09 June 2019

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Albums and Singles

Each new Richard Skelton release is a bit of a surprise these days, as his aesthetic is in a permanent state of flux shaped by where he is living and what he is thinking about at any given time. For the most part, his more divergent and experimental forays tend to surface as digital-only releases, but this physical release explores the least expected direction of all: a return to the more melodic, song-based aesthetic of his classic Type LPs from a decade ago. Obviously, Skelton is quite a different artist now than he was back then, so Border Ballads not a return so much as it is a very different vision ("telluric, grounded, earthen") rooted in a semi-familiar structure. Given that Landings and Marking Time were the Skelton albums that I first fell in love with, it is very hard to maintain any semblance of objectivity with this long-delayed sequel (of sorts). It feels like Border Ballads recaptures the transcendent magic of its predecessors only fitfully though, as its deep melancholy feels more like a somber, earthbound elegy than an ecstatic catharsis.

Corbel Stone Press/Aeolian Editions

The circumstances and inspirations behind Border Ballads are atypically simple and straightforward, as Skelton was primarily driven by the "hinterland topography" of a rural stretch of the England-Scotland border.He makes a particular point of mentioning the various watercourses delineating the region, which I found curious, as there is little about these pieces that suggests a spiritual kinship with liquid in any way.Rather, these twelves miniatures evoke the sense of the sun slowly rising over a stark and wintry landscape.There is a pervasive sense of isolation and sadness saturating this entire album that I cannot imagine originating during any other season, yet Skelton apparently worked on this album for two years.Perhaps this is a project that he returned to only during his darker moments though.In any case, the simplicity of the album's inspiration is carried through in the modestness and simplicity of the pieces themselves, as Border Ballads approaches something like neo-classical chamber music.For most other artists, such a structure would not be a conspicuously modest avenue, but recent Richard Skelton fare has more closely resembled shifting tectonic plates or collapsing stars than it has a man playing a haunted viola melody over some minor key piano.Despite that newly human scale, however, Skelton remains more at home with geological time scales that human ones: the melodies of Border Ballads more closely resemble the slow-motion swells of drone music than they do any conventional string ensemble.

While it is admittedly quite a pleasant change of pace to see Skelton returning to melody and songcraft, his melodies were never the primary appeal of his work: the brilliance of those earlier albums lay in their visceral and dazzling execution. I had never heard anyone play a bowed instrument quite like Skelton, as his strings churned, heaved, shivered, and threw off sprays of harmonic sparks as if they were alive.Happily, some shades of that supernatural conjuring return here in pieces like "Altar Valley" and "Spur."That former is especially wonderful, as any obvious traces of structure dissolve as the central theme lazily twists, undulates, and swells.Moreover, both pieces highlight Skelton's singular talent for beautifully carving through ambient languor with sharp tones or vivid clarity at the right moments. I had missed that bite and crackling electricity, so it is a true delight to find it resurfacing on a handful of Border Ballads' highlights.

For the most part, however, Border Ballads feels like a deliberately composed album with melodic structures and chord progressions that do not feel supernaturally alive.There are certainly many fine moments to be found, but that approach does not exactly play to Skelton's strengths.For example, the somber piano arpeggios of pieces like "Kist and Ark" and "Roan" feel like a bit of a regression to me.I suspect part of that is my own issue, as I have a potentially irrational hostility towards pianos.Nevertheless, some instruments are very well-suited for weaving illusions and some are not.For me, pianos fall into the latter category, as I have yet to hear a piano work so brilliant that it makes me forget that I am hearing someone playing a piano (though Arvo Pärt’s "Spiegel in Spiegel" may be an exception).With Richard Skelton albums, I do not want to hear chords and scales–I want to fall under a spell.The prominent presence of minor key piano patterns is like hearing someone who long ago figured out how to forge his own path go back to making music with the same rules and conventions as everyone else.

