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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Across the 16 songs that make up this album, the title makes perfect sense: a myriad of abstract, expansive pieces, full-fledged songs, and odd little miniatures. All of them are linked together with Robert Poss's infinite love for the electric guitar, however, and as a whole, it encapsulates much of the sound he has cultivated throughout his entire career.
Poss is best known for his tenure as guitarist/co-vocalist of Band of Susans, a band that often seems relegated to a footnote in discussions of noisy, unconventional guitar-based rock music, or for a number of years just cited as Page Hamilton's pre-Helmet band. Which is, of course, a disservice given how they expertly bridged the late 1980s "college rock" sound and the avant garde together. This style that he pioneered with bassist/vocalist Susan Stenger is never far on this new album, either.
Right from the opening "Secrets, Chapter and Verse," he channels this via panned guitar passages, drum machine programming, and vocals. Another of the 'songs,' "Hagstrom Fragment," has identical elements throughout, but a bit more of a bass-lead sound at first, and a bit more in the way of filtering and effects provide a different feel entirely. The sparse arrangement and lo-fi filtering of "Your Adversary" lend a wonderful "lost demo" vibe that sounds like anything but unfinished, however.
One of the most overt of the 'drone' pieces, "Foghorn Lullaby," is named perfectly, as Poss conjures that sound, with all its bassy resonance, via instrumentation, adding layers but never losing that singular focus. The open and sustained structure of "Skew Forest" certainly fits the drone criteria as well, although Poss mixes it up with some melodic playing towards the middle. "Trem 23" comes from a similarly abstract place, resembling a guitar sound being dragged through as many effects pedals as possible.
The 'fairy dust' segments are a bit less clearly defined, although the two songs that feature it in the title sound thematically linked. Poss begins "Out of the Fairy Dust" shimmering, twinkling passages of ethereal guitar that he assembles layer by layer before eventually bringing in a rhythm segment that could almost be described as "jaunty." The other piece, "Into the Fairy Dust," is similarly situated in the higher frequency end of the spectrum, with the drum machine kept low in the mix leading into a chiming conclusion.
Given his dedication to the electric guitar that has never waned, it is not surprising that Robert Poss's Songs, Drones and Fairy Dust does not sound too far away from his work with Band of Susans. It never comes across as treading overly familiar ground, however, and instead sounds like a natural progression from his previous work. Memorable and catchy songs, abstract expeditions, and visceral guitar intensity are all presented beautifully, channeling his past without lingering in it.
I believe I stumbled upon Moonshake's singular 1992 debut full-length by blind luck at a used record store, but I cannot remember if I picked it up because I was already vaguely aware that Margaret Fiedler was cool or if it was still pre-Laika. In any case, I always thought of Moonshake primarily as Fieldler's alternately frustrating and brilliant first band. In hindsight, however, I failed to appreciate how truly radical this foursome were during their brief flourish and dearly wish that I had dug a bit deeper back then, as Eva Luna could have (and should have) been my gateway into an amazing world of killer underground music that I was not yet aware of (krautrock, post-punk, free jazz, Jamaican dub, and even the C86 scene). Listening to this expanded reissue now with considerably more adventurous ears, I still find this album oft-frustrating, but I am newly struck by how almost every song features at least one moment where Moonshake sounded like the best band on the goddamn planet. That white-hot inspiration did not always sustain itself for an entire song, but this reissue beautifully strengthens the original album with some welcome gems from the band's early EPs.
The idea for Moonshake first took shape after the 1990 demise of guitarist/singer Dave Callahan's previous band The Wolfhounds. He was weary of playing rock music and wanted to try something more eclectic and sample-driven, but he was less than thrilled with the sound of his own voice, so he placed an ad in Melody Maker for a female guitarist and Margaret Fielder was the only person who responded. Callahan's original plan was allegedly to combine Byrds-inspired vocal harmonies with samples and Metal Box-inspired dubwise post-punk, but both of those influences fell by the wayside once Fiedler's own creative input started to shape their sound. The new band's first release was 1991's First EP on Creation Records, which is something of a gem in its own right, but sounds completely different from Moonshake of Eva Luna: the shoegaze-y melodicism of First is very much in line with other Creation bands of the time like Swervedriver and My Bloody Valentine. That achievement did not suit Callahan at all, so the band set out to completely reinvent themselves for their next major statement (spoiler alert: the PIL influence came back in a big way, but was joined by some fresh influences from hip-hop, free jazz, noise, and elsewhere).
