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It has been five years since Benjamin Finger released his masterpiece, 2009's Woods of Broccoli, which makes it as good a time as any for him to release a thematically similar successor.  Though not quite a full reprise of Woods' lushly hallucinatory aesthetic, The Bet's warped piano-and-sound-collage miniatures make for yet another warmly beautiful trip down the rabbit hole.  Nobody does fractured dreaminess better than Benjamin Finger.
Now that I have heard The Bet and have the benefit of hindsight, last year's comparatively simple and Satie-esque Listen To My Nerves Hum makes a lot more sense to me.  I now realize that it was not a departure or divergence from the abstract psychedelia of Finger's earlier solo work, but merely a rather unexpected bridge to the next frontier in abstract psychedelia (this one).  More succinctly: The Bet reprises Finger’s recent fascination with fragile, melancholy piano motifs, albeit in altered form.  Initially, the change is not especially profound, as the opening "Faintheadedness" merely adds some watery reverb to Benjamin's quiet plinking, but The Bet is an album of escalating weirdness and it does not take long before anything recognizably Satie-esque starts to drift in and out of focus, sound stretched, or sound like time has stopped cooperating entirely and caused a single snippet to keep piling up on itself.
Of course, the pianos are not the weirdest part of The Bet by a long shot, though I do not think the album becomes fully unstuck from reality until the fifth song, "Bad-Luck Planet."  I use "song" in the loosest way possible here: things like hooks and structure are but distant specks in Finger's rearview mirror these days.  I actually mean that as a compliment, as The Bet's warmly hallucinatory dream-soup is simply not a place where fully formed, graspable things can or should exist. What exists instead are mere snatches of hooks and beats amidst an increasingly fluttering, burbling maelstrom of skipping loops, distant voices, beds of lovely wordless female singing, snippets of radio, and fragments of tinkling piano.  Despite that, a few songs still manage to stand out a bit, primarily those parts with some hint of menace, like the eerily plunging strings(?) near the end of the aforementioned "Bad Luck Planet."
I am also especially fond of the dissonantly droning strings and industrial pulsing in "Care in Motion," but The Bet is truly an album that is meant to be experienced as a whole.  The gradual journey into Finger's shifting alternate dimension of gibbering, surreal lunacy mingled with delicate beauty is the real attraction here–not any of the specific stops along the way.  That said, all of the individual pieces are almost invariably quite good (though the ephemerally brief "Faintheadedness" does not linger long enough to make much of an impression).  And even when they seem weak, the offending part generally transitions into something better so quickly that it is immediately forgotten.  Does that make The Bet yet another masterpiece?  I am not sure.  I think I still prefer Woods of Broccoli (I like songs sometimes), but The Bet may very well be a cut above in regards to artistry, sophistication, and vision.  Regardless, it certainly is a wonderful and unique album, as well as a very promising contender for "best headphone album of 2014."
 
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This is the solo debut from Burch, who is probably best known for being the man behind The Spring Press label. Using a palette of consisting primarily of acoustic guitars and modular synths, Jeff offers up two very different long-form pieces.  While the lazily drifting ambience of "The Nine Points" definitely misses the mark for me, the jangling, mesmerizing psychedelia of the closing "La Perouse" is intermittently spectacular.
For all its faults, "The Nine Points" is initially quite a fine piece, as it opens with a single repeating acoustic guitar strum beneath a languorous and melancholy saxophone melody courtesy of guest Marcus Whale.  While I cannot say that I am a big fan of subdued, melodic saxophone playing in general, it works well within its context, as Burch gradually doubles the acoustic guitar with a distorted electric one and some massing swells of feedback begin to hang in the periphery.  It makes for excellent headphone listening once it all coheres and the endlessly repeating strum keeps a pleasantly hypnotic pulse.  If the piece had continued to blossom in that vein, I suspect I would have liked it a lot.  Unfortunately, the strum fades out around the 8-minute mark and "The Nine Points" segues into 10 minutes of gently drifting serenity that sounds like a handful of uninspired improvisations stitched together into an unnecessarily long, meandering multi-part epic.