Thankfully, that statement is likely true only fleetingly, as Skelton is an artist who always seems to have a number of irons in the fire these days.For all I know, there could be another monster Inward Circles album on the horizon that will knock me flat.With Border Ballads, Skelton just felt like composing a suite of moody, comparatively straightforward violin and cello pieces.Some of them are quite good and they amount to a uniformly strong and thematically coherent whole, but this album does not scratch the itch I hoped it would.Alas.On the bright side, Skelton remains an eternal wellspring of gravitas and quiet intensity.Also, his craftsmanship and attention to nuance are focused as ever, as the strings in a pieces like "Fair Shining" moan, shudder, and leave spectral trails in all the right ways.In fact, Skelton is in fine form in virtually every respect, which makes it perplexing that Border Ballads feels like a comparatively minor album.It just has the curious feel of being a (good) soundtrack rather than a stand-alone work.And, in an abstract way, that might be exactly what it is: not a soundtrack to a film or piece of art, but a soundtrack for the landscapes of Skelton's rural borderlands.

Samples can be found here.

09 June 2019

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Albums and Singles

Plantasia has become a well-known record despite a limited initial 1976 release to anyone buying a houseplant from the Mother Earth store in Los Angeles. This was music for plant owners to create an environment of optimal growth - simple haunting melodies composed on a moog.

Sacred Bones

Mort Garson’s musical resume is somewhat bizarre. In the 1950s and '60s, he wrote several pop hits and became a trusted arranger and composer in the fields of easy listening, film and television, working on recordings by such artists as Julie London, Doris Day, Laurence Harvey, and even the string arrangements on Glen Campbell’s "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." Then Garson discovered the Moog synthesizer and took a leap into what may be termed electronic exotica, releasing such oddities as Zodiac - Cosmic Sounds, with tracks dedicated to each horoscope sign, Black Mass (under the pseudonym Lucifer), and The Unexplained - Electronic Musical Impressions of The Occult. His broad interests and experience meant that Garson was well placed to compose and record Plantasia, and also to remain a relatively obscure figure. Plantasia probably owes a good deal to the 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants by Christopher Bird (an author with previous on the topic of dowsing) and Peter Tompkins, who had served with the (OSS) Office of Strategic Services behind enemy lines during WWII, along with hundreds of first-generation Italian-Americans who voluntarily returned to Italy to help tie the enemy down with anti-Nazi resistance offensives. Bird and Tompkins’s theories about plant sentience were influenced by Cleve Backster, a CIA interrogation expert who, after attaching a lie detector to a Drachea cane, was convinced that plants felt pain, fear, affection, and were capable of ESP. Backster later experimented on yogurt bacteria, eggs, and human sperm, and was probably influenced by the writings by Jagadish Chandra Bose.

The music stands up remarkably. The next disc I had cued up was Oren Ambarchi’s Simian Angel and it took a few minutes into the opening piece "Palm Sugar Candy" before I realized Garson had finished. For all its apparent simplicity, Plantasia is a deceptively substantial and varied album. The sinewy synth mutations of "Concerto For Philodenron and Pothos" and "Rhapsody in Green" for example, flow through light and sinister moods like a wandering vine captured in time-lapse photography.

It is easy to imagine an award-winning short animation film wherein hip West Coast foliage grooves along to the swaying melody and plonking rhythms of "Baby’s Tears Blues" and the breezy "Swinging Spathiphyllums." Equally, the creeping, swirls of "Ode To An African Violet" belong in, and indeed may already be in, a video game. I detect from "You Don’t Have To Walk A Begonia" a potent whiff of seaside pier amusement arcade and cheesy bingo parlor pipe organ. The title track first made me think of refreshing raindrops watering weary leaves and tired minds, but it blooms into something of a vivid musical canopy of Moog trumpets. "A Mellow Mood For Maidenhair" and "Music To Soothe The Savage Snake Plant" hint at at the stylized world of Gnac’s fantastic "Sevens" disc, with its contradictory mundane glamour, jet set travel, drab hotels, and weary secret agents - an accidental or unconscious link to the real life worlds of Backster and Tompkins.

