09 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

Atlanta's DKA Records has been quietly issuing vinyl for the past few years that sits on the outside of conventional techno or electronic music. Impeccable quality with an appropriately dark edge, they received a bump in notoriety last year issuing High-Functioning Flesh's debut album, which made waves into the conventional industrial/EBM world. This compilation, featuring them amongst other label luminaries, has a nice throwback feel while sounding anything but dated.

DKA Records

The title of the record alone made me think back to those early 80s compilations like Rising from the Red Sand or The Elephant Table Album.Current industrial darlings HFF lead off with "Confuse the Call", a dance floor stomp consistent with the strongest songs on their debut.Gurgling low quality samples, jagged Ensoniq synths by Greg Vand, and a catchy, memorable chorus by Susan Subtract (who does the best "yeah!" and "ok!", second only to perhaps Lil' Jon) has all the makings of another hit for them.The duo reappear on the flip side of the record with the Dva Damas edit of "Touch Oblivion Icon", which strips the song down to its most basic vocal fragments, deep kicks and a truckload of dubby echo and delay throughout.

The 1980s nostalgia feel pops up with a few other contributors here as well.TWINS' "A Hero’s Body, A Human's Heart" rides on taut analog sequences and up front 80s Oingo Boingo-esque quirky vocals distill the best of that neon-tinged cyberpunk vision of the future.The lengthy "The Red Dress (Parts 1 & 2)" from Tifaret emphasizes the darker edge of new wave, rather than the more conventional pop sounds.Drums seething with reverb and dramatic, nearly goth vocals blend with a mess of industrial clang and chaos, conjuring bits of the Sisters of Mercy and Skinny Puppy without sounding like either one. RedRedRed's "An Unrelenting Hour" is cut from a similar cloth, with pseudo British vocals, a wonderfully raw synth lead, and a more laconic tempo.

On a song like Tannhäuser Gate's "Pulse", the label’s more techno and dance floor oriented sounds come through strong.With a throbbing beat and brilliant bassline, bouncing from dense to minimalist arrangements while featuring heavily filtered vocals, it could work just as well in the club as it would in a more focused listening session.Xander Harris' "Protoculture" heavily utilizes stuttering kick drums and overdriven keyboard leads to again feel slightly more techno-like, but peppered with dialog samples throughout in lieu of conventional vocals.

Considering the quality of the material on here (and the previous releases on DKA) I hope that this compilation, propelled by the rising popularity of High-Functioning Flesh, will push the label into the spotlight.With an underground aesthetic, but professional quality in terms of both sound and presentation, the artists showcased on this compilation deserve a more significant amount of exposure.

samples:

• High-Functioning Flesh - "Confuse the Call"
• TWINS - "A Hero's Body, A Human's Heart"
• Tifaret - "The Red Dress"

 

08 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

Culled from the vaults of WFMU—the world’s most acclaimed free-form radio station—comes over 20 hours of mind-bending, hilarious phone calls between the renowned comedy duo of Tom Scharpling & Jon Wurster. From 2000 to 2013, their tremendous imaginations took over the WFMU airwaves every Tuesday night with bizarre tales from a fictional town called Newbridge, NJ and the desperate denizens that inhabit it.

Included inside this definitive collection are 75 calls over 16 compact discs, edited by Scharpling & Wurster (over 18 of them previously unreleased or unaired), a 108-page hardcover book with cover art by Joe Matt that features essays by Patton Oswalt, Julie Klausner, Damian Abraham (lead singer of F*cked Up) and Best Show associate producer Michael Lisk (aka A.P. Mike), a definitive interview with Scharpling & Wurster by Jake Fogelnest, notes on the evolution and inspiration behind each bit written by Scharpling & Wurster, a USB drive with all of the calls plus 4 hours of bonus material, a fold-out map of Newbridge, Philly Boy Roy & Timmy von Trimble Paper Dolls, postcards, and temporary tattoos with The Best Show catch-phrases.

For everyone that pre-orders the boxed set at numerogroup.com they will literally get a piece of history - everybody gets a portion of Jon Wurster’s smashed telephone that he used to make the Rock, Rot & Rule phone call, along with a tiny letter of authenticity. Pre-orders placed after January 1, 2015 will receive their phone piece with the shipped product.

More information can be found here.

08 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

Colleen is French multi-instrumentalist Cecile Schott, who uses her voice and the treble viola da gamba (a baroque instrument with gut strings), to weave intricate stories about the human mind and heart. Captain of None is the most melodic album in her repertoire, with fast-paced tracks rooted down by prominent bass lines and assorted percussive effects. It is also an album that breaks new ground for Colleen in terms of production. While previous works centered around sample-based or looped, minimal compositions, on Captain of None Schott significantly changed her approach, setting her viola and her voice as focal points. Captain of None is inhabited by delicately crafted, other-worldly pop songs incorporating dub-inspired techniques.

