- Duncan Edwards
- Albums and Singles
Dorothy Moskovitz was the singer in The United States of America, a short-lived group which made one legendary self-titled album. That was in December 1967 and she later became a member of Country Joe McDonald's band, sang live jazz, composed for children, commercials, theater, and became an elementary school music teacher. Her return on Under an Endless Sky, recorded with Italian electronic composer Francesco Paolo Paladino and writer Luca Ferrari is astonishing, and never more so at the moment around two and a half minutes into the opening title track when we hear Dorothy Moskovitz sing for the first time in a very long time*. If her voice once sounded cooler and more urbane than Catherine Ribeiro's, more innocent and intelligent than Grace Slick's, in 2023 it has a crumbling beauty and defiant timbre usually associated with Robert Wyatt or Nico (who apparently once tried to join TUSoA). Comparisons are entertaining but also odious; Moskovitz is a strange, distinctive treasure, perhaps unique.
The United States of America is indeed a legendary recording, and I realize that term is overused nearly to the point of being meaningless, but the record holds up more than fifty years later. The group had some fairly obvious 1960s politics at their core, but also a serious avant garde intent in their sound. They dispensed with electric guitars in favor of strings, keyboards, and primitive improvised electronics. Electrical engineer Tom Oberheim was commissioned to make a ring modulator and aerospace engineer Richard Durrett built electronic oscillators into a monophonic synthesizer. An octave divider was applied to electric violin, drums wired with contact microphones, and slinkies hung from cymbals for a musique concrète effect. Group leader Donald Byrd—previously a member of the Fluxus movement which included John Cage and La Monte Young—also threw in references to older American music such as ragtime, country blues, and—perhaps in a nod to Charles Ives—marching bands.
Moskovitz studied at Barnard College where she was taught by Otto Luening, the composer of such works as Gargoyles for Violin & Synthesized Sound and Sounds of New Music to demonstrate the potential of synthesizers and the electronic music editing techniques. She had also sung in a group with Art Garfunkel. At that time, ditching the guitar for electric harpsichord, organ, calliope, piano, electric bass, percussion, and the aforementioned primitive synthesizers, was close to sacrilege. Amidst all that—and the unfunny rejection of bourgeois hippie idealism—the beauty and integrity of Moskovitz's singing stood out and still does. She even makes "Love Song for the Dead Ché" sound absolutely great. It is a cracking album. If distorted electronic pseudo-classical discordant psychedelic elegance, albeit legendary, is not your thing, well it should be.
Moskovitz, Paladino, and Ferrari bring serious intent to Under an Endless Sky. Paladino's incredible album Doublings & Silences Vol.I and his work with Pier Luigi Andreoni is definitely worth checking out. Ferrari's choice of subjects for the biographies he has written (Third Ear Band, Tim Buckley, Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart, Nick Drake) gives strong clues to his lyric writing for Moskovitz. There is a marvelous feel to this album, not least as virtual textures are balanced by strings, woodwinds and percussion as if making a similar machine/human balance. Naturally, Moskovitz is central to proceedings but not in an artificial way. The fragility in her voice is matched by lyrics acknowledging the complexity of human existence. The paradox is that she allows resignation and inescapable fate to sound perfectly natural, calmly singing of being "afraid, insecure, under an endless sky". Even the bleak content of "My Doomsday Serenade" sounds bearable as she tells it "no recriminations then, only measuring the weight of my soul" because "denial and contrition don't amount to much at all."
*In 2021, Moskowitz sang on Todd Tamanend Clark's Whirlwind of the Whispering Worlds as well as The Secret Life of Love Songs with Tim Lucas, but I haven't heard these, nor her collaboration with Peter Olof Fransson.
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- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Releasing two full length albums mere months from each other, Colin Andrew Sheffield has been especially active in 2023. Considering his previous Repair Me Now dates back to 2018, it is a veritable flurry of activity. However, this is not a case where Don't Ever Let Me Know and Images seem like a double album split into two separate works, but both are thematically and structurally different from one another, even if both clearly showcase his approach of mangling samples and recordings into entirely different creations.
Simply looking at the song lists, the difference between these two records is clear: Don't Ever Let Me Know is two side-long pieces, while Images is a suite of eight more conventionally timed songs. The underlying models are different, also, with the former specifically drawing from recordings from or about his (and his father's) hometown of El Paso, Texas, and the latter exclusively sourced from jazz records. As expected, none of these recordings are at all apparent, but there seems to be a sense of nostalgia imbued into the album conveyed abstractly.