The aspects that immediately struck me about Eva Luna in the '90s remain every bit as true today: 1) Callahan's newly sneering and snarling vocals are a bit of an acquired taste, and 2) the band had a very adventurous, eclectic, and oft-schizophrenic vision. As Fiedler put it, "Moonshake was a collision - it was supposed to be a collision." The most obvious collision is that of the two principal songwriters, as the songs written and sung by Fiedler are more melodic, sensuous, and psych-inspired, while the pieces written by Callahan tended to be fiery and confrontational. That said, both Callahan and Fiedler played guitar and contributed samples and all of their contributions were subject to inventive deconstruction, so it is damn near impossible to tell where either artist's vision begins or ends with anything other than the vocals.
With apologies to Callahan, I've always found two Fiedler pieces to be the album's greatest heights: "Sweetheart" and "Little Thing." In "Sweetheart," the band unleashes a wonderfully clattering dubwise groove and the slashing ugliness of the guitar hook is perfectly counterbalanced by the softness of Fiedler's vocals and the trippy sounds flickering in the periphery. "Little Thing," on the other hand, is built from a rolling trip-hop groove enhanced with a gorgeous vibraphone-esque melody and plenty of scraping and stuttering guitar noise. I am also quite fond of the similarly rolling groove of the more hushed "Bleach & Salt Water," but the bigger headline is how much I have since grown to appreciate the album's other songs. While the swirling chaos of the crescendo of "Mugshot Heroine" stands as an especially unhinged and wonderful moment, nearly every song contains at least one god-tier noise freakout or killer sample and EVERY song features an absolutely stellar rhythm section (John Frenett and "Mig" Moreland) that can rival PIL or Can at their best (groove-wise, at least). Someone really needs to produce an instrumental dub companion from these masters with all the '90s alt rock elements stripped away, as it would be an absolute banger.
In yet another freak bit of luck for me, this reissue also includes the two Fiedler-era Moonshake releases that I had not heard before (1992's Secondhand Clothes and Beautiful Pigeon EPs) and they are generally every bit as good as Eva Luna. In particular, "Blister" is another Fiedler gem that features some very cool guitar sounds and skwonking free jazz chaos, yet Callahan's "Drop in the Ocean" is a surprise stunner that builds to a memorably face-melting crescendo. The band's previously bootleg-only 1992 Peel Session is a bit of an inspired inclusion as well, as Callahan and Fiedler switch vocal duties for alternate versions of a few of their strongest songs.
Fittingly, the album ends with a Fiedler-sung version of Callahan's volcanic "Mugshot Heroine." It is not quite as great as the album version, but it certainly reminds me of it, which then reminds me that Moonshake at their best rivals the finest work of any of their more revered influences or contemporaries. Unsurprisingly, the volatile/schizophrenic chemistry of the band was not meant to last, so Fiedler and Callahan parted ways after 1993's Big Good Angel EP (not included here) to follow their own divergent and fruitful paths: Callahan continued Moonshake, reformed The Wolfhounds, and established himself as a renowned birder, while Fiedler formed Laika, toured with PJ Harvey and Wire, has the record for playing in the most different bands in John Peel sessions (all the aforementioned plus God Is My Co-Pilot), earned a law degree, worked at the BBC, and threw herself into a passion for candle-making and aromatherapy. Both artists have recorded their share of fine music separately since Eva Luna, but it was still nice to get one last EP from that one-of-a-kind creative union and it is possibly even nicer that Beggars Arkive have now consolidated all of the other vital material from the era into this one expanded release.
