Gig #131: Of late 40: Maria w Horn, Kai Whiston, Shohei Amimori, Icky Reels, Ricardo Dias Gomes, Teresa Winter, Overlook, White Boy Scream, Jasmine Guffond, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Machine Girl, Swan Meat, Klara Lewis & Simon Fisher Turner

Maria w Horn
Kai Whiston
Shohei Amimori
Icky Reels
Ricardo Dias Gomes
Teresa Winter
Overlook
White Boy Scream
Jasmine Guffond
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu
Machine Girl
Swan Meat
Klara Lewis & Simon Fisher Turner

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Maria w Horn Ångermanländska Bilder
‘Ångermanländska Bilder is an Audiovisual Piece that was commissioned by the Art Museum in Härnösand in 2017. The commission was part of a larger project where several composers and visual artists with connections to the area were invited create something based on material found in their main collection – Quistska samlingen. Maria w Horn has been using Super-8 footage that depicts the environment of Ångermanland from 1930-1940. The video is a sort of documentation over the the manor houses of the rural community, the steamboats transporting timber along the river, also their sawmill before and after its closure. The piece is composed using the EMS Buchla 200, a reel to reel tape machine and archival field recordings.’ — 4:3

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Kai Whiston Mushy Seize
‘There’s something painterly about 19 year-old producer Kai Whiston’s hyper-surrealist beat music, with each sound being contorted and manipulated to the point that would rather reflect the mark-making of a De Kooning piece than any genre-focused electronic scenes. After exploring the ideas of adolescent fury on ‘Fissure Price’ EP –Released on Big Dada last year– and facing the dramas of the UK justice system after a brief false imprisonment, Whiston’s rupturing abrasion refuses to take it’s foot off the pedal. Across 40 minutes, his maximalist pastiche spans across the entire LP, drawing fractured influences from Arca, Hudson Mohawke, Death Grips, Timbaland, nu-metal and so much more.’ — Fissure Price

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Shohei Amimori Coincidental Planet
‘While having an academic background, Shohei Amimori is a composer that takes part in various scenes from pop music to contemporary art. Between his various activities such as exhibitions of two sound installations, presentation of orchestral works in the contemporary music scene and participating in the music production of television programs, Amimori finished his new album for the first time in two years since his previous release of SONASILE. Approaching from various angles the “abstractness of music itself”, this album’s concept is a bold hypothesis that “music does not yet exist ? imaginary music ? PATA MUSIC”. Compared to his previous work which had a strong electronic taste, his challenging new album intentionally eliminates unity and direction; it is a collection of straightforward pop rock music sung by himself, cinematic music that incorporates string quartets and experimental music that uses pitch circularity and phase transformation.’ — nobel label

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Icky Reels Large Sorry
‘Without much fanfare, Adrian Bertolone has been making some of the freshest, most intriguing electronic music on the scene. Also a talented visual artist, Bertolone made his bones with Cleveland, Ohio’s Jerk — a gnashing, tempestuous noise rock group that centered on cheap and barely-functioning electronic gear systemically deconstructed by Bertolone and his bandmates. Rarely did a gig pass without some patched-together keyboard or synth ending up in the junk pile. But throughout Jerk’s decade-long existence, Adrian was concocting addictive, spastic, hypermelodic digital music under the calling card Ay/fast. Periodically, CDRs and files would leak out and make bigger name artists look foolish and boring.’ — Schematic

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Ricardo Dias Gomes 1 2 3 Nenéns
‘Ricardo Dias Gomes returns with a new full-length of experimental compositions. Following up on 2015’s critically-acclaimed “-11”, heralded as a “weirdly hermetic sound world, alternating between tender, introspective ballads, rude electronic grooves, and dissonant ambience” by the Chicago Reader’s Peter Margasak among others, Aa continues Gomes’ intimate explorations of sound. This time, Gomes opts to collaborate with other like-minded aficionados including Moreno Veloso, Pedro Sá, and Arto Lindsay, who was a particularly guiding force in the creation of Aa. Inimitable, unplaceable, and beautiful,’ — Kill Shaman

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Teresa Winter For Murder
‘Breathtaking bad dream of a second album by Teresa Winter for The Death of Rave; a uniquely allegorical study in female sexuality and occult, transgressive fascinations that comes highly recommended if youre into Cosey Fanni Tutti, Coil, Jani Christou or Jean Rollin.’ — ÜBERMENSCH

