02 October 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

Back in 2009, Important Records released a landmark compilation entitled The Harmonic Series (A Compilation Of Musical Works In Just Intonation). Significantly, that album featured a Greg Davis piece entitled "Star Primes (For James Tenney)," which was Davis's earliest foray into composing using just intonation. Nearly a decade later, greyfade founder Joseph Branciforte found himself mesmerized by that piece on a long drive back home from Vermont and was inspired to contact Davis to discuss the unusual process behind the piece. As it turns out, Davis's interest in mathematical just intonation experiments ran quite deeply, as it formed the entire basis for his 2009 album Primes. Naturally, the enthusiastic Branciforte encouraged Davis to revisit his work in that vein, which led to an 8-channel performance at NYC's Fridman Gallery in 2019. The aptly titled New Primes is a reworking of that new material repurposed for a stereo home-listening experience. Needless to say, math-driven sine wave drones are not for everyone, but the cold and futuristic alien beauty of these pieces will likely resonate deeply with fans of otherworldly "ghost in the machine" opuses like Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith.

greyfade

My interest in "generative and process-based music" is considerably more casual than Davis's or Branciforte's, but it is not hard to understand the allure, as I imagine every serious musician on earth endlessly struggles to escape familiar patterns and an excellent way to do that is to create some kind of system that either opens new pathways or makes repeating those patterns impossible. Obviously, John Cage's I Ching-driven work is an especially noteworthy touchstone, while Ben Chasny's Hexadic compositions are a more recent prominent example, but there are presumably limitless ways to elude predictable compositional paths (albeit with wildly varying results in listenability). Davis's own system is a bit more complex than my feeble mind can handle, but it can be roughly summarized as "using prime number sets as a way to develop just intonation tuning relationships and intervals" which he realizes through a "custom software system in the Max/MSP environment, using a network of pure sine tones."

According to Davis, the prime number set used determines the overtones and the "panning, fades, metronome speed and other variables of each overtone are related to its frequency." In less abstract and cerebral terms, that basically means that New Primes feels like an album made by sentient feedback, as sine waves endlessly ebb and flow to create shifting patterns of oscillations. Given the hyperminimal nature and purposely characterless sine wave source material of these six drone pieces, they all unavoidably sound quite similar to one another, but they amount to an immersive and eerily lovely whole that is especially rewarding on headphones. To my ears, "Irregular" and "Pierpont" feel like the most compelling variations on the theme, but the entire album is fascinating in a cosmic/"post-human" sense, as it feels like the sort of album the hallucination-spewing ocean in Solaris might've made. This is music distilled to its barest essence of hums and oscillations, calling to mind mysterious deep space transmissions, time-lapsed blooms of otherworldly flora, or the amplified vibrational frequencies of the universe itself.

Listen here.

25 September 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

I doubt anyone can truly say that they know what to expect from a new Hausu Mountain release, but I still felt a bit gobsmacked by the latest from this ambitiously unhinged Ohio duo. While it may read like hyperbole to the uninitiated, the label's claim that Whipped Stream is a "durational smorgasbord of new music capable of knocking even the most seasoned zoner onto their ass" feels like an apt description of this triple cassette behemoth of fried and kaleidoscopic derangement (it clock in at roughly 3½ hours, after all). As I have not yet been lucky enough to experience Moth Cock's cacophonous sensory onslaught live, I was also a bit stunned to learn that most or all these pieces were culled from real-time performances. I honestly do not comprehend how two guys armed with a sax, loop pedals, and a "decades-old Electribe sampler / drum machine" can whip up such a vividly textured and wildly imaginative hurricane of sound so quickly and organically, as there seems to be some real hive mind shit afoot with these dudes. Unsurprisingly, I am at a loss to find a succinct description to explain what transpires over the course of this singular opus, but most of Whipped Stream can be reasonably described as a gnarled psychedelic freakout mashed together with Borbetomagus-style free jazz, the '80s noise tape underground, and jabbering sound collage lunacy. In the wrong hands, such an outré stew coupled with such an indulgent duration would be an effective recipe for total unlistenability, but I'll be damned if Moth Cock have not emerged from this quixotic endeavor looking like fitfully brilliant visionaries. I should add the caveat that Moth Cock also seem willfully annoying at times, but it is rare that such bumps in the road are not ultimately transformed into a near-perfect mindfuck or something unexpectedly sublime.

