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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This fifth full-length from Yorkshire-based guitar visionary Dean McPhee is actually a compilation of sorts, bringing together the pieces from his out-of-print Cosmos / Ether lathe cut 7" (2022) with a couple of gems from Folklore Tapes compilation appearances. Happily, however, Astral Gold is also rounded out with a pair of new pieces and one of them ("The Sediment of Creation") easily ranks among McPhee's finest work. Given that I was already a huge fan of one of the Folklore Tapes pieces included here, that is more than enough to make this a solid release, but it is also an unexpectedly focused and thematically compelling one given the varied origins and inspirations of these songs. It is quite an aptly named release as well, as the languorously meditative and cosmic mood of these pieces seem like they would be an ideal soundtrack for any astral traveling that one might have on the horizon.
The album opens with the two pieces from the Cosmos/Ether single on Reverb Worship, which was originally something of a divergent release for McPhee, as both songs feel more like the extremely understated work of a cosmic-minded '70s psych band than McPhee's usual fare (Manuel Göttsching being the obvious reference point). That said, the two pieces still sound a hell of a lot like Dean McPhee--they just happen to have unusually prominent bass lines. Of the two, I prefer "Ether," as it plays more to McPhee's strengths of hazy, reverbent melodies and looping chord patterns. While I love both the gently pulsing chord progress and the lingering vapor trails that hang in the wake of the lead guitar melody, McPhee's larger achievement lies in how he seems to slow and blur the passage of time: the way his notes seem to burn off or ripple away into silence is often more significant than the notes themselves. The uncluttered clarity of his playing is similarly striking and out-of-step with the current musical landscape, as he consciously avoids any excess notes or layers that would dilute the direct/real-time beauty of his themes.
The album does not start to truly catch (lunar) fire until the following "Neptune," however, which improves upon the "Ether" formula with underlying chords distilled to shimmering, dreamlike swells with a gently swaying pulse. Given McPhee's working method of slowly building an architecture of loops in real-time, repetition is an unavoidable foundational element here, but "Neptune" makes that constraint seem like a gift, as the seesawing sway of the backdrop is sensuously hypnotic. Dean also ratchets up his use of vibrato and sustain on the lead melody to such a degree that it feels like his guitar is almost emulating a singing saw or theremin. It is easily one of the most beautiful pieces on the album and also features a characteristically interesting conceptual inspiration, as it is a homage to the doomed moon of Triton, which is slowly being dragged towards its parent planet as its orbit decays.
The LP's second side kicks off with the first of the new pieces, "Lunar Fire." For the most part, it occupies familiar stylistic terrain for McPhee (glacial kick drum, clean slow-motion arpeggios, sustain-heavy lead melody, etc.), but he tweaks the formula a bit with a synth-y sounding Ebow bass line and a coda where he plays a recording of crackling fire through guitar pick-ups for a dub-wise finale of cracks and pops.
Dean saves the best for last, however, as Astral Gold's final two pieces are both absolute stunners. The first is "Second Message," a eerily ritualistic and dream-like piece inspired by the Ilkley Alien that previously appeared on Folklore Tapes' recent UFO-themed compilation. The piece is only a mere three minutes long, but it is a perfect distillation of everything that I love about McPhee's work and culminates in an impressively otherworldly finale that lies somewhere between a squirming alien fireworks display and a séance with another dimension. The album then winds to close with the single-take shape-shifting epic "The Sediment of Creation," which starts off good and steadily gets better and better as more and more loops are incorporated (wah-wah, rippling chord shimmer, harmonized leads, a lingering haze of slow-burning swells, etc.). In short, it is a goddamn tour de force.
Normally, I do not particularly care whether something was recorded in a single take, as recording killer music is not the same as a jumping a canyon on a motorcycle (if a song would be better with overdubs, I am happy to hear the better version), yet "Sediment" earns an exception to my rule, as the real-time loop manipulation makes McPhee seem like a fucking sorcerer (not a bad way to end an album). For those unfamiliar with his oeuvre, those final two pieces make one hell of an introduction to a truly unique body of work. Longtime McPhee fans will likely have heard most of this album already, but "The Sediment of Creation" is brilliant and substantial enough to make the release of Astral Gold a significant event anyway. When McPhee is at his best, there is absolutely no one else that can match his singular slow-motion magic.
