We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults.
The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings.
The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine.
Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna.
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Despite her slim discography, Montreal-based Myriam Gendron has quietly amassed a very passionate following over the last few years, which is quite an impressive feat given that she frequently sings in French and the bulk of her previous oeuvre was devoted to interpretations of French/Québécois traditional music or Dorothy Parker poems. Obviously, such fare is quite far from the zeitgeist of the present time, but that is a big part of Gendron's allure: her work taps into a deeper and more timeless vein that captures the joy and pain of being alive in an unusually profound and direct way. Those same themes unsurprisingly remain central on Mayday (it was assembled in the wake of her mother's passing), but this third album is Gendron's first to focus primarily on her own original compositions as well as her first release to be professionally recorded in an actual studio. To celebrate that auspicious occasion, Gendron is joined by a host of talented collaborators like Dirty Three's Jim White, Body/Head's Bill Nace, and Marisa Anderson. Characteristically, the result is yet another absolutely mesmerizing Myriam Gendron album.
Every single Myriam Gendron album to date has included at least one achingly gorgeous and perfect song (Not So Deep As A Well's "Recurrence," Ma Délire's "Go Away From My Window," etc.) and that trend happily continues here. In fact, Mayday actually features TWO such emotional gut punches. The first is "Long Way Home," which calls to mind a great lost '70s folk rock gem by someone like John Martyn. As always, I love Gendron's sad, low voice as well as her lyrics and her simple, unpretentious approach to melody, but this one simply has one heartbreaking line after another. Despite that, the piece still feels wonderfully bittersweet and uplifting due to its arrangement, as Gendron is joined by Marisa Anderson on lead guitar and Jim White on drums to balance the song's deep sadness with rolling and swaying folk rock magic. That "full band" approach is the ideal setting for such a poignant, quietly heavy piece, which is an unexpected evolution of sorts: I have long believed that Gendron's most beautiful songs would work every bit as well with no instrumental accompaniment at all (like all the best folk/traditional music), but Mayday features a handful of pieces in which well-placed guest appearances launch an already hauntingly beautiful song to another level altogether.
The best example of that phenomenon is the album's other stone-cold masterpiece, "Lully Lullay," which is the repurposed Appalachian version of a 15th century Christmas song ("Coventry Carol," which is generally regarded to be the darkest Christmas carol of all time). Instead of singing about King Herod's massacre of children, however, Gendron transforms the piece into a moving farewell to her mother, but the even bigger twist is that she tagged in Jim White for a wild free drumming catharsis ("I wanted something very violent, like a storm"). Dropping a wild drum solo in the middle of an ancient Christmas carol was definitely not something I ever expected Gendron to do and I very much love this new penchant for bold and visceral surprises.
Notably, there is yet another "holy shit-where did THAT come from?!?" moment lurking at the end of the album in "Berceuse," as Gendron invited saxophonist Zoh Amba to try her hand at whipping up a howling tornado (which she does brilliantly). Amusingly, the piece in question is actually a lullabye and one that Gendron thought was already finished, but she was inspired by the dramatic weather unfolding outside her home while she was writing about the piece for an Alan Lomax Digital Archive exhibit. I must say that it was hugely life-affirming to go into this album expecting a fresh batch of sublimely beautiful folk songs only to be blown out of my chair by fiery free jazz eruptions tearing through Christmas carols and lullabies. Gendron has mentioned in the past that she feels more at home in avant-garde circles than in folk/traditional music scenes and I now completely understand why: this is folk music with some legitimately sharp teeth.
The album is rounded out by a pair of acoustic instrumentals ("There Is No East Or West" and "La Luz"), a Gene Austin cover ("Look Down That Lonesome Road"), and a handful of bilingual or French originals. While I am quite fond of "Dorothy's Blues," the French songs did not resonate quite as deeply with me, which makes perfect sense, as my meager French skills prevent me from appreciating the beauty of Gendron's lyrics and reduce those pieces to a purely melodic experience. That is not a grievance so much as it is a testament to Gendron's gifts as a lyricist, however (even with covers and folk songs, as she is not shy about paring away bits that dilute or distract from their soulful essence). Much like Leonard Cohen (whose songs she used to play while busking in the Paris metro), Gendron seems like she is primarily a poet at heart.