Hausu Mountain

It did not take long at all for me to fall in love with this album, as the opening "Castles Off Jersey" is an absolute tour de force that starts off as a layered and trippy homage to Terry Riley-esque sax-driven drone and only gets deeper and weirder from there. Along the way, it makes stops at gnarled, howling noise and burbling kosmische synth en route to an impressively apocalyptic and layered crescendo of swirling orchestral samples and electronic chaos. The following "Threefer Thursday" is still more bananas, calling to mind the viscous, squirming synths of Rashad Becker's Traditional Music Of Notional Species series before throwing sleepy Hawaiian slide guitar into the mix for an exotica nightmare. It's an audaciously sanity-dissolving collision, but that is merely the jumping off point into an unexpectedly gorgeous stretch of warm, woozy chords…and then the bottom drops out again for a finale of cold, churning industrial-damaged psychedelia that feels like it could have been plucked from a live Throbbing Gristle performance.

In the wake of that wonderful opening salvo of hits, "Invisible Pranks" makes the album's first deep plunge into willfully obnoxious territory, as it feels like a manically jabbering locked groove for its first few minutes, but the second half blossoms into ghostly and lysergic drone magic. That piece also illustrates one of the album's defining traits: the end of these songs is often unrecognizably different from the beginning, yet Moth Cock somehow make such dramatic and maniacal transformations feel organic and seamless. Moreover, all of their genre-splicing madness is almost invariably distinctive and dazzlingly inventive–rather than feeling like a gleeful parade of crazed pastiches, Whipped Stream feels like five different impossibly cool bands all out to blow my goddamn mind. In fact, my notes for even the lesser songs are an amusing cavalcade of colorful phrases like "alien tuba nightmare," "Beefheart-inspired talent show at a mental hospital," "laser-strafed marching band on a tropical vacation," "children's song divebombed by psychotropic ghosts as an arcade throws up," and "an acoustic guitarist jamming with some elephants and an absolutely deranged doorbell buzzer." Also: "new age album invaded by a gibbering herd of malfunctioning toy dogs." Needless to say, such terrain is very much not for everybody, but it sure feels like nirvana to me, as I never have any idea what the hell is going to happen next and nearly all of it ends up being totally unlike anything I have heard before (and much of it rules). In general, the longer pieces tend to be the most inventive and rewarding, but this whole album is a god-tier rabbit hole of playfully broken-brained mindfuckery built upon a partially concealed scaffolding of killer musicianship, sophisticated avant garde sensibilities, and flashes of otherworldly beauty.

Listen here.

25 September 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This is apparently B. Fleischmann's eleventh solo album, which surprised me a bit, as I generally enjoy his work yet have only heard a small fraction of it. That said, the eclectic and shapeshifting Austrian composer's release schedule has slowed considerably since the heyday of IDM/indietronica/glitch pop in the late '90s/early 2000s that put him on the map. In fact, it has been four years since Fleischmann last surfaced with the amusingly titled but hopefully not prophetic Stop Making Fans and Music for Shared Rooms is actually more of a retrospective than a formal new statement. That said, most fans (myself included) are unlikely to have previously encountered any of the sixteen pieces collected here, as the album is a look back at some highlights from Fleischmann's extensive archive of pieces composed for film and theater. That archive apparently includes roughly 600 pieces composed over a stretch of twelve years, so Fleischmann presumably did not have much trouble coming up with a double LP worth of delights. To his credit, however, he decided to rework and recontextualize the selected pieces into a satisfying and thoughtfully constructed whole (and one that also doubles as a "kaleidoscopic glimpse of a forward-thinking musician at home in many different musical worlds"). Admittedly, some of those musical worlds appeal more to me than others, but Fleischmann almost always brings a strong pop sensibility and bittersweet warmth to the table, so the results are invariably wonderful when he hits the mark (which he does with impressive frequency here).

Morr Music

The title Music for Shared Rooms alludes to Fleischmann's vision for this album, as he views his recontextualized scores as something akin to "a photo album" in which each "page" conjures a "different scene in which you can immerse yourself." To his credit, the fundamentally "B. Fleischmann" feel of the pieces remains surprisingly constant despite their myriad moods and disparate original contexts, but nailing down the character of that aesthetic is an elusive task. In a rough sense, however, it is fair to say that Fleischmann achieves a unique blend of "seemingly naive" pop simplicity with exacting production and complex arrangements. Sometimes he admittedly leans a bit too much to the "willfully naive" side for my liking, but his instincts generally tend to be quite solid (if sometimes perplexing). Case in point: "Taxi Driver" opens as some kind of Mission Impossible/Peter Gunn theme hybrid, but unexpectedly transforms into a killer dubby groove that calls to mind prime Tortoise. 