On some obscure Venn diagram, Plantasia sits just within the point where espionage and manipulation techniques meet innocence and nature. It would make a great addition to the soundtrack of Douglass Trumbull’s 1972 post-apocalyptic environmental sci-fi film Silent Running. The lilting, spaced out charm of these ten tracks transcends the backstories and slightly von Dänikenesque musings about plant consciousness - which have long been overtaken by philosophical debate on artificial intelligence, sex toy robots, and digital life. Silent Running ends with a lone remaining Earth forest floating through space in a dome, tended by a single robot. We are not there yet, but it is arguably sad to consider the less than secret life of plants in modern agriculture, where they are speed grown in relentless artificial light and never allowed to sleep. Such a fate is the antithesis of Plantasia which was also briefly distributed to those buying a Simmons mattress from limited participating Sears stores. The 2019 reissue is, naturally, available on green vinyl and the cover artwork is still hopelessly harmless.

samples available here

 

09 June 2019

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Albums and Singles

Laurent Jeanneau's work as Kink Gong has been one of the most compellingly quixotic and unique projects in underground music for almost two decades, but I have only recently begun to scratch the surface of his mountain of work. He is probably best known as a prolific ethnomusicologist, occasionally surfacing on Sublime Frequencies. He has also self-released over 150 collections of ethnic minority music recorded during his many travels throughout Africa, China, and Southeast Asia. Naturally, that restless curiosity has made a deep impact on Jeanneau's own sensibility as an artist, resulting in a series fairly uncategorizable collage-based soundscape albums like this landmark 2013 release. At the root of Voices are a host of recordings of indigenous vocalists made in China, Vietnam, and Laos, but Jeanneau ingeniously transforms them into a haunting, otherworldly, and timeless vision that blurs the boundaries of tradition, experimentation, art, and reality.

Discrepant

The opening "Baozoo Khen" is the most sublime and powerful expression of Kink Gong's transformational wizardry on the album, as Jeanneau collages vocals from two women and a man into an eerily beautiful mass chorus of unusually harmonizing drones.There is also a backdrop of slowed-down mouthorgan, but the true brilliance and artistry of the piece lies how the voices endlessly converge and dissolve, hypnotically seesawing between their own wandering melodies and a single haunting, sustained chord.It is extremely simple and absolutely perfect in its unearthly, ritualistic reverie.Wisely, Jeanneau does not attempt to maintain that level of intensity for the rest of Voices, but he does masterfully deepen the spell, expanding his emotional and textural palette further with each new piece.In the following "Ar Mir Sanq Paq Aq Li," an Akha woman amiably and animatedly delivers a singsong monologue over gently, rippling bed of Jeanneau's lute playing.The effect is quite a dreamlike one, as the underlying music gradually evolves from a languorous sense of suspended animation to a multilayered cacophony of decontextualized voices, pointillist strings, and jabbering electronics.The first half of the album draws to a close with another highlight in the form of "Cym Wu Khmu," which ingeniously marries the visceral clatter of a Buddhist percussion ensemble with the playfully chattering voice of a Khmu woman.The percussion is impressively heavy and stomps relentlessly forward, yet the warbling and cheery voice in its midst creates an endearingly ambiguous mood.  

The second half's pleasures are a bit more abstract, thought they are no less unique and inventive.The side begins with "3 Hani Pipa," which is probably the album's most curious and overtly experimental piece.Ostensibly, it is a collage of three different songs, but it is impossible to tell where one song ends and another begins or even which parts are actually from a song.Instead, it is sounds like an insistently strummed lute beneath a surreal chaos of hooting and chanting that resembles a raucous and unruly parade.The following "Sixian Miao Choir" is another lute piece of sorts, but it seems heavily processed and resembles overlapping recordings of someone violently playing a stand-up bass.While the sounds of the titular choir do drift through the proceedings, the overall impression is more like a feral and unhinged free-jazz performance (particularly when the "strangled balloon" howls burst onto the scene). The closing "Haoshendd" continues the cavalcade of disorienting surprises beautifully, as Jeanneau transforms the sounds of a lusheng (a Hmong pipe instrument) into a queasily blurred impressionist haze.Interestingly, it is a piece that lacks any recognizable voices, which makes it an odd choice for the final act of an album entitled Voices.It is also the only piece that sounds like it could have been a Kink Gong solo creation, as almost all melody or regional character has been sanded away to leave only subtly a discordant fog of drones.I suppose that makes it the album's least compelling piece, but it is nevertheless very effective at ending the album on an enigmatic and eerie note.