The resemblance to Cohen does not end there, however, as Gendron has a similar intuitive gift for transforming her words into something almost transcendent through her choice of melodies and some simple acoustic guitar accompaniment. When she hits the mark, the directness, vulnerability, and intimacy of her songs hit with a power that no amount of clever arranging, technical virtuosity, or studio magic can ever hope to replicate. That is what I went into Mayday expecting: honest songs about the heartache and beauty of life undiluted by artifice or studio polish. I was not disappointed in that regard at all, but the sheer intensity and unexpectedness of some of the wilder instrumental passages was a revelatory addition to an already wonderful vision. That new layer bodes very well for the future, as truly great songs are like pearls or diamonds: they only appear under the right conditions and it can take a long time for them to reach their final shape, but an artist can still make one hell of an album if a handful of such gems is interspersed with a talented cast of musicians unleashing pure fire. In the case of "Lully Lullay," those two things collide in the same song to emphatically remind me exactly why Myriam Gendron is one of my favorite artists on the planet right now.
This latest boxed set to emerge from Will Long's Celer reissue campaign celebrates one of the project's more recent works, as It Would Be Giving Up was originally released as a digital-only album back in late 2020. As was the case with previous reissues, the album has been remastered by Stephan Mathieu, but the more exciting bit is that I had never actually heard this particular album before and it instantly became my favorite Celer release by a wide margin. That makes sense, as according to Long, It Would Be Giving Up is thematically tied to two of Celer's other recent classics (Future Predictions and Memory Repetitions), as the three albums focus upon "ensemble pieces made with tape loops and analog instruments" and share a certain "wall of sound" aesthetic. While my love of Future Predictions is well-documented and remains as strong as ever, I now believe that It Would Be Giving Up is the single most essential album in Celer's entire discography, as it beautifully transcends the ambient/drone milieu to strain towards ecstatic heartache as high art.
The album consists of four longform pieces that are each relegated to their own separate disc. That initially seemed like a curious decision, as the first two pieces could have easily fit on the same disc, but I ultimately decided that it made perfect sense to treat each piece like a standalone album or EP. In essence, It Would Be Giving Up is essentially four top-tier Celer releases with enough stylistic and thematic common ground to be presented together, which is important to note, as there is not a single weak piece to be found. This album is a four-disc tour de force because that is simply how much great material Long had recorded: nothing is unnecessarily extended and there is no filler to be found anywhere. This is simply four absolutely stellar pieces in a row without a detour or lull in sight.
The first piece, the 20-minute "True Maps Of An Unreal Place," is the album's most bold and unexpected stretch, as it is probably as close to a visceral harsh noise performance as Celer will ever get. Characteristically, there is also an endlessly looping melodic theme as well (albeit one with sharper edges than usual) and that motif beautifully floats above the roiling and howling maelstrom like shimmering and flickering psychedelic clouds over a violent and tumultuous sea. The following 17-minute "To Stay Up Above" is an unusual piece as well, as a half-majestic/half-menacing melody insistently loops over a murky, rumbling backdrop to evoke an epic and foreboding scene akin to the opening of Aguirre: The Wrath of God: a line of doomed conquistadors slowly navigating a fog-shrouded mountain pass, hopelessly dwarfed by their immense and dramatic surroundings. Sadly, Popul Vuh already recorded the perfect score to that film years before Will Long was even born, but "To Stay Up Above" is a wonderfully sinister mirage of a piece nonetheless: the looping melody remains constant in some ways, but also feels wonderfully liquid, unstable, and out of sync with itself as well. It is easily one of Long's most impressive feats of loop sorcery to date.
Remarkably, however, those first two pieces are merely an appetizer for the more substantial pieces to come, as "Imagined Settlement" and "An Evening, Elsewhere" both clock in at around 45 minutes of mesmerizing, haunting magic. In fact, "Imagined Settlement" may very well be the greatest Celer piece of all time, as its melancholy string motif has the intoxicating feel of a darkly sensuous dream. It also features an absolutely sublime dynamic arc, as the looping melody feels like it is subtly dissolving, distorting, and unraveling as it unfolds. In classic Celer fashion, the transformation is too slow and subtle to even notice in real time, but at some point one note starts to be feel especially intense and the melody starts to feel like a seductive Ouroboros in addition to being a blearily obsessive juggernaut and a dreamlike fantasia of quavering and ghostly overtones.
Remarkably, the closing "An Evening, Elsewhere" is similarly immersive and haunting, albeit in a very different way. It initially feels like lush and heavenly slow-moving clouds of frayed, soft-focus strings or slow, celestial exhalations. As the relationship between the various elements gradually transforms, however, subtle shifts in emotion start to become apparent and evoke everything from heartache floating in a sea of bliss to a melancholy, narcotic cocoon to a distant lighthouse in a fog of soft-focus anguish to a soul ascending towards a divine light. Of course, I am sure that I am merely projecting all of that onto the piece, but it is nevertheless a uniquely entrancing work that feels pregnant with heavy emotion and ineffable profundity. I wouldn't be projecting a damn thing at all if I did not find "An Evening, Elsewhere" to be so gorgeously immersive and soulful.