Elsewhere, Fleischmann sneakily transforms a tender piano reverie into a bittersweet trip-hop groove and a psychotropic squall of shortwave radio-style electronic cacophony in "Entwurf einer Ballade", while "Flüchtlingswalzer" turns a wonky carnivalesque waltz into a dramatic and dizzying crescendo of driving drums and swirling orchestral loops. To my ears, his neatest trick of all is probably "Der Lärmkrieg," which borrows a page from Beethoven's "Für Elise" and turns it into something that sounds like a sentient and lovesick old-timey player piano with some deep regrets. I am also quite fond of the spacey synth melancholy of "Im Atelier" and the stomping, "air raid" psychedelia of "Red Pill," but just about everything on the album boasts enough twists and hooks to hold my attention. Those endless twists and turns are also the album's biggest caveat, as not many pieces stick to a single theme for their duration, which can be a bit exasperating if I love a certain passage. Of course, the flipside is that the passages I am less enthusiastic about almost invariably transform into something cool if I stick around long enough and all of those eclectic and surprising detours add up to an endearingly charming, playful, and imaginative hall of mirrors.

Listen here.    

18 September 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This first solo album from queer, androgynous soul singer Kyle Kidd is an incredibly strong contender for best debut of the year, but he/she/they (Kidd embraces all pronounds) has been been steadily releasing great music for a while as part of Cleveland's Mourning [A] BLKstar ensemble. Notably, however, Kidd's past also includes a background in church choirs as well as a stint as an American Idol competitor. Normally learning about the latter would send me running in the opposite direction, but Kidd joins the exclusive pantheon of vocal virtuosos like Ian William Craig and Zola Jesus lured away from a conventional trajectory by a healthy passion for more underground sounds. That said, a decent amount of Soothsayer legitimately feels like it could have burned up the Soul/R&B charts if it had been released in the late '70s and had a major label production team at the console. As time travel was not a viable option, Soothsayer instead found a home on the oft-stellar Chicago indie American Dreams and Kidd's sensuous, hook-filled songs eschew the polished sheen of pop production for a hypnagogic veil of tape hiss and reverb (much to my delight, predictably).

American Dreams

The gospel-inspired opener "Salvation (Ode for Eunice)" is bit of a stylistic anomaly for the album, but the understated, minimal piano chords and subtle flourishes of jazz guitar beneath Kidd's soulful, wailing vocals illustrate one of the more notable and consistent themes on Soothsayer: backing music that sounds like crackling rare grooves unearthed by a moodier, more libidinal Madlib. Consequently, I was quite surprised when I glanced at the album notes and saw the large cast of guest musicians involved, as it genuinely feels I am hearing appropriated unheard grooves from Larry Levan, Arthur Russell, or Ann Peebles' backing band transformed into smoky, subtly psych-damaged Sade territory by a producer with a vision. The result does not exactly feel loop-based, but Kidd's songs tend to be built from single-theme vamps, which is exactly the right move: just lay down a hot groove and give Kidd plenty of room to belt her heart out and a killer song is almost certain to result.

In general, the strongest songs on the album tend to be the more smoldering, sexy ones like "Glass Dance" (or smoldering, brooding ones like "Temple"). However, the album ends with a sublime left-field highlight in the form of "Dreama," which hazily drifts along as a fantasia of rippling harp and a Satie-inspired flute hook. It almost calls to mind Nina Simone after a steady diet of Grouper and Benoit Pioulard albums, which is an unexpectedly wonderful niche that I had not previously encountered. Aside from perhaps the Sade-esque heartache of "Scars Alight" or the languorous sensuality of "Inside My Love," the remaining songs do not match the heights of that trio of near-perfect delights, but that is only because they are a bit more improvisatory and insubstantial in a "lost Arthur Russell jam session" kind of way. Unsurprisingly, that has its own appeal and Kidd wisely avoids letting such pieces overstay their welcome.

In fact, the whole album is over in roughly half an hour, which is exactly the right "leave 'em wanting more" length necessary to induce me to immediately start it all over again as soon as it ends.

Listen here.

