Matmos, "Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer"

RegardsOn this latest full-length, the perennially eclectic and boldly adventurous duo of Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt take a break from mining weird and esoteric source material to focus their energies on paying homage to underheard Polish composer and Krzysztof Penderecki associate Bogusław Schaeffer. Matmos were given full access to work their mindbending magic on Schaeffer's complete recorded works and the resultant album is as characteristically unpredictable and hard-to-categorize as ever: instead of remixing or reinterpreting the Polish composer's work, Matmos instead took "tissue samples of DNA from past compositions" and "mutated them into entirely new organisms that throb with an alien vitality." Put another way, Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer attempts to create a conversation or bridge between the "utopian 1960s Polish avant-garde" and "the contemporary dystopian cultural moment." That is certainly intriguing and fertile terrain for a Matmos album, but the resultant songs wound up somewhere even more delightful and confounding than usual, often approximating a collision between fragmented exotica, kosmische, and a Kubrickian sci-fi nightmare. Naturally, that will be very appealing territory for most long-time Matmos fans, as this album is an especially inspired "everything and the kitchen sink" tour de force of quite disparate stylistic threads woven together in playfully disorienting and mischievous fashion by an talented international cast of virtuousos, eccentric visionaries, and plunderphonic magpies.

Thrill Jockey

My knowledge of Bogusław Schaeffer's work is quite minimal, which makes sense, given that he is not particularly well known outside of Poland. However, I have previously encountered fragments of his ouevre through Bôłt's "Polish Radio Experimental Studio" reissue campaign (as well as an unknowing exposure via David Lynch's Inland Empire). Fittingly, Bôłt founder Michał Mendyk was the spark behind this endeavor (as well as providing some presumably much-needed translation assistance). To Mendyk's credit, reshaping and cannibalizing Schaeffer's work turned out to be an ideal project for Daniel and Schmidt to throw themselves into, as the end result is quintessential Matmos. Granted, the duo's characteristically morbid and/or gleefully ridiculous sound sources are absent here, but Regards checks a lot of other boxes on my personal checklist for an inspired Matmos album (kitsch colliding with high art, rigorous scholarship and compositional vision colliding with plunderphonic mischief, etc.). The opening "Resemblage" provides a representative window into the album's baseline aesthetic, approximating a squelchy strain of post-modernist exotica that evokes the feeling of being serenaded by an all-cyborg Xavier Cugat Orchestra in a psychedelic cave. My favorite pieces all follow soon after, as Regards boasts quite a killer first half.

Continue reading

Talweg, "Des tourments si grands"

Des tourments si grandsThis is my first deep immersion into Joëlle Vinciarelli & Eric Lombaert's deeply unconventional "free metal" duo, but I have long been a fan of the pair's noise/drone band La Morte Young (as well as Vinciarelli's repeat collaborations with My Cat is an Alien). Notably, there is absolutely nothing recognizably "metal" about this latest release, as the closest kindred spirits are probably outer limits psychonauts like the LAFMS milieu or Borbetomagus. However, even those signposts are inadequate at conveying how far Talweg have descended into their own personal rabbit hole with this album, as these four pieces feel both unstuck in time and decidedly pagan/occult-inspired (which makes sense, given Vinciarelli's passion for collecting unusual and ancient instruments). Further muddying the waters, this album arguably captures the duo in "soundtrack mode," as two of the pieces are early/rehearsal versions of pieces composed for a Monster Chetwynd exhibition, while a third borrows a nursery rhyme from Marcel Hanoun's "Le Printemps" as its central theme. While "rehearsals for an exhibition soundtrack" admittedly does not sound all that appealing on paper, these recordings are quite compelling in reality, as Des tourments si grands often feels like a remarkably inspired and deeply unconventional stab at outsider free jazz. Fans of Vinciarelli's work with MCIAA will definitely want to investigate this one, as it journeys into similarly alien territory, but the addition of Lombaert's killer drumming takes that aesthetic in a far more explosive and visceral direction.

Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers!