As I have noted many times before, the Celer pieces that have made the deepest impact on me have always been the ones in which a single perfect loop is allowed to lazily unfold into infinity (or at least for the duration of an album). All four of the pieces collected on It Would Be Giving Up are variations on that same winning and time-tested vision, but this album reveals an additional layer to Long's artistry that I had not appreciated until now. I had previously believed that Long was singularly gifted at distilling an emotion into its purest essence by crafting absolutely gorgeous loops. Obviously, there is a lot of artistry in finding the perfect texture, melody, and rhythm needed to cast a hypnotic and absorbing spell, but I can now see that subtly manipulating the volume of individual components with seemingly supernatural patience is yet another level of artistry altogether and can make an already achingly beautiful loop reveal even deeper and more nuanced shades of emotion. I usually try to avoid throwing around the word "cinematic" when i describe an album, as it usually implies that something would be a fine score for a visual accompaniment, but this album is cinematic in a way that makes me feel like reality has dissolved and I am now living inside an especially poetic moment from a heartbreaking masterpiece of longing like In The Mood For Love and that is quite a desirable place to linger. I genuinely cannot praise this album enough, as literally every aspect of this release captures Long at the absolute height of his powers. Getting lost in this album is a truly beautiful way to spend an afternoon.
Will Long's ambitious campaign to remaster and reissue key highlights from Celer's overwhelmingly vast discography continues with this expanded reincarnation of 2009's Engaged Touches (appropriately released on fellow ex-pat/ambient artist Ian Hawgood's Home Normal label during its Japan-based era). The album is an especially noteworthy release within the Celer canon for a couple of reasons, but the big one is that it ranks alongside 2008's Discourses of the Withered and 2019's Xièxie as one of the project's perennial fan favorites. While my own pantheon of essential Celer albums does not always align with that of said fanbase, this one's prominent place makes sense, as it was definitely one of the most high-profile albums released during the white-hot height of Celer-mania. As such, it was probably one of the first Celer albums that many people heard. It is also inarguably one of the strongest albums recorded during the project's early days as a husband-and-wife duo with Danielle Baquet-Long (Chubby Wolf) and most of the other contenders were not yet widely available before Bandcamp transformed the musical landscape. Given that, a reissue was both welcome and inevitable, but those who already love this album will likely be thrilled by the prospect of hearing it in its newly expanded and remastered form.
Much like how Wong Kar Wai was unable to resist tweaking the color grading of his films when the opportunity to release 4K restorations of his oeuvre presented itself, this version of Engaged Touches has been transformed and reshaped a bit by Long. Obviously, just about any artist can find room for improvement with the benefit of hindsight, but assessing whether this expansion is a significant improvement over the original is a bit tricky given the nature of the music (endlessly repeating slow-motion loops). In any case, this new version is roughly three times as long as the original (now either 3 CDs or 5 vinyl sides), but it is also two versions of the same album: the first two discs offer a new version with extended track lengths, while the third disc remains faithful to the original in every way except being remastered by Stephan Mathieu.
Naturally, it sounds great, but so did the previously available digital version, so I don't know how long ago that remastering took place. Notably, there are also a couple of new pieces included ("In Bright The Days" and "If Disabuse Is So Hard, Then"), but their combined length is a mere four minutes. Consequently, the album's transformation is essentially a durational one, albeit with some subtle enhancements to the flow (placement of field recordings, insertion of the two brief pieces between "Unless They Were Beautiful" and "What Our Mouths Make Them," etc.).
That said, a significant part of Celer's appeal has always been durational in nature, so the effect of the expansion is definitely felt and significantly transforms the listening experience. Listening deeply to one of Celer's major works is like being completely immersed in someone else's dream, so the tone of the album is arguably more important than any other aspect, though there are certainly exceptions to that statement. In general, however, how much I enjoy a Celer album comes down to which particular strain of billowing, looping, soft-focus melancholy resonates with me the most. In fact, an album like this one almost shares more common ground with a perfume than it does with music, as its pleasures are akin to an intoxicating spell.
In keeping with that theme, characterizing the spell of Engaged Touches feels a lot like trying to describe wine or a fragrance with terms like "earth," "smoke," and "leather": it is more of an evocative art than an exacting science. For me, this album feels like "faded grandeur" mingled with "watching rain-soaked landscapes roll by from the window of a clattering train while I drift off to sleep." That impression is subjective as hell, of course, but the "train" bit is not entirely a projection, as recurring interludes of train and train station sounds are a consistent thread running throughout the entire album.