"Don't Ever Let Me Know (Charms)" takes up the first half of the LP, consisting of loops of dissolving music, open resonate spaces, and bizarrely treated frequencies. Density builds and there is a sense of speed throughout, as he swaps out musical loops for harsher, digital sounds. There is definitely pre-recorded music used as some of the source material, but Sheffield sculpts it into something entirely different.
On the other side, "Don't Ever Let Me Know (Bliss)" is more polarized in sound, blending lush, melodic layers and buzz saw-like noise passages. It can be oddly pleasant at times, especially considering sections sound like a dungeon-y creak or wet, noisy crunching. There is a distinct combination of quieter, reflective sections and harsher swells, with his careful manipulation of delays and feedback bringing things just to the point of chaos but never crossing that threshold.
Images, besides having a more traditional "album" structure, also is unique in that it is drawn entirely from jazz samples. This carries over to the cover art, which could be an homage to vintage ECM or Windham Hill designs, but I may be reading entirely too much into that. Another unique facet here is that in this case, some of the actual sounds he utilizes are recognizable, at least as far as the instruments sampled, but maybe not the actual recordings per se.
"Crescent," for example, is a metallic resonance that eventually comes into focus as the clattering of cymbals, and processed horns eventually rise into the mix later on. "Song No. 2" could almost be a continuation, as a swarm of cymbals set the stage for a wobbling tone to take the focus. There is obviously music in here somewhere, but it is anything but obvious where it was sourced from, and the whole things ends in this beautiful interstellar drift at the end. That drift and use of melody is also notable throughout "Daylight," but in this case blended with sputtering, elongated delays and what sounds like a plucked sitar.
Other pieces are less apparent in their pre-recorded music pedigree. Metallic reverb drenched noises open "Images," leading to a shimmering, aquatic sense. Subtle melodies are weaved within, but they are more subtle here. "Embers" leads off with Sheffield morphing what sounds like a snare drum roll into a swarm of locusts, and the abstract tones that appear feature a bit more bass than what precedes it. "Silhouette" is a fitting name for a piece that leads off with a shadowy dark hum and turns almost symphonic with Sheffield reshaping the recordings into something heavily cinematic overall. It is only towards the end that a decipherable sound, in this case heavily processed horns, actually comes into focus.
It is clear that Sheffield uses some similar techniques on both Don't Ever Let Me Know and Images, but the two records are entirely different, and not just because of their structures. I personally felt a bit more nostalgia and emotion pervading throughout Don't Ever Let Me Know, and Images seemingly more the product of exploration and a focus on pure sound. However, given the intentionally abstract nature of his approach, I could be reading them entirely wrong. This is irrelevant, of course, because both records stand strong as purely sonic endeavors that of course raise questions and curiosity of their pedigree, but remain captivating solely on their own qualities divorced of any concepts.
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- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
The latest cassette from the enigmatic duo Zizia (astrologer Amber Wolfe and natural scientist Jarrod Fowler) is intentionally ambiguous just from its presentation. No information presented within the tape itself, its neon green case covers a blurry photo of the Zizia flower and an intricately printed abstract image on the cassette shell, without a single bit of text included on either. A quick search online finds a website that offers details, listings of insects, plants, and artists that serve only to confound more than clarify. The self-identified concept of anti-musicology is apparent, however, and results in a complex and diverse suite of two lengthy noise works.
Split into two 18-minute segments, each covering half of the tape, the first immediately explodes with an intense blast of noise that quickly recedes to allow sustained tones and metallic rattling to fade in. Wolfe and Fowler utilize consistent sonic building blocks throughout, but layer them in what seems to be superficially sounds like chaotic and erratic structures, but extremely complex. Digital stuttering and metallic pinging noises appear throughout, the use of cymbals being the only easily identifiable element from the list provided via the release's website. Noise surges and drops, with insect and field recordings cast atop murky textures.
The second side does not differ too significantly from the first from the onset. Opening with a similar violent noise burst, but one that lingers a bit longer and takes on some monstrous qualities as opposed to the tonality that appeared rather quickly in the first half. Overall, there is more of a noise crunch to the piece, and one that is a bit more grounded compared to the first half. With more consistency, but by no means static, the noise and complicated layering once again builds to the end.
Nuanced compositional structures and thematic approaches aside, Genera is a fascinating tape of noise that obviously has depth to it, but functions well purely on its own sound. The details Wolfe and Fowler share via the online "guide" add in appreciating the complexity of the sounds provided on Genera, but even taking it in as purely text-free cassette tape is extremely engaging. It is a microcosm of sounds guided by an abstract, but structured approach to composition makes perfect sense coming from a scientist and an astrologer, and it works beautifully.