18 September 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

Over the last few years, it has become quite clear to me that any major new solo guitar album from Bill Orcutt is destined to be an inventive, visceral, and damn near essential release. Unsurprisingly, Music for Four Guitars does absolutely nothing to disrupt that impressive run, yet I sometimes forget that Orcutt has a restless creative streak that endlessly propels him both outward and forward like some kind of avant garde shark. As a result, his discography is full of wild surprises, unexpected detours, and challenging experiments such as last year's wonderfully obsessive and completely bananas A Mechanical Joey, so anyone who thinks they know exactly what to expect from a new Bill Orcutt album is either delusional or not paying close enough attention. Case in point: Music for Four Guitars feels like an evolution upon Orcutt's Made Out of Sound approach of using a second track to improvise against himself, but he now expands it to four tracks and shifts to a more composed, focused, and melodic approach very different from his volcanic duo with Chris Corsano. Notably, this project was originally intended for a Rhys Chatham-esque quartet of guitarists and has been gestating since at least 2015, but COVID-era circumstances ultimately led Orcutt to simply do everything himself. As Tom Carter insightfully observes in the album notes, this album is a fascinating hybrid of the feral spontaneity of Orcutt's guitar albums and the "relentless, gridlike composition" of his electronic music that often calls to mind an imaginary Steve Reich-inspired post-punk/post-hardcore project from Touch and Go or Amphetamine Reptile's heyday.

Palilalia

Given how much time I have spent enjoying a handful of Bill Orcutt's recent masterpieces, I occasionally forget that he has been releasing albums for roughly three decades and his scrabbling, explosive improv eruptions are just one stylistic choice in an endlessly evolving body of work. I bring that up because Music For Four Guitars makes it clear that Orcutt could probably churn out killer riffs, intricate countermelodies, and inventive harmonies in his sleep and would seemingly be perfectly at home channeling his inner Glenn Branca, Built to Spill ("In The Rain"), Gang of Four ("From Below"), or art-damaged '90s emo band like Departures and Landfalls-era Boys Life if he felt like it. All of those stylistic threads appear in varying forms here and the determining factors tend to be whether Orcutt is inclined to craft a tense, jerkily staccato rhythm ("A Different View"), sharpen a melody with a spiky counter motif ("Two Things Close Together"), or do both at once ("In Profile").

At other times, Orcutt seems intent on channeling a locked groove escaping its confines or some kind of spasmodic mutant blues, but the results are invariably singular, melodic, and sharp-edged. If I had to glibly describe the album with one concise phrase, I would probably go with "sounds like a No Wave Steve Reich," but I would also have to add the caveat that Music For Four Guitars feels quite different from other artists in that vein (such as Chatham and Branca).

The difference is subtle yet important, as Orcutt seems to be arriving at a similar place from the opposite direction: this is not post-punk stretching into the realm of high art–it is high art sharpened into slashing, snarling, and convulsive two-minute sketches of noise-damaged post-punk urgency (most of the time, at least). As a result, this is yet another stellar album from Orcutt and also a very different animal from his other recent classics.

While I probably still prefer the more fiery and spontaneous-sounding side of Orcutt's formidable oeuvre overall, a strong case could be made that a piece like "Two Things Close Together" condenses virtually everything that I love about his work into a single near-perfect diamond.  

Listen here.

29 August 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

I had successfully deluded myself into thinking that I had spent my pandemic downtime wisely and constructively for the most part, but learning that Drew Daniel spent that same period assembling an all-star disco ensemble is now making me lament the sad limitations of my imagination and ambition. The resultant album—Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?—is slated for release this October, but this teaser mini-album (part of Thrill Jockey's 30th anniversary campaign of limited/special releases) is one hell of a release in its own right and a true jewel in Daniel's discography. Naturally, the big immediate draws are the killer single "Is It Gonna to Get Any Deeper Than This (Dark Room Mix)" and a disco/deep house reimagining of Coil's classic "The Anal Staircase," but the other two songs are every bit as good (if not better) than that pair, so no self-respecting fan of Daniel's oeuvre will want to sleep on this ostensibly minor release (very few artists choose to release their best work on cassingle in 2022). Naturally, there is plenty of psychotropic weirdness mingled with all the great grooves, but I was still legitimately taken aback by how beautifully Daniels and his collaborators shot past kitsch/homage/pastiche and landed at completely functional, fun, and legit dance music. No one would raise a quizzical eyebrow if someone secretly slipped this album into the playlist at a party (not until "Anal Staircase" dropped, at least).

