- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This singular trio composed of Australian avant-guitar visionary Oren Ambarchi and the rhythm section from Sweden’s Fire!/Fire! Orchestra first surfaced back in 2022 with Ghosted and they are now back with an aptly named sequel. While that earlier album was inconveniently eclipsed by Ambarchi’s solo Shebang album for me that year, I connect quite a bit more with Ghosted II, as the trio’s vision seems to have fully blossomed this time around. I have admittedly grumbled in the past about my preference for Ambarchi’s earlier, more abstract work over his more recent jazz/fusion/krautrock-inspired rhythmic excursions, but this album happily strikes a near-perfect balance of those two sides, as drummer Andreas Werliin’s Latin-esque percussion workouts are an ideal backdrop for Ambarchi’s flickering and impressionistic guitar phantasms. Also, I think I finally grasped that “ghosted” is a perfect description of Ambarchi’s guitar aesthetic in this context, as his playing is abstracted into an incorporeal shimmer in nearly every piece (and the few well-chosen exceptions make quite an impact).
I have quickly grown to love this album, but It took me some time to warm to the opening “en,” as Ambarchi’s playing is primarily limited to gently warbling and painterly smears while Johan Berthling’s bass playing is seemingly relegated to just a single jazzy yet endlessly repeating riff. Once I listened to it on headphones, however, I quickly understood that the piece was essentially a killer drum showcase for Werliin: Ambarchi is providing subtle coloration, Berthling is holding down the pulse, and Werliin is absolutely tearing it up on a rolling and clattering groove. As I am always a fan of great drummers given space to go off, merely shifting my focus to Werliin instantly worked wonders in deepening my appreciation for the piece. I found some other quiet delights as well (the way Ambarchi’s guitar sometimes sounds like an organ fading in and out of focus, the way the final fade out reveals new details in the bass line, etc.), but the other three pieces still feel stronger simply because they are more of a full-band effort. In the following “två,” for example, Berthling’s lovely bass harmonic motif is the heart of a stellar foray into a simmering and austere Tortoise-esque groove. Ambarchi’s contribution is still quite muted (woozy vapor trails, gently oscillating shimmer), but the trio make the most out of the piece’s spaciousness, as the vacuum of space makes a mere kick drum thump or bass throb feel sensual and significant.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
My first exposure to Li Chao's long-running project "from the filthy concrete cave of smoggy Beijing" was 2022's Misbegotten Ballads (SVBKULT) and that album's unique collision of grimy, junkyard-style "early industrial" sounds and playful weirdness left quite a deep impression on me. This latest album is not exactly a proper follow up, as it is a collection of material created between 2016 and 2020 that "nearly faded into oblivion" in the dark early days of the pandemic, but those orphaned pieces have now "been reborn with the strongest wishes" and Chao considers them to be among his "most cherished works." Happily, I can now cherish them too, as Chao's single-minded pursuit of a curdled and corroded vision frequently yields fascinating and singular results.
There is not a hell of a lot of information available about Zaliva-D, but the project has been active for roughly two decades now and is ostensibly a husband/wife duo. Notably, the band's other member (Aisin-Gioro Yuanjin) seems to exclusively handle the video art side of the pair's live performances, so Zaliva-D albums are essentially a Li Chao solo project. In the past, Chao has dabbled in dark ambient and black metal and darkness remains a prominent theme in Zaliva-D as well, but the darkness in Zaliva-D's case feels more like a killer basement show in the burnt-out ruins of a post-apocalyptic city.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This collaboration between Kenyan soundscape auteur Joseph Kamaru and industrial dub heavyweight Kevin Martin came as quite a wonderful surprise, as their seemingly unlikely pairing turned out to be a match made in heaven. The unexpected twists do not end there, however, as Martin also persuaded Kamaru to contribute some singing and spoken word passages after being captivated by his lilting voice and "soft-spoken accent." The warmth and humanizing effect of that innovation beautifully elevates Disconnect into something far more compelling than just the collision of two different visions. The dub-inspired format of this release is yet another delightful curveball, as Disconnect has the feel of a maxi-single rather than an album, with the epic "Differences" acting as the killer single that is backed by a darker B-side ("Arkives") and two radically transformed variations of each. The entire release is excellent, but "Differences" in particular stands as one of the strongest pieces in either artist's already revered oeuvre.