In contrast, "La Perouse" is instantly distinctive, focused, and propulsive, as Jeff weaves a loopy, off-kilter groove from a simple insistently repeating motif, a couple of chords, and some toms and tambourine from guest percussionist Stephen James.  Gradually, the charmingly stumbling rhythm gains momentum and Burch, James, and Psychic Ills' guitarist Tres Warren do their best to keep it in a deliciously unpredictable state of flux, offering up vibrant eruptions of guitar snarl and cymbal flourishes.  Curiously, however, it all gets sucked into a black hole of metallic grinding and howling feedback around the half-way mark and re-starts as fairly static soundscape of chirping and whining modular synthesizers.  While I actually like both the chirping and the accompanying cymbal shimmer just fine, the transition stops the song’s momentum dead and maddeningly dilutes an otherwise flawless, wonderful, and hypnotic piece.
While I am sure that Jeff constructed the album the way he did for a reason, his questionable compositional choices undermine the album in an exasperatingly fundamental way for me.  As a result, this effort far more promising than it is successful: there are certainly some excellent and striking ideas executed beautifully, but they tend to be blunted by too-long songs and over-ambitious structures.  On the bright side, this album can at least boast a 7 ½ minute stretch of near-perfection, which is something that few other releases this year are likely to deliver.  It also boasts some very cool cover art from Roni Horn.  You cannot lose with owls.
 
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ExcitoToxicity: The third studio album release from Nurse With Wound and Graham Bowers
ExcitoToxicity ... an excess of most things, both mentally and physically, although exciting and pleasurable, can easily accelerate and rapidly become toxic ... on a cellular level, deadly.
We have thrown caution to the wind and gone overboard on the quality of the 8 Panel DigiPak artwork design and packaging for this release ... why? ... Graham liked all Steven's proposed paintings for the album ... so
Steven decided we should feature them all ... on a heavy board in full gloss, on a matte background.
The pre-release has been limited to a quantity of 100 and contains a unique and individual printed insert of one of Steven's featured paintings, it takes the form of an unusual post-card, stamped with stamps of the world, franked, signed and numbered by Steven and Graham.
Please visit www.red-wharf.com for audio excerpts and further details.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPMAXm-Q4P4&authuser=0
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Reveries is the first collaborative effort of Noveller & TQA, two critically acclaimed lonesome composers welcoming us to an expanded guitar-based journey. Noveller is the solo project of Brooklyn-based composer Sarah Lipstate while Thisquietarmy is Eric Quach, unstoppable globetrotting musician from Montreal. Both use the guitar as their main instrument, creating some of the most impressive, hypnotic and rich-textured electric guitar works from the past years.
Empty architecture, luminosity, rocks and deserted zones. Somewhere between Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and Tarkovski's Stalker, there is a walk, a wait and an epiphany.
It happened. You were not there. You just read it. Or maybe it's the synopsis of it. It's written on the back cover of a dog-eared paperback that girl with the golden cap lost in the train you were just in. She was in a hurry. You'll never know its end, you just have to stick to the rocks and to the music.
Tomorrow is another day and tonight might be the night.
Recorded in January 2013 at Electric Blue Studios in Brooklyn, this new long player finds Sarah & Eric at their most luminous and aerial state, writing together layers of blissful drones resulting of a highly meditative and emotional four-parts piece.
More information here.
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Brand new double LP from the duo of Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella, who also play in Cerberus Shoal and Fire On Fire. The duo also performed on Michael Gira's Swans LP, The Seer in 2012. Based out of Portland, Maine, Big Blood has dropped a ton of stunning self-released CDs and cassettes since 2006 as well as some fantastic vinyl releases for Time-Lag, Feeding Tube, Phase and Immune.
Big Blood's sound is rooted in folk and prime '60s / '70s garage psych. This new double LP sees them focus more on the electric side of things than on some previous releases with the addition of drummer, Shon. The record was recorded after Colleen spent a lot of time listening to Sabbath, Zepp and Dead Moon, so it definitely has a heavier vibe than some of their past releases.
