Dave Phillips - (2020) Post Homo Sapiens

 

Attenuation Circuit ‎– ACU 1017

Screeching, prying dark ambient assembled from ghostly hums, booming percussion, and various field recordings. It’s a testament to post homo sapiens’ power and sublime instrumentation that, even though it clocks in at over an hour in its entirety, I never fail to become completely transfixed by it, unable to look away from its first cry to its final death rattles. If I were in a score-giving mood it would probably get my highest rating. There isn’t much I feel compelled to say about it here; I think the music does the talking. As the release page says: “PLAY LOUD as one listening session.”

Listen if: you’re on an elevator, going up, somewhere: where? It doesn’t matter. On each floor, the doors open and close. No one gets on with you; nothing stirs the void beyond the doors. You don’t get off, either; you’re not sure how, but you know that you have a long way to go before you reach your destination.

Joan of Arc - Tim Melina Theo Bobby LP

 

Joyful Noise Recordings ‎– JNR353 

Tim Melina Theo Bobby, the last album by Joan of Arc, plays as if Tim Kinsella, Melina Ausikaitis, Theo Katsaounis, and Bobby Burg sat down to compile their greatest hits, remembered they aren’t the kind of band that writes hits, and decided to try out a little bit of everything. There’s an effective literalism to this approach: If you’ve ever liked a Joan of Arc song, then you’ll almost certainly like some of these. And if you didn’t, then track 1 sounds exactly like American Football—talk about an instant crowd pleaser.

This is how a lot of people first come to Joan of Arc, of course: Via the most memed house in Champaign-Urbana, tracing the ways Tim Kinsella and his younger brother Mike’s musical careers have crisscrossed since Cap’n Jazz, the inventive and influential emo band they founded as teenagers. Joan of Arc’s anxious deadpan meandering and virtuoso weirdness can be a more acquired taste, and there’s a lot to acquire—they’ve released 20-some albums in the past 20 years. No two are especially alike, except for the constant presence of Tim Kinsella and a spirit of diffident, digressive unpredictability. And now it’s over.

As an album, Tim Melina Theo Bobby is maybe even less concerned than usual with coherence, which tends to create the atmosphere of a singles collection. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s about time and boundaries, the things that separate concepts like then and now or you and me. Musically, this can sound like a walk through Joan of Arc’s tangly, overgrown garden: the sawtoothed strums of “Karma Repair Kit” (“I got a lot of good to do/To possibly come out even”), the moodier reflecting pool of “Creature and Being,” the wet-noodle synth of “Land Surveyor.” Over the motorik groove of “Cover Letter,” Kinsella reviews his résumé, How to With John Wilson-style, reflecting on the many, many other jobs he’s performed in service to music: “I prepared various coffee drinks/And I waited tables stoned…/Afternoon shift selling businessmen porn in order to keep the shelves stocked with underground and foreign art films/And I wrote songs.” The hustle sounds like a drag; the song doesn’t, which is where the pathos comes in.

But Joan of Arc have always been a band of multiple simultaneous perspectives—never more than now, when Kinsella and Ausikaitis divide lead vocal duties. As a medium for undermining literal meaning, Ausikaitis is unrivaled; her lyrics can be funny, visceral, or morbid but always mysterious and absurd. “Another role where the movie ends, nice/It’s a natural conclusion that people can buy,” she sings at the top of “Feedback 3/4” (sounds just like the name says). I picture her reading film scripts, reaching for galaxy-brained director questions like But what is ending, actually? and So if this is ending, then what is life? Her riddles make for really good songs, like standout “Something Kind,” where a creeping, knotted guitar melody escalates to a noisy window.

The Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus - (2013) After The End 3xCD

 

 Infrastition ‎– End 016

A limited edition, 3-CD box set of The Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus's "The Gift Of Tears" (1987, Probe Plus), "Mirror" (1990, Probe Plus), and "A Rumour Of Angels" which appears to be unique to this box set: the first cut is from a VA compilation, Jekura - Deep The Eternal Forest; 2, 3 & 4 are from the EP, La Liturgie Pour La Fin Du Temps; 5, 6 &7 are from the EP Paradis (and cuts 6 & 7 were mislabeled in production with 7 being 6 and 6 being 7; 8 & 9 are from "Beauty Will Save The World."

This is similar to the 1994 compilation on Apocalyptic Vision with the exception which had only two disks and took three songs from La Liturgie Pour La Fin Du Temps to round out the second disk.

"After The End" is a remastered compilation.

--

When The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus turned up in the late-’80s Liverpool underground with The Gift of Tears, the critical lexicon to describe their sound didn’t quite exist. European folk influences are infused by Eastern Orthodox spirituality, industrial cacophony, disco beats, post-punk angularity and jazz rhythms. A quarter century later, we know RAIJ can be at least loosely associated with the apocalyptic folk movement of acts such as Current 93, Death In June, Dead Can Dance, Caroliner and Wovenhand.

But RAIJ reside even on the perimeter of that fold, not only for the imagery they invoke, but the enigma lying at their heart: no personnel listings, limited edition releases, not exactly reams to be read about them on the web and the way their disparate sound coheres over the course of an album as an enveloping, immersive experience transporting the listener to an alternate reality, where plainsong and operatic flights of vocal fancy met tribal drums, didgeridoo and some of the harshest of synth sounds.

After The End’s three CDs collect Gift and everything else RAIJ studio recorded (including two new tracks) in packaging handsome enough to pass for a Harmonia Mundi compilation of pre-Baroque classical music. The only things that might have made this more wonderful would have been lyrics, reminiscences from the Army themselves, a longer booklet essay and a video of at least one of their rare, multimedia-abetted concerts. But any more than what’s here might dissipate the mystery that’s always been a goodly percentage of The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus raison d’être.
 

Dan Oxenberg, Bear Galvin + Friends (Pillow Mt. Conspiracy) ‎- (2019) Early Abstractions. Vol. 1 LP

 

Feeding Tube Records ‎– FTR454 

Three:four Records (Switzerland) and Feeding Tube Records (USA) are pleased to announce the release of Early Abstractions, Vol. 1 by Danny Oxenberg (Supreme Dicks), Bear Galvin, and Friends (Pillow Mt. Conspiracy). "Early Abstractions, Vol. 1" is the follow-up to their 2016 release "Late Superimpositions" (three:four records), and contains recordings made in New York, Western Massachusetts, and Los Angeles…some old, some older, some relatively new, some borrowed, some blue. The album was produced by Maxime Guitton, with original art by Hippolyte Hentgen and design/layout by Darryl Norsen.

Of their previous release "Late Superimpositions", Sing Sing wrote: “Ce que ce duo flou ramène de telles pérégrinations est comme la carte brûlée d'un territoire authentiquement sauvage où mélodies radieuses et dissonances plus ou moins consenties, bruit lymphatique et lyrisme enroué, mélancolie indélébile et profusion d’épiphanies s'entrecroisent, s'échangent et se relancent pour mettre en branle quelque chose comme de la grâce…une raison supplémentaire de croire que les fantômes sont parmi nous et qu'ils n'en finissent plus de mourir d'amour.” (Translation: This hazy duet brings back from such peregrinations what sounds like the burnt map of an authentically savage territory, where radiant melodies and more or less agreed upon dissonances, lymphatic noise and hoarse lyricism, indelible melancholy and profuse epiphanies cross, substitute and rekindle each other, setting in motion something that could be grace…one more reason to believe that ghosts are among us and that they can’t stop dying of love.). Marc Masters (The Out Door: 200 words) wrote: “Subdued and patient, these simple, guitar-weaved tunes keep tilting to the side, wobbling away from the straight path into the weeds of something more interesting. They’re also just plain gorgeous…”  

CVN - (2019) I​.​C. LP

 

Orange Milk Records ‎– none

Japan’s Nobuyuki Sakuma is a prolific artist; formerly of the Jesse Ruins duo on the Captured Tracks label, he now shifts time between his electronic music project CVN, curating the mix series Grey Matter Archives, and chief editor duties at Avyss Magazine. “I.C.” will be his second album for Orange Milk as CVN, and it is an eclectic hybrid of beat music and abstract electronics. There is a searching quality in his music, with leaps in variation from track to track that are meant to elicit the mutating feelings of walking through Tokyo.