On one level, Voices stands with Harappian Night Recordings' The Glorious Gongs of Hainuwele as one the great recent masterpieces of ethnological forgery, as it is exotic, absorbing, and vividly realized in all the right ways.On a deeper level, however, it is more like a loving homage to the regional cultural traditions of the Laotian, Vietnamese, and Chinese villages that Jeanneau spent time in.With Voices, Jeanneau does not impose himself or appropriate ethnic minority cultures so much as he celebrates their vanishing traditions.While his transformations are certainly significant and occasionally dramatic, they are largely self-effacing ones that serve primarily to amplify and focus the existing attributes of the raw material: the emotions and performances in this album feel real, honest, and direct.Jeanneau's artistry lies primarily in his unerring intuition for recontextualizing these many voices in a way that is alluring to adventurous ears outside of rural Southeast Asia, yet does not sacrifice or betray their essence.That is an admirable approach and all the more so because it worked so beautifully: Voices is a wonderfully strange and multifaceted suite of songs that feels like a valiant attempt to convey everything that is joyful, dark, playful, and mysterious about being alive in a single piece of art.

Samples can be found here.

09 June 2019

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Albums and Singles

This inscrutable cabal of post-industrial scavengers continues to burrow into our murky cultural subconscious with a pair of minor new releases. Characteristically, both albums are heavily conceptual and mystery-shrouded, but The Recounting of Night Time at least volunteers that it "focuses principally on a certain piece of German gothic cinema made during the late 1970s." That certainly seems to suggest that a badly worn VHS of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu is at the heart of the sounds, but Fossil Aerosol Mining Project are (as always) far more interested in what time has done to the physical media than than whatever that media's original intended content was. About the superior Archeological Testing in the Land of Monkeys, even less is revealed ("A fatigued response to reminders of a cyclical past, surprisingly exaggerated in the years of the rooster and the dog"). Both releases offer their flashes of inspiration, but it is the digital-only and conceptually vague Archeological Testing that unexpectedly feels like some of the collective's finest work to date.

Helen Scarsdale/Bandcamp

The Recounting of Night Time's opening "An Unexpected Appearance of Folkway" is both maddeningly deceptive and weirdly perfect at setting the stage for the album to come, as its initial fanfare of sickly and smeared violins quickly gets mired in a noisy loop that continually restarts itself.Then it disappears completely to reveal a new theme that sounds like a distant fog horn melody.As it turns out, those brief flirtations with melody are arguably the album's last.The "fog horn" sounds, on the other hand, are an apt harbinger for an album that feels like a supernatural fog slowly filling my home in the night.It is not a particularly evil fog though: aside from an omnipresent backdrop of ominous, murky drones, the atmosphere never darkens beyond "vaguely unsettling."In fact, I would describe the aesthetic as lying somewhere between "time becoming frozen in a single repeating moment" and "being briefly haunted by a very lazy poltergeist."Almost all of the sounds evoke the sense of a darkened room where all of the electronic devices have quietly flickered to life, but all get immediately fixated on a single action: the record player skips, the VCR keeps failing to eject a tape, and the TV screen just shows crackling static with occasional mysterious glimpses of something more. That is a genuinely unique and fascinating atmosphere to conjure and Fossil Aerosol Mining Project do it beautifully.Unfortunately, they are quite content to stay there and the album feels forever stuck in that same moment pregnant with deepening events that never come.

