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 is the vinyl debut from American Primitive-inspired French guitarist Raoul Eden, but it previously surfaced as a self-released CD back in 2023 (a previous “incarnation,” if you will). That makes the chronology of Eden’s evolution a little blurry, as his other album (Anima, released on Scissor Tail) was recorded that same year. In any case, Incarnation is an absolute tour de force, as Eden tries his damndest to fill the void left by Jack Rose’s passing and gamely spices up his “primitive psychedelic blues” vision by incorporating Indian, Arabic, Turkish, Moroccan, and Taureg influences. Obviously, the solo steel string guitarist tradition of looking to the East for cool ideas goes back to at least Robbie Basho, but Eden executes that assimilation quite beautifully (and unusually seamlessly). In fact, Eden executes just about everything beautifully and that is the bit that elevates Incarnation into something quite striking and singular, as he brings an ecstatic intensity to almost every single one of these six pieces, resulting in a strain of fingerstyle guitar that often gloriously feels like a runaway train leaving a rain of sparks in its wake.
The album opens with one of its two extended centerpieces, “Red Sun of a Moonless Morning.” Clocking in at eight minutes, the piece opens with a brief and tender Middle Eastern-sounding reverie, but quickly ramps up to a feeling of breathless, unstoppable forward motion once the ringing arpeggios kick in. Naturally, there are plenty of melodies, cool virtuosic flourishes, and well-timed dynamic pauses along the way, but the best part for me is the sense of almost violent spontaneity that Eden achieves: melodies snap and twang brightly, chords slash, and the arc of the piece is unpredictable and shapeshifting in a way that feels organic and intuitive rather than composed. Given the technical demands of the piece and its seamless transitions from theme to theme, I am sure that Eden had practiced and performed the piece a hundred times before hitting “record,” but I am also sure that his muscles were tautly coiled and ready to unleash the most rapturous and volcanic version possible when that moment finally came. To some degree, Eden employs the time-tested strategy of bridging composed passages together with more free-form improvisations to give his pieces a sense of immediacy and unpredictability, but the sheer passion that Eden brings to his playing makes even the composed passages seem deeply felt, primal, and in-the-moment.
The album’s other dazzling highlight, “Beat your Head with Glorious Songs,” surfaces at the other end of the album as an emphatic closing statement (though it is followed by a brief and subdued coda, “L'Oeil se Ferme”). While the chords and melodies differ, it otherwise reprises the same winning formula of propulsive forward motion and physical intensity. Aside from that, I was pleasantly reminded that one of the perks of solo guitar performances is that an artist can unhurriedly linger on and emphasize certain moments (a rattling bass note, a swept arpeggio of harmonics, etc.) without being dragged forward by a rhythmic section or rigid time signature. Eden’s playing has some other pleasantly idiosyncratic elements as well, such as a penchant for false endings and a fondness for the occasional “wrong”-sounding note. Eden’s array of instrumentation is unusual too, as aside from the requisite “6 and 12 string guitars” and a lap steel dobro, he also plays the guembri (an Arabic bass lute) and notes that one of his guitars was modified with an extra fret for Turkish and Taureg-style “microtonal embellishments.” Eden also occasionally whips out a modular synth for subtle drones and industrial ambiance (most notably on the stark slide guitar blues of “The Ghost Hound”).
The album is rounded out with a pair of pieces (“Millions Now Living” and “Will Never Die”) that presumably nod to the apocalyptic prophecies of Joseph F. Rutherford rather than the sophisticated post-rock of Tortoise. Both are characteristically excellent and explore roughly the same half-feral/half-transcendent strain of American Primitivism as the other aforementioned highlights (and the latter being one of Eden’s more explosive performances to boot). The closing “L'Oeil se Ferme” is a bit of an outlier, however, as it is (I believe) a brief guembri improvisation over a looping industrial-sounding backdrop that arguably resembles slowed, smeared, and distorted church bells. In some ways, it is a curious choice for a closing statement, but it makes sense conceptually, as the title translates as “the eye closes,” which effectively conveys that Eden is now done “driving a vertical temporality out of history” and/or folding “time and space in intensivity” (for the time being, at least). I suspect someone could probably write an entire dissertation on Eden’s extra-musical inspirations, as Deleuze, Ibn Arabî, and Meister Eckhart all played a role in shaping his transcendent vision and that wellspring of esoteric ideas certainly led his muse to a compelling place. There is a long tradition of spiritually minded artists ranging from John Coltrane to David Tibet who have brought an ecstatic, almost possessed-sounding intensity to their work and Raoul Eden is clearly a soul who feels that same fire. This is a great album.