The first track 成分 Seibun is a calm pop song featuring Japanese vocalist NTsKi, and feels like an initial encounter with nocturnal cityscapes. As the album progresses a stranger Japanese electronic music culture begins to emerge, referencing artists like good friend Foodman and label partner Koeosaeme with irreverent assertions of anti-genre music making. Tracks like “Snippets of Heaven” are reminiscent of music on the labels PAN or Halcyon Veil, cryptic and sparse with random industrial beats and scraping metal. “舌下 (Karaoke)” is a more forlorn piece with straightforward rhythm and deeply effecting use of repetition. Sakuma states that he lets mood dominate his track making and does not care if this transitioning emotion fits into a cohesive style. The skill of harnessing the random nature of each tracks aesthetic is impressive, resulting in an exciting record that faithfully documents its creators place and time.

Félicia Atkinson - (2018) Coyotes

 

Geographic North ‎– GN49

Félicia Atkinson is a composer, sculptor, painter, poet, and publisher from Rennes, France. Atkinson has led a fruitfully fantastic run of eerily blissful, serenely euphoric sounds. Whether under her own name or via her defunct recording pseudonym Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, Atkinson has released work on Umor Rex, Digitalis Limited, Aguirre, and Shelter Press, an imprint co-run with Bartolomé Sanson.

‘Coyotes’ is an EP inspired by Atkinson’s last voyage to New Mexico in February 2017, when she visited and took in the geographic landscapes from Taos to Ghost Ranch. The same vistas also inspired much of Agnes Martin’s and Georgia O’Keefe’s painting, as well as Jerome Rothenberg’s poetry and translation’s works.

Atkinson describes a ‘Coyotes’ as a “Carnet de Voyage,” a tape you could directly play in your car while traveling somewhere, a kind of imaginary map to a sentimental journey. A spontaneous gesture, close to the notion of gift or offering. Or, simply, a postcard to a friend.” But it’s also a praise to the conservation of national and state parks and its human and non-human souls, menaced as we know now by drilling and violent economic speculations.

Here, coyotes act as a kind of metaphor of ambiguity and doubt, a state of mind that Atkinson find interesting to transcribe musically; the ambiguity furthered by Atkinson as a literal “foreigner” in New Mexico. She conveys a sense of visiting these native sacred lands and wondering what you are doing there.

Musically, ‘Coyotes’ is composed of two long tracks, “Abiqiu” and “Lighter Than Aluminium.” Each track features an effervescent froth of piano, midi sounds evokes marimbas, Fender Rhodes, bells, sub-basses, and spoken word poetry written by the musician to display a melancholic landscape made of transparent but deep layers of pale colors and blurry lines.

Liz Durette - (2020) Delight LP

 

 Feeding Tube Records ‎– FTR504 

"A very whacked new outing from Baltimore keyboard genius Liz Durette. Her earlier albums had a certain avant jazz approach, tempered perhaps by certain new music proclivities. And while I do not doubt she still has the chops for such things, Delight is a horse of an entirely different color. What's here was all done on keyboards, but at times it sounds like insane calliope music for wicked children with a taste for that old waltz beat. The whole first side could be the soundtrack for a surreal film about dead Viennese courtiers high-stepping their way around the Bardo as though it were a hedge maze. The more I listen to the record, the more circular its matrix appears, and the less certain I am of the direction in which gravity is pulling me. No surprise then, to learn that part of Delight's inspiration was drawn from A Genuine Tong Funeral, Gary Burton's amazing '68 LP, comprised of a full set of Carla Bley's wildest early compositions. On the flip, Durette is in a similar fettle, but seems keener on exploring the faux percussive aspects of her 'axe.' This involves the simulation of little people tap dancing on a xylophone, as well as very many other transgressive-if-meditative sonic activities. And they are all done with such flair and attention to detail you really have to wonder what sort of visions Liz has accessed. They seem to exist somewhere between romance and math. The universe of sounds she creates on Delight is wildly complex, but also it appears to operate by a set of congruous rules throughout. Like I said earlier, GENIUS!"

Dan Melchior & Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson - (2019) Cod War Kids CD

 

Some – none 

 A deep and delicate dive into the psyche of an unusual duo, British-born ex-pat North Carolinian guitarist Dan Melchior & Icelandic-born Hanover-based experimentalist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson. Each quite unique on their own accord, but in combination bring a sound reminiscent of some odd combination of church music, the Deep South, some kind of swampy bluegrass, the Phantom of the Opera — really it’s hard to pinpoint where they might go. But through the whispering murmurs, the twang and fleeting harmonica is a true exploration of darkened corners. It’s as if they’ve awoken the ghosts of the old Gentry, and put them on someone’s front stoop to haunt the neighborhood.

Titles such as Blind Curtains & Curious Eyes and More Exclusive Dramatic Moments show a completely wry side to a sound that meanders in the furthermost corners. On the first of these the duo sets off an alarm of sorts that blisters through a somewhat unsettled, dusty setting. The unfixed feel of ‘anything could happen’ breeds excitement. Between whispers in retreat and an inebriated drone lies open space and tormented quietude. The moodiness shifts from the hushed hallows to mock-rock with scintillating guitar fuzz spilled all over Wino Ryder Forever. Those apey voices amid the taunting funky bottom end are, well, everything. This one is spooked.

If you crossed The Residents with a lil’ Earl Scruggs and maybe just a pinch of Sunn O))) you might be in the next field over if you reversed it and played it back. Cod War Kids is mesmerizing, each and every moment, and More Exclusive Dramatic Moments is the record’s most elusive, in that it sounds more like its eavesdropping than trying to entertain. It’s ambient, it’s ominous, and so half-mast sleepy. Sooner Will Be Coming Soon (I Have Never Been Calm Or Misunderstood) only hints gently at a Phillip Glass soundtrack passage, it must be those burrowing horns. There’s this dreamlike sense of post-war, a lingering sense of dread fading.

As we are up to the finale, This Is The Scene Where Siggy And Dan Receive Their Prophecies From The Witches, the listener may lean to imagine how this tale ends. Barely audible walkie-talkie like transmissions, crickets and a wavering drone make for a pitched chamber misplaced in the woods. The atmosphere writhes in near silence for a while, and fades into the end. This record will create a flustered sense of wonder for those who dare. And, my dears, this will certainly end up on the top of my heap for 2019.

Dan Deacon - (2003) Silly Hat vs. Egale Hat CDr

 

Standard Oil Records ‎– SOR-04003 

The music contained on these albums I wrote while in college (and a few while in high school) when I was just discovering computer music. I wrote them for fun, never planning on doing anything with them at that the time or expecting them to be heard outside of my circle of friends. When I was asked to play a show on campus I thought it might be a good idea to burn some CD-Rs and try to sell them at the show.

Going through my files, I found the pieces that I liked the most, grouped them into two different collections and gave them the most appropriate/absurd titles I could think of. The organization of the songs was somewhat thoughtout but mostly chaotic: make sure the granular synth pieces are far from each other; keep the songs with beats spread out; sound collages placed amongst sine wave drone pieces. They were more like compilations of my experiments than albums of compositions.