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Overlook There Was Truth And There Was Untruth
‘Overlook is one of the most talented producers on UVB-76. Along with label alumnus Pessimist, he’s making waves outside the drum & bass community. Public Image is Overlook’s latest EP. The title track’s pacey, Downwards-informed drum beat disappears, only to crash back in with a whip-cracking rhythm that sounds like it’s trying to break free of its confines. Atmosphere and mood are also weapons in Overlook’s hands. “Deja Vu” feels like the kind of ambient track that would open a techno album, but it’s expanded into something substantial, with bass pulses that hit as viscerally as any kick drum. “There Was Truth And There Was Untruth” might be the most exciting cut. Its drumbeat is more diffuse and dubby than its counterparts, but the dungeon synths and cavernous atmospheres make it imposing.’ — Resident Advisor

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White Boy Scream Thou
‘Micaela Tobin is a classically trained soprano and sound artist who makes her own hybrid of noise-opera under the moniker “White Boy Scream” as a process of reclaiming and reconciling the construct of the “diva”. Her latest release, “Remains” is an accumulation of pieces composed between 2015-2017 that bear witness to her unique process of dissecting her operatic voice through the use of electronic fx pedals. The album itself serves as a tender and abstracted dedication to the poetry of a late friend.’ — CMS

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Jasmine Guffond Degradation Loops #3
‘Engaging the process of bit crushing, in “Degradation Loops” the sampling rate and bit depth of the audio signal is step by step, gradually, and completely reduced. The algorithmic unraveling of these tracks renders them increasingly discordant and unpredictable as time passes. Using intricate and highly articulate audio loops from an existing authored work, sound gradually becomes noise. Beauty is broken down allowing another type of beauty to emerge. By deliberately deconstructing the audio signal of otherwise highly deliberative compositions, “Degradation Loops” speaks to a contemporary audio realm where principles of High Definition dominate, in an overall musicscape preconceived as uniform.’ — karl records

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Wume Gold Leaf
‘Towards the Shadow is at its best when the music reflects the subject matter’s balance of heady complexity and emotional urgency. The majority of the songs are written in odd time signatures, but the effect is largely thrilling rather than obtuse. Synthesist and keyboard player Albert Schatz is a master of skewed melody, injecting each song with intricate, subtle details that seem not only natural but engrossing. On the instrumental “Ravel” he takes simple melodic fragments and twists them into different shapes, providing several layers of counterpoint for each iteration. Camlin’s drumming is ecstatic but precise, arriving at a midpoint between Can’s Jaki Liebezeit and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger.’ — Jonathan Williger

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Kyary Pamyu Pamyu Kimino Mikata
‘Like many Japanese artists, commercial ties in Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s music are so many, so numerous, and so gauche that they surpass gaucheness. Constantly entangled in webs of advertisement, she nonetheless maintains a weirdness that is unimaginable for an artist of similar stature in the Anglosphere. Camp rejects elitism; it is a taste in the arts of the masses. And as for boredom — it’s refreshing, today, to hear these straight-up bangers that eschew the snoozeworthy midtempos of most contemporary pop and the eternally suspended buildups of recent PC Music pop-oriented fare.’ — Rowan Savage

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Machine Girl This is Your Face on Dogs
‘Traversing the history of punk, the opening 30 seconds explode from the distant beating of drums to the synthesized onslaught of sequenced drums. The tensions between punk and dance music that haunted post-punk — with its gentrified visions of funk, “world music,” and pop, and its eventual copout in New Wave — are eviscerated. Machine Girl, now expanding to a duo and incorporating live drumming, does not give a shit about this history. Instead, on their new album The Ugly Art, the dividing line between hardcore and underground dance music dissolves, replaced by the amorphous blur between mosh pit and gabber dance.’ — David Farrow

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Swan Meat Lisp
‘The producer’s by-now signature crashing drums and stacked arrangements of noisy fragments join waves of theatrical, MIDI strings, sprinklings of 8-bit-inspired synths, and what she calls “a common sonic milieu that calls to mind early PS1 boss battles without feeling super obvious or referential.” She cites games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Don’t Starve as influences for these songs, especially the plucky “Flying Ants Waltz,” which rush at you, suddenly, like two magnets drawn into each other’s force fields. They snap against your back, bow-and-arrow style, or your hip, sword-like, with as much crisp force as the “bombastic, cinematic taiko hits” that clap throughout the release. A “repeated vocaloid voice,” which first appears on “Lullabye” and later on “Lisp,” haunts like a potentially helpful, potentially harmful spirit, as it sings, for example, “I feel sick for so long/ I search for help/ But the lullaby plays on.”’ — COOKCOOK