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- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
These two albums from Seah, also known as multimedia artist and philosopher Chelsea Heikes, seemingly draw from different elemental categories, which ends up setting the foundation for the sounds contained within. The first, Conduits of the Hydrosphere, clearly draws from water while Clouds and Spectres is appropriately expansive, vapor-like, and ghostly at times. Released separately, they feel like complementary works that act as variations on sonic exploration.
All five pieces that make up Conduits feature either direct or indirect references to water, which is unsurprising given the title. Seah makes this immediately apparent from the opening "Asteroidal Origin of Water," with multiple layers of water recordings, filtered differently and stacked atop one another to create a wall of liquid sound. She utilizes space well, as echoing, warped noises and rattling shrieks all vie for the focus. Aquatic field recordings also obscure a subtle tone beneath on "Songs Stones Sing to the Sea," which remains understated amidst scraping noises and a deep, lo-fi digital rumble.
Water is more insinuated in the sound of "Ova1" via heavily processed deep sea-like pulsations, which almost coalesce into some semblance of rhythm via the frequent use of loops. The mix is open, but there is a greater sense of lurking creepiness throughout. She collects slithering noises and cinematic-esque sound bursts on the lengthy closer (and amazingly titled) "Dinosaur Piss Runs Through Our Veins." Here, she patiently builds an excellent tension, which becomes almost overwhelming as the piece builds, but gently drifts away at the end.
For Clouds and Spectres, the overall vibe is less aquatic and more ghostly, characterized by lighter drifting passages and sounds. "Unfurling" feels just like the title, as Heikes patiently expands the structure an ethereal series of melodic tones. On "Accumulation," she more densely packs the sound, incorporates what sounds like buzzy phased analong synths in the foreground. While still using a great deal of space, it feels as if the clouds have gotten darker, as she emphasizes lower frequencies and darker synth buzz on "Skillter." Individual sounds are more distinct among a more prominent white noise hiss throughout. Even though it is noisier than the two preceding pieces, it overall remains restrained and quiet.
Listening to these two records sequentially the liquid/vapor/gas elemental qualities of each is clearly apparent. However, both are distinct experiences. As Seah, Chelsea Heikes has created fascinating diverse studies of sound and processing while retaining obvious themes.
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- Duncan Edwards
- Albums and Singles
Back in 2019 Benoit Pioulard (Thomas Meluch) issued Sylva—an album full of abstract hyper-saturated lo-fi drone-pop sonic textures, which came with an 84 page collection of nature photographs in a linen book. Two pieces with vocals stood out: the brilliantly Bibioesque "Keep" and the less jangly but equally catchy "Meristem." These songs could not have been more appealing to me if Meluch had somehow used a machine to extract my personal dream essence as I slept. Naturally, I promptly forgot to write anything about Sylva, but Eidetic is a leap forward, with more vocals, so I'm glad I kept my powder dry.
Distraction is embedded into modern life and that, rather than forgetfulness, is the real reason why I did not write about Sylva. I know this because the record left an impression and I've listened to it several times since 2019. It was stored in at least my short term, if not long term, memory. Eidetic memory, controlled primarily by the posterior parietal cortex of the parietal lobe of the brain, is a temporary form of short-term memory. Everyone has eidetic memory to a degree; it is the ability to see something soon after you look away. For most people, the image lasts from a fraction of a second to maybe a couple of seconds. Visual images in eidetic memory are either discarded or passed to short-term memory where they may be recalled for days, weeks, or months, then discarded or relayed to long-term memory. Of course since both Sylva and Eidetic are audio information this may not be literally pertinent but it is a way to begin to approach Eidetic and to paraphrase Basil Fawlty with his German guests "you (Thomas Meluch) started it."
No wonder then that the title track consists of a sweetly abrasive droning texture amid which voices mutter in the middle distant background for a brief minute and a half minute. Very nice sound, and it also qualifies as an indie joke, almost. As always with Benoit Pioulard recordings there is a good feeling throughout, it is gentle, cascading, twinkling music, quite affecting in a subtle way, with a good deal of blur and a far bit of strum. This is a given and I do like it, and also the fact that he is saying more using words. At times I wish the vocals were higher in the mix so I could catch what is being said, because these are good songs with clever meaning dotted in them. "Nameless" is an odd one, inspired by workers involved in the production of mercury mirrors who suffered neurological effects: driven mad while they looked at themselves. Other tunes I suspect are either deeply personal songs, deliberately obscured, and also that maybe the sound of the voice is as important as any lyric. There's a strong Songs of Green Pheasant vibe here, too, which is more than fine by me. On second, or is it third, thoughts, a lyric sheet would not go amiss.