This latest full-length from Australian composer Madeleine Cocolas is billed as a companion piece to 2022’s acclaimed Spectral, as the two albums have something of a conceptual yin/yang relationship: Spectral was devoted to “evoking memories and emotions,” while Bodies “is about being present in your body.” The title also has a dual meaning this time around, as Cocolas sought to explore “similarities between bodies of water and human bodies” and “blur the boundaries between them.” As is the case with most conceptual inspirations behind instrumental albums, it is hard to say how much of that actually comes through in the music, but it makes for interesting contextual background and it seems to have triggered a significant creative evolution, as Madeleine makes beautiful use of manipulated field recordings. That element alone is enough to set her apart from other ambient/drone artists in the Room40 milieu, but I was also struck by her talents for sound design and virtuosic ability to interweave countless moving parts in dynamically compelling ways. At its best, Bodies feels like a minor deep listening/headphone masterpiece.
The opening “Bodies I” provides an alluring introduction to Cocolas’s current vision, as it slowly fades in as a seismic drone throb beneath gently undulating and murmuring strings lingering in a flickering state of suspended animation. Gradually, it intensifies in power and takes on a more spacy, dreamlike tone, but the overall effect is akin to that of a billowing cloud of blissed-out ambiance with a roiling and unpredictable swirl of anguish and unease at its center. It is probably one of the most mesmerizing headphone pleasures on the album, but the following “Drift” is a similarly inspired slow burn. For one, it is the first piece to noticeably involve water sounds and her talent for sound design transforms those sounds into something that feels wonderfully immersive, viscous, and physical. “Drift” is also an unusually melodic piece, as a pulsing organ melody is gradually fleshed out with warm, rich chords. Also unusual: the chords and melody predictably steal the focus initially, but closer listening reveals a vivid psychotropic wonderland beneath the surface, as the layers of moving parts increasingly bend, smear, pan, change speeds, change rhythms, and organically ebb and flow around the melody. To my ears, that is what makes Madeleine Cocolas’s work feel like something special and singular: her genius for weaving together richly detailed layers of continually evolving field recordings, processed voices, and electronic instruments into a seamless organic fantasia.
The following “The Creek” can reasonably be described as a more sensuous and ambient-adjacent variation on the same themes (viscous water sounds, slow-motion drone swells, shimmering dreaminess, etc.), but the album’s second half descends into more darkly lysergic terrain. The biggest surprise is “A Current Runs Through,” which opens with gnarly feedback blooms and a slowed down heartbeat before expanding into smoldering doom metal chords. That is merely the foundation, however, as she pulls off some truly gorgeous sorcery with chords converging and resolving in unusual ways. “Exhale” heads even deeper into the darkness, landing somewhere between a chopped-and-screwed Coil, a demon visitation during sleep paralysis, and the lonely final breaths of someone in a shuddering ice cave as an extradimensional portal yawns into being. The final “Bodies II” then brings the album to a close with a different flavor of darkness, alternately resembling a deconstructed giallo soundtrack, a haunted parking garage groaning to life, a fog-shrouded folk horror moor, and a fading phantom broadcast from deep space.
To Cocolas’s credit, all six pieces on Bodies are absorbing and masterfully executed enough to make picking a favorite a challenge. Normally, I am not someone who goes into raptures over sound design, but this album is a rare exception where the mixing and production are impressive enough to eclipse the compositions themselves (in a good way). In the album description, Madeleine notes that when she listens to these pieces, she imagines herself floating on her back with her“ears half submerged in the water, being pulled back and forth by currents and tides with a sense of vulnerability and release.” While I don’t think anyone has ever managed to successfully capture that sensation in album form, Madeleine Cocolas probably comes closer than just about anyone (just like it is damn near impossible to paint anything as beautiful as a real sunset, it is a mighty tall order to record something more impressive than an actual ocean). That said, I genuinely love how Madeleine makes water sound on this album, but I am even more impressed by how she has brilliantly mirrored some of its physical traits in the structure of these pieces (fluid, cyclical transformations; a sense of immersion; the dissolution of clear boundaries between layers). Cocolas is definitely onto something wonderful here.