To my ears, "Openings Of Love (Fireworks)" is the album's sublime zenith, as beautiful slow-moving swells languorously roll across a quivering bed of drones for nearly 20 minutes while leaving a subtly accumulating haze of overtones, feedback, and shifting harmonies in their wake. The expanded version is slightly longer than the original version, but it is the sort of piece that could have easily been expanded to an entire album, as it is an absolute masterpiece of patience, control, and glacial transformation. Another variation of that feat is "Hanging Herself On The Lonely Fifth Column," as a lushly romantic two-chord loop steadily accumulates an intensifying trail of gently oscillating decay. Elsewhere, "Unless They Were Beautiful" endlessly loops a string motif that evokes the delirious cinematic romanticism of a poignant moment suspended forever in time. One of the album's shortest pieces is an unexpected highlight as well, as "Separations And Reactions" unfolds as a two-minute fantasia of shimmering, watery dream-chords over an elusive and enigmatic rumble of field recordings.
Given that Engaged Touches features at least four top-tier pieces from Celer's duo era, it is basically required listening for any self-respecting fan of the project, but whether that necessitates diving into the expanded version is entirely dependent on the degree of said fandom. For me, the single-album version of Engaged Touches is immersive enough without any further expansion, but the inclusion of Danielle's photography and her related poem make the physical release feel personal and almost sacred in a way that a digital album cannot hope to match. This is a beautiful object in its own small, quiet, and minimal way, which nicely mirrors how I feel about the music.
This latest release from Ben Chasney's shapeshifting and long-running psych project is billed as a sort of homecoming album, as Chasney recently moved back to California's famed Humboldt County region after a few decades away. As befits an album recorded on a picturesque coast best known for weed and beautiful redwood forests, Time Is Glass is an especially intimate, casual, and mellow Six Organs album (the cover art of a beachside dog walk captures the tone quite nicely, I think). Admittedly, that softer side of Six Organs is usually not my cup of tea (I am a fundamentally un-mellow person), but I genuinely appreciate Chasney's passion for continual evolution and reinvention and there is already a sizable backlog of Six Organs material that falls more in my comfort zone. As such, I am always willing to indulge Chasney's erratic muse wherever it may lead. More importantly, I consider Chasney to be something of a fitful and unpredictable guitar visionary: there are admittedly plenty of Six Organs songs that leave me cold, but it is never safe to assume that a new Chasney album will be devoid of flashes of brilliance. In keeping with that theme, Time Is Glass is a bit of an uneven album for me, but it does feature two sustained flashes of brilliance that rank among Chasney's finest work.
Listening to this album, I was newly struck by the improbable stylistic gray area that Chasney's oeuvre inhabits: Six Organs of Admittance has basically been an underground/psych institution since the turn of the millennium, but it always seemed like Ben's vision was shaped by classic rock almost as much as it was inspired by artists like Loren Connors and Richard Bishop. That is definitely not an easy balance to navigate or seamlessly maintain, but sometimes the collision of those two sides yields extremely cool results (Chasney's talents for dual-guitar harmonies and occasional fiery shredding have always delighted me).
I bring up Chasney's oft-blurry stylistic niche because much of Time Is Glass feels like ambient music done the hard way: these songs have lyrics, melodies, verses, and choruses, but rather than making me think "this song fucking slaps" or "wow-that's a killer line," pieces like "Slip Away" and "The Mission" instead evoke images of a solitary rustic idyll by design. In short, this is a very vibe-driven album: the songs have enjoyable melodies and a strong "mountain cabin" charm, but Chasney's vocals often have a hushed and floating falsetto-esque weightlessness to them that transforms these songs into an unusually impressionistic strain of loner Americana. If Ben set out to capture the naked and unpolished poetic romanticism of a man alone in a room soulfully playing a well-worn acoustic guitar, he nailed it.
For me, however, there is one song that towers above everything else on the album and that song is "My Familiar," which seems like it could be a reference to Ben's dog, as their daily walks partially set the rhythm for these recording sessions. Hopefully, said dog is not secretly a low-ranking demon masquerading as an animal, but I would be willing to overlook such a character flaw as compensation for inspiring such a cool riff. Aside from having a great hook in the form of that central riff and some of the best lyrics on the album, there actually isn't much difference between "My Familiar" and the rest of the songs until the crescendo, as Chasney briefly goes electric for a harmonized guitar solo and some warbling psychedelic coloring. Uncharacteristically, my other favorite song is also a guitar showcase, as the instrumental "Summer's Last Rays" steadily builds from a virtuosic solo acoustic guitar performance into an unexpectedly layered and spacey crescendo (and a very cool backwards guitar solo).