I made only 8 CD-R copies of each in photocopied sleeves with contact paper on the discs. I sold all but 1 of each for $7 or two for $10. Explosions were going off in my head, dollar signs appearing in my eyes. Making $70 from selling CD-Rs was blowing my mind. I started selling them at every show, even though the music contained on them didn’t represent what I ever performed live, since the music on Meetle Mice and Silly Hat was never meant to be performed live (except for the acoustic ensemble pieces).

The CD-Rs and artwork are riddled with mistakes. There’s digital clipping on many of the tracks; ‘Silly Hat vs. Egale Hat’ was meant to be ‘Silly Hat vs. Eagle Hat’; “copy write” should have been ‘copyright’, etc., but I thought the typos were funny and kept it with each batch of the CD-Rs. Since I was only selling them on campus or a few shows in NYC it didn’t really matter. I hated stuff that took itself too seriously so keeping my spelling mistakes glaring was important to me. And considering the music was made in a vacuum with no intention of it ever seeing the light of day, it made sense to keep all the errors in their original state (true of this reissue as well the artwork for this reissue was scanned from the original run of 8.)

I was a very different musician back then trying to figure out how to interact with sound, what could be done with it, where it could go, learning music software for the first time. Since then my aesthetic has shifted, my absurdist mindset subdued. At times I feel like these albums are skeletons in my musical closet. Many of the song titles are absurd or toy with the idea of what is offensive and what is not, many of them created as a commentary on the super politically correct atmosphere that was Purchase College in the early 2000s.

These albums are like seeds. They sound, look and feel very different from the fruit that they’ve grown but they are still of the same tree.

–Dan Deacon

 

Dan Deacon - (2004) Meetle Mice CDr

 

Standard Oil Records ‎– none 

The music contained on these albums I wrote while in college (and a few while in high school) when I was just discovering computer music. I wrote them for fun, never planning on doing anything with them at that the time or expecting them to be heard outside of my circle of friends. When I was asked to play a show on campus I thought it might be a good idea to burn some CD-Rs and try to sell them at the show.

Going through my files, I found the pieces that I liked the most, grouped them into two different collections and gave them the most appropriate/absurd titles I could think of. The organization of the songs was somewhat thoughtout but mostly chaotic: make sure the granular synth pieces are far from each other; keep the songs with beats spread out; sound collages placed amongst sine wave drone pieces. They were more like compilations of my experiments than albums of compositions.

I made only 8 CD-R copies of each in photocopied sleeves with contact paper on the discs. I sold all but 1 of each for $7 or two for $10. Explosions were going off in my head, dollar signs appearing in my eyes. Making $70 from selling CD-Rs was blowing my mind. I started selling them at every show, even though the music contained on them didn’t represent what I ever performed live, since the music on Meetle Mice and Silly Hat was never meant to be performed live (except for the acoustic ensemble pieces).

The CD-Rs and artwork are riddled with mistakes. There’s digital clipping on many of the tracks; ‘Silly Hat vs. Egale Hat’ was meant to be ‘Silly Hat vs. Eagle Hat’; “copy write” should have been ‘copyright’, etc., but I thought the typos were funny and kept it with each batch of the CD-Rs. Since I was only selling them on campus or a few shows in NYC it didn’t really matter. I hated stuff that took itself too seriously so keeping my spelling mistakes glaring was important to me. And considering the music was made in a vacuum with no intention of it ever seeing the light of day, it made sense to keep all the errors in their original state (true of this reissue as well the artwork for this reissue was scanned from the original run of 8.)

I was a very different musician back then trying to figure out how to interact with sound, what could be done with it, where it could go, learning music software for the first time. Since then my aesthetic has shifted, my absurdist mindset subdued. At times I feel like these albums are skeletons in my musical closet. Many of the song titles are absurd or toy with the idea of what is offensive and what is not, many of them created as a commentary on the super politically correct atmosphere that was Purchase College in the early 2000s.

These albums are like seeds. They sound, look and feel very different from the fruit that they’ve grown but they are still of the same tree. 

ﺍﺗﻤﻨﻰ ﻟﻮ ﺍﻥ ﺍﻟﺮﻳﺎﺡ ﺗﺠﻠﻲ ﺍﻟﺮﻣﺎﺩ Couronne De Merde - (2020)

 

 Broken Britain Cassettes ‎– BBC.WS2

BEIRUT, Lebanon — a haunted city. The dead look out from the bullet holes which scar the public squares and back streets, presided over by the monumental ruin of the Holiday Inn, overlooking the city from its seafront cathedral.

Broken Britain Cassettes advances its World Service campaign eastward with an anatopic release from Frenchman Couronne de Merde, who became preoccupied by the Lebanese Civil War after repeated visits to Beirut. Recorded over a week in Paris, these tracks are an exorcism of the ghosts who followed him back.

Spectral voices lurk behind the shell-shocked synths and an urgent battery of percussion. Proceedings move forward and backwards in time - at once observing the event and recalling it afterward. Disparate scenes and incidents are conflated in a trans-historical bloodbath, underscored by a sorrowful ambience which longs for meaning in Sacrifice.

Couronne de Merde casts an unflinching gaze at theocratic and political contradictions. ﺍﺗﻤﻨﻰ ﻟﻮ ﺍﻥ ﺍﻟﺮﻳﺎﺡ ﺗﺠﻠﻲ ﺍﻟﺮﻣﺎﺩ is a poetic documentation and dramatisation of a modern conflict, this late iteration of ancient struggles between Religion and Secularity, Christianity and Islam, Dominance and Freedom.

Fire-Toolz - (2020) Rainbow Bridge

 

Hausu Mountain ‎– HAUSMO99  

On her third LP for Hausu Mountain, the Chicago experimental musician amps up the extremes of her work: It’s more crushing than ever, yet it features moments as tranquil as anything in her catalog.

The music that the Chicago experimenter Angel Marcloid makes as Fire-Toolz exists somewhere at the fuzzy border between peace and pandemonium. Across the handful of albums she’s released under that name over the last half-decade, she’s made room for moments of blissed-out digital ambience, technical death-metal fantasias, glitch-scoured noise, and glossy AM radio jazz—often all slammed together within a few bars. It can feel like mayhem, but Marcloid insists her songwriting has never been self-consciously designed that way. She told AllMusic that over the last few years, her music has emerged from “a much more peaceful place,” even if it comes out gnarled and complex. “I might be making something about a serene meadow, but […] to someone who just listens to it, it might shatter their world temporarily,” she says. “That’s just how it’s going to have to be.”

On Rainbow Bridge, her third Fire-Toolz album for Chicago’s Hausu Mountain, she maintains this head-spinning approach, doubling down on the extremes of her music. It’s somehow more crushing and complex than anything she’s done as under the moniker, but it’s also full of moments as tranquil and bright as anything she’s offered in her catalog. It’s a strange balance, but it’s true to the spirit of the Fire-Toolz project as a whole, which is full of pieces that feel like they’re being torn apart as Marcloid’s impulses go galloping off in different directions.

The record begins in tumult with the double-kick battery of the concussive, minute-long “Gnosis .•o°Ozing.” It is bleak, bruising, and brief, but it also contains a few glimmers of an ascendant synth lead, which lends even this short, violent intro a surprising emotional complexity; there’s a sort of hopefulness embedded in its punishment. On “(((Ever-Widening Rings)))” she unleashes a series of terrifying screams over a shuffling synth piece that sounds not entirely unlike a Peter Gabriel instrumental. Marcloid has said that her fascination with metal began with proggy groups like Dream Theater and Fates Warning, bands that were more about world-building than brutality. The heavier moments on Rainbow Bridge seem designed with the same purpose in mind. They may be more transparently metal than anything Marcloid has done to date, but she’s not just trying to pummel you, she’s presenting complicated emotions for a complicated world. It’s a careful, considered exploration of a vein that’s run through her music from the very beginning.