As the first two installments of a seven-part subscription series on Die Stadt, David Jackman (as Organum Electronics) has fashioned two new long-form pieces that are seemingly sparse in their formation, but like the entirety of his lengthy discography, result in something with so much more depth. Material utilized in other recent works from him are building blocks in these two discs, but compared to the quiet and understated recent material, these align much more closely with his earlier, noisier material, and continues to demonstrate his compositions are as fascinating as ever.
Quietude is the noisier and overall more forceful of the two albums. It beings with an immediate blast of dense buzzing noise that approximates a jet engine very well, but multilayered and treated to give an amazing sense of depth and nuance. At times it almost seems as if it is a basic sound being utilized, such as the hum of a florescent lightbulb, blown out to massive proportions. The sound is sprawling, with intersecting passages shifting focus throughout. Shimmering engine sounds cascade over a continual buzz, with occasionally bassy churning sounds bubbling to the surface. Layers eventually relent alongside what sounds like rattling, scraping chains, leading to a jarring ending.
That sustained roar of sound leads right into Darcknes as well, although here the noise seems to be laced more with the sounds of organs. The mix is not quite as dense though and sounds of ravens and tolling bells that have been featured in some of his recent works appear here as well.
Jackman builds walls of sound and then peels them back, allowing what sounds like grinding metal to mesh with the apocalyptic organ stabs. Of the two albums this one is the more dynamic, with a bit more breathing room compared to Quietude, although this peace is always short-lived.
Considering the sparse nature of his recent output where the focus was on sparse organic instruments and field recordings, these two compositions are the exact opposite in construction. Each piece is a solid 40 minutes in length, and while there are some spaces in which the mix is pared somewhat back, they overall never relent until they come to abrupt conclusions. From a dynamic standpoint there are parallels with the harsh noise wall genre, but Jackman's touch is far too nuanced to lump into a single category or genre. Even at his most subtle and sparse, he manages to bring out the most captivating facets of the most basic of sounds, which is just as strong here in full on maximalist mode.
While I am unsure what distinguishes work as Organum Electronics from his output as Organum, or the recent material under his own name, none of that really matters given the quality of these two discs. As aforementioned, these are the first two installments of a seven-part series (with an additional album for subscribers) that are intended to form a larger piece that Jackman has been working on since 2018. What unifies them is of course a mystery for now, and one that is likely not to be obvious given his penchant for ambiguity, but I think that they will be nothing short of mesmerizing.
I acknowledge it is only February right now, but I believe I can confidently state that this soundtrack will be the weirdest and most mystifying new album that I will encounter this year. The film itself was released back in 2022 and follows the trials and tribulations of an imaginary performance art group during a surreal and contentious month-long artist residency. It is an absolutely brilliant and wickedly funny film (possibly director Peter Strickland's finest work) and joins similarly deranged fare like Holy Mountain in the pantheon of cinema so audaciously batshit crazy that it is hard to fathom how it was ever financed, cast, or released. As befits such a bananas endeavor, the soundtrack features a murderers' row of compelling artists from the experimental/psych fringes, drawing participants from Broadcast, Nurse With Wound, Stereolab, Neutral Milk Hotel, Swans, and elsewhere. Obviously, that seems like a solid recipe for a unique album, but it is a unique album with a twist, as the heart of it all is Strickland's own Sonic Catering Band, a shifting collective devoted to transforming the preparation of vegetarian meals into ritualistic noise performances.
The Sonic Catering Band allegedly formed as an anonymous ensemble in 1996 after finding unexpected inspiration in a bout of food poisoning. The band's mission statement is quite simple (if comically niche): "to employ a similar approach to electronic music as to (vegetarian) food; taking the raw sounds recorded from the cooking and preparing of a meal and treating them through processing, cutting, mixing and layering. No source sounds other than those coming from the cooking of the dish are used and as a commitment to artistic integrity, every dish is consumed by all members of the Band." The project spawned a record label (Peripheral Conserve) as well, releasing work by many of the folks who appear on the soundtrack as well as some other hard-to-categorize art provocateurs like The Bohman Brothers and Faust's Jean-Hervé Péron. Unsurprisingly, the project also resulted in some truly memorable-sounding performances ("on the wall by the table hung a lifesize 5ft gingerbread man with headphones on, listening to the sound of himself being cooked.").