After teasingly releasing a pair of soundtracks under his given name, Adam Wiltzie's latest solo album marks a return (of sorts) to the ambient/drone terrain of his beloved former duo with the late Brian McBride (Stars of the Lid). Unsurprisingly, the titular barbiturate/anesthetic deserves some credit for inspiring this shift in direction, as Wiltzie sometimes yearns for a "sacred escape" from the "daily emotional meat grinder of life," but the album also drew inspiration from his recent move to the Flemish countryside and a recurring dream ("if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die"). Based on my own listening experience, I can tentatively say that the album is probably not lethal (outside of dreams, at least) and also that it will presumably delight those Wiltzie fans who have been patiently longing for such a "return to form." That said, Wiltzie's vision is characteristically a bit of an understated one, so the pleasures of Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal tend to be subtle, ephemeral, and sneakily slow-burning ones.
The album opens with quite a varied and impressive four-song run of absolutely sublime, slow-motion beauty beginning with the enigmatically titled "Buried At Westwood Memorial Park, In An Unmarked Grave, To The Left Of Walter Matthau." The piece opens in somewhat unsettling and vaguely menacing fashion with eerie whines and seething ambiance, but soon blossoms into brighter, warmer territory once the strings come in (Wiltzie enhanced his home studio recordings with orchestral recordings made in Budapest at Hungary's former national radio facility). Once all the various elements are properly in place, the piece gradually achieves quite a wonderful strain of slow-motion grandeur that feels akin to a bittersweet sunset. That is admittedly textbook "Stars of the Lid" terrain, but Wiltzie's solo muse rarely lingers anywhere predictable or safe for long: the piece also features a dissolving middle section and a healthy amount of bending, smearing dissonance and tension (though the final section returns to shimmering beauty in a big way). My dark horse favorite on the album is the following "Tissue of Lies," however. Much like the opener, it opens in deceptively predictable fashion, but then an absolutely gorgeous two-chord guitar motif appears to fill the air with lingering ghost trail shimmer before abruptly disintegrating into a slow, hazy fade out (I actually shouted "Noooo!!!!" at my stereo when the transition to a third chord hit).
Notably, "Tissue of Lies" is quite an illustrative example of a sometimes fascinating and sometimes frustrating feature of this album: Wiltzie has a tendency to lull me into a drone-induced reverie before unveiling a killer set piece, but he rarely lingers around after that big reveal. As such, listening to this album feels a lot like seeing fleeting shapes cohere and dissipate in a dream fog: moments of striking beauty are always lurking just around the corner, but these songs only feel fully satisfying if I am completely immersed and attuned to Wiltzie's time-stretched wavelength when those big moments come. Wiltzie is a bit like a prickly veteran magician who is still at the top of his game, but bristles at giving audiences exactly what they want night after night. In keeping with that theme, the following "Pelagic Swell" is a shapeshifting mirage that repeatedly erupts into a wonderful churning string motif that never lingers around for more than 10 or 20 seconds, while the similarly shapeshifting ambient drift of "Stock Horror" unexpectedly culminates in a final perfect minute of gurgling and crackling menace.
The album's second half feels less uniformly strong and surprise-filled to me, but that may be in the ear of the beholder (my personal level of SotL fandom is more "casual" than "intense"). That said, the final two pieces bring the album to close with a pair of fresh highlights. On "We Were Vapourised," a roiling bass throb gradually reveals fleeting glimpses of spacy synth hallucinations, while the final "(Don't Go Back To) Boogerville" closes out the album on an unexpectedly visceral note with a churning and snarling string motif. Regrettably, it only lasts a couple of minutes, which ironically makes me want to go back to Boogerville immediately. For better or worse, that piece is a representative microcosm for the album experience, as Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal is full of great ideas that never stick around long enough to leave a deep impression (aside from the 9-minute "Westwood Memorial Park," every piece is under 5 minutes). Fortunately, it all sounds great (Loop's Robert Hampson did the mixing), so the only real caveat is that this album feels more like a killer sampler platter than a full-on meal. If some of these pieces had been allowed to stretch out and evolve more, I would probably be hailing Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal as a canonical Kranky opus, but it is damn nice to hear Wiltzie working in this vein again regardless.
My familiarity with James Vella is primarily through his role running the excellent Phantom Limb label, but that is just one facet of a varied career, as he is also a fiction writer and a member of the Canterbury-based post-rock ensemble Yndi Halda. He records as a solo artist too and has been sporadically releasing albums as A Lily for almost two decades now. Notably, Vella is also of Maltese descent, which inspired this wonderful stylistic detour: Saru l-Qamar is assembled from tapes of home recordings archived by the Maltese heritage organization Magna Żmien. Naturally, that made my ears perk up immediately, as I often enjoy the crackling and hissing escapism of dispatches from long-dead people in far-flung places, but the “oneiric bliss” of Vella’s achingly beautiful and hallucinatory collages proved to be an unexpected and welcome enhancement. This is one of my favorite albums of the year thus far.