Thrill Jockey

Some years back, one of Drew Daniel's friends was fatefully asked "is it going to get any deeper than this?" while DJing at a club. That question became a "kind of mantra" for Daniel, as he was fascinated by the elusive meaning of that question. I am somewhat fascinated now myself, as it inspired me to think about which elements can imbue a piece with "depth" and whether or not the opening "Is It Gonna to Get Any Deeper Than This (Dark Room Mix)" could be said to meet that enigmatic criteria. My official verdict is "absolutely," as Daniel's bevy of outsider disco brethren inventively ride an absolutely perfect, sensuous, and thumping dub techno-style groove for 8 glorious minutes without ever dispelling the magic with a single misstep. It almost feels like Coil and Rhythm & Sound teamed up to record a libidinal, floor-packing party anthem (it's a damn shame that never actually happened, but it seems like Daniel is perfectly happy and willing to fill that stylistic void himself).

Elsewhere, the following "You Don't Know (The Full Rose of Dawn)" feels like a sexed-up channeling of "Loose Joints"-era Arthur Russell, while "The Anal Staircase" gamely attempts to translate the stomping and dissonant menace of the original into a catchy house anthem. It doesn't quite work as well as the other three pieces for various reasons, but the biggest one is probably that guest vocalist Daniel Clarke sits that piece out (he is my pick for this release's MVP, as his soulful freestyling is a reliable and recurring highlight). On the bright side, it is impressive that a cool Coil cover is handily eclipsed by all three of the original pieces. In particular, the closing title piece makes for one hell of a surprising finale, as Daniel and some talented friends from Acetone, Horse Lords, and elsewhere unleash something that sounds like an improbably wonderful collision of a groovy harpsichord-centric giallo soundtrack with a never-heard-before sexy and spaced-out lounge music experiment by Carlos Santana.

Listen here.

29 August 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

There are several William Basinski albums that I absolutely love, but his various collaborations are rarely as compelling as his solo work (the leftfield Sparkle Division being a notable exception, of course). The fundamental issue is that Basinski's finest moments tend to be an intimate distillation of a single theme to its absolute essence, which does not leave much room at all for anyone else to add something without dispelling the fragile magic. While it is unclear if Janek Schaefer is unusually attuned to Basinski's wavelength or if the duo simply waited until the path to something lasting and beautiful organically revealed itself, I can confidently state that the pair ultimately wound up in exactly the right place regardless of how they got there. If I did not understand and appreciate the sizeable challenges inherent in crafting a hypnotically satisfying and immersive album from a mere handful of notes, I would be amused that Basinski and Schaefer first began working on this album together all the way back in 2014 and that the entire 8-year process basically resulted in just two or three simple piano melodies. In fact, I am still a little amused by this album's nearly decade-long gestation, but that does not make the result any less impressive. Significantly, " . . . on reflection " is dedicated to Harold Budd, but an even closer stylistic kindred spirit is Erik Satie (albeit a blearily impressionistic channeling of the visionary composer's work rather than any kind of straight homage).

Temporary Residence

The opening ". . . on reflection (one)" lays out Basinski and Schaefer's shared vision in gorgeously sublime fashion, as a simple and tenderly melancholy piano melody languorously and unpredictably flickers across a barely audible backdrop of room sounds. Naturally, things are deceptively far more complex than they initially seem though, as it soon sounds like two or loops of different lengths are all playing at once. A lingering haze of delay and decay gradually adds some muted streaks of color, but that is just icing on an already perfect cake, as I could listen to the melodies lazily intertwining forever. In a general sense, the piece calls to mind the delicate prettiness of a music box melody, but beautifully enhances that illusion with weighty emotional depth and seemingly endless variations in the shape and emphasis of the shifting patterns.

Significantly, an interest in Zen Buddhism helped lead Basinski to making The Disintegration Loops a few decades back and it feels like that influence directly or indirectly led to this album as well, as there is a very natural and liquid ebb and flow at work, as well as a meditative spaciousness: absolutely nothing here feels hurried, forced, or conspicuously manipulated. Obviously, that is a sneakily difficult effect to achieve without haplessly blundering into forgettable "ambient drift" territory. In fact, the following ". . . on reflection (two)" initially feels like exactly such a misstep, resembling an Erik Satie piece dissolved into hazy, twinkling impressionism. As it turns out, however, Basinski and Schaefer just chose a more slow-burning trajectory than usual, as it soon feels like I am blissfully floating through a three-dimensional dream space while constellations of piano lazily form and dissolve around me.