I suppose it isn't at all surprising that I enjoyed the pieces with multi-tracked harmonies, impressive technical flourishes, and more complex arrangements more than I did the more simple "acoustic guitar and a voice" pieces, but it did make me appreciate the direct and pared-to-the-bone nature of the other songs. A killer arrangement or an additional track can work wonders for a song that just needs a little something extra to fully work, so it is a gutsy/honest choice to go without such enhancements and rely on pure songcraft alone (such a constraint can be an extremely harsh light if your songs are weak). These songs are not weak, of course, but that does not mean that there are the definitive versions either, as it is easy to imagine an alternate or live version of one of those starker pieces surfacing as a beloved classic someday: how Chasney chooses to interpret a song can make all the difference in the world. In the meantime, Time Is Glass is a likable album with vibes for days and a couple of fresh additions to the Six Organs of Admittance highlight reel.
This collaboration has its origins in a sold-out opening night show from Madrid's 2023 SoundSet series, as Irisarri and Guido Zen tore the roof off the Condeduque cultural center ambient-style with their encore duet. Naturally, that intense performance ("Waking Up Dizzy on a Bastion") is included here for the benefit of hapless chumps like me who were on the wrong continent that night, but the experience inspired the two artists to keep their partnership going afterwards (albeit remotely). That continued creative union eventually resulted in a longform studio piece ("Place of Forever") that is every bit as impressive as the Madrid performance, if not even better. Unsurprisingly, I have been a fan of both artists for quite some time and this album is one of those rare times in which an ostensible match made in heaven actually sounds as absolutely mesmerizing as I hoped it would. This album is pure blackened drone nirvana.
The album opens with the new studio piece ("Place of Forever"), which gradually fades in from silence as a subdued chord progression, a host of pops and crackles, and a bleary industrial drone that languorously pans and undulates through space. If this were a lesser album, I can guarantee that I would be frustrated that it took a full 7 or 8 minutes before the opening piece finally started to catch fire, but such a long, slow build up feels quite confident and earned here: if I know a piece will eventually blossom into something incredible, the slow, simmering ascension to that point becomes incredibly tantalizing rather than an unnecessary lull.
Articulating exactly why "Place of Forever" is so brilliant is a bit tricky, however, as it essentially just sounds like a classic Abul Mogard slow-burner: majestic and melancholy synth swells glacially intensifying over a hissing backdrop of industrial ambiance for 17 glorious minutes. In fact, I am having a hell of a time even identifying where Irisarri's hand comes into play at all, but whatever he was doing seems to have made quite an impact, as the textures are even more tactile and detailed than usual (aside from guitar, Irisarri is credited with "treatment" and Augustus Loop delay). At its best, the piece feels like time-lapse footage of curling and billowing smoke organically expanding into dark new tendrils. Unlike smoke, however, "Place of Forever" increasingly packs a seismic power that feels damn near elemental.
That would normally be an incredibly tough act to follow, but in this case it isn't even the main course (in theory), as the album's very raison d'etre is the Madrid performance. Given that Abul Mogard's aesthetic can be reasonably described as "subtly manipulating dials and sliders with superhuman patience until it sounds like the fucking earth is seismically shuddering and cracking," it makes perfect sense that "Waking Up Dizzy" shares a very similar dynamic trajectory with its predecessor: silence steadily intensifies into a howlingly visceral maelstrom of noise-gnawed synths and industrial textures and that slow, psychotropic journey extends for an entire side of vinyl.
That said, there are some significant differences between the two pieces, however, as Irisarri's bowed electric guitar is newly prominent and there is also a melodic hook of sorts. The album description's claim that Irisarri's "melting guitar patterns" recall the "most lysergic moments on Loveless" feels like a bit of a stretch, but certainly not a delusional one, as it merely feels closer to an immense-sounding remaster of Belong's classic October Language album instead. I do think Kevin Shields would be impressed with how skillfully Zen and Irisarri ravage and submerge their melodic hook with noise and distortion, however. If not, at least they managed to impress me and a roomful of enthusiastically clapping people in Spain, as the best moments of "Waking Up Dizzy" evoke an image of timeless ruined beauty that lies somewhere between streaking comet trails over a burning city and a violent sunset of blood reds and bruised purple: immense, elemental, melancholy, and achingly beautiful all at the same time. In fact, I am genuinely having a hard time thinking of any previous Abul Mogard or Irisarri releases that can match Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close, as this album is about as perfect as heavy electronic drone music can get. Zen and Irisarri are two stone-cold killers at the height of their powers here.