The album is divided into four separate longform pieces that always extend for at least fifteen minutes of shapeshifting psychotropic magic. Picking a favorite is damn near impossible, as every single piece eventually gets somewhere wonderful, but my current feeling is that the closing "où l'on souffre, des tourments si grands que..." is the highlight that best captures the duo at the height of their powers. It initially calls to mind a duet between a free jazz drummer and an orchestra of demonic air raid sirens, but the howling maelstrom is soon further enhanced by the sing-song nursery rhyme at its heart, resulting in something that sounds like a somnambulant French Vashti Bunyan loopingly intoning the same lines over and over again inside a gnarled extradimensional nightmare. Somehow the piece only gets better from there, as a descending chord progression and a stomping, crashing beat take shape as Vinciarelli unleashes a viscerally feral-sounding trumpet solo. Notably, it is the only piece on the album where I can hear any real trace of the pair's metal inspirations, as it feels like a heavy doom metal jam played on the wrong instruments (coupled with a pointed avoidance of all genre tropes, of course). In short, it rules, but the other three songs all come quite close to scaling similarly lofty heights.

Continue reading

Zemi17, "Gamelatron Bidadari"

Every now and then, I stumble upon a singular artist whose work has somehow managed to remain largely undocumented and entirely under the radar all but the most devout underground music fans. Aaron Taylor Kuffner is the latest visionary to fall into this category, as his Zemi17 project has been around for a quarter century now and he has only just gotten around to releasing his full-length debut. Notably, Gamelatron Bidadari is quite a departure from Zemi17's previous two EPs on The Bunker's house label, as Impressions (2014) and Zipper (2016) were an attempt to integrate Taylor Kuffner's techno past with more natural and timeless sounds originating from his time spent studying gamelan in Indonesia. On this latest release, all traces of Zemi17's dancefloor past have disappeared to showcase another side of Taylor Kuffner's unique artistry: the Gamelatron project that he co-created in 2008, which is billed as "the world’s first fully robotic gamelan orchestra." Since the project's inception, Taylor Kuffner has built more than 70 site-specific kinetic sculptures and provided his signature "immersive, visceral experience" to more than a million people across the globe. The Gamelatron Bidadari captured here is but one of those sculptures and originally debuted as part of an exhibit entitled "No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man" at The Smithsonian's Renwick gallery. While a lot of site-specific installations understandably do not translate terribly well to home listening, this one is a delightful exception, as the resultant recordings feel like an ingenious twist on a timeless favorite, taking traditional gamelan music into an even more loopingly hypnotic direction than usual.

The Bunker New York

It admittedly took me a few listens to fully warm to Gamelatron Bidadari, as I quite like Zemi17's earlier beat-driven aesthetic and Taylor Kuffner's kinetic installations unavoidably suffer the same curse as every modular synth album: once an artists comes up with a killer patch or loop, it is damn hard to evolve beyond the inherent lattice of repeating patterns, resulting in a lot of motifs that play out for a few minutes, then simply fade away before they wear out their welcome. To his credit, however, Taylor Kuffner navigates that predicament quite well within individual pieces by adding and subtracting countermelodies and seismic bass throbs at well-chosen moments. In fact, there are a handful of pieces that I would not mind hearing stretched to album length. In general, the longest pieces tend to be the most compelling. In "The Ring Is Satu," for example, an insistent metallic pulse blossoms into a simple four note pattern that leaves a resonant, quivering, and eerily beautiful vapor trail in its wake (a feat later enhanced further by the nimble insertion of a chiming melody in the spaces between those sustained tones). Elsewhere, Kuffner revisits that approach on "Contours" with an increased sense of spatial depth and stronger shades of melancholy and subtly dissonant harmonies (as well as a steadily snowballing intensity).

Continue reading

The Plastik Beatniks, “All Those Streets I Must Find Cities For"

All Those Streets I Must Find Cities ForOriginally a musical radio play, these twelve tracks excavate and spotlight the life and work of original Beat poet Bob Kaufman; and with Kaufman the life and the work are genuinely inseparable. A mentor to Kerouac, and dubbed the Black American Rimbaud, Kaufman endured savage SFPD brutality, electroshock treatment, and incarceration, before his young and obscure death in abject poverty. Kaufman had purposefully stilled his own voice with a vow of silence stretching from the JFK assassination until the end of the Vietnam War, yet here it still resounds with the speed and spirit of surrealist jazz, forever “lost in a dream world, where time is told with a beat.”