"Where To" ends the album and it is an addition to anyone's funeral music file: ethereal, haunting, and all that jazz. The Japanese release of Eidetic has a bonus track titled in honor of Peggy Jo Tallas. The piece is also released as a stand alone single. Now that is a tale worth telling but maybe preferably by Dylan. Peggy Jo was a quiet suburban woman who disguised herself as a man in order to go on a bank robbing spree in the Dallas area. She evaded capture with ease because the cops were not looking for a woman, then kept her head down and cared for her invalid mother. Before getting caught she was dubbed Cowboy Bob by detectives. Peggy Jo never carried a gun and she died in a hail of bullets like Butch and Sundance in her favorite film. If that sounds much more interesting than Eidetic, well, to be fair it is more interesting than many records. Naturally, in Pioulard's hands it's an instrumental.
- Duncan Edwards
- Albums and Singles
Every so often a beautifully flawed pseudo-concept album gets released which it is almost a sin to try to describe. So it is with this absolutely mesmerizing record, a taste-smashing, fabulously old-fashioned, wobbly blitzkrieg of slippery, retro-futuristic, prog rock precision. As a rule I try to avoid describing music by talking about other music the reader may or may not have heard, but the gloves are coming off for this one. Imagine if modern psych groups weren't so one-paced, if Barclay James Harvest had a wah wah pedal and enjoyed fiddling with tape speeds, if Yes were fronted by Serge Gainsbourg or had a sense of humor, if The Opium Warlords and Bo Hansen joined The Mike Sammes Singers; and it all sounded perfectly natural. Juxtaposition and incongruity are at the heart of The Valley of The Dandies: a wonderfully unpredictable recording which manages to sound deliberately dated, and also touches on mythical themes ("explored" would be an exaggeration) but not in a po-faced or over-referential manner. The music is sometimes grandiose but CV Vision does not portray by resorting to a dull slow burn plodding pace. These tunes are amusing, bright, clever, and dynamic, the lyrics intriguingly clumsy but yet light and unobtrusive. There is an unknowable quality to this album, though; and a certain confidence in its completeness. It can not be reduced to a few neat genres, has a rich complexity but never sounds cluttered or gets bogged down. This is a real gem: clean, clear and valuable. It may become a cult classic or merely prove to be a refreshing oddity. Either way I played this thing through five times without a break!
As such, it is weird to speak of individual tracks but here we go. The opener "Welcome" sounds like a cryogenic time reversal accident has resulted in Wendy Carlos waking up in medieval times and getting right to work with mysterious bleeps and ominous thuds. There then follows a bout of funky bass driven prog rock jousting called "The Pious Wanderer." Drums seem to shatter and splat, and the German lyrics waft on a flute like breeze as the track races onward and then clicks into "The Messenger Faster Than The Wind" which includes a child talking of swords pulled from stones followed by the waking from death of a rightful King, returning to save the land at time of great need—presumably during a hideous outbreak of repressive good taste. It brings to mind a futurist motorik-lite version of an ancient prediction woven into tapestry. In one of several brilliantly incongruous moves, CV Vision sings the word "messenger" with a decidedly un-folky edge, more as if he were trying to impress a crowd of bikini clad beauties on Copacabana beach. "Ride My Seesaw" was never this odd.
"King Friedrich II" is a veritable mini masterpiece, somewhere between French psych-pop and a jaunty late-1960s television theme tune. It begins with a low-fi grungy guitar which Dwane Warr might have discarded because it was too surreal and weedy. Then it flips quickly into what could easily be a lost TV theme from a spy or detective show; perhaps a Jason King/Department S style series with a ludicrously debonair womanizing hero who, off screen, naturally prefers birds of his own feather. "Before And After The Storm" initially sounds as sublime as a graceful swan gliding across a pond, and then as groovy, thunderous, and manic as if it were titled Blade Road Runner Throb. All these pieces maintain the flow of the album while adding variety and contrast which burst out unexpectedly.
Take "Wizard and The Hex" where a spell-like incantation gives way to a surf-fuzz bass groove, meandering morse code dub effects, and a languid synth sway. Equally, a sort of reverse time traveling whirl makes "The Journey Inward" an absolutely beautiful track; disintegrating superbly from sub-Floydian grandeur (via what sounds strangely like early Little Feat if they'd emigrated to Berlin) to a dynamic series of headless fast action pursuits. "Light Moon" approximates a hyper-cooing version of Stereolab wading through interstellar quicksand. So it goes on, as dogs bark, anvils thump, cows moo, and at times we may wonder if Edgar Broughton has used the flute from Hawkwind's "Silver Machine" to make a dub track. "The Merry Juggler" and "Children of The Miller Who Lives On The Edge Of The Forest'' indeed took my musical taste buds to the edge of somewhere, just pulling back before the desire to perform my own dentistry became overwhelming. Naturally, "Over Love Affairs" brings everything together and rolls it safely back home like the essence of sun sparks zooming into a hundred video game endings (with strings).