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Klara Lewis & Simon Fisher Turner Tank
‘Embracing dualities and paradoxes of nature and technology, gender and age, aggression and fragility, the pair bring the best out of each in four expansive parts, where Fisher Turner brings over 40 years experience between pop, post-punk and the avant-garde to Klara Lewis’ fine-tuned ear for field recordings and her diaphanous production palette. ‘Tank’ ventures into into the Middle East with the buzz of kids singing soon enough cut short by politically timed ballistics, leaving listens reeling in a fizzing mid-air streaked by stressed strings and a plangent Arabic vocal that leads into Muslimgauze-like dub rhythm and a gorgeous electronica coda.’ — boomkat

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p.s. RIP Lorna Doom. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. How did the zine class go today? So cool. I watched part of the debate pre: the no confidence vote last night, and the combination of excessive decorum and totally babyish behavior in the UK parliament is completely wacko. It’s true that it feels a bit like pulling teeth to even think about willingly listen to anyone do ‘Halleluja’ at this point, but I’m intrigued, okay. I’ll try. Thanks, pal. ** Josh D, Well, hi, Josh! A rare and lovely pleasure. Your book! Cursed or not, I’m ultra-happy that it’s in the world. I will of course go partake as soon as I’m out of here and have answered a few urgent emails. Cool. Everyone, Joshua Dalton, a near-lifelong d.l. of this blog and a fantastic writer, has a new and very long awaited book available to read at a finger’s touch. It has the great title ‘i hate you, please read me’, and I so highly recommend you use this rare opportunity to luxuriate in Mr. Dalton’s work. Do so right here. Thanks, man! Exciting! ** James, They say coincidence is a … I forget. Rough and deep with your father. I feel you. Well, I think if you believe death means relocating to a wonderful, druggy, locale of some sort, death can seem theme park-like. If you think you’re about to be nothing and gone, it’s not so easy to surrender to. I guess. Thing/time with your rapping nephew sounds like big fun. No, ‘PGL’ doesn’t have any merch. Can’t imagine it ever will, well, unless a DVD counts. Very safe and swift trip home. Love, me. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yeah, I dig that film too. I did in fact do a Day on Michael Gothard some time ago. I’ll go see if it’s salvageable and restorable. Funny, LA rain being a preventative, but, yeah. Surely someone will have iPhoned Gary. ** Amphibiouspeter, Hi there. It’s great to see you! I’m pretty good, thanks. And thanks about ‘God Jr.’, and yeah, about the leaking obsessions. The Brexit seems as nuts as anything could possibly be. Excellent news about your writing becoming more available to you. Heavy encouragement and interest from me, of course. Hope to see you again soon, and, yeah, take care. ** rewritedept, Hi, Chris! Great that you can come see the film. And I think Puce Mary is going to do a music set after the screening, which should be amazing. I’m not sure about hanging out time. My schedule is getting being figured out for me. Curious what the Jawbox reunion will be like, although I seriously doubt they’ll make it over here. GbV are playing in London in June, their first trip overseas in 18 years, and you can bet I’ll be taking a little trip over there for that. Paris is fine. The powder keg aspect is interesting. I’m in Paris, but going to London next week for the ‘PGL’ screening there then to the West Coast for the screenings there. Love, me. ** Steve Erickson, I hope your cold has vamoosed. I’ll look for the Nuri Bilge Ceylan film, naturally. Sounds very interesting. ** Brendan, Hey, hey, B! Jeez, I’m really glad you’re out the other end of the bad health stint. And excited about your stuff’s new ideas. Cool, cool, thanks for getting a ticket. Like I said up above, I think Puce Mary is going to do a set after the screening, and that’ll make it a real shebang. Can’t wait to see you too! ** Bill, Nor was he on mine until the commissioner directed me to spotlight him. Great about the upcoming projects! Can you say more? ** Misanthrope, My mom liked/read Chopra. That’s how I know. I like Yoko’s music, well, only the very early avant-screaming stuff, but her ‘wise’ aphorisms are mystically phrased cliches. Ha ha, your Trump imitation is just uncanny! Kidding. Duh. Devoting a little time every day to your writing, even if it’s just daydreaming time, is a big key to getting things done, I think. So, cool. ** tender prey, Hi, Marc. Oh, wow, your reminder of that ‘O Lucky Man’ scene just brought a bit of shuddering back to my fore. So, yes. And, yes, it’ll be cool to talk to you about the thing I mentioned. And to see you! Have a fine, Brexit-scrubbed day! ** Okay. I made you one of my basically monthly gigs starring recent music I’ve been into and that I feel like sharing. So have at it or, I guess, don’t, if you insist. See you tomorrow.