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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It has somehow been seven years since this long-running Vienna trio last surfaced with 2016's stellar On Dark Silent Off, but they seem to have spent that time diligently dreaming up innovative new ways to be amazing. In a general sense, Radian's vision is not a far cry from the austere, jazz-adjacent post-rock of their celebrated labelmates Tortoise. The magic of Radian, however, lies in the band's singular attention to detail and their quixotic compulsion to continually turn sounds upside-down in imaginative feats of dynamic sorcery. The overall effect is akin to that of dub techno being made by an incredibly tight live band, but the live aspect is quite illusory, as Distorted Rooms presumably sounds almost nothing like what the band originally recorded (in fact, the band themself note that one piece "eliminates nearly all traces of the original performance"). While many of the sounds do remain present in one form or another, Radian revels in celebrating and amplifying the barely audible and non-musical bits while also eliminating or burying the louder, more traditional "rock" tropes like chords and melodies. Obviously, The Dead C have made a fine career out of similarly deconstructing and inverting rock music, but Radian are the gleaming, precision-engineered opposite of Dead C's own shambling, spontaneous, and blown-out vision.
The opening "Cold Suns" was also the album's first single, but it is unclear if it was chosen because the band believed it to be one of the most perfect distillations of their vision or if they merely thought it was one of the album's more immediately gratifying pieces. I suspect the reason may be the latter, as the album's second single "Skyskryp12" features a similar level of comparatively heightened drama. For the most part, however, "Cold Suns" offers a fairly representative first impression of Radian's current direction: gently stuttering loops, killer drumming, and a remarkably minimalist palette of guitar sounds. Unlike many other songs on the album, however, it eventually coheres into a brooding and tense chord progression, which lands the piece in somewhere near the post-punk revivalism of Moin (at least until the bottom drops out for a lengthy outro of distorted vocals, smoldering distortion, whimpering synth quivers, and broken, skeletal drums). "Skyskryp12" has a roughly similar aesthetic, but with one key difference: after it collapses upon itself, it kicks back into gear and builds towards a darkly cinematic crescendo. While both pieces are admittedly enjoyable and satisfying, however, the album's strongest pieces tend to be the ones with a bit of a lighter touch.
My personal favorite is "Stak," which also happens to be the piece in which Radian obliterated their original performance almost entirely. In place of that erased performance, Radian conjures a wonderfully seething groove of quietly thumping kick drum, skittering cymbals, insistent bass throb, and a host of subtle guitar and amp noises. To my ears, it sounds like a refreshingly novel strain of dub techno in which the omnipresent warm, hazy synth pads are jettisoned entirely for a lean, muscular and industrial-damaged groove enhanced with a host of subtly echoing and psychotropic creaks and gurgles. Unfortunately, I am not sure anyone else could replicate this particular strain of dub, as Martin Brandlmayr's virtuosic "quiet storm" drumming feels like an absolutely essential ingredient. The other big highlight is "C At The Gates," which opens in a deceptively entropic state, but gradually coheres into a pleasantly broken and jazz-inflected groove of heavy industrial textures, sludgy seismic bass, and strangled feedback.
The following "Cicada" keeps that post-punk party going a little bit longer, albeit in somewhat more stomping and driving fashion, as it calls to mind an ingeniously remixed performance of someone like Ike Yard on an especially good night. The album then closes with a bit of a departure from that winning formula in "S at the Gates," but it makes for a fitting coda, as Radian stretches and breaks their groove into a fractured, sputtering, and dissolving state of suspended animation. That one purposeful exception aside, Distorted Rooms is one killer, exactingly realized hit after another, so it looks like I will remain a devoted Radian fan for the foreseeable future. By any metric, this is an excellent album, as the trio are masters at manipulating dynamic tension, ruthlessly carving away every trace of fat in search of taut perfection, and inventively transforming familiar instruments in unexpected ways. In fact, serious fans of sound design and studio technique may very well consider this album to be a masterpiece of sorts, as this is one of the most fascinating examples in recent memory of how radically a performance by an ostensible rock band can be transformed into something sleek and futuristic through creative mic placement and unconventional mixing decisions.