To some degree, the album's lengthier pieces stretch a bit beyond that monochromatic, hypnagogic spell of eerie emptiness, but they usually just do so by slowly building to a somewhat higher pitch of textural intensity.The only real exceptions come near the end of the album.In "The Retelling of Fragmentary Legends," all of the initial themes of Night Time are reprised in a surreal miasma of creaking, hissing, and whooshing noises en route to a brief but beautiful passage of ghostly synth chords."Emptying the Village," on the other hand, features a blearily somber chord progression right from the start, then embellishes it with a warped, quavering melodic fragment.By default, it is the album's strongest piece and I am quite fond of it.If a few more pieces had cohered into some semblance of rhythm, melody, or harmonic activity, The Recounting of Night Time probably would have been a much stronger release.I suspect that was simply not possible, however, as Fossil Aerosol Mining Project seem like they are EXTREMELY invested in the thematic purity of their work.As such, it is likely that this album had an extremely constrained palette and that its artistry lay in making something compelling from those unlikely and unmusical fragments.Few other artists would use a thirty-year-old "field recording" of a poorly attended screening in a mildewed movie theater as one of their primary sound sources and I cannot blame them.I am delighted that this shadowy mass of weirdos is more than happy to take on that challenge though, even if it does not always yield the most dynamic music.The Recounting of Night Time is almost pure atmosphere.

Samples can be found here.

As far as I know, Archeological Testing bears no intentional relation to The Recounting of Night Time, yet it weirdly feels like a willful return to the same territory with some significant improvements. The mood is certainly a similar one, even if the sound sources are completely different.In the case of this release, however, there is not a sense of endless suspended animation, as a jabbering cacophony regularly and gleefully breaks through the fog of hiss and subterranean drones.Even the drones themselves are more vibrant this time around, as "A Poorly Remembered Decade" feels like it is permanently at a low boil.The artists also make especially effective use of vocal samples, alternately using them as a narrative tool (of sorts) or for pure distorted and demonic mindfuckery.Impressively, the opening "Armassist" uses them for both purposes at the same time, as a pitch-shifted voice with a vaguely Southern accent kicks off the album by proclaiming "Somethin's wrong somewhe-uh!"That 'somewhere' is arguably the world of this album, as I often feel like I am surrounded by gibbering, skittering chaos as I hallucinate screams and strange voices emerging from the static of my possessed television set. However, that infernal scene is endearingly undercut by the delightful lunacy of some of the sounds and voices.There is a perverse element of humor that surfaces throughout the proceedings that the band's spiritual forefather George Romero would appreciate."Disco Stones" is an especially fine example of that exquisite blend, mingling smeared and delirious funk Muzak with something resembling strangled walkie-talkie transmissions.

For those amenable to Fossil Aerosol Mining Project's post-modernist celebration of the lingering physic residue of forgotten culture, there are an impressive number of highlights to be found throughout Archeological Testing.My favorite of the lot is "Nowhere Near (11th Month Remix)," which resembles an inspired variation on the classic "sci-fi tribal" aesthetic of FAMP’s erstwhile collaborators Zoviet France (it sounds like a series of reality distorting, extra-dimensional howls reverberating through an abandoned space station).That deliciously creepy and unreal atmosphere carries into the following "Aocean" to some degree as well, though its simmering dread feels more akin to Solaris than Alien.The final moments of that piece also feel like the album's haunted and enigmatic heart, as a distorted voice repeatedly intones "With each word, with each breath, with each moment."That hot streak remarkably continues for the entirety of the album's second half, as the bleary kitsch of the following "Disco Stones" gives way to the dynamic phantasmagoria of "The Night Roar" and the eerily lovely coda of "Ruined Melody."The unpredictability and variety of these pieces truly brings out the best in Fossil Aerosol Mining Project’s aesthetic and I am curious to know if that was a deliberate choice or just a happy accident.After all, this album is described as "unplanned and largely unannounced," so it could very well be a collection of unrelated recent (or not recent) pieces that did not fit with one the band's more rigorously themed formal albums.It is perplexing that such a fine album was allowed to slip into the world largely unnoticed, though I suppose self-promotion has never exactly been one of this collective's greatest strengths.In any case, I am delighted that Archeological Testing surfaced despite its lack of planning and fanfare, as it is one of Fossil Aerosol Mining Project's most dynamic and compelling releases that I have encountered.

Samples can be found here.