This album is definitely one of the more unlikely underground hits to cross my path in recent memory, as this strikingly unique bagpipe performance first quietly surfaced as an extremely limited CDr back in 2017 on Strasbourg's Soleils Bleus label. Last year, however, it got a well-deserved vinyl resurrection on Belgium's forward-thinking Morc Records and it sold out almost immediately (as did last month's repress, unsurprisingly). Notably, the bagpipe has historically not been my favorite instrument, but I've said the same thing in the past about harps and harpsichords only to have my mind blown by Joanna Newsom, Mary Lattimore, and Catherine Christer Hennix, so this is merely the latest revelation that any instrument can sound amazing in the right hands. I also never expected the French traditional music scene to be the source of so many stellar contemporary albums, yet Lise and Lisa have just joined my personal pantheon of Gallic folkies (France, Tanz Mein Herz, etc.) who have dropped killer left-field psych gems in recent years. That is an especially impressive feat for Kaüffert, given that she is a German bagpiper.
As far as I can tell, Lo Becat was originally recorded back in 2016 for a radio broadcast, but Lise and Lisa have been playing together as a duo since 2014. While Kaüffert's own origin story remains a mystery to me, Barkas' journey to traditional music amusingly began via Coil, as she was entranced by Cliff Stapleton's hurdy-gurdy playing. That eventually led her to the music of France's Yann Gourdon and her involvement in more traditional fare, but that was mostly because there is a lot more demand for bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy players in the traditional/folk music scenes than in the experimental one (Coil is no longer hiring, I'm afraid). In the years since, however, Barkas and her like-minded friends have carved out a unique niche through the band L'Écluse (Kaüffert is also a member) and collectives like Kreis. Unsurprisingly, Lo Becat is the appropriately unusual fruit of a union between two avant-garde-minded bagpipers with one foot in traditional music circles, as it is essentially a loose fantasia upon an old ballad entitled "la belle va au jardin des amours" (Beauty Goes To The Garden of Love) that segues into a folk dance. Neither of the two pieces incorporated into Lo Becat are familiar to me as an American, of course, but I doubt a dueling bagpipe version of either would be recognizable to many French people either. That said, a timeless and beloved melody is always a solid foundation for adventurous experimentation or improv.
While the central melody is indeed a lovely and haunting one, the real magic of Lo Becat lies in the execution, as the two bagpipes organically drift back and forth between intertwining melodies and an eerily harmonized unison. Ironically, the album feels like a dance long before it incorporates the actual dance piece, as each piper seems to be independently playing something quite beautiful with their own cool flourishes, yet the two halves fluidly and sensuously merge again and again to form otherworldly harmonies. Aside from that, there is also a subtle psychedelic haziness and a host of fleeting nods to everything from free-jazz intensity to the repeating patterns of Reichian minimalism. The latter proves to be especially useful, as Morc's reissue splits the original 25-minute recording into two halves for the vinyl format, but manages to do it quite seamlessly due to a stretch that resembles a locked groove.
To the duo's credit, none of their forays into wilder and more experimental terrain ever feel self-conscious, as Lo Becat always feels like a killer performance that is alternately frayed, fiery, and churning in service of a thoughtful dynamic arc. Hell, even the inherent shrillness of bagpipes works in the pair's favor, as it gives the melody a viscerally anguished-sounding edge that only enhances the melody's inherent beauty. Throughout it all, I am reminded of Charles Bukowski's famous dismissal of Camus: he preferred "somebody who screamed when they burned." Unlike the hapless and presumably long-forgotten Albert Camus, Barkas and Kaüffert manage to unleash a fiery intensity that leaves one hell of a deep impression and they did not waste any time doing it. More importantly, the two ladies had the good sense not to linger around once they achieved that dazzling feat: Lo Becat is 25-minutes of pure fire without a single lull or hint of filler in sight (and their masterful interplay keeps the performance compelling long after that initial impression dissipates).