The gatefold sleeve features artwork by Colleen, Unlikely Mothers refers to Colleen's mother (pictured on the inside) and Colleen's aunt (pictured on the outside), both were nuns. Her aunt stayed a nun and colleen's mom left (obviously) during Vatican II. The two images for the sleeve are from an ongoing series about women who buck common notions of who are the mothers in our lives.
More information can be found here.
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First new material since 2001. Six new songs plus two dub versions.
More information can be found here.
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The reissue of ARISPEJAL ASTISARÓ+ on vinyl for the first time!, in expanded version (Double LP) with the four outstanding tracks "Noising in the Rain I - IV," included in the legendary Bruitiste compilation (1987) by RRRrecords. Recorded between 1987 and 1989 and firstly published only in CD (1992) by Línea Alternativa, an especially interesting period where the unique and characteristic rhythmic-industrial Esplendor Geométrico style, developed along the eighties, turns more minimalistic, schematic, cold and rough.
Remastered in 2014 with a vastly improved sound, ARISPEJAL ASTISARÓ+ includes the 10 original tracks of the CD plus the 4 of Bruitiste, that constitutes the perfection of the eighties E.G. sound in all its aspects, included the voice of Arturo Lanz. Aggressive siderurgical hammering ("Jari", "Arispejal astisaro"), mechanized tribalism ("Felacion", "Bi bajin"), and hypnotic spirals ("Catare").
Geometrik presents the reissue, on vinyl for the first time and remastered in 2014 from the original reel to reel tapes!, of SHEIKH ALJAMA, originally published only in CD (1991) by Daft Records (Dirk Ivens label). Recorded between 1987 and 1989, an especially interesting period where the unique and characteristic rhythmic-industrial E.G. style, developed along the eighties, turns more minimalistic, schematic, cold and rough, with sporadic influences of Arabic musics and rhythms. SHEIKH ALJAMA is an Esplendor Geométrico classic and one of the best albums of their whole career, including their hit "Sinaya." Sheikh Aljama stands out for the incorporation of sonorities, voices and percussions of Arabic influence.
More information can be found here.
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On paper, this album seems like a lock for one of the most fun and memorable releases of the year, as Drew Daniel is one of the smartest and most innovative artists currently working in electronic music and he and his talented friends are reinterpreting some of the most spectacularly self-parodying music ever recorded (the album's subtitle is "Electronic Profanations of Black Metal Classics").  The reality, however, is more baffling than anything.  While Heathen certainly boasts a couple of inspired moments, its bulk lies somewhere in an unsatisfying no-man's land between one-note joke, head-scratching pastiche, and weirdly reverent homage.
As ridiculous and contrarian as the idea of turning extremely hostile, uncommercial, and politically dubious metal into queer club anthems sounds, it is clear that Daniel went into this endeavor as a sincere fan of the genre who was just as intent on celebrating black metal as he was on calling attention to its more laughable aspects.  Drew clearly knows his metal, drawing as equally from first-wave classics by Venom and Hellhammer as he does from deep obscurities by Sargeist and An.  Also, for the most part, Daniel loosely leaves the original chord progressions and structures intact, which is simultaneously one of the album's greatest weaknesses and one of its most compelling twists.  Staying somewhat true to the original songs definitely inhibits Drew's ability to transform Satanic misanthropy into dance floor-packing pop gems, but the transformation can still be impressively radical, most notably with the soulful House take on Sarcófago's "Ready to Fuck" (featuring guest vocals from Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner).
Given those self-imposed constraints, Drew and his collaborators opt for fairly primitive strains of black metal, as they offer a far less restrictive canvas than more contemporary, baroque strains.  Still, these are not particularly catchy chord progressions for the most part, so Daniel and his cohorts are forced to create their dance anthems primarily through radical rhythmic overhauls.  The execution of that, lamentably, is where Heathen goes very wrong for me, as The Soft Pink Truth seem to combine metal fascination with a crash course in the last 20 years of underground dance music.  The end result often sounds (at best) like raspy metal vocals welded to second-rate Squarepusher or Venetian Snares, making the album both perplexing and instantly dated.  I can understand the conceptual reason for mashing the two scenes together, but it certainly is not easy on my ears.  I did not particularly like rave/house music in the '90s and it is sadly no better when metallized by the guys from Matmos.