The slower moments of Rainbow Bridge are no less engaging. Tracks like “Dreamy #ex Code” evoke both the dizzy mysticism of new-age music and the burpy psychedelia of Animal Collective’s early collage experiments, while others draw on the humid jazz riffing that informed Marcloid’s record as Nonlocal Forecast. Even if any given moment is crammed with sounds, the record gives a lot of space to the serenity that she says informs her work. The record’s closer, “{Screamographic Memory}” is perhaps the most purely placid thing in her catalog: a collection of bell-like synth tones stretching and seeping into one another. It’s sweet and sunny, about as far from the thunderous terror that opens the record as you could imagine getting.

Rainbow Bridge was made in part as a reflection on the death of Marcloid’s cat Breakfast, which explains in part the way the record swings back and forth between beauty and cacophony. Marcloid’s work as Fire-Toolz has always been about the way that these two emotional poles can coexist, but the way we deal with death is especially complicated. Even the most intense grief is braided with moments of peace and clarity, the beautiful memories of a life well-lived. Rainbow Bridge mirrors the intensity and the confusion of these experiences and shows that even in the direst times, it’s possible to find comfort.

Manuel Mota, Marcia Bassett & Margarida Garcia - (2019) Here They Rest Immobile LP

 

 Yew ‎– YEW-009

November 2017 found Marcia Bassett, Margarida Garcia and Manuel Mota converging in Antwerp. This LP is the premiere recording of the trio configuration. Extraordinary passages of immersive improvisation interactions combine abstract transcendental chemistry that soars through dark hallucinatory passageways. If fragmentary thought is recurrent it converges here in mutual inspiration. Here They Rest Immobile refers to the ghost of place, the shadows that slowly shift with the light, the skeletal frame work of half built /partially torn down structures and the resonating hum of the activity that once defined Diamantkwartier. The trio recorded the three new improvisational suites found on this record at Sound in Motion Studio, Antwerp. Identifying streaks from each of the players, all respectively known for their own solo explorations and improvisational techniques, interweave and take flight into otherworldly soundscapes.

ENA - (2019) Baroque 12''

 

 Different Circles ‎– DIFF009

 Two years in the making, Different Circles is very proud to present Baroque, six unorthodox excursions into chaotic upper-atmosphere dynamics from Japanese artist Ena.

Variously recalling coded AI shortwave transmissions and blasted high arctic landscapes through the filter of the most abtruse Chain Reaction-adjacent sound design, it is a pleasure to welcome Ena to the DC fold.

Vinyl avaiable now. Download released 31 October 2019.

This release features specially designed cover art by Raime.

Euglossine - (2019) Coriolis CS

 

 Hausu Mountain ‎– HAUSMO 83 

Tristan Whitehill is a Gainesville, Florida-based musician and visual artist who runs the adventurous, playful netlabel Squiggle Dot and has released over a dozen albums and EPs as Euglossine. Having refined his sound from his crunchier, more lo-fi early work, Euglossine's first Hausu Mountain release is a peaceful, trippy mélange of fusion jazz and smooth funk, as well as the knotty intricacies of IDM and prog rock. Trained in jazz and classical music, Whitehill's virtuosity is obvious, and his compositions are richly detailed, yet they're so fluid that it can be easy to overlook their complexity. With prior releases on labels like Beer on the Rug and Orange Milk, Euglossine has fallen into the orbit of the vaporwave scene, but the project's work seems far more sincere than most of the bedroom-dwelling laptop postmodernists slowing down samples of Weather Channel smooth jazz and hiding behind memes. The drum machines are a bit plastic-sounding, but the synth textures and especially the guitars are much warmer and more vivid, and tracks like "Eternal Mouse" have pleasing melodies reminiscent of Mike Paradinas at his prime. "Cloud Bop" is a feathery shot of future-shocked electro, and the peppy "Zig Zag" injects some skronky sax, like John Zorn trapped in an elevator. Both relaxing and stimulating, Coriolis is Euglossine's smoothest ride yet.

Exportion + Meoss - (2010) Drawing For Recognition

 

Section 27 ‎– [S27-038] 

 

Eartheater - (2015) RIP Chrysalis CD

 

 Hausu Mountain ‎– HAUSMO 38

"As droplets of data rain from the Cloud, Alex Drewchin embeds another digital seed into the soil and watches the vines unfold according to their own feral algorithms. RIP Chrysalis is her second full-length album under the Eartheater moniker released on Hausu Mountain in the year 2015, which she will remind you is the Year of the Goat. The files ripped from her devices duplicate through electronic pollination and drift from ear bud to ear bud. The moments we spend listening fall back to earth as plucked petals. RIP Chrysalis spreads on a lateral trajectory from the same rhizome that bore her debut full-length Metalepsis. The two albums stand together as sibling entities, bearing similar faces and distinct personalities. With her experiments as a founding member of the avant-psych duo Guardian Alien illuminating a parallel path through deep inner space, we witness Drewchin transmute her concrete experiences into another harvest that expands in all directions at once. Her intricate ballad arrangements rise from standing pools of hi-fidelity synthesis. Her dynamic vocal performances span an untold number of tactics and tonalities, flitting between sing-song cadences, otherworldly coos, and flights of operatic grandeur. Her dense song structures find room for multiple staggered climaxes, tangents of sampled found sound, and expanses of drone meditation. Drewchin builds layered electronic productions possessed of enough detail to constitute stand-alone worlds, each weighted thick with text and texture.

RIP Chrysalis finds Eartheater stretching her omnivorous compositions into longer frameworks, allowing each atmosphere to thicken to its saturation point with stacked tiers of choral voice and interwoven synth lines. The sudden onsets of spoken word interludes, bursts of corrupted glitch, and hip hop 808 kick patterns maintain Drewchin's role as the unpredictable curator of her own sonic universe - and yet these missives feel more essential than ever, juxtaposed against legible passages of guitar and vocal performance that bend conventions of pop and rock like elastic playthings. As her productions diversify into new realms of fine-grain electronic experimentation, Drewchin simultaneously steps closer to some semblance of humanity. Her lyrics wind their way into your psyche from multiple entry points. Abstract metaphysical incantations lean on frank colloquialisms. Multi-syllabic rhyme schemes churn through surreal images in double time. Some turns of phrase astound on the spot, and others sneak past your defenses, only to manifest as obvious revelations many listens down the line. Drewchin's guitar chimes through arpeggios that glue her compositions together at the seams, while flashes of acoustic texture provided by lush string arrangements elevate her crescendos to new heights of emotional catharsis. At any given moment, an Eartheater composition reads somewhere between a folk song, a musique concrète collage, and a filmic suite fit to soundtrack a multiversal montage that only Drewchin can imagine in full detail. Her music grants us an opportunity to observe a process of internal negotiation: the deprogramming of false fundamentals; the fulfillment achieved by creating from within a system sinking deeper into bureaucratic regulation and surveillance; the ongoing construction of an avatar as a necessary foil to a breathing human."

Beatrice Dillon - (2020) Workaround

 

 Pan ‎– PAN106 

 ‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythm-obsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro-Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity.

Recorded over 2017-19 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, ‘Workaround’ renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band’s Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock’s Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14
bright and spacious computerised frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play.

‘Workaround’ evolves Dillon’s notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse’s book ‘Finite And Infinite Games’ to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon’s ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system.

With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon’s rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra’s tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in ‘Workaround Two’, while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palatecleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork’s seminal ‘Basic G’, or Rian Treanor’s disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy.

Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music’s pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialisation of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialised in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, ‘Workaround’ can be heard as Dillon’s ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace.