Before I heard this album, I mistakenly believed that I had a reasonable familiarity with Rafael Toral's oeuvre, as I had heard and enjoyed a handful of his classic guitar-era albums such as 2001's Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance. That said, it had been a while since I had kept tabs on his work, so I was quite curious to hear what made this "quintessential album of guitar music" exciting enough to reawaken Jim O'Rourke's decades-dormant Moikai label. As it turns out, absolutely everything about Spectral Evolution feels like a goddamn revelation to me and I am now kicking myself for sleeping on Toral's post-guitar Space Program-era of experimentation with self-built instruments. The psychotropic omnipresence of those self-built instruments makes it amusingly misleading to call Spectral Evolution Toral's return to guitar music, but if the presence of some recognizable guitar sounds lures more listeners towards this one-of-a-kind work of genius, I believe that claim has served a worthy purpose. Listening to this album was like hearing classic Merzbow or My Cat Is An Alien for the first time, as Toral plays entirely by his own set of rules and succeeds spectacularly.
After being properly gobsmacked by one of the album's early "singles" ("Fifths Twice"), I was not sure that I was even listening to the right album when I finally played Spectral Evolution for the first time. That feeling quickly dissipated after the first minute, but the album deceptively begins with Toral casually improvising around a few jazzy chords.on a relatively clean and effects-free electric guitar. It does not take long at all before that pleasant motif is absorbed by an otherworldly cacophony of whining harmonics and squirming electronics, however, and the wild ride that ensues leaves those jazz chords so far in the rearview mirror that they feel like a memory from a previous life. If someone held a gun to my head and demanded that I coherently explain what was happening in the album's opening minutes, I would probably resign myself to my imminent death, but "I think an alien jungle just crash landed onto an organ mass in Mindfuck City" is probably a reasonably accurate summation…temporarily, at least. If I waited another minute or so, however, I would probably lean more towards "a group of psychotic puppets just formed a jarringly discordant marching band and kicked this Mardi Gras party into overdrive!" Consequently, it is hopeless to make any generalizations about Toral's vision for this album at all unless that generalization is something vague like "an unpredictable series of dissolving lysergic mirages dreamed up by a madman."
That said, Toral is presumably not a madman at all and I am sure he knew exactly what he was doing at all times–I am just having an incredibly hard time comprehending how one human mind managed to weave together such otherworldly sounds with so many seemingly incompatible motifs and somehow still wound up with a mesmerizing and coherent album in the end. While Toral's instrumentation is modestly listed as "guitars, bass and electronic instruments," many of the most prominent sounds resemble someone strangling balloon animals in an alien rain forest. Amusingly, that is not unfamiliar territory for me as a fan of Rashad Becker's Traditional Music Of Notional Species albums, yet Toral's own psychedelic space jungle seems like it is also hosting an eclectic battle of the bands in which big band jazz, a gospel organist, Pink Floyd, and some Tuvan throat singers all strain to be heard in an undulating maelstrom of squirming electronic weirdness.
That said, there are also some unexpected moments of striking beauty along the way. In the aforementioned "Fifths Twice," for example, thick, lazily undulating synth-sounding tones intertwine to form a shifting array of strange and haunting harmonies. Notably, however, "Fifths Twice" is not a discrete piece on the actual album, as Spectral Evolution is presented as a single, endlessly shifting 47-minute opus and that is exactly the right way to experience this bold vision. Some parts are certainly more strange and dazzling than others, but any hint of a lull is merely a pregnant pause before the next wave of gibbering, howling, smeared, and primal electronic madness rolls in.
I am tempted to say that no one else could possibly make an album like this one, but I am frankly still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Rafael Toral himself managed to do it, as a lot of this album feels more like field recordings of a sentient extra-dimensional cloud than it does the work of some guy playing guitar in the mountains of Portugal. While I have never before felt more like I was dancing about architecture in trying to describe an album, I nevertheless feel quite comfortable in proclaiming that Spectral Evolution is a legitimately brilliant and singular release. It is probably also safe to say that this is already destined to be an Album of the Year candidate for anyone drawn to outer limits of psychedelia, as the limits of my imagination prevent me from envisioning anything that could top it.