The album’s title translates as “They Became The Moon,” which is a lovely and poetic way of saying that the lives and loves of previous generations remain part of the fabric of our lives forever (like the moon, they are “always present, but always out of reach”). Naturally, Vella’s own family surfaces (in the cover art), but the bulk of these recordings are snatches of traditional Maltese folk songs known as għana. Normally, the phrase “folk song” conveys a canon of specific songs and lyrics that have existed for generations, but għana departs from that tradition in being a malleable song form that people can use to tell their own stories. According to Vella, “from the ‘60s until the modern era, it was common for Maltese families to receive reel tapes from relatives abroad,” as that was simply how people shared news with distant friends and family. In short, Maltese people had their own cassette underground in which they regularly exchanged personalized songs with each other. Unsurprisingly, I am now retroactively mad that my own family never exchanged songs about mundane events like getting a new cat or whatever. Life could be so much more beautiful than it currently is.
Notably, the history of għana is a fascinating rabbit hole of its own, as it apparently originated as a way for Maltese women to share news and gossip as they engaged in household chores on rooftops or communal wash houses carved out of caves. One of għana’s variants in particular is Għana tal-Fatt, which is a “melancholic ballad style” that translates as “fact” and was used to share interesting or humorous stories, local news, or colorful anecdotes about the various characters in their lives. This facet alone makes me dearly wish that I spoke Maltese, as the few translations that Vella provides reveal unexpected context and meaning to these pieces (“there was a burglar in the house yesterday” being a personal favorite, though “do your utmost to spend all your money at the feast” is a close second).
The compositions themselves are simple and effective, as almost every piece is built from little more than melancholy Middle Eastern-sounding vocal loops over a synthesizer backdrop. While Vella notes that there was “minimal DAW intervention,” the vocal loops are enhanced by “a lot of audio cleaning” as well as some effects. The opening “Żeżina Ddoqq is-Sħab (Zezina Plays the Clouds)” provides a fine introduction to the album’s aesthetic, as a frayed snatches of a beautiful and sad vocal melody fitfully erupt from a muted backdrop of woozy and flicking synth shimmer. Vella subtly fleshes out the music a bit more as the piece unfolds, but the vocal sample remains the focus and gradually transforms through added harmonies and wah-wah. It feels melancholy, dreamlike, and ecstatic all at the same time and resembles some kind of space music séance with a digitized ghost, which is quite an excellent stylistic niche in my book.
The rest of the album could reasonably be described as variations on those same themes, but Vella manages to imbue each piece with its own distinct character despite his minimal palette. For example, the following “Kemm Nixtieq Li Qed (How I Wish I Was)” delves into even more hypnagogic territory, as the vocals are more submerged and the synths feel more slippery, shimmering, and viscous. Elsewhere, “Flimkien Ngħaddu Mill-Bieb (Together We Pass Through The Door)” feels almost like an autotuned outsider soul deconstruction, while “Ħajti Kollha, Qalbi (All My Life, My Heart)” feels like psychotropic drone music in flickering suspended animation. That said, I could probably write an entire paragraph about every single song on the album, as damn near every single piece features either a wonderfully haunting loop, a great spacy synth motif, or some kind of hissing and immersive textural fantasia.
In fact, it is entirely possible that the textures unexpectedly steal the show on this album, which was presumably no accident. Based on 2017’s Ten Drones on Cassetteproject (“each cassette is limited to one copy, and each cassette has a different piece taking up a complete 45 minute side”), it seems safe to say that Vella is a big fan of both physical media and cassette culture in general. As I am also a longtime fan of cassette culture, it was a legitimate delight to discover that Vella enlisted Sean McCann for the album’s mastering. I bring that up precisely because there was a brief stretch during the 2007-2012 underground cassette explosion in which it seemed like damn near every great new tape I discovered ubiquitously featured some kind of mastering/production credit for Sean McCann. For me, McCann’s mixing sorcery practically defined an era. While Saru l-Qamar was released on vinyl rather than cassette, Vella and McCann beautifully manage to recapture the same murky, hissing, and tactile magic of that brief drone/psych golden age. This album is absolutely mesmerizing (especially on headphones).