The opening "Differences" slowly fades into being with deep bass drones and a slow, simple two-note melody with a long and reverberant decay. Gradually, however, a chant-like vocal loop emerges and the piece slowly blossoms into a rich tapestry of gorgeously textured layers that feels like a sublime and beatless deconstruction of a great Jesu song. It is a perfect marriage of melody and production, as Kamaru's vocal hook is bittersweet and soulful, the psychedelic touches are immersive and spatially mobile, and every note is given plenty of space to linger and be felt. In short, "Differences" is thirteen minutes of pure sonic heaven. Needless to say, that sets the bar quite high for the rest of the album, but revisiting the same raw material two more times is an inventive way to solve such a problem. On the colder "Difference," a slow but insistent kick drum thump carves a path through bleary underground parking garage ambiance, while "Differ" sounds like a spectral, time-stretched, and hiss-soaked deconstruction of Basic Channel-style dub techno.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This collaboration could not possibly have come at a better time, as Sam Shackleton has been riding quite a varied and adventurous hot streak over the last few years with his collaborations with Holy Tongue, Scotch Rolex, Waclaw Zimpel, and Siddhartha Belmannu. Given that Ben Chasney is also quite a creatively restless artist, Jinxed By Being could have gone in any number of possible directions, but the direction that the duo ultimately landed on sounds a hell of a lot like a Six Organs of Admittance album. The twist, however, is that it sounds like a truly great Six Organs album that I have been waiting for my whole life, as Chasney's signature psychedelic folk vision blossoms into vivid psychotropic color with the addition of Shackleton's panning and swirling electronic mindfuckery. Chasney and Shackleton have truly hit upon a magic formula here: usually a Six Organs album lives or dies based on the strength of Chasney's songwriting or the quantity of killer guitar motifs, but Shackleton's "heavy cosmic dread" aesthetic makes every song feel like I am being lured deeper and deeper into a phantasmagoric dreamscape.
The opening "The Voice and the Pulse" is currently one of the leading contenders for my favorite piece on the album, but it is more of a shapeshifting mind-melter than a structured song. While I am not usually a fan of Chasney's falsetto vocals, the hushed, repeating refrain of "keep the corpse alive" makes the piece feel like a morbid nursery rhyme leading me into a reality-dissolving psychedelic fog that is as outre as anything by Current 93 or Legendary Pink Dots. Like most of the pieces on the album, the best parts tend to be the hallucinatory swirl of sounds in the periphery rather than the song itself, but the tribal-ambient percussion flourishes and the vibraphone-sounding melody that surface throughout the piece are sublime pleasures as well. The album's next stunner follows soon after with "The Grip of the Flesh," as Chasney's chant-like vocals guide me into a shapeshifting phantasmagoria of kalimba melodies, layered field recordings, and gorgeously shivering chord strums. Then the bottom drops out and the piece unexpectedly transforms into a more pounding and doom-inspired second act that favorably calls to mind Chasney's erstwhile labelmates Om (albeit only if Al Cisneros swapped out his bass for a formidable arsenal of electronics and effects pedals). More importantly, "The Grip of the Flesh" kicks off an unbroken run of killer pieces that stretches all the way to the end of the album.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
In 1965, John Cage "composed" a piece for Alvin Lucier that debuted at Brandeis University's then-new Rose Art Museum (Lucier was employed as Brandeis's chorus director at the time). The score for the piece was characteristically Cage-ian, as it was essentially just "correspondence and notes regarding the preparation of magnetic tape" and left plenty of room for chance and spontaneity to play significant roles. While Cage settled upon a total of 88 loops to mirror the number of keys on a piano, the contents and length of those loops were left very open-ended (as was the duration of the piece itself, as its beginning and ending were determined by the arrival and departure of the audience). There was also an element of mischief to the piece as well, as Cage's original vision included loops as long as 45 feet that stretched over a fountain and also included instructions for what to do when some of the loops inevitably broke mid-performance. Unsurprisingly, performances of "Rozart Mix" are quite rare for those reasons, but Aaron Dilloway was recently lucky enough to land the time and resources necessary to perform his own personalized interpretation and there is literally no one on earth who could be better suited for such an endeavor.