Captain of None was recorded, mixed, and produced entirely by Schott in her music studio in San Sebastian, Spain. Schott tried to open the gates in the way she played, sang, and wrote lyrics for the album, and set out to explore how effects like delay and echo could go from the "cosmetic sound varnish" role they usually play to a fully dynamic, constructive, song-shaping role.

Although the influence of Jamaican music is subtle, its implicit impact is felt throughout Captain of None. As a child, Schott became enamored with a cassette tape of Lee Perry tracks from 1976 to 1979. She continued to explore the music of Jamaica, awed by the amount and the variety of incredible music that was recorded with such breathtaking inventiveness. This infatuation can be heard on tracks like "Eclipse," where Schott utilizes some of the more common dub production techniques, such as using an echo effect on the percussion and vocals. Her love of Augustus Pablo can be felt on "Salina Stars," in which Schott uses the melodica, an instrument that she played for years but never used on her albums. She incorporates a Moogerfooger delay pedal to create vocal feedback and analog glitches, and used homemade devices — chopsticks, an Indonesian metal printing block — as percussion.

As for her unique main instrument of choice, Schott first noticed the viola da gamba in the film Tous les matins du monde when she was 15 years old. The instrument, which has been said to be the musical instrument that most resembles the sound of the human voice, heavily resonated with her. However, rather than bowing the instrument in a traditional manner, and heavily influenced by African music from different countries, genres, and eras, Schott tunes the viola da gamba like a guitar and plucks it, opening up a new world of sound that she explores in great depth on Captain of None, an addictive, unconventional pop album.

More information can be found here.

08 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

This posthumous release, following last year’s Handbook for Mortals, presents the peak of Letha Rodman-Melchior's compositional work. Traversing landscapes of affective registers with the organizational ability of Christine Sun Kim and the diversity and intimacy of Throbbing Gristle, Rodman-Melchior re-categorizes objects to find the foreign in the familiar. Moving in and out of focus, her musical patterns themselves grow and become more and more self-aware.

As a response to possession and the human/nonhuman interface, Shimmering Ghost recalls the most moving of performances by Roger Reynolds. It exposes the overlap between senses and suggests that resonance, as distinct from hearing, is a source for beauty beyond sense. And by the use of sense’s special effects, Rodman-Melchior crafts a language that is simply a pleasure. Mary Lattimore's harp playing at times is reminiscent of Three Musicians' Music from the Rochester Folk Art Guild, but with urgency heard nowhere else.

More information can be found here.

08 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

Over the course of its two-decade existence, Lightning Bolt has revolutionized underground rock in immeasurable ways. The duo broke the barrier between stage and audience by setting themselves up on the floor in the midst of the crowd. Their momentous live performances and the mania they inspired paved the way for similar tactics used by Dan Deacon and literally hundreds of others. Similarly, the band's recordings have always been chaotic, roaring, blown-out documents that sound like they could destroy even the toughest set of speakers. Fantasy Empire, Lightning Bolt's sixth album and first in five years, is a fresh take from a band intent on pushing themselves musically and sonically while maintaining the aesthetic that has defined not only them, but an entire generation of noisemakers. It marks many firsts, most notably their first recordings made using hi-fi recording equipment at the famed Machines With Magnets, and their first album for Thrill Jockey. More than any previous album, Fantasy Empire sounds like drummer Brian Chippendale and bassist Brian Gibson are playing just a few feet away, using the clarity afforded by the studio to amplify the intensity they project. Every frantic drum hit, every fuzzed-out riff, sounds more present and tangible than ever before.

Fantasy Empire is ferocious, consuming, and is a more accurate translation of their live experience. It also shows Lightning Bolt embracing new ways to make their music even stranger. More than any previous record, Chippendale and Gibson make use of live loops and complete separation of the instruments during recording to maximize the sonic pandemonium and power. Gibson worked with Machines very carefully to get a clear yet still distorted and intense bass sound, allowing listeners to truly absorb the detail and dynamic range he displays, from the heaviest thud to the subtle melodic embellishments. Some of these songs have been in the band’s live repertoire since as early as 2010, and have been refined in front of audiences for maximum impact. This is heavy, turbulent music, but it is executed with the precision of musicians that have spent years learning how to create impactful noise through the use of dynamics, melody, and rhythm.