The band portrayed in the film is quite a bit different from the actual Sonic Catering Band, as it is centered on an uncompromising visionary played by actress Fatma Mohamed, but they otherwise mirror the SCB's quixotic commitment to artistic purity and vegetarian cuisine. Therein lies the big caveat with this album: there is a huge artistic constraint looming over everything, which unavoidably steers much of the music into noise/dark ambient terrain (sizzling, frying, blending, and chopping sounds filtered through chains of effects). There is also a hapless journalist in the milieu whose unrelenting bowel problems provide further scatalogical grist for uncompromising sound art.
In the context of the film, the food-based pieces are quite mesmerizing, but a lot of that appeal is due to the visually striking and ritualistic nature of the performances. As decontextualized sound art, however, brief pieces like "Death Borscht" and "A Pain I Can't Hold In" feel like teasing excerpts from a killer noise show rather than substantial stand-alone compositions. The album is also strewn with shapeshifting variations of a considerably more melodic Heather Trost piece that serves as the film's theme (a harpsichord-driven psych-pop confection). Similarly, Roj from Broadcast contributes his own recurring and shapeshifting piece ("Trip To The Shops") that is roughly in the vein of NWW's self-perpetuating feedback loop epic Soliloquy For Lilith. The actual NWW piece on the album ("Hindu Monastery Breakfast") is considerably more nerve-jangling, resembling a rattling tea ceremony hosted by someone plagued with uncontrollable tremors. I am not sure if that necessarily counts as a recommendation, but it certainly made me want to crawl out of my skin in discomfort.
My favorite piece is a solo work by SCB associate Daniel Hayhurst, as his "Monday Service" is an echoing spoken-word fantasia in German over a backdrop of gnarled and heaving sounds that organically form and dissolve in unsettling fashion. I also enjoyed Marta Salogni's "Cross-Contamination" quite a bit, as she deftly transforms a simple bass pulse into something that feels both seismic and cyberpunk. That said, the album also works quite nicely as a whole for those in search of a sustained fever dream mindfuck, as I listened to it on headphones while blearily wandering through my house in the middle of the night and instantly felt like I had been dropped into a supernaturally tinged nightmare. That is no small achievement for a project that modestly began with little more than a tofu recipe and a mischievous sense of humor. As far as I am concerned, Peter Strickland was already an international treasure as a director alone, but knowing that he can also turn something like a crêpe or a Christmas pudding into a harrowing noise assault makes me love him even more. Hopefully he will continue to find people willing to finance his crazily indulgent whims forever, as the world is sorely lacking in artistic visionaries blessed with such a scathing sense of humor and healthy appreciation for the absurd.
This is the second album from the instrumental duo of Ellis Swan and James Schimpl and the first Dead Bandit album to follow Swan's killer 2022 solo album 3am. Happily, Memory Thirteen returns to the hypnagogic "witching hour" vibes of 3am, but it also marks a very compelling creative leap forward into fresh stylistic terrain. To my ears, that blearily dreamlike terrain is best described as "what if Boduf Songs scored a gig as the house band at a strip club in the Donnie Darko universe?" Needless to say, that is a very tricky and hyper-specific niche to fill, yet Dead Bandit consistently find new ways to combine hushed and haunted late-night melancholy with neon-soaked sensuousness, deadpan cool, and dreampop shimmer.
The opening "Two Clocks" introduces most of the elements central to the duo's current vision: understated guitar melodies, well-timed flickers of human warmth, submerged and distressed-sounding textures, and slow-motion, head-nodding beats. It is a fine way to start an album, but it feels more like a setting of the stage than a legitimate album highlight (even if it undergoes a gorgeously dreamlike transformation around the halfway point). The first unambiguous highlight follows soon after, however, as "Blackbird" feels like a window into a narcotic and carnivalesque cabaret of eerie melody, throbbing bass, lysergically smeared textures, and simmering, seething intensity.