Atonet Moonilena - (2019) Boiling Sea CS

 

 Moloton ‎– MOLOTON011 

 Atonet and Moonilena, also co-runners of the label, have collected a series of tracks on a cassette split, ‘Boiling Sea’.

The Atonet side of the split presents a series of monochromatic ambient and generative works, made with tape loops and various synthesis techniques. Moonilena’s side contains a piece that she presented for the 100-year anniversary of late text-sound composer, artist and fighter pilot turned antimilitarist Åke Hodell. In it, she explores an imagined narrative in which a since long discarded signal intelligence system forgets its initial mission and starts producing underwater poetry, scrambled with random coordinate readings.

Ashtray Navigations & Anla Courtis - (2019) Protozoic Rock Express CD

 

Public Eyesore ‎– PE144 

 The pressure is heavy on Protozoic Rock Express. A sonic current steadily pushing through the subsurface, and within the intensity, clarity and detail escape like air breathing from volcanic vents. A dark droning composition filled experienced aural stitching. Life pulled from the darkness then placed like breadcrumbs along the path. Two artists across an ocean, their patience and care over multiple years produces a heavyweight masterpiece.

Three tracks on Protozoic Rock Express divided into forty five minutes. Phil Todd is the force behind Ashtray Navigations, playing acoustic guitar, oscillators, moog sampled harmonium & casio sampler. Anla Courtis plays electric guitar, organ, hawk-bells e-bow & found metals. Together these duo creates a fantastic sonic landscape. The severity of these sounds in perfect balance with the aural facets lifting above the depths. The beauty of Protozoic Rock Express is it's ability to provide contemplative meditation, but never sinking so deep as to drown thoughts with the music itself.  

 

Arek Gulbenkoglu - (2017) Three Days Afterwards

 

Penultimate Press ‎– pp29 

 Three Days Afterwards is the fourth solo release from Arek Gulbenkoglu. Within manifests a disorientating assignment of tones, textures, and voice. Hovering around the key words below there is an unsettling psychedelic music – ripe for this foreboding age.

Klara Lewis - (2020) Ingrid LP

 

 Editions Mego ‎– EMEGO 270

Klara Lewis comes into her own with the furling melancholic loops and raging despair of ‘Ingrid’, recalling Steve Reich’s phasing inventions worn out by Basinski, or the way her stark native landscape manifests in black metal.

“Following 2018's acclaimed collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner, "Care", Swedish sound artist Klara Lewis returns with "Ingrid", her third solo release for Editions Mego. "Ingrid" is a departure from Lewis's previous solo outings, drifting from the eerie rhythmic variations of "Too" and "Ett" and moving assuredly into long-form experimentation. The piece retains those records' pulsing core and builds on a single cello loop that is steadily enveloped by a surge of distortion. It's almost like a voice or chant, shifting pointedly from a whisper into a scream before singing peacefully into the light.

At times, "Ingrid" reminds of William Basinski's looping melancholy or Steve Reich's controlled and innovative phase experiments, while at others, it recalls the chaotic Scandinavian physicality of black metal. Yet the entire composition is anchored in Klara Lewis's distinct emotional world. By dissolving familiar and beautiful strings in baths of noise, Lewis allows something violent but tender to grow in its place. In a society struck through by cynicism, "Ingrid" is a cathartic listening experience and a beacon of hope.”

Ka Baird - (2019) Respires

 

RVNG Intl. ‎– RVNGNL61 

 Respires, the second solo album by Ka Baird, blurs the line between word and action, definition and possibility. Spirited yet restrained, bearing its wildly thrummed heart strings and inner calm alike, Respires ventures toward the unknown, charting the shifting ground of experimental music and the rewards born of risk.

Tapping the ecstatic energy and cathartic experience of Baird’s live sets, pushing the extremes of psychological and physical release, Respires represents an unquestionable leap for an artist already out on a limb. Largely written and recorded across the length of 2018, the eight pieces align as a series of visceral actions, captured, culled, and intricately shaped by Baird, then expanded with contributions from Zach Rowden (bass), Max Eilbacher and Andrew Fitzpatrick (synths), and Greg Fox (drums).

Respires was born from the intertwined etymologies of spirit and breath, the results of Baird’s singular approach to extended vocal technique and radical notions of “body music” which push her performances to uncompromising extremes. Channeling a raw energy from an internal depth, the genetics of Respires construct new bridges of communication, reaching across the perceptual boundaries of spiritual and physical.

KTL - (2020) VII

 

Editions Mego ‎– eMEGO 287  

 A new timley studio album from the duo of Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley. Recorded and mixed during an unexpected extended stay in Berlin when the borders of the world suddenly closed. The claustrophobic urgency of this scenario is seared into the colossal vibrations set into this vinyl release.
Unlike many of their releases this is a studio record made unto itself as opposed to the many soundtracks they have made for theatre works and the like. It also stands as one of their most fully realised releases to date.

Proceedings are launched with The Director. Sitting somewhere between contemporary classical and doom this is a sliding and menacing mass of sound, more Masque of the Red Death than The Decameron. Silver lining is an alarming swooping buzzing track, looming and lowering only to rise and descend again. A delicate play with the Shepard-Risset glissando manifesting a delirious swarm of sound. Lee’s garlic orbits into a short fragmented zone with bursts of harsh feedback and crashing fx, all manner of audio enters and is discarded with an underlying sense of despair and frustration. Proceedings continue on Side B with Tea With Kali where a calmer plateau is embedded with oscillating guitar and fluttering electronics. Beating sine waves envelop the listener in a meditative thought piece of sound. Frostless concludes this epic dispatch as a subtle and gentle foray into twitching electronics as a light buzzsaw drone swirls as around your mind.

The interplay of sources (guitar, electronic equipment (hardware, software, speakers) is so entwined it’s often difficult to discern who is doing what amongst the broad sound field. KTL VII is instrumental music as visual narrative resulting in an exquisitely crafted release full of sophisticated and sublime illusory effects.

L.S.Y. - (2019) Midheaven CS

 

Jungle Gym Records ‎– JGT37

 JUNGLE GYM RECORDS presents "Midheaven", official debut of Los Angeles' L.S.Y. A collaborative effort from Dravier and Samira Winter, JGT39 scours the the dampest corners of LA for aquatic ritual and subterranean trapdoors. A bold introduction to the L.S.Y. universe, "Midheaven" is exotica for storm-drain portal... exclusively from JUNGLE GYM.

Francisco López - (2008) Untitled (2006 - 2007) 2xCD

 

Monochrome Vision ‎– mv25

 Francisco López uses sound in a holistic way to reward attentive listeners. Adopting Pierre Schaeffer's attitude to sound as having the ability to recontextualise the world as we know it, his objets sonore - or aural pictures - explore the sum of an environment and the sound-making elements that inhabit it when divorced from the other four senses. This forms a proposal for the listener to contemplate outside of language, a freedom so rarely offered by the 24/7 loquacity of the modern age.

'untitled (2006-2007)' showcases almost all of the shorter pieces L
pez produced over the two year period where all but three of the sixteen pieces have appeared elsewhere. This not only saves the collector from seeking out many and varied compilation albums from boutique labels spread across the globe but, for the uninitiated, also makes for a good introduction to the artist, solidly surveying the breadth of his disorientating style.

For the closest examples to straight field recording, Untitled # 209 and # 210 both use "sound matter" recorded during Costa Rica's rainy season. # 209 pans back across a field heavily populated in insects who work up to a living, breathing mantric state that takes on the properties of coastal tides and later heavy rain - intensities out of which tones and rhythms emerge self-selected by the listener. While # 210 zooms in on the syllables of apes, but somehow endows the utterances with a less primal and more deliberate tongue that is both earnest and intelligent. While both have recognisable sources that can be linked with López' ecological studies, their subtle treatment and editing ultimately encourage the listener to re-consider them as pure sound, a composition that is not attempting to convey ecological, sociological or metaphorical messages - a consistent outcome regardless of the specifics behind all of López' work.