Fantasy Empire has been in gestation for four years, with some songs having been recorded on lo-fi equipment before ultimately being scrapped. Since Earthly Delights was released, the band has collaborated with The Flaming Lips multiple times, and continued to tour relentlessly. 2013 saw the release of All My Relations by Black Pus, Chippendale’s solo outlet, which was followed by a split LP with Oozing Wound. Chippendale, an accomplished comic artist and illustrator, created the Fantasy Empire's subtly ominous album art, and will release an upcoming book of his comics through respected imprint Drawn and Quarterly. Brian Gibson has been developing the new video game Thumper, with his own company, Drool, which will be released next year. And, of course, Lightning Bolt will be touring the US in 2015.

More information can be found here.

08 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

Drumm has just released an extended mix of his 2012 Editions Mego EP Relief (composed for pulse generator and shortwave radio).

More information can be found here.

08 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

White Hills are proponents of psychedelia as transformation. The music made by Dave W. and Ego Sensation is risky and cutting edge, rooted in dystopian futurism and hyper-conscious of society’s constant desire for a new and better drug. That progressive aesthetic is at the heart of White Hills’ newest album Walks For Motorists, a radically stripped-down record that emphasizes rhythm and groove. The album bursts forth with a new kind of intensity, one born out of laser-focused precision and detail-oriented songwriting. Possibly surprising to fans familiar with the Hawkwindian guitar squall of earlier albums, the songs on Walks For Motorists began as a keyboard melody or bass line, and several songs on the album don't even feature guitar at all. This is propulsive, open music, surreal to its core but made to inspire people to get out of their seats and move.

Walks For Motorists was recorded with David Wrench (Caribou, Bear in Heaven, FKA Twigs, Owen Pallet) at Bryn Derwen Recording Studio in Bethesda, Wales which borders the Snowdonia National Forest.  The band had 24-hour access to the studio, which allowed them to work whenever inspiration struck. Wrench's expertise producing and mixing electronic music was an essential asset when perfecting the crisp tones heard throughout the record. This is the first album the band has recorded outside of New York City, and the vast, rolling Welsh landscape that surrounded the studio influenced the album’s uncluttered sound. Walks For Motorists is also White Hills’ most diverse album to date. Fuzzed-out rockers sit comfortably next to kraut-infused grooves, and there are more vocal contributions from Ego than ever before.

More information can be found here.

08 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

This Brooklyn trio’s fourth full-length almost did not happen, as the band was plagued by a host of tensions, false-starts, and creative second-guessing before everything eventually came together.  Ostensibly, Transfixiation is an attempt to translate Strangers' live intensity into their studio work in hopes of creating something more dangerous and unhinged, but their intensity has never exactly been in question for me: narrowness of focus might be a bit of problem, but lack of bad-assness definitely is not.  Transfixiation sounds more or less exactly like I would expect a new APTBS album to sound (like a darker, more pissed-off Jesus and Mary Chain), which is perfectly fine by me–they are what they are and they are very good at it.  All I hoped for was a few more great songs and Transfixiation did not fail me at all.

Dead Oceans

A Place To Bury Strangers have a well-deserved reputation for excess due to their ear-melting live volume and vocalist/guitarist Oliver Ackerman's impressive array of self-designed effects pedals (he runs Death By Audio).  However, not many people seem to notice that the trio have a similar gift for restraint as well, which is one of my favorite aspects of their sound.  On the opening "Supermaster," for example, the entire song is driven by Dion Lunadon's muscular, propulsive bass line and drummer Robi Gonzalez barely even touches his cymbals.  As far as I am concerned, it is a perfectly constructed piece: there is a great groove, excellent dynamic variation, masterful use of space, some killer bursts of warped guitar and it is all over in about 3 minutes.  Everything that is supposed to make an impact does exactly that, as there is literally nothing unnecessary that could have been carved away.

When they stick with that lean and hooky formula, as they do with the even better "Now It's Over," APTBS are a great band.  When they stray from that formula, however, things get a bit more complex.  Obviously, if they released an album with 9 largely interchangeable variations on a single theme, it would get tired very quickly.  Unfortunately, the divergences from that comfort zone can be a mixed bag.  A few of them work quite well, like the barreling, full-on garage rock chaos of "I'm So Clean" or the warped, woozy, and treble-heavy "Love High."  I also enjoyed the masterfully fucked and wrong-sounding pop of "What We Don't See" quite a bit.  The darker, more menacing "Deeper" is something of another stand-out, gradually escalating from deep subterranean bass drops and threatening pronouncements into some kind of post-industrial sex jam with guest vocals from Emilie Lium Vordal.