I tend to enjoy damn near everything that Sweden's XKatedral label releases, but this half-disturbing/half-transcendent tour de force by co-founder Maria W. Horn still managed to completely blindside me. Panoptikon's four-part suite was originally composed for a macabre installation at the "disbanded Vita Duvan (White Dove) panopticon prison in Luleå, Sweden." Being a panopticon, Vita Duvan had an unusual circular design "to create a sense of omniscient surveillance," but that is just the tip of a very grim iceberg, as it was also known for its brutal isolation tactics as well as rampant torture and execution. While the prison mercifully ceased operations in 1979, I suspect I would've needed months of therapy to recover from Horn's installation alone, as it pulsed in synchronization with the prison's lights and the cells contained speakers broadcasting the imagined voices of the doomed prisoners. Thankfully, the decontextualized album is considerably less harrowing than its origin suggests, as its dark choral opening quickly expands into an immersive swirl of heady drones, spacy synths, and timelessly beautiful vocal motifs.
The heart of the album is the opening "Omnia citra mortem," which borrows its name from a legal term that translates as "everything until death." In the context of Vita Duvan, that meant that no one could be sentenced to death for a crime they did not confess to, but they couldcertainly be tortured until a confession was made. Needless to say, few were inclined to stick around very long, as being beheaded with an axe was vastly preferable to the alternative. According to Horn's research, the crimes that could land one in Vita Duvan could be as minor as "drunkenness" or "vagrancy," but several dozen unfortunate women met their end there because miscarriage and abortion were considered "child murder" at the time.
Horn initially channels that dark history with a deep drone and a haunting choral theme that roughly approximates the solemnity of a Gregorian chant, but that stark foundation gradually warms and becomes more polyphonic as more themes and voices are added. As the vocal melodies intertwine and harmonize with one another, the funereal feel gradually dissipates and the piece begins to evoke something more akin to newly liberated souls floating heavenward. That sublime transformation is reinforced further by the piece's final section, as the voices fade away entirely to leave only a simple, pure, and radiant drone that slowly undulates its way into silence.
The remaining three pieces are a bit less intense (and shorter as well), but they are all similarly mesmerizing in their own ways. "Hæc est regula recti" borrows its title from a book on correcting childhood deformities and initially shares the "choral mass" feel of its predecessor, though the voices are massed in harmonized unison this time around. After a couple of minutes, however, the chorus again vanishes to unveil a gorgeous finale of immersively shimmering drones that flicker and spatially roam as a host of buried and whispering voices creep in. Horn then follows that pair of stunners with the unexpectedly spacy and hallucinatory title piece. "Panoptikon" initially reprises the same underlying drone as the earlier pieces, but soon takes on a bleary, shapeshifting sense of unreality as Horn's synths swoop, plunge, buzz, and smear. On a compositional level, I am very impressed at how Horn managed to seamlessly blur the timeless feel of the earlier pieces into something futuristic-sounding, but the more striking feat is how the piece evokes both a prison riot of ghosts and an ancient church at the heart of a cyberpunk dystopia. The album then ends with one more inspired twist, as the closing "Längtans Vita Duva" is a surprisingly hopeful-sounding traditional choral piece that feels like an old spiritual.
I imagine composing music that could do justice to the sad and cruel story of Vita Duvan and its broken and damned inhabitants was one hell of a daunting task, but Horn was unquestionably the perfect artist for such an endeavor (especially given her healthy appreciation for psychoacoustic phenomena). In particular, I was struck by how deeply the prison's history and the associated conceptual themes shaped both Horn's music and the installation itself. For example, the speaker placement was designed to evoke the sense of voices "striving for community but hindered by the forced isolation of the prison architecture." Moreover, the prison's previous torture and execution practices were replaced by the different horror of three-year stretches of total isolation after 18th century prison reforms and that too was mirrored ("the only indication of the passing of time was found in cycles of daylight amongst the silence, uncertainty, and solitude"). I honestly do not know how this album could have been any better, as there is not a false step or wasted note to be found anywhere and these pieces cumulatively pack quite an emotional impact. To my ears, Panoptikon is easily the strongest and most memorable album of Horn's career, but her larger achievement was turning something so soul-shreddingly dark into such a listenable thing of transcendent beauty. This album is a masterpiece.