Indeed, many of the other pieces across 'untitled (2006-2007)'s two disks are from unrecognisable sources and do not sport any guidance. Untitled # 195 jumps from electrical scratches through the hum and pace of industrial machine routines to deep, cavernous isolation, like sudden edits in a film carefully unfolding a tense, urgent drama through different viewpoints, but where the activities viewed are imagined by the audience not the director. Meanwhile, Untitled # 190 demonstrates López' predilection for blurring the boundaries between so-called natural sound (be it biological or elemental) and man-made noise (be it manual or mechanical) as signs of life move delicately in the distance triggering a wind that disturbs millions of blades in a plastic field that, in turn, becomes the background noise of a room with a photocopier whose rhythm builds as it blends with rain hitting the windows.

The results are no less warped when López works with donated source material. This compilation features four such tracks - untitled # 193 uses Rapoon's 'Tribal Sci-Fi' loop library in a seemingly subterranean excursion, untitled # 198 entombs Kathy Kennedy's recording of eight voices humming into a holophonic microphone, burying them alive, untitled # 202 turns a recording of life in Victoriaville, Canada by Thomas Phillips into a textural river of sound, and untitled # 203 celebrates the qualities of aircraft engines originally captured by Lawrence English. In fact, this rich and resonant exploration of the Brisbane airport is possibly in direct response to R Murray Schafer's comment that "no sound contains less interesting information than that of an airplane". As initiator of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and self-elected curator of the acoustic environment, Schafer has been known to display a kind of snobbery towards 'noise' that Schaeffer's and now López' work dramatically refutes. English's aircraft soar like power chords, yet when filtered by López reveal a full range of timbres and tones in their dynamism as a dream-like aeronautical display is paraded through the centre of your skull.

Frustratingly, these short pieces don't always afford the time to mesmerise and overwhelm as much as López' more extended pieces whose length extinguishes the instinct to ‘guess the context’ long before they are over. So while this compilation is not as successful as other releases at opening up a private, uninhibited world for the listener, it certainly provides enough of a dose to drop ones defences and stir aspirations for longer journeys into the unknown.

Grant Evans - (2020) The Pessimist

 

Adversary – Adversary no. 27

Using crude acoustic sounds recorded to 1⁄4" tape, "The Pessimist" finds Grant Evans crafting an unsettling aural self-portrait of the artist struggling to keep afloat after a dark and tumultuous year. Piano and out of tune strings - scraped, bowed, and plucked - melt into organ drones and dense electric throbbing, all buried under a gauzy layer of tape hiss. Not for fans of music. 

Loren Connors - (2017) Angels That Fall 12''

 

Family Vineyard ‎– FV100

A haunting and volcanic suite of electric guitar and piano from the modern master of the avant blues and the abstract -- Loren Connors. Angels That Fall slips deeper into Loren's headspace where vocalists in glissando and the swelling romanticism of chamber strings echo from beyond this mortal plane. Transcribed through Connors effect-laden six strings, he carries the listener from bluesy violence to sadness, hope and a piano coda.

Yeule - (2017) Coma

 https://i.imgur.com/kbMdoW8.jpg

 Zoom Lens ‎– none 

Today the always-innovative Zoom Lens released Yeule’s Coma EP. Like the Singapore artist’s self-titled debut in 2014, and like all great super-dreamy gothic pop, it’s incredibly soothing for how bleak it can be. My favorite type of music: just let those synths waaaash.

Here’s what Yeule had to say about it:

FADER Mix: Yeule
Read Next: FADER Mix: Yeule
“I wrote this album to commemorate the people I’d lost. Through death, through parting, through distance, just people who have gone from my life. They are all painful memories, but they have shaped my life. I’ve wasted the early years of my life trying to understand my depression, but recently I realized that it doesn’t need to be understood. I just had to embrace these feelings and create a void in myself.

“For me, it's always been the same. Happiness, sadness, love, hate, compassion, regret, loss, grief, content — they all feel like the same thing, but on a scale. I'm always on one end of the spectrum or the other. When I’m down I know that I’ll get back up and when I’m euphoric I know it won’t last forever. My art will always have a tinge of this sadness if not already indulged in it. I’ll always keep that part of myself, because without pain, you cannot have pleasure.

“And even though I keep the poison locked in the vault of my heart, in the end I know it will consume me whole, so I let it go.”

White Poppy - (2020) Paradise Gardens

 

Not Not Fun Records ‎– NNF 359 

British Columbia dreamer Crystal Dorval’s latest and lushest kaleidoscope-pop long-player took root four years ago as a hazy notion of “new age shoegaze bossa nova.” Across reflective summers and long winter nights in a thin-walled shack on a remote rural horse farm the vision evolved, eventually centering on a mythical muse, Paradise Gardens, somewhere between utopian sanctuary and decaying tropical apartment complex. Though the songs began as attempts to “transcend darkness,” over time they absorbed shadows and sorrows of their own, becoming lessons in coexistence: “learning to be with it all.” The album evokes overlapping vignettes within this layered fantasia: fading flowers along a balcony, distant birds above the surf, light glittering off a courtyard pond, sunset skylines darkening to lavender night. It’s a place of healing but also heaviness, fragile peace contoured with pains of the past.

White Poppy’s music has always been mirage-like but here her voice, guitar, keys, and soft-focus siren designs feel uniquely potent and distilled, weathered and wizened by years and yearning, the weight of memories of memories. These are melodies of psychic questing and self-discovery, at the edge of illusion and insight, glimpses of heaven half-remembered and half-imagined: “Paradise is a place within.”

White Hand Gibbon - (2019) Songs About Cars

 

Späti Palace ‎– SP025 

 White Hand Gibbon is the solo project of Dominik Jureschko. Since 2014 he's released off-kilter, folky dream-pop, which at first glance seems fragmentary, owing perhaps to the incorporation of field recordings, ambient passages and a certain bedroom-recording aesthetic. On second listening though, "Songs About Cars" exposes itself as a lyrically aswell as musicially accomplished and intimate softcore-emo album, placing it somewhere between The Postal Service and the soundtrack of the film "Drive".

VA - (2020) Southeast of Saturn

 

Third Man Records ‎– TMR-629

 

It makes sense that Detroit had a buzzy, thriving space-rock scene in the ‘90s. What American city’s denizens had a more urgent need to disengage and think outside the grim, post-industrial rustbelt realities? With space-rock (and its close sonic cousin shoegaze) being at once expansive and introspective, it naturally appealed to the young, intelligent artists who gravitated toward its vertiginous orbit.

The music of Southeast Of Saturn did not arise organically from metro Detroit’s fertile soil. Locally, garage-rock, goth-rock, neo-hippie groups, and the usual preponderance of adequate bar bands dominated the landscape. Thirsty Forest Animals guitarist Andrew Peters summarizes the prevalent attitude among the Motor City’s space-rock contingent: “I don’t think we really noticed the local Detroit scene earlier on. We were more into the bands you would see in the NME / Melody Maker, zines, and records - mostly from the UK - on the walls at Play It Again”. If anything was a major factor locally, it was Play It Again, the independent record store in the suburbs of Detroit that nurtured the scene with its amazing curation of imports and killer used records picked up on owner Alan Kovan’s British record buying trips.