As someone who has loved Cécile Schott's work since 2003's Everyone Alive Wants Answers, I have long been fascinated by the various twists and turns that her vision has undergone over the years. While there have certainly been stretches in which she has lingered upon a vision for more than one album, Schott's creative restlessness invariably steers her into adventurous and unfamiliar territory eventually. As a result, Colleen's small discography is divided into an impressive number of distinct phases (the sample-driven collage era, the viola da gamba years, the synthesizer years, etc.). In a general sense, this latest full-length (her ninth) is a continuation her recent synthesizer phase, but it is also a significant break from her previous work in that vein: Le jour et la nuit du réel is seven-suite double album of minimalist vignettes exploring how a motif can be significantly transformed through the manipulation of synthesizer settings alone. Given the fundamental constraints of that vision, the album admittedly feels a bit less substantial than several of Colleen's previous releases, but connoisseurs of nuance and elegant simplicity will find much to love.
The album's title translates as "The day and the night of reality," which is a nod to both the album's structure and its primary inspiration. The "reality" bit is a reference to how "subtle or radical" changes to synth settings can completely transform how the same melodic phrase is perceived by the listener, which Schott likens to how new information can transform our feelings about a person or situation (i.e. our perception of reality). In keeping with that theme of transformation, the album is divided into "day" and "night" LPs and the first LP concludes with a suite entitled ""Be without being seen," which is intended to function as a "twilight transition zone." According to Schott, the "day" pieces feature "more friction, tension, and abrasive timbres" in order to channel the "invigoration of daylight," while the "night" pieces feature "slower, more melancholy textures and longer trails of delay." Being a longtime fan of both melancholy and trails of delay, I personally prefer the album's second half, but both sides of the album share a hell of a lot more common ground than they do differences: every single piece on the album is essentially a simple melody unspooling over a shifting bed of arpeggios. Schott's gear was similarly stripped down, as the entire album was recorded analog-style with just a Moog Grandmother synth and two delays (Roland RE-201 Space Echo and "her trusted Moogerfooger Analog Delay") and "no additional digital production." Interestingly, this album is the first entirely instrumental album that Schott has recorded in well over a decade, but it began its life as an "an album of songs with lyrics in the style of her previous album," so Schott's muse definitely led her quite far from where she originally intended to go (and I suspect this new vision must have been considerably more challenging to realize than what she originally had planned).
For me, the centerpiece of the album is the five-part "Les parenthèses enchantées" suite, which Schott named for a French idiom that means "a beautiful moment destined to end soon." The suite is certainly beautiful and ephemeral enough to justify its title, but its duration (around 20 minutes) actually makes it the longest suite on the album by a significant margin. Lurking within those 20 minutes are both of the album's most sublime highlights. In the first, "Movement I," Schott delves into decidedly Satie-esque territory, as an understated melody quietly unfolds over a simple arpeggio pattern with appropriately wistful results (and the occasional trilling and fluttering flourishes leave behind a lovely vapor trail of hazy delay). Unsurprisingly, "Movement III" shares a similar mood, but features considerably more flickering and stuttering in its central melody, which gives it an unusually spontaneous, vibrant, and unpredictable feel.
Naturally, the other six suites have their own character and beautiful moments as well (the two-part "The long wait" being another favorite), but Schott's larger achievement lies in how masterfully she manipulates her synth and delay settings to seamlessly move between moods ranging from dreamy calliope to glassy murmurs of feedback to something resembling laptop-ravaged banjo (as well as quite a few other places that elude easy description). I was briefly tempted to observe that the album's other caveat besides Schott's aggressively minimal "nothing but a synth and some delay played in real-time" vision is that several pieces are far too brief to leave a deep impression, but I ultimately decided that she intuitively knew when to end each piece before it started to overstay its welcome. Also, it does not matter if there are six or seven 1-minute pieces if the album itself adds up to a substantial and dynamically satisfying whole (which it does). Consequently, the only real caveat here is that Schott achieved something both wonderful and highly specific, so how much one loves this album is entirely dependent on how much one appreciates her craft and virtuosic attention to detail: other Colleen albums may have more memorable or more moving songs, but no Colleen album can boast stronger performances or a more focused vision. It remains to be seen whether or not Le jour et la nuit du réel will someday become one of my own favorite Colleen releases, but I do feel confident in stating that is a gorgeously realized work of art, as I can think of very few other artists who could weave a few simple melodies, patterns, and arpeggios into a unique and quietly mesmerizing tour de force of perfect, uncluttered elegance like this one.