That said, some great moments still shine through the clattering, synth-driven chaos, particularly the cover of Hellhammer's "Maniac," as the lazy, cartoonishly menacing verses are absolutely hilarious ("mayhem is my goal!").  Also, Daniel cleverly tosses in an unexpected percussive allusion to the completely unrelated "Maniac" from the Flashdance soundtrack.  That was a nice touch.  Venom's genre-birthing "Black Metal" is also quite fun.  More often, however, things that should be extremely funny just fall kind of flat, elicit a fleeting smirk, or are just are not particularly amusing at all.  The latter category is solely represented by an annoying (but brief) performance of an Anal Cunt side project's "Grim and Frostbitten Gay Bar."  As for the former categories, they are best represented by the C&C Music Factory snatches in "Satanic Black Devotion," M.C. Schmidt's attempt to sound vampiric, and Wasner's deadpan soul diva-wailing of lines like "I will lick you from the feets to the head, making you feel torrential orgasms."
Aside from my fundamental disinterest in taking a tongue-in-cheek trip through the history of rave with some metal vocals tacked on, the most damning flaw with Heathen is that it is just not as good as the music that it is mocking.  As silly as they are at times, most of the original songs are still bracingly, viscerally bad-ass.  These covers, on the other hand, largely feel like a very labor-intensive, elaborate novelty.  Also, several of these bands are better at being self-parodying than The Soft Pink Truth are at parodying them.  For example, Jenn Wasner's performance in "Ready to Fuck" is amusing, I suppose, but not nearly as funny as the singer from Sarcófago referring to his cock as a "penetrator hammer" with complete earnestness.  Consequently, Heathen falls short as both music and humor for me, which is very exasperating given the promise of the premise and the level of talent involved.  It is hard to imagine many people continuing to listen to this album after the initial curiosity subsides.  That said, Heathen does succeed in one regard: as subversive art, as the orgiastic cover art and campy collision of queer/rave culture with corpse-paint and evil posturing goes a long way towards de-fanging some of Black Metal’s more homophobic/fascistic/extreme right-wing tendencies.
 
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There has been an unusual amount of excitement about this debut and for good reason: Eric Holm takes a very cool and inspired idea and executes it beautifully.  Culled entirely from contact mic recordings that Holm made from remote telephone poles used by military listening stations in the Arctic Circle, Andøya is an unexpectedly rhythmic and haunting series of meticulously crafted industrial soundscapes that occasionally blur into weird minimalist techno.
It goes without saying that unusual sound sources are hardly groundbreaking in today's experimental music landscape, but seeing them combined with a healthy amount of imagination and compositional talent is a legitimate rarity.  In most other hands, these pops, hums, and crackles would have been turned been into straightforward field recordings, academic-sounding sound art, or recognizability-obliterating noise.  To his credit, Eric has proven that he has the talent and vision needed to join the ranks of folks like Matmos and Klara Lewis in figuring out how to twist very non-musical sounds into structured, compelling music.
Holm is at his best when strongly emphasizes the machine-like rhythms of his recordings, as he does in the stellar opener Måtinden.  I suspect Holm must have encountered a particularly virtuosic and multitalented telephone pole for that piece, as the murky sub-bass thrum, repeating thumps, crackles, hisses, and shudders do not just combine to approximate minimalist techno–they combine to approximate quite complex minimalist techno.  Equally impressive is the fact that Holm manages to keep the piece compelling for almost 10 minutes simply by deftly fading components in and out. While Eric repeats that general template a couple more times over the course of Andøya (he has an extremely constrictive palette), he still manages to vary the pace and atmosphere enough to make pieces like the slow and echo-heavy "Stave" and the propulsively rumbling bassquake of "Kvastinden" seem similarly distinctive and striking.