Alien Transistor

The Plastik Beatniks, alias Andreas Ammer, Markus and Micha Acher of The Nowist, and Leo Hopfinger aka LeRoy) formed for that September 2020 radio play, “Thank God For Beatniks.” There is also a bit of Ginsberg and Patti Smith, but it’s the contributions from Angel Bat Dawid and Moor Mother which really breathe life into this project. Angel Bat Dawid has consistently exceeded the high expectations generated by her debut The Oracle, and her vocals and clarinet have a perfect air of improvisation, joy, and pain, especially on “West Coast Sound 1956.” Similarly, Moor Mother drives Kaufman’s "War Memoir" with empathy and passion to match the wild, slithering, Eastern-tinged guitar lines. There’s a note of defiant optimism, too, in the simple act of changing the final word of Kaufman’s “O-JazzO War Memorial: Jazz, Don’t Listen To It At Your Own Risk” from “die" to “live."

Continue reading

Nate Scheible, "Fairfax"

cover image

Originally released on cassette back in 2017 on London's seemingly now defunct ACR label, this absolutely brilliant album failed to reach enough ears to make much of an impact the first time it surfaced.  Thankfully,  the Slovakian Warm Winters Ltd. label has now reissued this obscure masterpiece (now remastered by Lawrence English) to appropriately universal acclaim.  The premise of the album is admittedly a modest one on paper, as Scheible simply presents some excerpts from a cassette scavenged from a second-hand store over a minimal backdrop of ambient/drone music.  The crucial detail, however, is that the appropriated recording feels like a strong contender for the greatest thrift store find of the century, intimately documenting the joys and heartaches of a lonely but irrepressibly hopeful middle-aged woman as she waits to be reunited with the love of her life.  Beyond that, virtually nothing is known about the album's anonymous heroine or what series of circumstances led to something so personal winding up in a Virginia thrift store.   Everyone loves a good mystery, of course, but that aspect of this album feels almost irrelevant once the unknown woman starts talking, as her openness and vulnerability pack one hell of an emotional wallop.  Sadly, life was not easy at all for the album's unwitting protagonist, so there are some truly heartbreaking passages to be found, but they are mingled with some others that fill me with an uncharacteristic sense of warmth and connection for the rest of humanity.  In short, Fairfax essentially distills all of the joy and pain of life's rich pageant into one perfect record.  

Warm Winters Ltd.

The album opens with quite an emotion gut punch, as a simple message of "good morning, my love" immediately turns dark, as the unknown woman immediately realizes that she has confused October and April and announces that she is "not well" (a message furthered darkened by Scheible's minimal backdrop of brooding drones).  Things initially seem like they are brightening a bit in the following "After Work on Monday Afternoon," as she talks about how excited she was to receive a letter from her love, but the situation quickly becomes unsettling once more when she mentions that she has read the letter over and over again and gently chastises the letter writer for being "about nine letters behind" (there were some letters that she forgot to number).  She then fades away to leave behind a gorgeous coda of swaying, spacey ambiance with frayed, hissing edges.  It feels like reality has unexpectedly dissolved into some kind of immersively hallucinatory state of suspended animation.  Thankfully, our heroine briefly brightens up for "Our Doubts Are Traitors," as she recites an inspirational poem over some pleasant ambient shimmer.  That shimmer gradually becomes curdled and darkened by ugly harmonies and gnarled textures though, which paves the way for next two devastating gut punches: the stand-up bass jazz noir of "Made to Feel Special" and uneasy spectral drift of "Thrilled to Death."  

Continue reading

Kate Moore, "Revolver"

cover image

This is my first exposure to Netherlands-based composer Kate Moore, but I probably would have encountered her much sooner if I paid more attention to the modern classical music scene,  as she released a well-regarded album of piano compositions on ECM back in 2014.  Revolver is an entirely different animal though, as Moore composed for a small string ensemble augmented by a percussionist and a harpist.  The album draws inspiration from the "kinetic physicality and aesthetics" of Australian artist Ken Unsworth, which Moore (a fellow Australian) attempted to translate into a "feeling of suspension between movement and stasis."  The few Unsworth pieces that I have seen certainly share that feeling, but translating a vision of hanging rocks in an art gallery into eight strange and beautiful string pieces is not a simple and linear path, which is where the album title comes in: Moore attempted to recreate the same feeling of suspension through "evolving and revolving melodies, poised skilfully in polyrhythmic structures."  To my ears, the result shares plenty of common ground with the repeating arpeggio patterns of modern classical minimalists like Reich and Glass, but enhanced with a considerably lighter touch, more human-scale intimacy, and a healthy appreciation for subtle psychedelia.