Unsurprisingly, the remaining three pieces can be described as variations on the same themes ("deploying a delicate piano passage from their collective archive, Basinski and Schaefer weave and reweave in numerous ways"), but it is one hell of a theme and the five pieces add up to quite an immersive, beautiful, and poignant song cycle. If I had to choose a favorite piece, I would go with ". . . on reflection (four)" solely on the grounds that it sounds almost exactly like the already great opener, yet stretches out even longer and is texturally enhanced by a helpful chorus of chirping nocturnal birds. If "more of the same, but longer" seems unambiguously welcome (if not actively enticing) to me, I feel quite comfortable in proclaiming . . . on reflection to be an ingeniously constructed minimalist masterpiece.   

Listen here.

29 August 2022

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

Previously based in Chicago, Steve Fors has build a small, but strong discography first as half of the duo the Golden Sores, and then on his own as Aeronaut. Now based in Switzerland, It's Nothing, but Still is his first full length solo work under his own name. It certainly feels like a new album, but traces of his previous projects can be heard, which is for the best. Lush with both beauty and darkness, it is nuanced and fascinating.

Hallow Ground

The six distinct pieces that comprise It's Nothing, but Still follow similar structures:  mostly leading off with field recordings, Fors then weaves in dense layers of electronic and acoustic sound that build in intensity and complexity. Even though there may be structural similarity, each piece stands out as unique. A piece such as the opener, "(Good Enough) For Now," begins with wet crunching amidst rain and insects before a swelling passage of cello gives the piece an uneasy sense of inertia. To this, he blends in fragments of conversations and the occasional harsher, wobbling bit of noise, all the while continuing to expand upon the droning tonal elements.

There are some similarities in "Unsound Structures," with the use of bowed cello, but instead everything has a bit of a darker hue. The electronics are bleaker, the cello has a greater sense of menace, and its abrupt concluding section makes for a perfect release of tension. "Lead into Aether" features Fors transitioning from light into dark within the same piece:  gentle electronic tones are arranged tightly, with some nice panning effects to give depth. However, he slowly increases distortion to the mix, ending the piece on a shrill, feedback heavy note that significantly contrasts the peace from which it began. 

There are pieces in which Fors simplifies the mix and instead creates things that are more aligned with conventional song structures. For "It's Nothing, but Still," he transitions from field recordings into pure piano, with fuzzy, distorted electronics tastefully worked in to serve as a countermelody. What resembles processed operatic vocals are added in throughout, resulting in a rather beautiful song-like structure. The concluding "The Way to Heaven" is similarly sparse in its construction: the recording of a train, a hovering melody, and a bit of low end punch come together as a perfectly unified piece of music.

Part of the impetus for It's Nothing, but Still is a chronic lung condition that Fors suffers from, and it is hard to not hear the use of slow, heavy cello swells throughout much of this record as a reflection of that. Heavy, deliberate, and a bit unsettling, the parallel to labored breathing is hard to ignore. Even with this bleak element though, there is a lot of beauty in this record as well, and the pairing of bleak and hopeful is perfect.

Listen here.

22 August 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

Ten years after her first appearance on Keith Rankin and Seth Graham's perennially bizarre and eclectic Orange Milk label , Paul returns to the fold with her new trio. Naturally, there are plenty of similarities between this latest release and the trio's 2020 debut (Ray), but there has been some significant evolution as well. To my ears, I Am Fog feels considerably more sketchlike and challenging than Ray, but that is not necessarily a bad thing, as anyone seeking out an Ashley Paul album would presumably already have a healthy appreciation for dissonance and deconstruction. A decent analogy might be that Ray is like a short story collection while I Am Fog is more like a series of poems: the voice and vision are instantly recognizable, but these nine pieces are an unusually distilled, minimal, and impressionistic version of that voice. In less abstract terms, that means that I Am Fog again sounds like some kind of unsettling and psychotropic outsider cabaret, but the emphasis is now more upon gnarled/strangled textures and lingering uncomfortable harmonies than it is on melodic hooks and broken, lurching rhythms. In addition to the trio's overall step even further into the outré, the album also features further enticement with one of Paul's strongest "singles" to date ("Shivers").