The remaining three pieces, however, are a bit more abstract.  "Åse," for example, is built upon an insistent stuttering buzz punctuated by echoing scrapes.  "Høyvika," on the other hand, sounds like minimalist techno that has been deconstructed and abstracted into a murky miasma of fits-and-starts and hollowly echoing clatters and shudders.  The final piece, the titular "Andøya," is probably the most abstract of all, cohering into a pulsing sub-bass drone embellished with eerie metallic whines and dissonantly harmonizing hums.  While I personally prefer the more rhythmic pieces on the album, the more atmospheric pieces do not display any significant drop in quality.  I just happen to prefer experimental sound art with hooks to experimental sound art without them.
Aside from the excellent concept and massive amount of skillful editing involved in crafting Andøya, I also loved the sounds themselves: the telephone poles deserve some credit too.  Though knowing the origin of these sounds undeniably affects my perception of the album, I think Andøya's coldly inhuman array of buzzes, throbs, and clicks would have had no problem evoking scenes of paranoia and isolation even without their backstory.  Also, in a more specific sense, I loved that Eric used so many buzzing and throbbing low frequencies near the threshold of hearing.  That enhances the sense of mystery a lot for me, as it frequently feels like deep, elemental forces are cohering into something on their own rather than being shaped by some guy with an expensive laptop.  I am definitely the target demographic for sonic illusions, intentional or otherwise.
Obviously, an album like this is going to have niche appeal at best, but I think Andøya is intermittently great enough and musical enough to potentially lure in some adventurous listeners from beyond the sound art/experimental music communities.  I sincerely hope it does, as it deserves to be heard.  Also, I would very much love to live in a world where the reigning club banger of the summer was unwittingly penned by a telephone pole on a mountainous Arctic island.
 
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Capturing a single performance between these two titans of improvised music, labeling this three-plus hour set as "intense" would be doing it a disservice. Recorded in 1996, after Keiji Haino and Peter Brötzmann had worked together in the studio setting some time prior, so the two artists had some previous interactions to build from. Here augmented by the full Fushitsusha trio of Yasushi Ozawa and Jun Kosugi, it all comes together with a primal intensity few can match, and well up there with the best moments in both artists’ catalogues.
Like many (dumb) kids, I grew up deriding jazz as boring music for boring people, the world inhabited by people like Branford Marsalis and Kenny G.It was not until I received a dubbed copy of the Peter Brötzmann Octet’s Machine Gun that I reconsidered the possibilities that it could be something that I enjoyed, and while my tastes still stick to the more chaotic free jazz end of the spectrum, it was still a development for me, and one of the reasons why Brötzmann’s work always holds a special place in my heart.
To be fair, some of the groundwork had already been laid for me via bands such as God and Painkiller, the latter of which featured Haino in a few of their recordings.Had I heard this performance some 18 years ago (when I was still at the prime "jazz sucks" age), it would have likely pushed me a bit more close to jazz acceptance.Disc one begins with a series of erratic, trashy sounding snare drums and chiming bells, providing a pseudo mystical, spiritual introduction to what will come.After a few rushes of cymbals the band pares back to just return lead by a brilliantly distorted bass guitar.When the full band finally launches in, it is a full on drum pounding, sharp and monstrous roar that tenses and relaxes, lead by Haino's distinctive voice.
Brötzmann's contributions do not become prominent until the second disc, squealing through rumbling bass and hurdy-gurdy drone.The full quartet lock into a hellish expanse of sound that just gets louder and louder, with Haino’s vocals becoming more and more frightening.Moving towards a jerky stop/start structure lead by Brötzmann’s sax and beginning a duet with Haino’s guitar, the performance turns deliciously harsh.Both of these artists built much of their careers on an extreme, idiosyncratic approach to playing their respective instruments, and as such the two of them together playing in unison is simply transcendent.The performance surprisingly drops back to a more restrained, overtly jazzy sounding piece with muted horn and piano before ending the second hour with a nice blast.