I have translated the German track titles so any errors here are mine.
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- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
The latest ambitious durational epic from the Opalio brothers is thankfully not nearly as daunting as its 15-disc physical form suggests, as RINASCIMENTO ("Renaissance") is composed of 15 movements of varying lengths ranging from 5 to 40 minutes. The reasoning behind the unusual format is arguably twofold, as the Opalios' belief that "each sound claims its own space" is extended to dedicate a full disc to each movement and listeners are invited to "subvert the order" to make use of "random/chance operation à la Cage." There is an additional piece to the puzzle as well, however, as the handcrafted box and CD-R format were deliberately chosen as a return to MCIAA's "radical DIY" origins and as a pointed commentary on underground music's current maddening dependence on vinyl pressing plants and predatory corporations. Unsurprisingly, the primary appeal of RINASCIMENTO is the same as that of every other multi-hour MCIAA tour de force: it is a sustained and mind-altering plunge into otherworldly psychedelia that abandons nearly all earthbound notions of harmony, melody, structure, and instrumentation (and that is not an exaggeration). While the brothers' sonic palette will be a familiar one for longtime MCIAA fans (being a two-person real-time "spontaneous composition" project has some limitations), RINASCIMENTO is nevertheless one hell of a statement, as it collects the duo's most revelatory flashes of inspiration from an entire year of recordings (several of which capture the duo in peak longform form).
The first movement of this 5 ½ hour epic is a deceptively brief and harsh one, as a miasma of tape hiss, whines, and jangling metal sounds call to mind someone slowly dragging a mass of metal cans ("just married!") around a burst pipe in a queasy swirl of alien harmonies and gibbering electronics. In theory, the fifteenth and final movement (smoldering feedback slowly streaking over thumping ritualistic percussion amidst a fog of cooing voices) is not radically different from that opening piece, but it certainly FEELS very different when it eventually comes because it is impossible to listen to 5+ hours of MCIAA without feeling like one's mind has been fundamentally transformed in some way by the sustained plunge into the Opalio's smeared, unnerving, and otherworldly vision. That said, some of the longer movements can achieve a similar effect in drastically reduced time on their own.
Given the fact that the Opalios are playing everything in real time spontaneously, the strongest movements feel akin to witnessing a solar eclipse: it takes a while for all of the moving parts to lock into the right places, but the spectacle can be quite transcendent once the threshold is finally reached. To my ears, RINASCIMENTO starts to truly catch fire around the fourth movement ("Revenge Of Native Aliens") and reaches its zenith somewhere between the eighth and tenth movements, but there are plenty of wild deep space mindfucks on either side of that stretch. For example, the second movement fleetingly calls to mind a flock of honking psychedelic birds disrupting a holodeck beach trip, while the fourth movement evokes the feeling of slowly sinking in a space bog while being serenaded by a lysergic chorus of extradimensional frogs and crickets.
That fourth movement kicks off a sustained and increasingly inspired run of highlights, but the top-tier consciousness-expanding mindbombs are movements six, eight, nine, and ten. In "Fury Of The Alien Gods," for example, it sounds like a free jazz drummer is consumed by a time-bending supernatural haze while jamming with an interplanetary distress signal.
Elsewhere, "Aliencentricism" passes through stages evoking everything from "flock of birds enveloping an extraterrestrial kinetic metal sculpture" to "a field of rusted metal wires vibrates in the wind while an insistent distress signal endlessly reverberates around the ruins of an abandoned space colony." "Matter Becomes Spirit," on the other hand, approximates some kind of slow-motion industrial dub, as a series of erratically timed metal clanks shudders and echoes beneath a smoldering alien melody of smeared beeps that sounds like the death song of a burning space station. "Alienophony" also evokes a looping distress signal in an abandoned place, but as a connoisseur of the genre, I can confidently report that it has an entirely different character this time around ("squirming and squelching short wave radio transmissions in blizzard-ravaged arctic outpost").