Penned “Detroit Space-Rock”, the scene centered around Burnt Hair Records, Burnt Hair CEO Larry Hoffman’s Life According To Larry radio show, Zoot’s Coffeehouse and bands, such as Windy & Carl, Asha Vida, Füxa, Auburn Lull, and Majesty Crush. It was a modern movement of a more traditional “space-rock” sound, influenced less by The Stooges and MC5 and more by Spacemen 3, Loop, My Bloody Valentine and krautrock bands like Can and Neu!. Even the best-known artists on Southeast Of Saturn - Windy & Carl, Majesty Crush, Füxa - never achieved mainstream success, but within the rock underground, they inspired a cultish devotion that burns to this day.

If you missed their evanescent output the fi rst time around, this compilation will get you up to speed over its 19 mind-altering tracks. ECHO ECHO ECHO ECHO ECHO ECHO ECHO

SRSQ - (2018) Unreality

 

Dais Records ‎– DAIS119

SRSQ (pronounced seer-skew) is the solo project of Kennedy Ashlyn (vocalist/keyboardist of Them Are Us Too). Creative voids aren’t filled, but rather holes left that push the edges of the present into new realms of consciousness. SRSQ’s pulse began after the death of Kennedy’s closest friend and TAUT collaborator Cash Askew, a casualty in the sudden and tragic Oakland Ghost Ship Fire of 2016. Driven by loss, SRSQ became the vehicle for Kennedy’s transformative process, exploring nuance, nostalgia, reflection, and reconciliation, manifesting in the aural landscape of Unreality.

As a debut, Unreality is entrance into a new form of storytelling, traversing the present while pulling from a deep swath of experience, immersion, and sound. Like the impulse it pulls from, each song evokes the complex duality of meditation—where simple intersects with infinite. Ambient synthesizers that approach harshness, relentless arpeggiations act together with Kennedy’s vocals as a lush weapon, weaving cloudlike fables over orchestration that’s familiar and foreign. Trance-like at times, yet always rooted in cadence and structure, the synesthesia of sound and feeling takes cues from the delicate miasma of Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, or Dead Can Dance, using their example as the ground floor for building a new temple of frequency. Kennedy proves an adept architect of rhythm, using sequenced electronics as a deep backbeat that allows the harrowing beauty of her vocals to lead the journey. 

TOPS - (2020) I Feel Alive

 

Musique TOPS ‎– none

With a saturation of ‘80s synthwave revivalists, it’s easy to forget TOPS were there earlier than most. But on fourth album ‘I Feel Alive’, it’s obvious they’re well-practiced at the craft, conjuring up 35 minutes of their trademark melancholy. It’s also an album of firsts for them - newly added keyboard player Marta Cikojevic adds a vital new layer. This in turn frees up vocalist Jane Penny to add a couple of flute solos on the record, which is a pleasant surprise. In fact, it’s the broadness of flavour on the album that is its main strength. The sparse, chilling layers of ‘Ballads and Sad Movies’, or the Joni Mitchell-esque delivery of ‘Take Down’ really show the broadness TOPS are capable of. On top of this, Jane’s vocal is remarkable throughout, ranging from the fragility of Lana Del Rey to the power of Kate Bush. An album with some undeniable gems but perhaps a few too many soft-rock fillers, ‘I Feel Alive’ delivers a genuinely refreshing take on melancholy. 

Slender - (2019) Time On Earth LP

 

La Vida Es Un Mus ‎– MUS205

Cataclysmic punk obituary that basks as readily in the causeways of the sun as it does in stormy, apocalyptic marvel . From the second “Time On Earth” came a clobbering we were returned to the dilapidated, wall-crawling psychedelia that we NEVER saw coming on their five track 7” on LVEUM back in 2017, getting us all buzzy that such a potent cerebral secretion was no one-off and that our beloved Slender would not fall under the axe of Paco’s oft-heralded - “Mate, ANYONE can make a good single” -mantra! Spirits rejoice!

SO MUCH to sink into on this debut long haul with the elusive NYC skirmishers. Lean, concise, often juxtaposed songs and interludes are deftly thatched together to make up the majority of Side A, with dense, drowning-world electronics on tracks like “Heavy Weather” clearing the skies for jovial, anthems of the Anthropocene like “New Country” (which for us totally rings the same joyous bells as Yuzo Iwata’s “Gigolo”!!) and the grittier, barnacled basement etherea of “Sleep The Trees”.

The restrained fury in the opening minutes of Side B at first recalls the slow-stirring storm clouds on that shadow-cast Blodarna 7”, the thought of seeking shelter only arising as proceedings are adrenalised and escalated into what feels more akin to listening to Amon Düül perform kali ma on the guys from Pelt in some subterranean death church! The closing trio of “So”, “Far” and “Down” tunnels on and takes place as some sorta on-acid-and-caught-in-earthquake rite, that sees the volcanic pounding intensify and whatever THAT sound is (bass guitar?? some demonic synthesiser??!) begin to envelop everything like the swelling of oblivion - any brief interval between tracks serving only as a moment to observe your own mind try to scramble it’s way out of the slowly opening sinkhole.

Bonkers. Slender channels the same wild and earthy desire for experimentation as such un-pinnable, sleeping giants as Cro-Magnon, Blumen Des Exotischen Eises, The Fates or Moolah. But far from copying the founding fathers of homemade psychedelia Slender move forward to the caves with their own brand of Neo-Chamber Music.

No idea how the inhabitants of earth will express amazement / bewilderment in thirty years time but can imagine some archival psychopath or discogs dweeb digging this one up and ripping a righteous WHAT THE FUCK. 

Molly Nilsson - (2008) These Things Take Time CDr

 

Dark Skies Association ‎– DSA003 

 Last year, John Maus' We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves LP included a song by a little-known, Swedish-born synth-pop artist named Molly Nilsson. "Hey Moon" was a lovely, downtempo duet, offsetting the claustrophobic intensity of Maus' originals with a moment of understatement and calm. What many of us didn't realize was that, aside from Maus' vocals, it was an almost note-perfect rendition of a track from These Things Take Time, a CD-R Nilsson self-released in 2008. Since then the interview-shy, Berlin-based songwriter has written and home-recorded no fewer than three LPs, and put all of them out on her own Dark Skies Association imprint. Like Maus', her songs are built primarily from vocals and vintage electronics, with a comforting patina of false age.

History, her fourth full-length, is an 11-track collection of power ballads and off-kilter dance-pop, carried by the commanding, almost Nico-like ominousness of her voice. Synthetic, darkly romantic, and full of grandiose swells, her songs are likely to sound self-consciously 1980s without reminding you of any artist in particular. They also feel slightly awkward, as though she were struggling to reproduce the ecstatic pop vision inside her head using the antiquated tools at her disposal. Should there be any doubt that Nilsson's notion of History is partly about the relationship between humans and technology, anthemic opener "In Real Life" cuts straight to the chase with an existential meditation on the unreality of life in the internet age: "Online I never feel alone. I never feel alive." "Hotel Home", another anthemic standout, sees Nilsson comparing herself to a "satellite," and warning us that she's "never at home, so call on Skype."

There is a sort of wide-eyed innocence to statements like these, a guilelessness that feels equivalent to the cheesy synth presets she unleashes from the opening note. Susan Sontag once defined camp as "art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.'" Album standout "I Hope You Die" demonstrates the over-the-topness of Nilsson's aesthetic most forcefully, combining a bouncy dance beat, swirling synths, and the sort of tragic romanticism that would make Morrissey proud: "I hope you die, by my side, the two of us at the exact same time." The key here is that Nilsson's music feels celebratory even at its darkest moments, chock full of auto-harmonies and dramatic tempo changes and eager remind us that "too much" can be very satisfying sometimes.

