I have historically not followed Felicia Atkinson’s prolific career too closely, aside from enjoying the excellent Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier album on Aguirre, but this latest experiment in surrealism/dada/collage/detournement piqued my interest.  For one, it is billed as a "concrète/post-digital oratorio in five parts" and was made in willfully constrained/minimalist fashion using only a laptop with limited software (Atkinson has previously sounded like a one-woman psych-rock band).  Also, it was partially inspired by being frightened as a child by Pierre Henry's "Apocalypse de Jean" and is built upon texts ranging from George Bataille's erotic prose to Felicia's own writings to snippets from random Italian art magazines.  To me, that either sounds like a recipe for a pretentious towering fiasco or a goddamn masterpiece, but the end result is mostly neither, though one piece ("L'Oeil") does manage to veer quite close to the latter.
This posthumous release is a thoroughly bittersweet affair, as Shimmering Ghost is both Rodman Melchior's final album and her finest hour (probably, anyways).  A series of fractured and flickering collages, these pieces are "experimental" in the best sense of the word, using an unpredictable and simple mixture of instrumentation, found sounds, and field recordings to weave together a very complex, intimate, and evocative narrative.  At its best, Ghost makes me feel like I am drifting through an immersive, mysterious, and disorienting stream of someone else's dreams and memories.  No one else makes albums like this.
Cetology is one of those albums that sits somewhat close to an established style (in this case techno) on the genre spectrum, but just far enough out to sound like something else entirely. The elements are all here: synth leads, catchy basslines, programmed drums, but it all ends up put together in a way that might seem wrong, but because of that becomes a different and captivatingly unique beast entirely.
Few bands consisting of only a drummer/vocalist and bassist would be able to carry that arrangement for almost 16 years, but few bands are Lightning Bolt. Sticking true to their roots since 1999, Fantasy Empire is their first record in five years, and also their first recorded in a professional studio. This has not at all dulled their sound: it is still as blown out and distorted as ever, and as before memorable riffs and melodies lie beneath the primordial low-end sludge.
The photographs that comprise the artwork for Characters at the Water Margin, of the Hoh River and of Washington State’s Pacific coast, teem with secluded life, the same life that Loren Chasse presents in his music. It’s an unusual sort of life, easy to miss despite its ubiquity. Gnarled tree trunks, stones worn into smooth ovals, driftwood piled into broken lattices; by definition these are dormant and inanimate things, but Chasse listens and composes with a heuristic ear. Along and above the Olympic Peninsula’s jagged shoreline, small commotions lie in wait, accompanied by the constant pulse of the ocean. Tucked away at the foot of a national forest, in the wreckage of a glacial waterway, they are all but invisible. The circumstances of their appearance depend on close listening, on the slowing down of time, and on a willingness to hear the depth of music that subsists in the tiniest places.
On paper, this compilation seems like exactly what the world needs: a new compilation celebrating the legacy of a criminally underappreciated and mostly forgotten band whose entire catalog is largely out-of-print.  In reality, however, Bourbonese Qualk 1983-1987 is kind of a perplexing mixed success, as Mannequin decided to focus exclusively on Qualk's rather primitive early years, bypassing almost all of their more distinctive and original work.  There is still a lot to like here, as the band originally sounded kind of like an anarcho-punk band that could not afford guitars or a full drum kit, but this era definitely would not have been my first choice if I were commencing my own reissue campaign.
A collaboration between these two avant-garde elder statesmen could have gone any number of ways, given Chatham’s late-career embrace of the trumpet and Palestine’s unrelenting eccentricity.  For the most part, however, the sprawling, nearly three-hour Youuu + Mee is a huge success, taking minimalist drone into some very twisted, unexpected, and dark places (though Palestine's occasional eruptions of yowling vocals remain very much an acquired taste/potential deal-breaker).
Ralph Steinbrüchel’s formal training is that of a graphic designer, and his approach to Parallel Landscapes is one of a visual artist more than a sonic one. Packaged with a thick booklet of photography and design, this album is as much of an audio as it is a visual composition. With less of a focus on rhythms or melody, and more on vast expanses of terrain and landscape, simultaneously beautiful and foreboding, the album has a consistent, yet complex sensibility to it.
23 Skidoo has had a significant portion of their previous work reissued over the past few years, but Beyond Time is their first album of new material in 15 years. A soundtrack to the documentary of the same name, exploring the life and art of 23 Skidoo core members Johnny and Alex Turnbull's father, William Turnbull, it stands strongly on its own as an atmospheric work that stays faithful to the band’s roots in funk, hip-hop, and unique post-industrial noise.
As much as I like Boduf Songs, I have to admit that the albums began to all blur together for me at some point, as Mat Sweet’s hushed, morbid, and deliciously Lovecraftian aesthetic is an extremely specific one that he has mined for quite a long time (though 2013's Burnt Up On Re-Entry gamely tried to shake-up that formula).  I certainly do not blame him, as it is a very appealing and distinctive niche, but there is quite a lot of similar-sounding material out there as a result.  And now there is still more…sort of: Stench of Exist is a return to the "classic" Boduf sound, but with some healthy vestiges remaining from Sweet's more adventurous recent work.  The end result is probably one of Mat's finest albums to date and one that definitely features a couple of Boduf's strongest songs ever.
