the hooks strong.  It is like the exact opposite of garage rock, but in the best way possible: instead of striving amateurs, Senegal 70 is filled with stone-cold killers just kicking back and riding some excellent grooves.  That said, however, Gestu de Dakar’s stand-out "Ndiourel" definitely sounds like it could have been recorded in a garage or basement, though I don’t know how common either are in Dakar (I do not get out there much).
Of course, the one song that stands out the most flies in the face of all that sinuous, understated soulfulness, as King N'Gom and his band ham it up beautifully on the very fun and ridiculous "Viva Marvillas."  Aside from veering dangerously close to novelty song territory, "Viva Marvillas" is unique in that it basically sounds like two very different songs smashed together, as it becomes very serious and very musical for its second half.  Definitely an odd choice, but I bet King N’Gom would not have made it onto this compilation if "Marvillas" did not ultimately transform into something considerably more sensual and soulful.  In all other cases, the songs on Senegal 70 tend to take the more linear and sensible approach of starting good and staying good.  Admittedly, they also tend to blur together a bit, but that is because they are all so uniformly excellent for exactly the same reason (a great groove).  A few pieces do stand out for other reasons, however.  For example, Fangool’s "Mariama" easily boasts the most rich and charismatic vocals on the entire album.  Elsewhere, La Souruba De Louga improve upon an already spectacular groove with wild percussion fills and a surprisingly dissonant guitar solo.  Orchestre G.M.I.'s "Africa" succeeds similarly, gradually building up to some great trade-off solos from their horn section.
The only arguable downside to Senegal 70 is just that it lacks a single real bombshell that sends me scurrying to long-abandoned music blogs to track down whatever I can by some brilliant new-to-me artist.  That has definitely happened in the past with folks like K. Frimpong, Ebo Taylor, and Amare Touré.  However, my not being blown away by anything probably has a lot more to do with my current level of immersion in African music than it does with Redjeb’s curatorial skills: major revelations come rather easily and frequently when you are new to a particular milieu.  Also, labels like Soundway, Strut, and Analog Africa have likely already unearthed all of the major works to be found and have settled into the much deeper, harder work of digging up all the other great songs that slipped through the cracks. Which, of course, is exactly what Redjeb achieved here: Senegal 70 is a tight, beautifully assembled collection of tight, beautifully assembled songs (many of which have never been previously heard by Western ears, aside from perhaps the aforementioned hip sailors).  Diablos Del Ritmo still maintains its supremacy as my favorite Analog Africa compilation (with Angola Soundtrack a close second), but Senegal 70 probably comes closest to a highly coveted "all killer, no filler" summation than any other collection that Analog Africa has released to date.
 
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In his liner notes for The New Attractive, Yu Wakao writes, "In a sense, there is no need for individuality in noise music—ultimately, noise can only be hindered by the individual." Taste, he concludes, is far more important. It’s what separates this noise from that noise, the sound of traffic outside your car window from whatever is on the stereo. It’s a provocative claim because Takuji Naka and Tim Olive’s music on The New Attractive both affirms and refutes it, and because the distinction between taste and individuality is ambiguous. How are we to separate the two? Which one determines the instrument that the artist brings to their art? Which influences their preference for color, duration, and texture? What about volume? Naka and Olive certainly seem present in their work—the use of magnetic pickups and mechanical turbulence is familiar enough, as are the congealed puffs of electronic haze. The brevity of these five untitled tracks, their loose atmospheric structures, and the quiet, almost casual quality of the duo’s interactions all sound deliberate, the product of individuals with distinct tastes. Those qualities rise up and disperse across a wider plateau, however, propelling the music and musicians toward a nebulous border where specifics fall apart.
Recorded near Kyoto, Japan in 2013, The New Attractive is named for pamphlet written by Robert Norman, a 16th-century English navigator who discovered and described magnetic dip using a compass that moved vertically rather than horizontally. Besides being an effect airplane pilots watch for when navigating by compass, it’s an obscure nod to the technology that makes this music possible: namely magnetic tape and electricity. Some semblance of both appears in the music, whether it’s through the warped signal of manipulated tape, the metallic clang of spring reverb, or the even rise and fall of synthesized tones. Whatever Naka and Olive do with their equipment, the rawness of the noise and the fragility of the field recordings that briefly flicker in and out of it serve to emphasize the medium itself, and that includes the electromagnet as much as the ferric-oxide.