This album's origins date back to 2020, as Dilloway was contacted by the John Cage Trust and Acra, NY's Wave Farm about staging a fresh performance of the piece. The following year, Dilloway spent "a wonderful and intense week" at Bard College researching Cage's notes and materials, then performed a 6-hour version at the Trust with the assistance of Rose Actor-Engel, Twig Harper, C. Lavender, Quintron, Robert Turman, and John Wiese. According to Dilloway, the performance involved "12 individually amplified reel to reel tape machines, placed around multiple floors of a house, playing 88 tape loops spliced together by 5 to 175 splices" and "created an overwhelming and joyous environment of cacophonous sound." Amusingly, that performance just leapt to the top of my ever-expanding list of "missed concert" regrets, as I used to live a mere 10 minutes from Bard College. Alas. On the bright side, the durational constraints of vinyl have distilled that performance to a mere 16 minutes of surrealist magic that I can now experience at home. It is certainly less immersive and hypnotic than a 6-hour dose would be, but the new brevity imbues the piece with the "all killer, no filler" feel of a great noise set, so I am definitely not complaining.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This unique quartet unusually originated as a collaboration between two French photographers, as Frédéric D. Oberland and Grégory Dargent performed some improvised duo concerts a few years back to accompany screenings and exhibits in Cairo, Beirut, and elsewhere. The duo was then expanded into a quartet to include Lebanese bassist Tony Elieh and darbuka player Wassim Halal and a three-day "improvised sound bacchanalia" ensued. The foursome describe themselves as a "post-anything quartet featuring multi-instrumentalists from the Mediterranean inland Sea" and share an ambitious vision of "new folklore for a devastated planet" and "tangos danced on the glowing ashes of our days." In less colorfully poetic terms, SIHR is a visceral and freewheeling collision of Arabic percussion, snatches of Middle Eastern melodies, timeless folk instrumentation, and ambitiously weird/mangled/abused synth sounds. In fact, literally everyone other than Halal plays a synth of some kind, which makes for a deeply strange collision of traditional music and outré electronics. While SIHR only fully transcends its improvisatory roots on the more melodic and sax-driven "YouGotALight," the album as a whole is an oft-fascinating outlier and this quartet truly never resembles any other improv ensemble that I have encountered.
The opening "Oui-Ja'aa" is a fairly representative plunge into this foursome's bizarre collision of disparate aesthetics, as Halal's clattering percussion builds into a hypnotic groove while a maniacally insistent synth figure wanders and trills all over the place. It eventually becomes a bit more melodic in the second half, but the endlessly propulsive and shapeshifting groove is the highlight by a landslide, as it sounds like it could be a live recording of Can on a particular great and adventurous night. Aside from that, "Oui-Ja'aa" also sounds at times like Catherine Christer Hennix has just ridden a war elephant into a Middle Eastern street fair. The following "Enuma Ellis" cools things down a bit, however, resembling something between a strain of droning oud-driven desert rock and a ritualistic street procession gnawed by pulsing swells of howling distorted electric guitar (Oberland's handiwork, I imagine). "YouGotALight" then further reduces the intensity to a sublime simmer, as Oberland's alto sax sensuously weaves a melody across a subdued landscape of quivering and rippling minor key arpeggios, dubwise percussion, melodic bass, and spasms of electric guitar. The final minute is especially wonderful, as a melodic crescendo unexpectedly drifts in. Frankly, it sounds like the best song that Barn Owl never recorded.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Alex Keller's newest album's title, as well as many of the individual song names, are direct references to the CIA's notorious mind control MKUltra project, with thematic linkage due to Keller's use of electromagnetic sounds and interference, which was also part of those experiments. While this would almost be indicative of a harsh noise endurance test, Sleep room is quite the opposite. It may be a bit raw at times, but Keller's singular approach has a massively impressive depth and complexity to it, both stimulating curiosity as to what the sounds actually are and aesthetically engaging at the same time.