09 June 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This unusual reissue quietly entered the world last December when everyone was frantically obsessing over the year-end lists and features, so it did not get nearly the attention it deserved. It is certainly an odd release for a couple of reasons, but the most obvious one is that a 35-year-old album of bird songs was resurrected by a record label best known for avant-garde and experimental music. The other is that Birds of Venezuela was just one of over one hundred albums recorded and released by French ornithologist Jean-Claude Roché. That naturally begged the questions "What makes this album the special one?" and "Who exactly is this for?". As it turns out, the liner notes by David Toop answer the former and the album itself decisively answered the latter: this album is for me because it is amazing. In fact, Toop actually started planning a trip to the Amazon soon after hearing this Birds of Venezuela and I probably would have done the same, as a strong case could be made that the most texturally and melodically compelling music scene of the mid-‘70s was the Venezuelan rain forests.

Sub Rosa

Given that this is an album of field recordings of birds, it is no surprise that the birds themselves are the stars.Among the many participants, the pootoo portrayed on the album’s cover is the biggest draw of all, as the liner notes breathlessly describe it as "a metal-looking bird" that is "one of the sonorous curiosities of this mad nature."Toop himself encountered the pootoo's song on his own Venezuelan trip and described it as "like lost ghost-souls crying out to the living" and one of the "most affecting" listening experiences of his life.With source material like that, Birds of Venezuela certainly would have been a fitfully striking release as just a collection of pure field recordings, but it is actually elevated to a higher plane of art and vision by Roché's unusual collage approach to mixing.Unlike many bird-based albums, Roché’s intention was not to document and isolate the individual songs.Rather, he ambitiously attempted to create a vivid and vibrantly alive "stereo concert" that roughly replicated the experience of being inside the delightful cacophony that erupted every dusk and dawn in Venezuelan forests.Amusingly, Roché unintentionally became an actual avant-garde artist a few years later, as the Lyon-based GMVL started presenting evening events where they would play five of Roché's stereo concerts at once in a park.Depending on one's location in the park, it was possible to experience a blurring together of sounds from various continents at once.Jazz musicians soon began approaching Roché to tell him that they liked his work.I expect most ornithologists do not experience that level of fame in art scenes.

Each of the five pieces assembled here has its own distinct character and subtly surprisingly trajectory.For example, the opening "Ocumare" initially sounds exactly like what I would expect from an album of Venezuelan bird songs, then unexpectedly erupts into a bubbling and hallucinatory crescendo with the help of a chorus of frogs.In "Gran Saba," one especially singular bird call that I recognized from a Dead Can Dance album stands out, but the depth and the warbling, seesawing dynamics of the backdrop are perhaps even more compelling (until it is all enveloped by the sinister roar of howler monkeys, anyway).The shorter "Rancho Grande" revisits that immersive, multilayered sound field of chittering, gibbering, and chirping sans monkeys, acting as a palette-cleanser of sorts before than album's bizarre and memorable second half.As a composition, the lengthy "Palmar" is arguably the album’s zenith, as it undergoes a mesmerizing and surreal transformation that strikingly feels industrial or futuristic at times.Naturally, Roché saves the pootoo's appearance for last, as their haunting call sneakily creeps up through the otherwise happy chirping and gurgling of "Guanare/Barinas."Toop's description of the sound as "ghost-souls" is a fairly apt one, as the pootoo's call does have an eerily human sound, albeit one that sounds smeared and processed.To my ears, it is not necessarily more attention-grabbing than the album's previous frog eruptions, but it is deliciously unnerving in its context.It feels like Roché presents a lively, colorful, and playful swirl of sounds, then stealthily pulls back a curtain to reveal the darker and more disturbing reality that also exists in the Amazonian rain forests.

One element of truly great music that I am always chasing is a masterful feat of illusion that erases any overt traces of deliberate compositional arc, recognizable instrumentation, rigid chord structure, or the hand of the artist.I did not expect to find such a perfect example of that achievement here, as I have heard plenty of bird-song albums before and I have never been particularly dazzled by them.Roché's stereo concerts, however, elevate a chorus of isolated pretty sounds into a trilling, chirping symphony of genuine depth and textural genius.Many years ago, I got to experience a Francisco López piece that was essentially processed rain forest sounds played with maniacal intensity and crushing volume.Unsurprisingly, it was an amazing and overwhelming experience.Birds of Venezuela is every bit as compelling as that, albeit a far more subdued variation: "birds as ambient soundscape" rather than "birds as noise assault."As a pure musical experience, this album is a virtuosic masterclass in dynamics and layering, as there a vibrant mélange of constant movements, shifting distances, loop-like rhythms, and melodic unpredictability pervading all these pieces.I know nothing about bird and frog psychology, so I have no idea how much the individual participants on this album consciously interact with other species sound-wise.They all seem to have a very important role that complements the roles of others though: Birds of Venezuela is like hearing a vast improv ensemble operating on a hive-mind level and it feels both effortless and transcendent.