That emphasis speaks to Wakao’s claim about individuality in noise music. The stress is on the noise and the means necessary for making it, not the people behind it. And while it’s easy enough to associate certain music-making strategies with certain musicians, it’s not so easy to determine who is responsible for which sounds. In the section of Derek Bailey’s Improvisation devoted to objections against the practice of improvised music, Gavin Bryars singles out this zone of interference as an obstacle to pursuing new conceptual ideas. "One of the main reasons I am against improvisation now," he writes, "is that in any improvising position the person creating the music is identified with the music. The two things are seen to be synonymous. The creator is there making the music and is identified with the music and the music with the person. It’s like standing a painter next to his picture so that every time you see the painting you see the painter as well and you can’t see it without him."
Only in the case of Naka and Olive improvisation and anonymity co-mingle. Their names are scrawled across the album art and liner notes, yet they are practically invisible, or may as well be referred to as a unit, identifiable by inference because of the preferences they bring to the field.
Large sections of The New Attractive are aeriform, dispersed to the point that the co-existence of their parts feels like an accident. Some might call it ambient music and choose to focus on the way the different elements harmonize, and that’s a legitimate way of listening to this music. Naka and Olive mine the pleasures of synchronicity by allowing their materials to speak for themselves. But it’s perfectly natural to wonder what else is at play on an album like this one. Are the artists speaking through the music? Or is something being channelled through the artists, either despite them or because of their willingness? If it is as Yu Wakao argues, the artists are giving us a glimpse of a much bigger picture, not because they’re creating sounds, but because they’re carefully, sometimes passionately, selecting them.
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Clodagh Simonds has had a lengthy and storied career, working with the likes of Mike Oldfield and her own 1970s band Mellow Candle, and her return after a lengthy break with Fovea Hex beginning in 2005. With the rest of the band, including such recognizable artists Michael Begg, Colin Potter, Laura Sheeran. Cora Venus Lunny, and Kate Ellis, and special guests Justin Grounds and Brian Eno, this EP is a captivating, achingly stunning suite of music that defies any sort of classification.
The Salt Garden I is the first in a series of three planned 10" EPs of new material and released by the odd combination of living prog legend Steven Wilson's Headphone Dust imprint and the venerable, experimental label Die Stadt.This alone is telling of the wide reaching style and appreciation to be had for Simonds and crew's unparalleled work.One of the defining characteristics of The Salt Garden I is a sense of timelessness.More specifically, a sense of music that simultaneously resembles medieval balladry as much as futuristic electronic composition."The Golden Sun Rises Upon the World Again", for example, showcases vocals that could be from the middle ages, but paired with a tasteful accompaniment of electronic instrumentation.With some elegant vocal processing and effects, the piece builds beautifully.
Sparse, clean arrangements are to be had throughout, even though the songs themselves have substantially different feels and moods to them.Gentle synthesizer passages and slightly dissonant percussive elements balance the light and dark moods amazingly on "No Bright Avenue".At the same time, dramatic symphonic flourishes and tasteful string arrangements meld with Simonds' beautiful, yet strong vocals, resulting in a song that draws from both the big and the small.
On "The Undone Mother," the group emphasizes the electronic elements of their sound more, with synthesizers and other electronic passages swelling up to take center stage before retreating, allow the instruments and vocals to breathe even more, maximizing their impact.With Simonds' voice multitracked subtly, the result is a nuanced, yet tastefully understated piece of music.
The final piece, "Solace," is aptly titled.An instrumental work, the full Fovea Hex ensemble creates a piece that links beautifully melded passages of electronics and stringed instrumentation.With lengthy segments of silence weaved into the more commanding musically oriented passages, it is an amazingly peaceful, yet still powerful piece of music that builds in volume and dynamics as it goes on.