Well known for his time in Dead World, as a member of synth trio Nightmares, and his deactivated power electronics project Deathpile, Jonathan Canady has long been a pillar of the American noise world. Now working under his own name, he has recently entered the world of soundtracks and participated in an extremely limited collaboration with legendary artist John Duncan. Suffering and Defiance is his latest purely solo, purely audio work, and it loses none of the harshness he is known for, yet makes it clear his work is anything but harshness for the sake of harshness.
There is no question what the album is going to be like from the opening moments of "Suffering and Defiance Part I": woozy, overdriven noise loops appear immediately, pushing the whole mix into the red. However, there is much more going on beyond just noise. The second part of the title piece appears later on the CD, a rumbling crunch with sustained, sizzling buzz that demonstrates an excellent use of layering and audio textures.
"Invincible Crisis" is similar, but even with a blasted out later of distortion the depth is evident, and with sputtering, wet noises added, the complexity is fascinating. There is less of an apparent loop structure, and oddly enough the more expansive dynamic gives an almost pleasant, welcoming feel to the otherwise unwelcome mood. "Overcome by Catastrophe" (both Parts I and II) go back to more rhythmic, looping structures, but the more apparent droning synth that permeates both segments are excellent standouts.
Of course, there are moments where pure onslaught is the intent, and "Continuously Abused" is one of those moments. Overall, there is a looser, more raw structure, with lots of noise blasts and bursts. The panned helicopter-like noise layers adds complexity, but brutality is obviously the intent. As a whole, Canady focuses more on structure and depth on the disc, such as the sputtering rhythms and heavy stereo effects throughout "Conflict Operation Indicator" where the abrasiveness is apparent, but there is a lot more going on simultaneously.
The CD ends with two lengthy (just shy of 15 minutes each) compositions that were originally recorded separately and released as the digital only Present Shock EP from 2020. With both being live to two track recordings with limited gear, the overall feel is rather different from the album proper. "The Immediate Future" is an expansive of echoing reverberations, with fragments of voice popping up here and there, and eventually chugging noises that stutter and fade away. "Violence Today" drones and swells, with heavy tape echoes leading to an uneasy ambience. Synths sweep and clang as the piece eventually relents to an overdriven crunch to end the disc.
Superficially resembling an aggressive noise record, Jonathan Canady does so much more with those rudimentary elements on Suffering and Defiance. Not in the sense of a massive wall of noise obscuring details, but instead he mixes and layers the elements beautifully. Taking those rudimentary layers of sound and constructing something with so much more depth, it makes for a carefully nuanced mix that can still blow out speakers if someone isn't careful with that volume knob.
This is a weird one. Billed as a film soundtrack—although I cannot seem to find any evidence of the film actually existing—this tape from enigmatic UK artist Grey Windowpane is all over the place as far as styles go. Free improvisation electronics, bedroom pop numbers, and random interludes are all scattered about this cassette. The lo-fi sound and production serve as a unifying factor on these 11 songs, giving an slight sense of continuity within the chaos.
Loose, drifting noises are a constant from piece to piece: they underscore the crusty organ of "C.E. Last Hurry CUF," the precursor to the churning loops of "Manny Soaked My Arm in There," and as part of the open space and random voices of "Jubilee." There are other, more chaotic pieces, such as the clattering thumping collage of the aforementioned "Manny" feature hints of musical tones and melody, but never quite get there.
The biggest highlights on this tape for me are when Grey Windowpane makes overtures towards conventional music. The layered vocals and stiff beat of "Oh, Here's My Skull" is pure bedroom four-track aesthetics, but the chiming melody is infectious to say the least. "Barnie Bewail" is also straight-ahead synth pop demo track work, with an insistent drum machine and raw vocals extremely up front in the mix. Closing "In a Fantasy (Livin')" brings that feel back to end the tape, all overdrive keyboards and gauzy, processed guitar melodies fleshing things out.