Samples can be found here.

07 June 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Pauline Oliveros' Tara's Room has long been a favorite in the Imprec office and it's a great honor to be able to release it on LP for the very first time.  Tara's Room was cut by John Golden and pressed at RTI in order to achieve a quiet, dynamic pressing. Originally released on cassette in 1987.

This LP features two long sides of infinite depth and sensitivity. Oliveros performs these pieces using a Just Intonation accordion and her Expanded Instrument System in order to bend both time and pitch.

More information can be found here.

07 June 2019

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Albums and Singles

Pauline Oliveros and Guy Klucevsek's Sounding/Way was originally released on cassette in 1986 and has been out-of-print ever since. This LP was cut by John Golden and pressed at RTI in order to achieve a quiet, dynamic pressing.

The Sounding/Way concept was simple. Each artist would write a piece for two accordions and then they would perform them together. Thus, side A contains Guy Klucevsek's "Tremolo No. 6" performed by Guy Klucevsek and Pauline Oliveros. Side B contains Pauline's composition "The Tuning Meditation," also performed by both Pauline and Guy.

This is the second release in an on-going effort between Important Records and the Pauline Oliveros Trust to maintain and promote the music, philosophy and legacy of Pauline Oliveros.

Guy Klucevsek is one of the world’s most versatile and highly-respected accordionists. He has performed and/or recorded with Laurie Anderson, Bang On a Can, Brave Combo, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Coleman, Dave Douglas, Bill Frisell, Rahim al Haj, Robin Holcomb, Kepa Junkera, the Kronos Quartet, Natalie Merchant, Present Music, Relâche, Zeitgeist, and John Zorn.

Pauline Oliveros, composer, performer and humanitarian is an important pioneer in American Music. Acclaimed internationally, for four decades she has explored sound - forging new ground for herself and others.

Through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work with such breadth of vision that it profoundly effects those who experience it, and eludes many who try to write about it. Oliveros has been honored with awards, grants and concerts internationally. Whether performing at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., in an underground cavern, or in the studios of West German Radio, Oliveros' commitment to interaction with the moment is unchanged. She can make the sound of a sweeping siren into another instrument of the ensemble.

"On some level, music, sound consciousness and religion are all one, and she would seem to be very close to that level." ~ John Rockwell

"Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening, I now know what harmony is. It's about the pleasure of making music." ~ John Cage

More information can be found here.

07 June 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

"The Entertainer is Alex Twomey's first album since 2012.  Many have been waiting and, finally, here we are!  During the silence, Twomey’s keyboard work has germinated into a more framed compositional structure, beaming with orchestral strings, woodwinds, and brass.  Eleven cinematic settings and bouncing refrains mark this LP.  Alex describes the album as, "vignettes alluding to a vague narrative regarding one’s idea as an artist."  A somber beauty is penned.

Alex previously recorded as Mirror to Mirror and operated the record label Jugular Forest from 2004-2012.  I first met him in 2010 during a large concert in Santa Cruz, CA.  Alongside Twomey, myself, Kyle Parker (Infinite Body), Matthew Sullivan (Earn), Pedestrian Deposit, Mike Pollard, and Peter Friel performed that night.  Alex's performance was a thick ocean of chords, a penetrating grace that I can still recall.  Everyone has since bloomed from the ambient roots of that time in their own way.  Alex has held onto utilizing the keyboard, albeit as a tool to build a larger musical world.  A legend to the map.

On this album the melodies dance as twinkling bulbs along a retired parade float.  A dark comedy, a tragic smile.  Love found in the rough of it all."

-Sean McCann

More information can be found here.

