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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Barely six months after his last double album Embrace This Twilight, Matt Weston has just released another record of idiosyncratic compositions. Consisting of two side-long pieces, Weston balances two notable different approaches to composition, with the first side being the more spacious and sustained, and the other dense and sprawling in approach, linking disparate sounds in an incredible manner.
"You Have to Question the Validity of your Sneer," comprising the first side of the record, features Weston exercising restraint into what sounds he works with. In the simplest terms, what resembles a ghostly, inhuman howl opens the piece, with a heavily processed chime/bell/gong/something metallic punctuation throughout. Through the entirety of the piece there are groans and squeals making for an uncomfortable, unsettling lurch. As the piece progresses, he incorporates rumbling, what sounds like war trumpets, and evil screeching birds to the already sinister proceedings. The vibe is darker and more unsettling than a lot of his work, but it is still excellent.
On the other side "Half-Suburban Waltz" is more chaotic in construction but continues the already bleak vibe. Opening with skittering, clipping metallic clanging, Weston tosses in some crunchy, grinding bits to the bass heavy swells. As a whole it sounds as if these are mostly layers of percussion that he is working with but processed into something entirely different. Some passages almost sound like chugging guitar riffs. Coupled with the treated industrial banging, the result is like heavy metal deconstructed and rebuilt with an entirely different pallet of sounds. The overall mix is denser, and structures shift heavily on this side, but it ends on a gentle, if unsettling outro of what sounds like an emulation of creepy carnival music.
Compared to his other recent material, the overall feel of This is Broken is one that is more concise and succinct, which makes sense given it is only a single record, but by no means is it any less structured or nuanced. The dichotomy between the two sides is especially strong though, with the first side staying consistent with the sounds he works with, and the latter being collage-like at times. They are both unified by the overall bleak mood that, given the title of the record, is not at all surprising. It may be dreary, but the intensity is unquestionable, and that is what makes it such a captivating album.
This is New York-based composer/puppeteer Tristan Allen's full-length debut and it is quite an ambitious one, as Tin Iso and the Dawn is the first chapter of a planned "shadow puppet symphony" trilogy loosely based on Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" that has been in the works since 2015. From where I am standing, there are innumerable ways in which such an album could go wrong and they range from "forgettable score to cool puppet show" to "cloyingly precious" to "outright bombastic." Instead, however, Tin Iso and the Dawn sounds like a stone-cold masterpiece dropped by a creative supernova. Listening back to Allen's previous discography (a pair of classical piano EPs), it almost feels like this vision materialized out of nowhere, but the seeds of this puppet-centric magnum opus may have been planted more than a decade ago when Allen co-wrote a piece with Amanda Palmer in the early days of her "Dresden Dolls hiatus" solo career.
The album begins in somewhat deceptive fashion, as "Opening" is initially just a bittersweet solo piano melody that feels like a simple yet lovely classical piece built from a few well-chosen arpeggios. That is familiar territory for Allen, but that familiarity begins unraveling in under a minute, as the arpeggios are quickly enlivened with harmonies, melodic flourishes, rhythmic disruptions, psychotropic tendrils, and a wake of groans and lingering decays. Then yet another surprise happens in the final minute, as it sounds like Allen stops playing, closes the piano, and lets the lingering haze of murk threaten to become a self-perpetuating drone piece. If Allen were some kind of Andy Kaufman-style performance artist/comedian, it would have been a solid move to let that haze of decay play out for another forty minutes, but it instead segues into the first of four acts ("Act I: Stars and Moon"). From that point onward, Tin Iso and the Dawn features a near-unbroken run of achingly beautiful and unique orchestral pieces.
The four acts share some common themes and textures, unsurprisingly, but they each feel like their own discrete world as well. In "Stars and Moon," for example, a slow-motion chord progression quickly blossoms into an epic-sounding swell of brooding brass, gnarled distortion, sensuously dreamlike flutes, and something that sounds like it could plausibly be puppets playing rusty xylophones. Aside from being a wonderfully haunting piece in general, "Stars and Moon" was the first piece in which I found myself awe-struck by Allen's uniquely brilliant execution. For one, it has the scale of an orchestral composition, yet organically ebbs and flows like an especially beautiful drone piece rather than a formal composition: Allen's manipulation of layers feels akin to that of a killer dance producer expertly adding and removing cymbals and kicks (albeit with puppets and flutes instead). I was similarly struck by Allen's lightness of touch and inspired balance of textures. Pure beauty is nice and all, but pure beauty being gnarled and gnawed in interesting ways is even better.