The descent back to earth from those peaks is a gradual one, however, as the journey has a few more memorable stops before the final station (for example, "The New Verb" sounds like a doomed astronaut trying to navigate through a supernatural windstorm with unreliably bending and warping sonar pings). While the wealth of highlights here is admittedly quite a treat, it is worth noting that MCIAA is one of the rare projects in which the varying appeal of individual compositions is distantly secondary to the overall vision, as one does not need to get very deep into RINASCIMENTO (or just about any other MCIAA albums) to reach one of two conclusions. One of those conclusions is probably "I need to turn this off because this nerve-jangling, unearthly cacophony is burrowing into my mind and rapidly driving me insane," but the other one is "this unearthly cacophony is burrowing into my mind like absolutely nothing else that I have ever heard and I love it." For those that fall into the latter camp, a fresh durational monster from the Opalios is a legitimate event and the fact that there are several highlight reel-level pieces here is just further delicious icing on an already wonderful and unique cake. The Opalios are not wrong in their claim that RINASCIMENTO is future music happening in the present, as their complete rejection of contemporary music's established framework unquestionably represents at least ONE possible future. Whether or not it represents THE future remains to be seen, yet landmark MCIAA releases like this one are objectively as forward-thinking as many previous innovations that have provocatively challenged the way that people understand, experience, and appreciate organized sound (such as Just Intonation, chromaticism, John Cage's use of the I Ching, or the birth of noise).
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- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This is the second solo album from NYC-based violist/composer/musicologist Annie Garlid and it borrows its name from the Greek word for "place." Notably, Garlid moved back to the US in 2018 after spending a decade in Europe (playing viola in a German opera orchestra, among other things) and that return to her home country unsurprisingly stirred up some deep and unfamiliar thoughts and feelings. Those ruminations directly inspired Topos conceptually, as the album is a meditation on the "simultaneous familiarity and foreignness" of Garlid's surroundings and her entanglement "with a place that was both in her memory and in front of her eyes." Regardless of its inspirations, Topos is a very different (and stronger) album than its predecessor United, as Garlid's medieval and baroque influences are newly downplayed in favor of a more sensuous, hallucinatory, and vocal-centric vision. While that transformation makes a lot of sense given Garlid's work with artists like Caterina Barbieri, Holly Herndon, Emptyset, and ASMR artist Claire Tolan, her assimilation of those disparate influences is impressively seamless and inventive, as Topos feels like the blossoming of a compelling and distinctive new vision.
The five pieces that compose Topos cover an unexpectedly expansive stylistic territory, as each individual piece takes a very different path than the other four. For example, the opening "Riverbeds" is not a far cry from Laura Cannell's sublime art-folk, as string drones sensuously rub up against one another beneath hushed, spoken vocals. It is a fine piece, but the two that follow are the ones where Garlid's vision truly catches fire.
On "March 6th" she conjures up a psychotropic folk dance by combining a viscerally stomping and clapping rhythm with a serpentine pizzicato string motif, Siren-esque choral stabs, and vocals that resemble an eerily harmonized jump rope game. On the following "Ocelot," Garlid's hushed voice ruminates on her favorite childhood animal ("you were the jewel of the catsssss") over a gorgeously sensuous groove enhanced with dreamy vocal harmonies. It is sexy, simmering, and psychedelic in all the right ways, but I was most struck by the seemingly effortless virtuosity of Garlid's vocal phrasing, as she artfully veers between trance-like spoken word, warmly harmonized choral melodies, creepily unsettling effects, pregnant pauses, and hissing sibilance.
The album's final piece, "Forest Floor," is yet another gem, as Garlid enlists a handful of collaborators (her sister Thea, flautist Rebecca Lane, saxophonist Eve Essex) to craft a wonderfully shapeshifting ambient fantasia of whispers, field recordings, hazy snaking melodies, and subtly trippy chorused guitar fragments. Given its more vaporous and elusive form, it does not quite match the impact of the album's stellar first half, but it makes for quite a lovely way to end an album, as the closing minutes evoke a ghostly folk ensemble slowly dissolving in a thunderstorm. The album's remaining piece ("Robert") is not quite up to the same standards, acting more as an interlude than a fully formed statement, but that does not otherwise dilute Topos' impressive run of highlights or dampen my view that this album is a huge creative leap forward for UCC Harlo. That said, "March 6th" and "Ocelot" are on a separate and revelatory plane all their own, as they easily rank among my favorite new pieces in recent memory and resemble no other artist that I am aware of.
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- Duncan Edwards
- Albums and Singles
Just about anything which bucks stereotypes, and the more effortlessly the better, is usually fine and dandy with me. The notion of a sustained outbreak of surrealism down in Alabama is therefore beyond delicious. I say this because there's a definite sense in which Turner Williams Jr. is following in the rambling loose limbed footsteps of such musicians as Ron Pate, Fred Lane, LaDonna Smith, and particularly Davey Williams, who studied with Johnny Shines and was part of the whole Raudelunas Pataphysical Revue scene - playing alto and guitar on such pieces as "The Lonely Astronaut" and "Concerto For Active Frogs''. Let me say here that the origin of pataphysics is perhaps best left to another time, since Alfred Jarry's absurdity and all that merde (absinthe-fueled and otherwise) simply cannot be skimmed over.