Orange Milk

As a devout fan of Paul's unsettling and singular work, I am intrigued and fascinated by how her vision has evolved since Otto Willberg and Yoni Silver became regular collaborators. While I do miss her prickly, pointillist guitar playing a bit with this album, I quite like how Silver and Willberg provide a somewhat more traditional "jazz trio" foundation for Paul's excursions into the alien and unknown rather than simply following her into increasingly broken and sickly frontiers of strangled dissonance. The opening "A Feeling" is an especially interesting example of that dynamic, as the slow-motion chord progression and male/female vocal harmonies approximate a curdled and unraveling "black lodge" version of Low. My favorite pieces tend to fall on the "creepy and lysergic outsider cabaret" side of the spectrum however. "Escape" is the strongest incarnation of that aesthetic, as it resembles a haunted nursery rhyme recited over an obsessively repeating bass pulse, a broken-sounding martial beat, and sax playing that unpredictably drifts back and forth between a blearily melodic hook and a host of tormented whines and squeaks. It feels like someone accidentally left their childlike whimsy outside and it became partially rotted and macabre overnight.

Elsewhere, the album's other highlight ("Shivers") feels a bit like a torch song or standard, as Paul's lilting vocals fall somewhere in the uncomfortable sweet spot between "lovesick lament" and "I am going to murder you and wear your skin" over an unexpectedly melodic (if spartan) backdrop of double bass, wandering clarinet melodies, and pleasantly clattering, lurching drums. While "Escape" and "Shivers" admittedly feel like they are on a level above the other pieces on the album, I Am Fog's second-tier gems are quite strong as well and there is quite a solid mid-album run of them (though the omnipresent strangled dissonance may be an endurance test for some). For me, the pieces that work best are the ones in which Willberg plays it straight and opts for bass lines that would not feel out of place on a classic Bill Evans album. That said, the appeal of those pieces is simply that they make Paul's excursions into more difficult terrain feel a bit more grounded and digestible. That is certainly a welcome and effective touch (Willberg is a great foil), but Paul's provocatively original and endlessly evolving transcendence of the familiar is still the main draw. 

Listen here.

22 August 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

Jeff Barsky has been quietly releasing alternately sublime and noise-ravaged guitar albums for years and this latest album finds him returning to LA's oft ahead-of-the-curve Already Dead Tapes (where he last surfaced with 2015's Flickering). Normally, I would not describe an edition of 100 tapes as a major release, but most of Barsky's solo work has historically appeared on his own Insect Fields imprint so Celestial Cycles will likely reach more ears than usual. Fittingly, it is an especially strong album, capturing Barsky at the absolute height of his powers. While few solo guitarists can summon dreamlike beauty from their ax as reliably and masterfully as Barsky, the centerpiece of this album is unquestionably the swirling and nightmarish closing epic "Become The Birds," which arguably recaptures the magic of Campbell Kneale's Birchville Cat Motel project in its prime (which is damn high praise coming from me).  

Already Dead Tapes

The brief yet lovely "Follow the Moon" introduces Celestial Cycles' general aesthetic of quavering drones, flickering harmonic whines, and rippling flurries of hammer-ons and pull-offs before the album begins in earnest with the more substantial "Celestial Shift." Given the loop-based nature of Insect Factory, extended durations tend to almost always result in increased textural and harmonic sophistication and "Celestial Shift" is a solid illustration of that, as the expected shimmering beauty is nicely enhanced with a host of twinkling, smoldering, buzzing, and seesawing themes. If the remainder of the album was simply four more variations of that vision, I would be perfectly happy, but Barsky instead chose to go with a parade of cool twists and curveballs and the album is better and more memorable for it.

The lurching, blurting melody of "Movement" is especially delightful and would be my personal pick for a chart-burning single, as Barsky simply unleashes a killer theme then wisely checks out before it overstays its welcome. The next two pieces plunge the album into darker territory, as Barsky first balances beauty with blackened, grinding heaviness and tape hiss ("Infection Chain"), then abandons conventional beauty altogether with the oscillating, blown-out industrial thrum of "Low Gear Meditation."  That sets the stage nicely for the main course, as "Become The Birds" gradually evolves from tenderly murmuring swells of bliss to a roiling and howling crescendo that sounds like an angry swarm of noise hornets over the course of about 23 minutes. To my ears, the whole album is stellar, but "Become The Birds" ends it with one hell of an exclamation point (and an instant classic in my personal pantheon of noise guitar masterpieces).     

Listen here.