After a brief introductory song that sets the languid tone, the second throws out a hook with a luxurious bass line, reeling me in. At this point bootgazing becomes the order of the day. On their seventh release the duo easily straddles starry eyed left-field pop and drones as expansive as America's western plains.
Frank Baugh has been beguiling me with his warm and wobbly soundscapes for a couple of years now, but this is his first "proper" album.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect, as I have only heard a fraction of his vast catalog of limited-edition tapes and CD-Rs, making it very difficult to follow his chronological evolution. Also, I was secretly hoping that he was holding back some truly staggering material for his auspicious vinyl debut. After hearing it, I don’t think Fields and String eclipses his past work, takes things to another level, or delivers any major surprises, but it certainly reaffirms what myself and Frank's small-but-devoted following already knew: he makes some uniquely beautiful music.
This rather unusual anthology compiles the nascent works of pioneering electronic/computer composer Pietro Grossi and several of his contemporaries and collaborators. Unsurprisingly, the music assembled is often quite challenging, discordant, minimal, somewhat primitive, and historically important. Unexpectedly, however, several of these 40-year-old pieces sound like they could have been recorded today. I am not sure how much direct influence Grossi may have had on the contemporary electronic avant-garde scene (given the historic rarity of his recordings), but he certainly anticipated and explored many now-commonplace elements of extreme/outré music decades before the rest of the world caught on.
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Scott Morgan is something of an anomaly in the field of ambient music for having a simple and clear purpose: releasing a consistent stream of reliably good albums. He has no clear avant-garde pretensions, nor any reliance on high-concept philosophical underpinnings or improvisation. He just turns out dense, composed, and immersive washes of sound, year after year. Anyone that has heard Loscil before probably has a pretty good idea of what Endless Falls sounds like, but there is an unexpected surprise at the end that may signal a bold new direction.
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