Whether an actual or an imaginary soundtrack, Barnie Bewail is an enjoyable piece of strangeness. With little information available on the artist or their other works, the mystery just adds to the off-kilter vibe throughout here. Unpredictable, bizarre, but totally fun, the sprawling aversion to genre boundaries are what solidifies this tape as a great one.
I enjoyed Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf's gnarled, doom-soaked debut Big Other (2020) quite a bit, but I enjoyed it in a casual way and failed to truly grasp the full extent of his singular and ambitious vision. While that situation has thankfully been remedied by this latest opus, the music of Internal Return is just one piece of a much larger and more complex ambition that incorporates Jewish tradition, artificial intelligence, video art, and a uniquely disturbing visual aesthetic that resembles a vivid sci-fi nightmare that blurs together several dystopian cinematic futures at once. Curiously, when taken by itself, the music of Internal Return is more elusive and ambiguous than its more crushing and epic predecessor. When combined with Rosendorf's AI-created videos, however, Internal Return transforms into a viscerally unsettling mindfuck that will probably haunt me for weeks. As Rosendorf himself puts it: "It is not a comfortable place to be in, at least not exactly; like being adrift in an imageless dream, it produces monsters of a kind that, once they are receding into memory, we get the sense they were not actually terrifying, just... strange." Hopefully, those monsters will recede into memory for me soon, as I am still very much lingering in the "terrified" stage for now.
As was the case with Big Other, Rosendorf enlisted an eclectic array of talented guests to help him realize his vision and Tzadik/Davka alum Daniel Hoffman kicks off the album with a fiery klezmer-informed violin solo over a roiling bed of doom-inspired drones. As Rosendorf sees it, Hoffman's violin acts as "a furious, yet frail guiding voice in a void" while "the music treads a path that you cannot follow, one that arbitrarily narrows down, twists and turns whenever you're certain you have it right." He also compares the underlying music to a series of depth charges and "an apocalypse in miniature," which sounds about right to me. Without the accompanying videos, Internal Return feels like being trapped in a crumbling and haunted fun house: it approximates a labyrinth of darkly surreal scenes that feel more like fleeting, enigmatic impressions than compositions with a deliberate dynamic arc or cathartic payoff. There is one exception, however, as the album's smoldering final drone epic ("Immer Besser") tags in Liturgy drummer Greg Fox for a ferociously volcanic crescendo of sludgy doom metal chords and machine-like blast beats. That piece is the closest thing that Internal Return has to a single, as the remaining pieces are too deconstructed to make a deep impact outside their intended context (musically, at least).
Within the context of the album, however, there are a number of other compelling pieces to be found. In particular, I am especially fond of some of Rosendorf's piano pieces, such as the understated noir jazz of "Shûb" (gradually consumed by a howling void) and the seething melancholy chamber music of "Heave" (ripped apart by a howling maelstrom of feedback). Elsewhere, the tender "Rückkehr" reprises the noir jazz mood of "Shûb," but uncharacteristically avoids being ripped apart, blown out, or otherwise ravaged and provides an unexpectedly pleasant late-album respite of sorts. Conversely, "Tacheles" is pure glorious ruin, landing somewhere between burning planes falling from the sky in extreme slow motion and the hull of a cavernous empty spaceship bending and warping as it is dragged into a black hole.
For me, however, Rosendorf's most striking and impressive achievement is "Wave Offering." On the album, it does not necessarily stand out all that much from the surrounding pieces (a gently undulating drone gets slowly consumed by a nightmarish squall of noise and distortion), but it becomes a mind-wrecking tour de force of psychotropic horror when combined with the accompanying video (shapeshifting fungal landscapes, grotesque hands, all-enveloping spore clouds, mysterious obelisks, eerie golden light, etc.). In fact, it feels more like an exceedingly dread-filled and prophetic dispatch from a (mostly) post-human future than a mere music video and Rosendorf impressively transforms AI-generated art's limitations into an asset, masterfully wielding the uncanny valley of the almost real for maximum unnerving discomfort. If I had seen that video in the middle of the night when I was an adolescent, I would probably still feel traumatized and unsettled by it today. Notably, that is not the case with most other sci-fi dystopias that I have encountered (aside from possibly the first two Alien films), so Rosendorf is definitely onto something wonderfully fucked up and profound with his disturbingly ungraspable and impressionistic nightmarescapes.