Keller's employment of electromagnetic transducers takes the form of pieces extracted from other technological sources, such as old modems, network servers, LED lightbulbs, and even a bug zapper and stun gun. Manipulated in real time, rather than just processing existing recordings, means that Keller is able to truly treat these as instruments, rather than just sound sources that act as fodder for effects pedals and plug-ins.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
David Jackman proceeds through the latest two entries in Die Stadt's current subscription series of his new work with some sense of continuity with recent works as well as the first two installments of the series (Darcknes and Quietude, both as Organum Electronics). However, and perhaps most clearly indicated by the different moniker he is using, the two discs emphasize different facets of Jackman's art, while still representing linked parts of a long-form project.
As Organum Electronics, Noughwhere is the more forceful of the pair. Obviously utilizing electronic instrumentation throughout, Jackman begins with an organ-like sustained tone, but soon incorporates more abrasive electronic sounds. Throughout the 56-minute-long piece, the tones are often overshadowed by his use of the resonating electronic noise, which makes this the more challenging of the two albums. He does use one clearly non-electronic element throughout: the massive tolling bell that has been featured in much of his recent work. Even that, however, receives some level of sonic manipulation, with him intensifying the sound into something even heavier than its natural qualities.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
As far as I can tell, this is probably Diamanda Galás' tenth live album to date and it documents a pair of 2017 performances in Chicago and Seattle (Galás' previous live album, At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem, dates from the previous year). For the uninitiated, that probably sounds like an excessive number of live albums, but the improvisatory nature of Diamanda's art ensures that every single live performance is a truly singular event. Of course, actually experiencing Diamanda Galás live (an essential experience) is not quite the same as hearing a recording of the performance, much like watching a professionally shot video of a burning house is not quite the same as actually being inside one. That said, it is still a wild and compelling experience nonetheless and the lines between studio albums and live albums are increasingly academic given her volcanic spontaneity and preference for single-take recordings. The similarities to jazz do not end there, however, as Diamanda Galás in Concert is devoted to radical piano-and-voice interpretations of an eclectic and fascinating array of unconventional standards.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest album from Vicki Bennett, her first since 2018, is a characteristically dizzying and multilayered collage fantasia drawn from her currently touring AV performance "The Library of Babel." Fittingly, the album title has a dual meaning (either "abundance" or "copy"), but the deeper conceptual vein lies in the AV performance's title nod to a Jorge Luis Borges short story. In that story, "isolated librarians" struggle to "find meaningful texts amidst an overwhelming number of nonsensical or irrelevant books." Naturally, that nicely mirrors our own existential struggle to make sense of life while drowning in vast amounts of information, which Bennett colorfully portrays as "a journey through cinema and sound where the actors are set adrift from their story, left with pure experience." Fans of Bennett's previous work will find a lot of familiar samples, melodies, and themes set adrift from previous songs as well, as COPIA feels like a fever dream tour of the project's discography distilled into one memorably unhinged plunge down the psychedelic rabbit hole. Such self-cannibalism is very much in character for the project, of course, but a few of COPIA's fresh variations on a theme rank among Bennett's most mesmerizing work.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This Swiss percussionist has been quietly carving out a very cool and unique niche for himself over the last decade, as he continually finds unusual conceptual scenarios to combine with his virtuosic playing. I greatly enjoyed 2021's aptly titled Locked Grooves, but had not yet delved too deeply into his earlier work, so I had missed the first installment of Hidden Tracks: 2017's Basel – Genève. For that album, Sartorius brought his drumsticks along for a 10-day, 270km hike along Switzerland's Jura Ridgeway Trail and recorded improvised beats on whatever intriguing sound sources he encountered (trees, empty silos, corn stalks, etc.). On this latest installment, his journey is now vertical, as Sartorius kept a similar beat diary as he climbed from the Italian village of Domodossola "to the peak of Weissmies (4017m above sea level) in the Swiss Valais." In theory, that upped the game considerably constraint-wise, as Sartorius gradually leaves behind both humanity and trees in his ascent, but that comparative dearth of available sound sources was no match for his resourceful inventiveness.