07 June 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Important Records announces Vibe, the new LP from Extended Organ, the Los Angeles-based quintet associated with the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS).

Vibe, Extended Organ’s first full-length studio LP since 2000’s XOXO was recorded in April 2016 by members Joe Potts, Fredrik Nilsen, Paul McCarthy, Tom Recchion, and Alex Stevens. The album consists of two side-long tracks, "Hate" and "Vibe," recorded live at LACM Studio in Pasadena, California by acclaimed engineer André Knecht.

On Vibe, the band employs prepared piano, junk percussion, Joe Potts' Chopped Optigan, electric guitar, voice, Rheem organ, various electronics, and homemade instruments. Each track is improvised, then assembled and edited without overdubbing in studio. The music moves with velocity and direction revealing surprises at every turn. The resulting sound is ominous, humorous, harmonious, chaotic and at times quietly erotic. This is abstractly powerful music.

The highly provocative cover image, created collaboratively by Joe Potts, Fredrik Nilsen, and Tom Recchion, is shrouded inside a unique laser-cut outer sleeve. Like the music contained within, the cover reveal is a beguiling experience in and of itself. This intriguing package was art directed and designed by Tom Recchion.

Formed in 1994, Extended Organ produces a dynamic otherworldly ambience which can be simultaneously hilarious and frightening. Joe Potts lays down a carpet of sound using and his self-engineered drone instrument, the "Chopped Optigan," over which Paul McCarthy performs vocal and guitar improvisations channeled and processed by Alex Stevens. Alex also adds his own keyboard triggered synthesized sounds. Tom Recchion, renowned as an inventor of homemade instruments, a free improviser, and an accomplished composer of acoustic, electronic and tape music, performs an array of sounds folding lush beauty and horror sensibility into the matrix. Fredrik Nilsen plays an antique Rheem Mark 7 organ along with electronic sound and recordings created by Mike Kelley. Kelley was a member of the group from 2000 until his death in 2012 and continues to be a contributing member by virtue of sound recordings he provided before his death; "In case I can't make a gig, I can still play."

The LAFMS formed in the early 1970s around a loosely knit group of like-minded musical improvising sound experimenters in eastern Los Angeles who discovered their mutual interest and banded together to design modes of self production and distribution of recordings and publications, helping to develop and propel the DIY movement. In the ensuing 45 years the LAFMS has gone on to create dozens of records and groups (including Doo-Dooettes, AIRWAY, Le Forte Four, Smegma, John Duncan and Extended Organ), hundreds of concerts, festivals in both US and Europe, a full-scale gallery retrospective and volumes of artwork, sculptures, homemade instruments, videos, recordings, and other ephemera.

More information can be found here.

07 June 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

With Breach, Zeno van den Broek totally disrupts the world of glitch and electronica with an energy we have never heard before.  Breach dives into chaotic systems and creates a manifestation of the recent events of protests and riots across the globe. The album and live audiovisual performance explore the build up and release of tension, anger and energy in a new form of pitch black metal electronics and dense polyrhythmic structures. Utilizing electromagnetic recordings of communication devices and found footage of uproars, Breach establishes an intense experience by putting the beholder in the center of a system on the verge of breaking into chaos.

"Breach testifies to the blackened sounds of tectonic shifts shaking the worn habits of society’s nature and nurture. NOW! blares from metal screens. As stability is a long-lost illusion and equilibrium stands at odd angles, Breach screams: Come out and play. Offers on billboards: Tables filled to the brim, a riot in excess. Over there! Look, out of the window: The movement of revolutions per minute in a rapidly changing landscape where as below so above can very well be the next trending hashtag for barricade-progressive action. If not thought.

Breach sloganeers: Your anger is a gift. Breach unleashes: What was kept pent up, creeping slow like glacier ice, but advancing surely as the scorching lava that entombed Herculaneaum. Leaving behind the spiked blast of unloading, Breach does not represent — fashions disruptive events: compositions of chaos in flux. Breach breathes the frantic fumes and pulsates with the moving noises of electromagnetic rebels in the streets:

This, the density of today. For Breach is manifest."

More information can be found here.