Happily, the second act ("Sea and Sky") is every bit as wonderful as the first, as it sounds like a swooning and bittersweet distillation of Disintegration-era Cure's lush Romanticism. There are also plenty of psychotropic and ravaged textures to help deepen my immersion, of course, but I was additionally struck by how Allen is able to work on such a large scale without sacrificing any sensuality or intimacy.
The album admittedly loses a little steam with the more ambient-adjacent third act ("Land and Growth"), but only because it feels a bit like a score rather than a stand-alone piece. I can only assume that the puppets are going to be doing something so incredibly cool that Allen concluded that the music should temporarily downshift into a mere backdrop, but I enjoyed the pleasantly ghostly ambiance nonetheless. Also, there is a subtly gorgeous glassy/fluttering motif in the final moment that feels like a supernatural fog just dissipated to reveal a beautiful phantasmagoric lepidopterarium. I bet Wagner never did that. Probably never even occurred to him, in fact.
To my ears, the centerpiece of the album is the fourth act ("Death and the Dawn"), which is yet another slow-motion masterpiece of bittersweet Romanticism. All of the elements that I love from the earlier pieces are back in prime form (haunting melodies, softly beautiful flutes, well-timed intrusions of distortion/feedback, etc.), but there are also a couple of new features that elevate it to another plane altogether. The first is that it feels like the central melody is being played on a massive Ellen Fullman-esque zither or prepared piano soundboard in which the entire room becomes an immersive resonance chamber (and I love that the harmonic-like melody is enhanced with a lingering decay that falls out of sync). It also features my favorite touch on the entire album: a mournful brass moan around the 8-minute mark that briefly cuts through the piece like a howl of anguish, then promptly vanishes.
The final act is also an unusually warm piece, which is yet another illustration of Allen's impressive appreciation for nuance and lightness of touch. Given that Tin Iso and the Dawn is a Wagner-inspired shadow puppet story with doomed Romanticism at its heart, this easily could have been a very dark album (or a very camp one), but Allen keeps enough genuine human warmth at its core that it feels like a bittersweet celebration of both life and love instead. In keeping with that theme, the album closes with a brief solo piano coda that feels vibrantly spontaneous and alive, which is an absolutely perfect way to end: it feels like a dreamlike spell has just lifted to reveal a flesh and blood human alone at a piano. If I were experiencing this live (something I definitely hope to do now), that last touch would probably nudge me (and everyone else) into a spontaneous standing ovation. This is an absolutely wonderful and one-of-a-kind debut that deserves an immediate and passionate cult following.
Much to my surprise, my favorite tape music album of 2023 did not come from any of the usual suspects (Nonconnah, Lilien Rosarian, Ian William Craig, etc.) and instead came courtesy of this unusual collaboration between newly Parisian jazz pianist/composer Richard Sears and producer Ari Chersky. While I am unfamiliar with Sears' previous activities in NYC's avant-garde scene before his trans-Atlantic relocation, Appear to Fade is an entirely new animal altogether, as it is a series of collages built from decontextualized/recontextualized recordings of solo piano compositions and live improvisations. I can understand why this is being released as a Richard Sears album, given the fact that he played everything and has some serious jazz cred to boot, but the impact of Chesky's editing and healthy appreciation for pleasures of analog tape distortion elevates those recordings into something brilliant that feels far greater than the sum of its parts. While much of that success is due to the pair's unerring intuitions and Sears' undeniably beautiful playing, the real magic of Appear to Fade lies in how masterfully the duo were able to organically weave together looping melodies with fluid and spontaneous-sounding improvisations while evoking a mesmerizing mirage of elegantly shifting moods.
The opening "Tracing Time" is quite possibly one of the most gorgeous tape-based pieces that I have heard in my life, as a delicate piano melody lazily winds through a shifting and swaying landscape of straining tape warbles, analog murk, and subtly rhythmic swells. Moreover, beyond its immediately obvious melodic and textural pleasures, the piece evokes a wonderful strain of frayed and unraveling opulence and also feels like time is fitfully freezing and reversing due to all the ingenious tape manipulations. There is even a surprise twist at the end, as the dream-like bliss curdles into something more ominous that resembles the soundtrack from a mangled VHS of a Bela Lugosi-style classic vampire film played backwards. Obviously, it does not take a genius to realize that putting your best foot forward is a great way to kick off an album, but there is definitely an art to sequencing the remaining pieces so they feel like different flavors of wonderful rather than a dip in quality. To their credit, Sears and Chesky succeed beautifully in that regard and even managed to keep a second masterpiece ("Manresa") in the chamber until nearly the end of the album.