Unsounds

The title piece kicks off the album with quite an impressive statement of intent, as violinist Anna McMichael unleashes a sad and lovely melody over a repeating two-chord backdrop of xylophone and harp arpeggios.  It is elegantly simple and uncluttered and occasionally feels like some kind of zen meditation on water and the transitory nature of all things, but it ultimately builds into a swirling and intense finale of ascending violin patterns that feels wonderfully out of phase with xylophone motif beneath.  While my favorite pieces on the album all fall in a stellar four-song run on the second half, "Revolver" is an excellent piece that showcases Moore's distilled vision of strong melodies and shifting patterns beautifully.  The second piece ("The Boxer") showcases further exquisite pleasure, as a mournful violin melody slices nicely through a gently hallucinatory backdrop of harp, xylophone, and a kick drum pulse that calls to mind an erratic, slowed-down heartbeat.  I especially love how Moore balances the sharp physicality of the violin with soft-focus arpeggios that feel like harmonics that dreamily linger in the air.  

Continue reading

Jeremy Young, "August Tape Sketches"

cover image

This latest release from Jeremy Young is quite a different album from last year's eclectic Amaro, which is not surprising given the adventurous array of collaborators involved in the latter.  This time, however, Young keeps things simple and solitary and the result is similarly stellar.  In fact, this album amusingly calls to mind a sort of more punk/DIY/lo-fi Tim Hecker or Fennesz, as it is similarly fragmented and flickering, yet also sounds like Young just plugged a guitar straight into his amp and wove pure magic in his garage.  In reality, the magic was a bit less spontaneous and supernatural, but that does not make the album any less beautiful.  Much of the secret lies in the album's admirably literal title, as August Tape Sketches transforms Young's guitar sketches into complex and hallucinatory tape cut-ups that could reasonably be mistaken for the rough demo of a Kevin Shields ambient project.  While I am not yet ready to proclaim that Young is a one-man My Bloody Valentine, I do feel confident in proclaiming that he is very good at stretching, bending, and warping guitar sounds in extremely cool ways.  

meakusma

The opening "Untitled (For Ernst)" provides a largely representative introduction to the album's aesthetic: stammering chord swells and a fragmented melodic hook languorously convulse and flicker for roughly two minutes, then vanish.  The overall effect is quite "ambient," as the looping nature of the compositions lends itself nicely to hypnotic repetition, but the construction/deconstruction of Young's loopscapes is quite inventive and fascinating.  On pieces like the opener and "Untitled (For Kelly)," the raw material seems like little more than a single chord or arpeggio pulled apart and exploded into its own artfully blurred and stuttering micro-galaxy.  Those two pieces are both wonderful, but the strongest pieces tend to be the ones in which Young allows himself to stretch out into more song-like territory.  To my ears, the centerpiece of the album is "Earlier Than Energy," which casts a warped and blissed-out spell evoking a Phllip Jeck cut-up of a great Slowdive outro.  

Continue reading

My Cat is an Alien, "Music for Phantoms (IV)"

cover image

The Opalio brothers have been reliably surprising me with adventurous detours and evolutions for years, but this latest album is a creative leap into even more unexpected territory than usual.  In some ways, that can be attributed to the unusually sparse gear involved (two glockenspiels and a single condenser microphone), which makes it quite a bit easier on the ears than usual for the dissonance-averse.  In fact, I would not even have immediately guessed that this was an MCIAA album if I had first heard it while blindfolded.  On a deeper level, however, this may very well be one of the duo's defining statements (and a sneakily brilliant one at that).  The Opalios long ago cast aside earthly melodies, harmonies, and instruments in their journey into the furthest regions of the atonal, psychedelic cosmos, so I would be hard pressed to think of something even more outré for the next phase.  As it turns out, however, I would have been asking the wrong question altogether, as the Opalios nimbly sidestepped that stylistic challenge and opted for something far cooler than another intensification of their characteristic otherworldliness: they dissolved into pure light (musically, at least).  Put in their own words, this album represents "the blinding darkness coming from a dying flame and a new light not yet discernible on an increasingly undefined horizon."  Given how rampant dying flames and undefined horizons are these days, Music for Phantoms (IV) feels uncannily tapped into the earthly zeitgeist (particularly for a duo who frequently seem to exist in an alternate dimension).