My familiarity with James Vella is primarily through his role running the excellent Phantom Limb label, but that is just one facet of a varied career, as he is also a fiction writer and a member of the Canterbury-based post-rock ensemble Yndi Halda. He records as a solo artist too and has been sporadically releasing albums as A Lily for almost two decades now. Notably, Vella is also of Maltese descent, which inspired this wonderful stylistic detour: Saru l-Qamar is assembled from tapes of home recordings archived by the Maltese heritage organization Magna Żmien. Naturally, that made my ears perk up immediately, as I often enjoy the crackling and hissing escapism of dispatches from long-dead people in far-flung places, but the “oneiric bliss” of Vella’s achingly beautiful and hallucinatory collages proved to be an unexpected and welcome enhancement. This is one of my favorite albums of the year thus far.
The album’s title translates as “They Became The Moon,” which is a lovely and poetic way of saying that the lives and loves of previous generations remain part of the fabric of our lives forever (like the moon, they are “always present, but always out of reach”). Naturally, Vella’s own family surfaces (in the cover art), but the bulk of these recordings are snatches of traditional Maltese folk songs known as għana. Normally, the phrase “folk song” conveys a canon of specific songs and lyrics that have existed for generations, but għana departs from that tradition in being a malleable song form that people can use to tell their own stories. According to Vella, “from the ‘60s until the modern era, it was common for Maltese families to receive reel tapes from relatives abroad,” as that was simply how people shared news with distant friends and family. In short, Maltese people had their own cassette underground in which they regularly exchanged personalized songs with each other. Unsurprisingly, I am now retroactively mad that my own family never exchanged songs about mundane events like getting a new cat or whatever. Life could be so much more beautiful than it currently is.
Notably, the history of għana is a fascinating rabbit hole of its own, as it apparently originated as a way for Maltese women to share news and gossip as they engaged in household chores on rooftops or communal wash houses carved out of caves. One of għana’s variants in particular is Għana tal-Fatt, which is a “melancholic ballad style” that translates as “fact” and was used to share interesting or humorous stories, local news, or colorful anecdotes about the various characters in their lives. This facet alone makes me dearly wish that I spoke Maltese, as the few translations that Vella provides reveal unexpected context and meaning to these pieces (“there was a burglar in the house yesterday” being a personal favorite, though “do your utmost to spend all your money at the feast” is a close second).
The compositions themselves are simple and effective, as almost every piece is built from little more than melancholy Middle Eastern-sounding vocal loops over a synthesizer backdrop. While Vella notes that there was “minimal DAW intervention,” the vocal loops are enhanced by “a lot of audio cleaning” as well as some effects. The opening “Żeżina Ddoqq is-Sħab (Zezina Plays the Clouds)” provides a fine introduction to the album’s aesthetic, as a frayed snatches of a beautiful and sad vocal melody fitfully erupt from a muted backdrop of woozy and flicking synth shimmer. Vella subtly fleshes out the music a bit more as the piece unfolds, but the vocal sample remains the focus and gradually transforms through added harmonies and wah-wah. It feels melancholy, dreamlike, and ecstatic all at the same time and resembles some kind of space music séance with a digitized ghost, which is quite an excellent stylistic niche in my book.
The rest of the album could reasonably be described as variations on those same themes, but Vella manages to imbue each piece with its own distinct character despite his minimal palette. For example, the following “Kemm Nixtieq Li Qed (How Much I Wish it Were So)” delves into even more hypnagogic territory, as the vocals are more submerged and the synths feel more slippery, shimmering, and viscous. Elsewhere, “Flimkien Ngħaddu Mill-Bieb (Together We Pass Through the Gate)” feels almost like an autotuned outsider soul deconstruction, while “Ħajti Kollha, Qalbi (My Whole Life, My Darling)” feels like psychotropic drone music in flickering suspended animation. That said, I could probably write an entire paragraph about every single song on the album, as damn near every single piece features either a wonderfully haunting loop, a great spacy synth motif, or some kind of hissing and immersive textural fantasia.
In fact, it is entirely possible that the textures unexpectedly steal the show on this album, which was presumably no accident. Based on 2017’s Ten Drones on Cassetteproject (“each cassette is limited to one copy, and each cassette has a different piece taking up a complete 45 minute side”), it seems safe to say that Vella is a big fan of both physical media and cassette culture in general. As I am also a longtime fan of cassette culture, it was a legitimate delight to discover that Vella enlisted Sean McCann for the album’s mastering. I bring that up precisely because there was a brief stretch during the 2007-2012 underground cassette explosion in which it seemed like damn near every great new tape I discovered ubiquitously featured some kind of mastering/production credit for Sean McCann. For me, McCann’s mixing sorcery practically defined an era. While Saru l-Qamar was released on vinyl rather than cassette, Vella and McCann beautifully manage to recapture the same murky, hissing, and tactile magic of that brief drone/psych golden age. This album is absolutely mesmerizing (especially on headphones).