For the most part, History unfolds with the theatrical pacing of a rock opera, alternating between large-sounding anthems and more stripped-down, slow-paced asides, usually with Nilsson singing over elementary piano melodies. Even with these variations, everything does start to feel a little bit the same, but you probably won't mind if you're easily enchanted by the album's overall gloss of elegiac, glam-rock decadence, enhanced by Nilsson's deadpan delivery, and lyrics that revolve around doomed love, lost worlds (see: "The City of Atlantis"), and "chances... blown" ("Hotel Home"). Even if you're not, there's still something charming about the sound of a person trying to make "big" music with wonky drum machines and limited keyboard technique. When she doesn't quite pull it off, there's a beauty to the sound of a person trying, failing, and letting us bear witness to the whole thing. When she does, we're smitten.

The Radio Dept. - (2004) Why Won't You Talk About It?

 

 XL Recordings ‎– REKD 41

Like many a cult artist, the Radio Dept have frequently proven their own worst enemies. Take it from their label boss, Johan Angergård of Stockholm’s Labrador Records:

There’s been fights and threats regarding contracts. They’ve cancelled more interviews than all the other bands I’ve worked with altogether. They are unworldly time optimists (they can miss a deadline by three years). They’ve demanded – and received – so much advances that we haven’t been able to pay our bills. I’ve had to bribe them with drugs to persuade them to talk to selected parts of the press. They’ve been soundly pissed off when a colour of their artwork didn’t turn out exactly the shade they intended … the story goes on.”

Now consider that these complaints were listed in the liner notes to the band’s 2010 singles and rarities collection Passive Aggressive (in case you’re wondering why Angergård bothers releasing the Radio Dept’s music at all, elsewhere he hails them as “fantastic songwriters and almost geniusly wayward producers”), and you begin to appreciate that a kind of glorious dysfunctionality is written into these painfully shy lo-fi electro dreampop Swedes’ DNA. That and an integrity few other groups could claim to possess.

A rotating cast of musicians based around long-term friends Johan Duncanson and Martin Larsson (occasional third member Daniel Tjäder also plays with Korallreven), the Radio Dept originally hail from the southern Swedish university town of Lund. Their name, taken from a local petrol station turned radio repair shop, has been used by Duncanson since 1995. But the band’s noisy-melodic signature sound only really came to be with a string of EPs from 2000’s Against the Tide through to 2003’s Pulling Our Weight, each of them self-produced – like all of the Radio Dept’s music to date – by Duncanson and Larsson at their home studio.

There’s true magic in these early formative toyings with wonky drum machines, gauzy synths and guitars soaked in fuzz and reverb. Only semi-discernible through an enigmatic cloak of ambient drones and tape hiss, Duncanson’s softly sung words speak to his stubborn iconoclasm and bored disillusionment with normative power structures, be they within the music industry, politics or relationships. The pseudo-shoegazey, feedback- and distortion-torn Against the Tide and Why Won’t You Talk About It? – each recorded initially as demos, now firm fan favourites – are so overdriven it feels like your speakers can barely take it...

White Poppy - (2017) The Pink Haze Of Love

 

Self-released ‎– none 

White Poppy's latest EP marks something of a departure for Crystal Dorval's oft-titled "dream pop" project. Ironically, Pink Haze of Love clears some of the "haze" that masked her previous releases and positions Dorval as a new age singer songwriter. The album weaves through 8 songs that deal in matters of love, limerence and heartbreak in an uncharacteristically forward manner. Dorval's hypnotic guitar circles its way around warm, droning synths while her lyrics and voice take centre stage for the first time. The result is a short but sweet meditation, sung from a candlelit cabin, that echoes over a calm tide.

Teams, Noah & Repeat Pattern - (2018) Kwaidan

 

flau ‎– FLAU72  

 KWAIDAN is collection of reverb soaked harmonies leaning on a couch of field recordings and heavy drums all accompanying the vocals of flau’s Noah. Songs referencing Japanese folk tales about ghosts and spirits presented, not in the usual tone of a ghost story but rather, in a romanticized air of normalcy and matter-of-factness.

Stranded Whale - (2018) The Revival

 

 Qiii Snacks Records ‎– none

The ten-song album signifies the transformation of the band, from urban folk to alternative, within three years. The Revival features Grey, a song collaborated with Taiwanese chamber group Cicada during the band’s tour in 2016. The album also highlights two songs, Why Don’t You and Dies In A Room, from a limited edition of 7” lathe-cut “Why Don’t You?”, which is distributed by indie label Sweaty and Cramped. In 2017, a dreamy and obscure music video of Sunday’s Over was released, which demonstrated the band’s avid interest in alternative, electronic and jazz.

The whale has voyaged from the sea and plunged into the deepest ditch.

Sparrows - (2019) Berries LP

 

flau ‎– FLAU79 

 “Travel is always the theme of Sparrows’ work,” says Ryota Miyake (aka Sparrows himself). It’s on his latest album Berries that this is truly exemplified, not just in the international smorgasbord of featuring artists from Fazerdaze (New Zealand), Julián Mayorga (Spain), Casey MQ (Canada) and Vincent Ruiz aka Yung Veerp (Switzland), to Iranian-American producer Kamron Saniee, but in the actual feeling of the music itself. “I wanted it to be a little hard-boiled and rough,” he admits, “but in the end, the concept is to travel like science fiction.”

And when it comes to “travel like science fiction”, nothing does it better than Miyake’s latest body of work. Taking cues from the retro dadaist electronica of his band CRYSTAL, there are tracks like ‘Moon’, drenched in atmospheric VGM flavours, ‘The Star Tours’ which Ryota himself describes as “pre-YMO fusion”, and the “phony jazz band, acid house bass and synth noise” of ‘Bands In The Sand’. This theme of the “imaginary band” crops up more than once.

Elsewhere Berries tumbles along in a patchwork of ‘Coffee and TV’ jangle, splashy jazz elements, ‘60s psychedelia and galloping, airy space rock, making for a journey that’s as vivid as it is varied. Sounds, we’re told, from Miyake’s student days.

“I had a lot of opportunities to listen to jazz, fusion, and soul,” he admits, “but I decided on the overall tone thinking that I would be able to mix the feeling of the puffy life I had spent abroad with the pale, dreamy, psychic atmosphere I had always liked.”

Speaking of that “puffy life”, he was originally going to name the album Sparrows’ Lazy Life but decided on Berries when a friend suggested “a short title like Taylor Swift because there were a lot of sweet pop songs.” Each track on Berries bursts with flavour: the perfect road trip snack for a mystical mixed salad of journeys and travels.

somesurprises - (2019) ST LP

 

 Drawing Room Records ‎– DRLP00036

Somesurprises is the moniker of Seattle singer/songwriter Natasha El-Sergany. What once was a solo project focusing on spectral balladry and late night exploration, somesurprises has since formed into a dynamic live band. Motorik beats, reverb-drenched vocals, washes of fingerpicked guitars, and hazy synths expand El-Sergany’s delicate and blissful songwriting. Over the years, somesurprises has built a strong presence in the Seattle music scene, and toured the west coast. In Seattle, they have opened for touring artists such as Circuit Des Yeux, Carla dal Forno, A Place to Bury Strangers, and the Cave Singers...

...With its 36th release, Drawing Room brings in a new wonder with somesurprises’ self-titled debut LP, a treasure among pop treasures. The album explores a range of styles, from gradually intensifying meditative drones, to songs where the same moment never quite happens twice. As in previous cassette releases with fewer members, El-Sergany uses her ethereal voice as an instrument, no more or less central to the music than a guitar hook or a drumbeat. But the vocals and lyrics are more in focus than ever before. From shimmering cascades of reverbed guitar chords, to driving bass and percussion guiding guitar and synth freak-out outros, as a full band, somesurprises finds its fullest expression yet. The songwriting here, laden with effects and orchestral arrangements, reaches for more than navel-gazing, or (even shoegazing) and seeks, perhaps, through knowledge of the self, to guide the way out of one’s own mind.