On the three tracks here, at least, Williams Jr. manages to play a variety of strings with a truly wild yet intensely focused style. I have not heard much like it. In a humdrum world of scissor kicking guitarists he's a real Fosbury Flop. The resulting waves of jangled and strangled sounds at times resemble a bottleneck jam of notes being squeezed and released; like traffic buzzing along, slowing, and then oozing through a toll gate to speed along or crash and explode. Eastern-tinged vibrations dominate throughout, as if electricity were throbbing along desert telegraph wires, setting fire to antique receiving equipment in some remote Embassy with a boom, crackle and pop, and dispatching fierce hums and whines of distorted feedback, throbbing backwards and squealing up through hot air rising and howling like out-of-control robot space-wolves bouncing off an old knackered rusted satellite on their way to oblivion. Or maybe to Oblivion, Alabama.
To stunning effect, he plays electric shahi baajas, (probably) bulbulturang, definitely FX and Gaz, and some other instruments which I haven't yet deduced. He plucks and thrashes as skillfully as someone with a PhD in plucking and medals for thrashing, who recently woke up and decided to quit messing around and work at really cranking up his game. That is not an indictment of his previous releases, by the way, because I haven't yet found time to hear any of them. Briars On A Dewdrop can easily be digested in one sitting or sampled track by track in any order. The lengthy third piece "On A Dewdrop" has a scorching crescendo which left me wanting more, so I'd have preferred for that final track to precede the more spacious "Briars." Actually I'd also like for the pieces to swap titles as well, because "On A Dewdrop" is much more spiky and prickly. I suppose it is more surreal to have the titles mixed up, though, but then again I'm Dada all the way so I am leaving that to the surrealists.
Williams Jr. has fairly recently decamped to France, and he recorded these pieces before heading off. These are beautifully tangled stylistic brambles through which to wade, a marvelous journey which in theory could be spent trying to work out how it all fits together, but that isn't really necessary, and neither is a thick tweed jacket or thornproof headphones. The flow is the thing, and like a river hitting a weir before cascading down over rapids, this music has it in spades. What comes to mind is hard to describe: part Dogon spacecraft with a wheel in the ditch, part absurd Ubu Roi theatrics, part three million bicycles carried by the fleeing shirtless population of a flooded Asia, part chubby cow jumping over the doggone moon.
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- Duncan Edwards
- Albums and Singles
This is the fifth album of traditional folk tunes which Alasdair Roberts has issued. He has also released several albums of his own compositions and it is a mark of his skill that it is pretty much impossible to tell the difference, and to know whether songs are his own imaginings or not. All share an erudite sensibility, often mixing his plaintive ghostly wailing voice (sometimes mournful, often joyous) with fine, spidery, guitar accompaniment. This new record is a deep collection, full of sweet spots, rich in detail, crystal clear in execution, and teeming with life. As usual, he reveals the multilayered meanings and nuances in even the most apparently straightforward songs, as with "The Bonny Moorhen" of Celtic folklore, and "Drimindown," a simple tale of a lost cow but also a devastating loss of a family's livelihood.
I probably first heard and liked the music of Alasdair Roberts in August 1997 when on an English summer holiday at Woodspring Priory—or Worspring as it was known in the Middle Ages. It was founded in 1210 by William de Courtenay, grandson of Reginald Fitz-Urse, one of the assassins of St Thomas Becket. Providing an income for the locals was likely a way for de Courtenay to purge his family's ongoing guilt, and indeed St Thomas is patron saint of the priory and his martyrdom depicted on its seal.
Woodspring was continuously improved right up until 1536 when it was suppressed and bashed about by Henry VIII—probably because no one believed he'd go through with his wrecking plans. Today Woodspring is remarkable for the way in which it was converted after the Dissolution: the new Tudor owners putting their house right inside the church itself! Now, imagine all this as a beguiling airy narrative seasoned with blood, ghosts, tears, and romance, and you'll start to get an idea of the kind of detail and atmosphere in the recordings of Alasdair Roberts.