The enjoyment of the rest of the album, however, hinges mostly upon how much a given listener loves blown-out and mangled shoegaze guitars.  I myself like them quite a bit, but vastly prefer them when they are employed in the service of a great song.  "We've Come So Far," unfortunately, is basically just an excuse for a howling guitar blow-out, while the closing "I Will Die" is so fried and in-the-red that it is probably more treble sizzle than actual content.  That said, it is crazy to fault APTBS for failing to churn out a start-to-finish masterpiece given how brutally constrictive their chosen niche is: for a band four albums deep into their career, I would say that they have wrung a surprising amount of variety and excitement from a formula of deadpan, range-less vocals coupled with wild guitar eruptions.  Granted, it probably is not enough variety and excitement to actually carry an entire album, but I have always viewed APTBS as more of a singles band anyway and I cannot think of anyone else who is doing a better job at mining this particular territory.  Given that arguably half of Transfixiation consists of strong singles, it seems like as fine an album as any sane person could reasonably hope for.

• Supermaster
• Deeper
• Now It's Over

 

 

07 March 2015

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Albums and Singles

Simon Crab was one of the founding members of Bourbonese Qualk, who were easily one of the most strange and compelling bands to emerge from the ‘80s underground.  They were also sometimes one of the best, but they never quite achieved the stature in the post-industrial canon that they deserved.  A good part of that is probably due to their constantly shifting and eclectic style, though they seemed to perfect their singular mélange of electronic music, mutant funk, gamelan, and experimentalism by 2001's On Uncertainty (their final album).  With After America, Crab essentially picks up right where his band left off (though sans funk), offering up a distinctively kaleidoscopic and uncategorizable fantasia on the evergreen theme of America's decline.

Fathom

I was not quite sure what to expect from Crab after what was essentially a decade-long hiatus, but I am very happy to report that After America seamlessly embodies the very same "anything and everything is fair game" aesthetic that made late-period Qualk so great.  What Crab does is very different from self-conscious genre-hopping though: there is no "look what I just did!" showiness or attempt to blow my mind with how adroitly he can juggle seemingly disparate threads, nor is there any clumsy appropriation of "ethnic" music to heighten the exotic or psychedelic aspects of these pieces.  Instead, Crab just sounds like an artist with very wide-reaching and unusual tastes coupled with the ability to skillfully assimilate those elements into something all his own. That is a truly rare combination.

Curiously, there truly is no common factor that unites After America's best moments: sometimes Crab's bizarre synthesis works brilliantly, sometimes it just works well.  My personal favorite piece is probably "Saccades" which sounds like a blearily soft-focus, slowed-down hip-hop anthem.  The following "Wintex-Cimex 83" is another stand-out, combining an ominous, mechanized crawl with wild live drums and a languorous flute melody.  I suspect that both Discogs and I may have those two song titles reversed, however, as there is a 20-minute piece called "Saccades" that Crab released in 2013 that includes part of the alleged "Wintex-Cimex" above.  In any case, they are still both great.  Yet another highlight comes much later on the album in the form of the woozy guitar and organ reverie of "Pareidolia."

Elsewhere, Crab successfully delves into a noirish strain of dub ("Useful Idiots"), sublimely hallucinatory and submerged-sounding ambiance ("Foreign Objects"), ominously robotic sound art ("Stammheim"), and gently burbling electronic grooves ("For Jian-an").  In other places, such as "A Whole Distant World," Simon and long-time collaborator Andy Wilson weave something that resembles an achingly beautiful film soundtrack augmented with field recordings.  There are also a few instances that recall Crab's work with Bourbonese Qualk, such as the sinuous groove and druggy haze of "Kropotkin."  In still other pieces, After America sounds like an ambitious evolution upon that past work, a feat perhaps best exemplified by "Lullabye," which sounds like a dub techno piece that has been shattered and stretched into skittering otherworldliness.

With very few exceptions, Simon excels at just about everything he tries with After America.  While there are a few pieces that seem weaker or less inspired than others, the album’s only real shortcoming is a highly subjective one: Crab rarely allows any of the individual pieces much time to grow and evolve; rather, the album is a collection of short vignettes that explore just one theme for a few minutes until a new vignette appears.  However, it is abundantly clear that that was a deliberate artistic decision rather than a compositional failing, so it is not particularly fair to critique After America for what it is not (a collection of songs).  Crab seems to have achieved exactly what he set out to do with this album, composing a complex, unusual, dynamic, perfectly sequenced and occasionally moving suite that adds up to a very rewarding whole.  I would have been happy just to have Crab back to making albums again, but he unexpectedly seems to have returned at the height of his powers.

• Saccades
• Wintex-Cimex 83
• Pareidolia

 

06 March 2015

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Albums and Singles