Elliptical Noise/Opax

In characteristically colorful fashion, the Opalios describe the genesis of Music for Phantoms (IV) thusly: "recorded in the middle of the night...in the Western Alps with only 2 glockenspiels, wordless vocals and a single condenser microphone to capture the essence of the screaming silence."  Naturally, the cover art thematically complements that vision, as it comes from a Polaroid that abstractly captured a light installation that the brothers dragged through the snow at night (few artists are as tirelessly committed to finding and creating otherworldly beauty, magic, and poetry as the Opalio brothers).  While nearly everything about this album feels fresh, inventive, and heartfelt, it is nominally a continuation of a side project that began in 2007 and last surfaced a decade ago.  Notably, this album is a radically different animal than the first three installments in both tone and instrumentation, but it does share the series' exclusive commitment to acoustic sounds.  Even acoustic sounds can be very weird in the hands of the Opalios, however, as evidenced by the first two minutes of the opening "Traces of Shooting Stars" (it calls to mind a bunch of marbles dropped on a metal platter).  That is admittedly an enigmatic and curious way to kick off an album this tenderly beautiful, but absolutely everything that follows is quietly and mesmerizingly sublime.  

Given the album's hyper-minimal instrumentation, its three pieces all feel roughly cut from the same cloth, but they each have their own distinctive character.  In "traces of shooting stars," for example, it sounds like an enchanted music box has become untethered from the rigidity of time signatures and drifted into a reverie of dreamlike, gossamer melody.  The following "ocean of iridescent silence," on the other hand, takes a more shimmering and rippling approach, as the endlessly sweeping glockenspiel runs leave a quivering haze of celestial bliss in their wake.  The closing "estranging analog morphologies" initially feels quite similar (sweeping cascades of notes leave behind a blurred and beautiful vapor trail), but it steadily becomes more structured and percussive before unexpectedly dissolving into a quietly lovely and hymn-like final act.  It was a genuine surprise to hear Roberto's voice used in such a naked and melodic way.  I am reluctant to use the word "ambient" to describe the overall feel of Music for Phantoms (IV), as it is constructed from Coltrane-esque sheets of sound, but it does evoke a pleasant state of suspended animation and strong sense of place: this album makes me feel like I have just stepped out of my remote mountain cabin to take in a gorgeously hallucinatory canopy of swirling and shimmering stars.  I cannot think of any other album that successfully casts a similar spell and it is quite a lovely and immersive place to linger, so Music for Phantoms (IV) will probably connect with a hell of a lot more people than My Cat is an Alien's more characteristically challenging vision.  It certainly deserves to reach a lot of new ears, as it feel like one of the strongest and most focused albums of the Opalios' career.  

Samples can be found here.

Colpitts, "Music from the Accident"

cover image

This is the first album that drummer John Colpitts has released under his own name, but he has been a familiar and almost ubiquitous figure in underground music for years through Oneida, his various collaborations, and his solo work as Kid Millions and Man Forever.  Unsurprisingly, the new name signals a new direction for Colpitts, though the circumstances that inspired his stylistic shift were not exactly pleasant ones, as the album title is a literal one:  this is music Colpitts composed in the aftermath of a car accident that "severely injured his back and left him unable to work or perform for months."  Necessity being the mother of invention, Colpitts enlisted Greg Fox to assist him in "transposing his rhythmic ingenuity to other instruments."  In more concrete terms, that means that Music from the Accident is primarily a (modular) synth album, but Colpitts' imperiled ingenuity comes through admirably well, as this is a synth album like no other and it is a good one too.  Moreover, the three compositions mirror the stages of Colpitt's recovery, "shifting from stasis to toddling and finally transcendence."  My favorite stage is apparently "toddling," as the stumbling, off-kilter return of Colpitts' drumming on "Up and Down" is the highlight of the album for me.