The third disc leads off softly, at first propelled by unconventional sounding percussion, ambient horn and droning bass, until screamed voices from Haino leads things into a ritualistic direction.Functioning nicely as the calm before the (expected) storm, the players stay somewhat relaxed before building the performance in intensity and density.Everyone finally erupts into a brilliantly lurching psych rock outburst, not entirely unconventional but played with a force and intensity few could hope to match.The closing minutes drift into utter chaos and back again, wonderfully coming apart as the conclusion gets ever closer.
I am rather surprised that this gem has remained unreleased for nearly two decades, given that both Peter Brötzmann and Fushitsusha have a strong following and have had the support since prior to this performance.Regardless of that, Nothing Changes measures up to expectations based upon the players, and also apparently represents the first full length, commercially available Fushitsusha performance, and it is an exceptional one at that.
[note:song titles listed for samples are best guesses, each disc is indexed as a single track]
samples:
- Ango (1996 Version-Entering into Depths where Meaning Cannot Exist
- Layer upon Layer of Missing Answers, Swirl in Circles Speaking to Me "Still You Ask Why?" They Say
- Nattanjanai-Akin to This
 
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Tom Kovacevic has been in a couple of great bands over the years (Cerberus Shoal & Fire on Fire), but he has never been an especially prominent figure, so I had absolutely no idea what to expect from a debut solo album that celebrates two decades of studying Arabic music.  As it turns out, I should have expected a lot, as Universe Thin as Skin is a bit of a minor masterpiece (and a wonderfully anachronistic one besides).  While there are certainly appealing shades of Fire on Fire to be found, Tom's true kindred spirits seem to go a bit further back to visionary folks like Robbie Basho and The Incredible String Band (though he thankfully eschews any of the latter's absurdist tendencies).
I know I am on shaky ground discussing purity and authenticity in relation to an album of quasi-traditional Arabic music recorded by a white guy in Maine, but Universe Thin as Skin at least feels quite direct, timeless, and guileless from its very first notes.  While I am sure some of that sense comes from the somewhat unfamiliar modes, instruments, and timbres that Kovacevic employs, I also feel that Tom taps into something quite a bit deeper as well.  It is those vague and intuitive qualities that make Universe so unique, as these eight songs feel wonderfully comfortable and lived-in, traits that stem from Tom's unhurried pace, deep understanding of space and flow, and avoidance of anything resembling artifice.  Also, there is quite a bit of passion to be found in these songs as well–I suppose I should mention that.  Without that perfect balance, Universe would merely be pleasant rather than weirdly transcendent.
Curiously, Universe is the rare album that seems to be deliberately formulaic and all the better for it (I imagine that structural consistency is an intentional nod to traditional Arabic music).  With the exception of the nay flute-driven instrumentals "Kürdi" and "Dulab Bayati," every song begins with a brief tremolo-picked oud improvisation before settling into a lazily hypnotic and swaying groove and staying there, which is just fine by me.  Aside from subtle percussion and some occasional flute coloration, Kovacevic does not embellish his simple oud motifs with much of anything beyond his plaintive, unusual vocals.  While that tactic yields no surprises at all once the album gets going, the gain is that Universe attains a sort of languorous, quasi-ritualistic beauty.  That said, some songs still work better than others, with the lengthy, dynamically rhythmic "I’ll Ask You" stealing the show as the album’s inarguable centerpiece.  There is not weak piece in the entire bunch though, unless too much of a very specific good thing can be said to yield diminishing returns.  I do not think it does in this case though.
With the exception of a single slightly dubious Beatles reference, it is difficult to find a single flaw with Universe Thin as Skin without proclaiming Tom's entire vision to be a towering misadventure.  His idiosyncratic vocals, unusual cosmos-minded lyrics, and repeating formula certainly will not be for everyone, though fans of his Kovacevic's previous bands will likely be predisposed to appreciate them. In any case, Tom's bizarre alchemy certainly works for me, as his intense sincerity and otherness make for one of the most compellingly singular albums of the year as far as I am concerned.  I have been playing this record to death and expect to continue doing so for quite some time.
 
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