The Salt Garden I continues Fovea Hex's expanding tradition of music that defies categorization or even the more rigid annals of time.With a sound that could be just as easily from the past or the future, and lead by Clodagh Simonds' gentle but commanding vocal presence, the record's only down side is that it just feels all too short.And while the promise of two future installments attenuates this feeling somewhat, I think they need to come sooner rather than later.
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In 2014 Lattimore received a prestigious fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage — a rare honor given to 12 people every year — and used the funds to take a road trip across America with a friend, writing and recording songs at each stop along the way. With her harp and laptop, Lattimore drew inspiration from each location, letting the environments in which she recorded color her work. The result is evocative, delicate and haunting music, Lattimore’s harp at times bright and skipping, other times distant and hazy, swathed in gauzy delay.
She recorded much of At the Dam in the beautiful setting of Joshua Tree. “I would wheel the harp out on to the porch of my friend Chiara’s little house and I had the whole desert around me. It felt like a residency on another planet.” Lattimore also recorded in Marfa, Texas at a friends home, as well as in the mountains of Altadena, east of LA.
Recording far away from her Philadelphia home gave Lattimore space to navigate her thoughts. The stirring, slightly ominous opener "Otis Walks Into the Woods" attempts to encapsulate her reaction to the news that her family’s blind dog had walked into the forest on the outskirts of their farm to pass away – a gently hypnotic ode to a noble companion. "Jimmy V" recalls another fallen hero, basketball coach Jimmy Valvano. "Before taking the road trip, I’d seen a great documentary on him, a really interesting and complex, inspiring character, and thought I’d write a song with him in mind," Mary says, "Maybe it’s the first harp song written about a basketball coach?" On “Jaxine Drive,” a guitar sighs, low and sorrowful beneath Lattimore's hopeful-sounding harp, while "Ferris Wheel, January" imagines one looking at the Pacific Ocean from high elevation and the patterns of the waves creating an illusion resembling the bright lights of the Santa Monica Pier in winter. "It's a travel diary," explains Lattimore, "A chunk of my life that I attempted to wrangle into a recorded language that feels familiar but not too precious."
At The Dam is named for a Joan Didion essay about the Hoover Dam: "its enchanting, grandiose practicality, how it will keep operating in its own solitude, even when humans aren’t around." Drawing inspiration from these ideas and treating each memory thoughtfully and sensitively, Lattimore captures transient moments as time moves inexorably forward.
More information can be found here.
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After having the NME announce him as "one to watch for 2015," Mark Wynn promptly quit music. Harbinger Sound spent the summer coaxing him out from early retirement and the result is The Singles album. A compilation of 18 tracks culled from two years worth of limited self-released CDs. Wynn's scattershot avant-skank acoustic gobshitting blends despair, bleakness and humour. It then pulls apart any worthless comparisions to The Fall, Wreckless Eric, Patrik Fitzgerald, etc with his irreverent, awkward but smart lo-fi songs. After spending the autumn touring with the Sleaford Mods , Wynn is now back in the game as one to watch for 2016. This album features such classics as "Rip Off The Fall" and "She Fancies Me That One In Age Concern."
"The same grey fucking cloud that followed me now hangs above him. He's got it!" - Jason Williamson / Sleaford Mods.
More information can be found here.
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Like her last record (2013's Character) and much of her solo material, Asperities is Kent, her cello, and a tasteful amount of processing and effects. While her list of collaborators are a veritable who’s-who of modern experimental music, her solo work is just as strong, but stripped down and intimate enough to place all the emphasis on her and her instrument. These restrained arrangements, however, serve to bring out the finest and most nuanced details in her playing and strong sense of composition.
Unsurprisingly, the deep, at times friction-laden sound of bowed cello strings feature heavily throughout the nine pieces that make up Asperities.Opener "Hellebore" exemplifies this, with its mostly untreated passages being slowly layered atop one another.The sound and dynamics are clearly that of a traditional cello, but eventually the swells become a massive, cavernous wall of tense music that fails to relent until its conclusion."Heavy Eyes" is another song in which the traditional sounds of Kent's instrument remain at he forefront, with the other elements making for subtle, but effective accents.