The tune I heard back then was "Well Lit Tonight" from his earliest group called Appendix Out. Most likely I had recorded the John Peel radio program and was taking a short break from beer, whisky, sausages, cake, cricket, and the board game Fair Means Or Foul to re-listen to the show on a cassette recorder and pick out what I thought were the gems. Since that time, Roberts has released a torrent of music and also engaged with a rare enthusiasm in myriad collaborations. In a sense, though, nothing has changed: the uncluttered nature of his tunes invariably allows them to shine like stars against a clear dark winter night. Incidentally, the way he collaborates is also admirable: never hogging the limelight but never basking in reflected glory either. What is new on Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall is piano accompaniment on several tracks. Naturally this works because it sounds completely unforced and, well, natural—not least with Roberts swapping gender to sing "The Lichtbob's Lassie."
The album title is a strong clue to his delicate yet microscopically all-encompassing approach, subtly exploring the extremes of human experience and much that is in-between; as down to earth as a mud clad chapter of John Berger's writing in Pig Earth and as stunningly phantasmagorical as the final piece here "The Holland Handkerchief." If Philip K Dick had written folk ballads rather than novels, even he might have struggled to come up with such a tale.
When Alasdair Roberts exits this earthly realm, hopefully a long time from now, I am certain that his passing will trigger a deeply reverential critical assessment of the amazing body of recorded work he will leave behind; whether self-penned songs or works unearthed from the traditional seam.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest album from Markus Popp marks yet another intriguing stylistic detour for his endlessly shapeshifting Oval project, as he delves into "an omnipresent and yet oft ill-defined, even maligned area of music and art–the romantic." The idea for this album first began as a multimedia collaboration with digital artist Robert Seidel intended for the grand opening of Frankfurt's German Romantic Museum, but the endeavor soon evolved and expanded beyond the original purpose, as the two artists "sought a more expansive definition of 'romantic,' extending outward from the museum's comprehensive survey of the 19th-century epoch in art." That said, I suspect only Popp knows how influences from literature, architecture, and visual art helped shape the album, as my ears can only process the final destination and not the journey. In the case of Romantiq, that destination feels like a series of brief vignettes/miniatures assembled from period instrumentation and filtered through Popp's fragmented and idiosyncratic vision. Given that this is an Oval album, of course, very few of the 19th-century sounds are instantly recognizable as such (aside from some occasional piano), but Popp's kaleidoscopic and deconstructed homage to the past is a characteristically compelling and intriguingly unique outlier in the Oval canon (and it is often a textural marvel as well).
The album's description promises a perfume-like experience ("rich scents flooding the senses before evaporating on the breeze"), which feels weirdly apt, as most of the pieces feel like a fleeting impression of something beautiful rather than an intentionally substantial experience (though the album itself is a substantial whole). That approach makes sense given the album's origins as just one part of a larger installation, yet these pieces do not feel like they are missing anything—they simply feel purposely ephemeral, elusive, and impressionistic. In more concrete terms, many of the pieces sound like a music box made of crystal that has been modified to make its simple melodies unpredictably stammer, smear, and flicker. While that is an admittedly cool baseline aesthetic, the stronger pieces on the album tend to be the ones that enhance that foundation with some kind of inspired addition. For example, the opening "Zauberwort" features both a trombone and a recording of an opera singer unrecognizably "atomized into smoke trails."
To my ears, the album's centerpiece is the wonderfully phantasmagoric "Okno," which feels like a smeared and convulsive orchestral loop dueting with a glass vibraphone, but that description fails to do it justice (it more accurately lies somewhere between "violently remixed film score" and "chopped and screwed rendition of 'Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy'"). The following "Touha" is quite wonderful as well though, as it approximates a crystalline and psych-damaged variation on Aphex Twin's Drukqs-era computer-controlled piano pieces. Elsewhere, "Cresta" and "Amethyst" combine for another strong one-two punch, as Popp beautifully elevates his "crystal music box" vision with psychotropic tendrils and a host of burbling, gurgling, and smeared electronic sounds.
Admittedly, there are also a couple of more traditionally piano-centric pieces that do not quite connect with me, but this is otherwise a solid and playfully anachronistic (if modest) album that reaffirms my Oval fandom yet again. Obviously, some Oval releases make a much deeper impact on me than others, yet the recurring theme in Markus Popp's career continues to be one of bold and continual reinvention. While it has been roughly three decades since he first exploded onto the scene with his groundbreaking "skipping CD" innovations, he continues to focus his formidable production skills on bending and stretching the boundaries of electronic composition and seems to have an almost pathological aversion to ever repeating himself or taking an expected path. While plenty of artists give fans exactly what they want, Popp is one of the rare artists who is far more interested in nudging adventurous listeners towards sounds and ideas that transcend the familiar (like a perfume-esque and partially architecture-inspired fantasia of deconstructed 19th-century romanticism, for example).
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