“Manresa” favorably reminds me of Steve Roden’s uncharacteristically melodic Stars of Ice album, as it similarly feels like it was constructed from samples culled from an old 78 of Christmas music. That was not the case here, of course, but knowing that does not stop me from feeling like I am inside a hallucinatory snow globe: the disjointed and tumbling melodies nicely evoke distantly flickering Christmas lights in a phantasmagoric winter landscape. Happily, the remaining six pieces are all compelling in their own distinctive ways as well. For example, “Oceans” feel like darkly jazzy chord shapes fleetingly forming and dissipating in an ambient fog, which is a neat trick, but it also feels like those chords are incrementally moving closer and closer towards cohering into a pattern that never comes. Elsewhere, “Flotsam” resembles a room full of out-of-sync ballerina music boxes conjuring a flickering constellation of pointillist beauty, while “Tulev” feels like I am being sucked into a black hole while extra-dimensional traffic noise bleeds into a piano recital.
The album’s final piece, "What I Meant to Say Was," is also quite noteworthy, as it is an unedited performance of Sears “improvising a jazz standard” at the end of a long day on one of David Klavins’ artisanal Una Corda pianos. Normally, I would bristle with indignation (is nothing sacred?!?) at the idea of ending a near-perfect tape loop collage album with a straight piano performance, but it strikes the perfect tone in this case, as sounds like Bill Evans was dropped at the piano in Casablanca to deliver a spare and bittersweet coda of magical realism. While I historically tend to believe that virtuosic musicianship is more of an obstacle than an asset when attempting to craft a bold creative vision, it is always a legitimate thrill when I encounter an exception like this one where the opposite is true. There are plenty of other artists out there who could throw together a cool album from piano loops, but it takes someone with legitimately sophisticated melodic and harmonic sensibilities to achieve such a wonderfully surreal Alice in Wonderland-like tapestry of seamlessly interwoven beauty, darkness, innocence, disorientation, and magic.
It has been a while since this duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas last surfaced, but they are back with a new EP to celebrate Subtext's 50th release. Since releasing 2019's Blossoms, the pair have been quite busy with other projects, as Purgas's research played a crucial role in the release of The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972 while Ginzburg has kept himself occupied with running a record label, releasing solo albums, and performing as part of "experimental supergroup" Osmium. Emptyset was never fully dormant, however, and Ginzburg and Purgas convened in Bristol this summer to shape their accumulated ideas into one of their most focused and singular releases in recent memory. It is also one of their most concise, as ash clocks in at an extremely lean 16-minutes. If this were any other project, that brevity would suggest a serious dearth of fresh ideas or compelling new material, but it is exactly the right length for a perfect distillation of Emptyset's viscerally spasmodic and pummeling percussion assaults.
Much like their Manchester peers Autechre, it is very easy to forget that James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas were ever interested in making beat-driven music aimed for the dancefloor, as they long ago plunged into an avant-garde rabbit hole of abstract deconstructionism, cutting edge sound design, and self-built instruments and have not looked back since. I bring up that origin for a reason, as understanding that ash was inspired by Bristol's sound system culture is crucial to grasping the appeal of the duo's current vision. In fact, I was initially underwhelmed by these songs, as I could not understand why Ginzburg in particular would want to regress to punishing, no-frills rhythm workouts after blowing me away with the droning immensity of his 2021 solo album crystallise, a frozen eye.
Eventually, however, I got around to listening to ash on headphones and everything immediately made sense again: this is not an EP intended for casual listening. The correct way to experience ash is to crank it up so loud that you can feel every seismic crunch, vibration, and throb. Once I had that revelation, ash immediately transformed into something considerably more brilliant and unique. This is absolutely not the place to look for great songcraft or killer beats, but it is probably one of the best releases around for those looking for precision-engineered brutality, masterfully harnessed spatialized sound, and intense physicality. Someone should commission a forward-thinking ballet company to choreograph a mind-blowing performance for one of these songs immediately.
Musically, ash-era Emptyset shares a healthy amount of common ground with classic Godflesh, as the main ingredients are overloaded bass and a fondness for bludgeoning, mechanized repetition, but it would be closer to the mark to suggest that their primary influences are "convulsions" and "the futuristic battle scenes from the Terminator movies." Some pieces certainly evoke robot tanks rolling over piles of crunching bones in a scorched and broken landscape more strongly than others ("embers" being the best example), but the differences between these six songs are less important than their common ground of shuddering waves of distorted bass, lurching rhythms, and slow-motion machine gun snares. Experiencing this album is a lot like getting thwacked in the head with six different baseball bats: they would certainly all have their own unique character, but the subtle differences between them would be unavoidably eclipsed by the force of the impact.