Compositions such as "Flag of No Country" and "Invitation to the Voyage" feature Kent opting for plucked, rather than bowed playing, and have a less tonal, more overall rhythmic feel.Both of these pieces, however, feature her blending in the more sustained tones (both via her playing style and through effects) as a backdrop to the mix, resulting in rich works that carry the same intensity as a much larger ensemble would struggle to meet.On a song like "Lac Des Arcs," both her playing and the arrangements take on a more somber, bleak sensibility, which contrasts the more boisterous, aggressive pieces on the album extremely well."Empty States" is similar, with an overall murky mix to the song, which starts from slow, heavy creaking noises and expands into a more intense, fleshed out piece with a tasteful amount of distortion at the end.
I found most memorable were the pieces where she expanded upon just focusing on the cello and into other instrumentation and heavier sonic treatments.The early moments of "Terrain" embody this perfectly, where a jerky synthetic rhythm underscores deep, churning layers of cello to create an amazing, tangible sense of tension that builds and grows even once the rhythms are removed.The concluding "Tramontana" also features a bit more in the way of processing and effects, with bits of delay and reversed playing fleshing the song out before concluding on an aggressively dissonant note, both in her playing and her processing of the sound.
Julia Kent's solo work has always emphasized the sound of her singular cello playing above most other instrumentation, and Asperities is no different.Because of that, anyone who is not a fan of the instrument (and it being the primary focus of an album) may not find this record as engaging.However, her sense of composition and virtuoso playing ability results in an always changing and evolving piece of music, and the record ends up being a much more diverse endeavor than it may seem.Kent captures a plethora of moods and emotions here, in a way that few artists who focus so heavily on a single instrument can.
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The titular MB on this record is not the Italian noise pioneer, but GOG's Michael Bjella with Robert Skrzyński (of Micromelancolié) in collaboration. Black Box Recordings may not resemble Bianchi in any obvious way, but the duo have a similar raison d'être of utilizing purely dissonant electronics, roughly recorded found sounds, and the occasional interjection of conventional melody and instrumentation. Like its title would indicate, it is a bleak and disturbing collection of sounds that could easily be the final recordings of a cataclysmic event.
The dynamics of this record sit somewhere between the harsh dissonance of the noise world and the more reserved, spacious setting of an ambient record.For example, the short "Homes in Paris" is an idiosyncratic collage of found, but unidentifiable noises and incidental sound effects.But even within these abrasive layers, processed electronics and droning moments bring an oddly comfortable set of music and placidity to the otherwise heavy chaos.
On other pieces, the noisier tendencies of the duo’s sound stays in the forefront."Black Box Recording" sounds as if much of the recording is culled from its title, based upon what sounds like bursts of static and radio communication noise, but never fully discernible dialog or human voices.Layers of low fidelity recordings, bursts of noise, and explosions results in the two artists’ conveying the harrowing nature of a flight recorder capturing the first few moments of a catastrophic disaster.
Other moments, however, make for more of a transition between the harsher and melodic moments."Tearing Up" is all dark and lurching loops, at first just uncomfortably dissonant but amped up with static and distortion go become even more chaotic.Interestingly, towards the conclusion some clean guitar playing from Bjella glides to the forefront with a somber, beautiful tone that gives the song’s title two distinctly different interpretations depending on its pronunciation."Yes the Enduring Classics" is built from cavernous, almost musical loops as layers of noise are piled atop.Both the melodic and chaotic moments are magnified by the inclusion of what sounds like cello and metallic percussion, and straddles that line perfectly.
The two choose to close the album on a dourer, disturbing note on the lengthy "The Brighter Side of Fucking History".Opening with massively reverberating water drips and rattling noises with bass-heavy, subterranean rumbles, it captures the ambience of an expansive, disused concrete basement.Some oddly treated synthesizer passages drift in and out, with strange metallic scrapes and mechanical clattering making for an unsettling piece of moody ambiguity that excels in both its composition and its insinuated creepiness.
I am more familiar with Michael Bjella's work as GOG, and while a different beast, Black Box Recordings still bears his mark in the same way his primary project does.With less of the heavy metal elements and increased noise contributions from Skrzyński, it is an album of blackened industrial noise and experimentation that may have a familiar mood, but an entirely fresh and innovative sound in its execution.
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