Ironically, the following "Circus" feels considerably more like a dirge that lands somewhere between surf-damaged rockabilly twang and a suicide note, but a closer listen reveals a host of subtly psychotropic touches to savor. Those quiet glimpses of sublime beauty are a bit of a recurring theme throughout the album, as even the weaker songs tend to be elevated by at least one unexpected (and oft partially submerged) flash of inspiration. The stronger songs benefit from that tendency as well, as illustrated by the jangling guitar figure that appears around the halfway mark in "Blackbird" or the overlapping arpeggio motif that emerges from the feedback cloud in "Peel Me An Orange."
That said, Swan and Schimpl save their most brilliant work for the album's second half, as the one-two punch of "Somewhere to Wait" and "Revelstroke" is the heart of the album for me. On "Somewhere to Wait," Dead Bandit sound like the best fucking surf band in Twin Peaks, as a shuffling and seductive groove provides the backdrop for a twangy, woozy guitar melody while quivering afterimages linger like a ghostly haze. "Revelstroke," on the other hand, takes a very different path, as a warmly flickering dream-drone haze blossoms into absolute heaven once the acoustic guitars come in. I also love the less substantial album closer "Across the Road," as it is probably the most achingly beautiful two-minute coda of shimmering and smoldering guitar noise that I could possibly hope for.
That said, there is probably a moment lurking within every single one of these pieces that I absolutely love and the difference between a great piece and a very good piece is merely that the great pieces extend that moment for their entire duration. Beyond that, I genuinely cannot praise the duo's execution enough, as Swan and Schimpl seem to have almost supernaturally unerring intuitions for texture, nuance, and mood through Memory Thirteen's entirety and they manage to pull it off without a single wasted note or descent into morose navel-gazing. That said, there is certainly a depressive mood here that may be a bit oppressive for some, but depressive moods are the water that I swim in and Dead Bandit do a hell of a job of balancing those more brooding tendencies with a carnal, flesh-and-blood undercurrent and brief flashes of wounded beauty akin to a spectacular sunset of fiery orange mingled with bruised purple. This is an absolutely perfect late-night album for lovelorn and/or dissolute insomniacs.
On her first solo vinyl release, Mexico's Concepción Huerta largely employs the use of Buchla and Nord synths, recorded in residence at EMS Stockholm. Further tape manipulation is then used to create a record that sits somewhere between atmospheric space and intense noise. Textures and distortion sprawl outward, but occasionally relent to allow some gentle elements to slip in, resulting in a record that sounds rooted not just in the Earth, but also expands far into outer space.
The opener of the first side, "Emerges from the Deep" (featuring co-production with Olivia Block) is a perfect summary of how the piece sounds. Opening with muffled tones rising from a deep ocean trench, Huerta crafts a subtle melody that soon transitions into crunchy resonating low frequency sounds, adding a subaquatic heaviness. Eventually the low-end subsides as the piece gently floats off into the distance. Huerta follows with "The Crack Is Illuminated," where sweeping shimmering synths glisten a gentle floating passage, accented by some pleasant buoyant distortion.
Block returns as co-producer on "Trepidation," where the mood darkens. It is an interplay between what resembles bowed horror film strings and abrasive synth stabs, both melodic and aggressive. It's more distorted than the prior pieces, and Huerta briefly flirts with harsh noise territory. She dials it back before long, however, and what remains are lush electronic melodies.
On the flip side, the overall feel is more spacious. The synths on "The Earth Has Memory, the Body Too" are expansive, sounding as if they were run through a vocoder with what could almost be heavily treated voices buried in the mix. Huerta continues this feeling on "The Sacredness: Minerals & Rhizome," with synth layers drifting in an out with only a slight hint of distortion to provide texture. She works at her most minimal on "We Return to the Center," which seems less Earth-bound than cosmic, with hushed high frequencies coming in and out like deep space radio signals. She closes the record with "From Another Place," which also has a similar interstellar sense to it but feels more forceful due to the use of lower, more bass-heavy frequencies and subtle, echoing delays that magnify the pulse-like dynamic.
The theme of The Earth Has Memory stretches beyond just the soil and into the firmament. Concepción Huerta conjures an amazing sense of both space and time throughout the album. Just via synths and tape treatments, she conjures the depth of the ocean, the solidity of the earth, and the remnants of the Big Bang, all within the span of seven compositions. The use of melody and texture complement each other in an amazing way, which gives this already complex record an even greater, enthralling depth.