To my ears, the best moments are probably "cinder" (I half expected viscous trails of blood to start running down my walls when the opening fog of grinding and menacing dissonance appeared) or the title piece ("a giant sentient typewriter with malicious intent" meets "the space-time continuum warps, stretches, and tears during a fireworks display"), but every one of these pieces is an absolute banger. That is an impressive achievement in itself, obviously, but a full album of such uninterrupted bludgeoning would be absolutely exhausting and would quickly yield diminishing returns. To their everlasting credit, however, Purgas and Ginzburg understood the limitations of their vision and were wise enough to keep most of ash's violent, churning convulsions under three minutes: if there was ever an album that has earned the coveted "all killer, no filler" mantle, it is this one. Every single song makes a deep impact and the whole thing is over long before any numbness starts to set in.
In a 2017 interview, Ginzburg noted that he and Purgas leave "piles and heaps of detritus on the cutting room floor" and now I understand why: ash is the sort of perfect distillation that could have only been made by absolutely ruthless editors willing to throw away months of work and several albums worth of material to just to wind up with one great 16-minute EP.
I am almost always intrigued by the eclectic and unusual inspirations behind Marc Richter albums and this latest full-length for Thrill Jockey is no exception. The core concept at the heart of this one is the "hybridity within each and every one of us," which Richter set out to mirror through a mixture of self-created sounds and manipulated samples. Things got more interesting along the way, however, as Richter had the epiphany that his own methods are quite similar to artificial intelligence "hallucinations," which is a phenomenon in which an overloaded AI starts perceiving non-existent patterns or spewing incorrect or nonsensical conclusions.
Beyond that, the methods behind this album remain an enigma to me, as does the inspiration behind the album's curious title, though Richter does note that the song titles borrow phrases from poetry and mythology with a deliberate leaning towards erotic innuendos and the ridiculous. Naturally, most of the humor and ridiculousness that found its way into these sound collages is far too buried or oblique to be readily apparent to listeners, but I had no trouble at all grasping that At Zeenath Parallel Heavens is yet another excellent Black to Comm album. In fact, this might be one of the most beautifully focused and immersive albums that Richter has ever released.
The album's description suggests that "Richter's audio occultism" was pushed into "even more divine, transcendent territory" than usual, which is an interesting claim given the rest of his discography. It may very well be an accurate one, as there are several pieces that achieve a sublime or celestial level of beauty, but Richter's path to transcendence is not without some hard detours into nightmare territory along the way. That said, the opening descent into dreamlike bliss does last for two full songs. The first, "Then Began the Harp to Fashion," is a lush swirl of subtly warping drones, quivering whimpers, skittering percussive clicks, rhythmic throbs, and jangling metal. It is a hell of a piece, as it elegantly and organically morphs and swells like a sentient supernatural haze, but the host of strange and beautiful textures that Richter unveils are a recurring pleasure for the album's entire duration. Unexpectedly, however, that opener is immediately eclipsed by the following "Steep Thy Plumage in His Sweetness." The piece deceptively opens with a motif that sounds like a stretched and slowed reverie of brooding strings, but a host of sensuous textures gradually creep in until it becomes a swooningly gorgeous melange of hisses, oscillations, choral voices, and gentle throbs worthy of its archaically horny title. Also, despite being only four-minutes long, that slow-motion heaven somehow manages to blossom into an unhurried epic that feels like a tender (if deconstructed) ballad sung by a lovesick robot.
The situation becomes considerably more gnarly with "Never Heed the Tongues of Wooers," however, as that otherwise great advice is soundtracked by a menacing fog of squirming, curdled strings and infernal ululations. Unexpectedly, the mood brightens into a lovely fadeout of drones and subtly spacy synth tones after a cathartic percussion interlude. The fragile beauty lingers on for the following "Time Will Fly on Equal Pinions," but the respite from sinister-sounding mindfuckery abruptly ends with "La société des rêves," as oozing, unnerving drone swells and weirdly springy thuds provide an eerie backdrop for overlapping vocal loops of a French child. That weirdness only continues to deepen, as the piece is further enhanced by a stammering brass fanfare and violently disruptive splashes of warped choral voices.
The following "Musik im Schatten" draws out the darkness a little bit longer, resembling a heavy drone performance in a metalworking shop with sporadic sirens in the distance, but the final two pieces bring the album to a close in more warmly sublime fashion (even the piece that translates as "Slime of Ignorance," which I dearly hope is not another erotic innuendo). Richter still has one final surprise up his sleeve, however, as the final "On the Grass Her Shoes of Deer-Skin" feels like a shimmering exotica-inspired mirage of a moonlit grotto. That is quite a delightful note to end on, as it makes me feel like I was just spat out onto a tropical beach by some kind of phantasmagoric theme park ride that felt like it lasted for several lifetimes (and just in time to hit the tiki bar before eagerly getting back in line to experience the whole mind-melting ride again!). This is a truly wonderful headphone album.