Thrill Jockey

The opening "Bread" is the most synth-centric of the album's three pieces, as Colpitts weaves a meditative state of suspended animation from organ-like drones and stammering, oddly timed chords.  Initially, it feels like a jazzier, organ-driven homage to classic glitch-inspired laptop music à la Oval and Fennesz, but it soon becomes fleshed out by other elements (panning drones, intensifying low-end heft, additional layers of slippery, elusive synth melody) en route to a blooping kosmische soundbath of stuttering, interwoven synth fragments.   The following "Up and Down" began life as "series of complex interlocking rhythms" that Colpitts tried to drum along with, but he ultimately removed the "labyrinth of overlapping meters" to leave only his wonderfully bizarre live drumming.  There is also some spacey and minimal synth accompaniment, which makes the whole thing feel like a willfully naive, outsider art deconstruction of Bitches Brew-style fusion.  I wish it were a bit longer (its the shortest piece on the album), but "leave 'em wanting more" is always a better approach than "flog a good idea to death" or "overstay your welcome," so I cannot complain.  Colpitts does, however, allow the closing "Recovery" to deservedly stretch out for an epic sixteen-minute run.  It is yet another surprising piece on an album full of surprises, as guest Jessica Pavone unleashes a feral-sounding squall of "microtonal viola runs" to steer the album into territory akin to Spires That in the Sunset Rise teaming up with a killer drummer like Chris Corsano (or John Colpitts) for a volcanic set of drone-heavy free folk.  Of the three pieces, "Recovery" is the most substantial and cathartic, but the entire album is packed wall-to-wall with enough interesting ideas and virtuosic execution to feel like a revelation and a significant creative breakthrough (quite a rare feat for any artist already a decade deep into a solo career).

Samples can be found here.

Svarte Greiner, "Devolving Trust"

cover imageThis latest release from Erik K. Skodvin's long-running solo project is billed as "zen music for disturbed souls."

Recorded back in 2018 in the bunkers of the "bombed out" Schneider Brewery in Berlin as a solo cello performance (of sorts) in the vein of past longform/(darkly) meditative releases like Black Tie and Moss Garden, "Devolving Trust" was originally intended only as a one-off installation/electroacoustic improvisation.Skodvin describes the space as "wet and hollow with a dark past and long reverb," which seems like an ideal setting for an eerie cello performance (or practically any Miasmah release). While attempting to translate such magical site-specific acoustics into an album intended for home listening can be one hell of a challenge, Skodvin pulled it off beautifully here, as these two pieces make very effective use of visceral, reverberant cello moans and the long decay of notes in the brewery's empty basement hallways.In fact, the recording translated so well that Skodvin was inspired to turn it into a formal album despite being historically averse to releasing live performances.That said, this album is also something more than a faithful documentation of a unique performance, however, as Skodvin ingeniously cannibalized the original 30-minute performance for a more tightly edited and mesmerizing companion piece ("Devolve") that feels roughly like all of the best parts experienced in reverse.Both pieces are great, but I especially enjoyed how beautifully the long decay times transformed into intensifying swells when the original recording was played backwards.

Miasmah

The opening title piece begins with a bassy, reverberating strum that rhythmically repeats, albeit with plenty of space between strums for the long decay to fade into silence.It is a fine starting point, as the chords have a pleasingly woody and hollow tone, yet the piece begins to blossom into something more substantial after a couple minutes when Skodvin starts to introduce new chords and textures between the deep, echoing strums.The slow-motion intensification continues to evolve as the piece unfolds, gradually becoming more gnarled and visceral as echoing scrapes, harmonic squeals, and violently bowed notes become a more regular occurrence.It achieves a fascinating sort of bleak beauty, as new forms to start to appear and an uneasy balance is struck between the slow, heaving pulse of the chords and the more convulsive snarls of bowed melody.By the 15-minute mark, the piece has become something quite wondrous and organic, evoking a haunted aviary of ghost birds mingled with slowly heaving cosmic exhalations. Skodvin leaves one last trick for the final act though, as the crescendo of the piece feels like a spacey free jazz performance by a lone saxophonist in a cavernous cistern. I have absolutely no idea how Skodvin produced such a reverberating storm of blurts, squeals, and howls from a cello, but whatever he did is extremely cool and cathartic.

Continue reading