Author: DC (Page 1082 of 1133)

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Rafael Anton Irisarri Hiatus
‘Recorded over the past two years, the record bares the marks of difficult terrains – personal, political, social and cultural. It tips its hat to the complex and unpredictable dynamics of the contemporary world, correlating concerns both macro and micro. Compositionally the music mirrors the tensions of contemporary America, contrasting passages of great beauty and calm with harrowing waves of density and pressure. A Fragile Geography also charts Rafael Anton Irisarri’s personal journey of transience and tumult. His entire studio, audio archives, and possessions were stolen while moving from Seattle to New York, forcing him to rebuild from ground zero. But such a tabula rasa moment also brought with it a chance for renewal, and for reductive experimentation. This experience birthed a range of fresh approaches and ideas, many of which became central to the aesthetic pillars of this record. Empire Systems, the album’s centerpiece, perfectly encapsulates this mood of flux: a rich and harmonically saturated monolith of sound, restless and constantly reaching outwards.’ –– Room 40

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Stara Rzeka Małe świerki
‘The disconnect between virtual and physical realities has been a prevalent theme in art and philosophy since the first humans closed their eyes, and realised the images don’t necessarily disappear. Even so, it feels of even greater importance to the 21st century human being. Via digital pathways we wander a multitude of astral planes – of our very own making no less – and though largely free from the tyrannical shackles of organised religion, we remain irrevocably interleaved with some non-physical form of existence. Music itself is perhaps more trapped between real and imaginary worlds than any other art form, often manifesting itself merely as vibrations in the air; digitised recordings of recordings of recordings of amplified strings channeled through pickups. Kuba Ziołek’s choice with Stara Rzeka to examine these themes via the medium of music then, is as odd as it is apt. Speaking to Joseph Burnett for tQ back in 2013, Ziołek explained: “material objects are not the neutral background of our lives, they constitute our world and our thinking of ourselves,” and that certainly unlocked some of the mystery behind the patchwork of first Stara Rzeka album Cień chmury nad ukrytym polem, where semblances of soaring black and drone metal, psychedelic folk, and electronic pop all coalesced into something of a drifting album length suite, yet feelings of longing, and sheer brutal reality shone throughout.’ — Tristan Bath, The Lead Review

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Why Be WHALIN
‘Snipestreet is as diseased as it is utilitarian. His rhythms generate in a manner that calls to mind the “naturalism” of stark hardware manipulation, yet there is clear digital degradation interspersed through his free use of sampled sounds that pockmark driving kicks, hi-hats, and claps. He plays with tempo modulation amidst cinematic atmospheres and often breaks firm patterns with unexpected whip cracks or Noh woodblocks. Opening track “Heroin Hat” is a fantastic revision of the groove. The kick descends heavy on the one amongst marimba covalently arpeggiated alongside the free-play of an open hi-hat; the hat is warped in such a way to suggest a breathy human voice. Intermittently, there are impact sounds culled from pirate-able sample packs, cuts of glass breaking, or pitched voices — classic rack sounds that are used both rhythmically and abstractly, not unlike the way Actress deconstructed hi-hats and fragile rack tools on R.I.P. Similarly, “Deeq” extends a driving 130bpm kick that flips forward alongside the chant of the “Ha,” the classic sample fueling a ravaged, scorched tonality. “Late (Laser Ha)” re-imagines the stomp into an anime-style “Ha” that enlivens the beat within the martial atmosphere of colored hair and blood-soaked bandages wrapped around clenched fists.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Oneohtrix Point Never Mutant Standard
‘Challenging listeners, intentionally or otherwise, has been a part of the 0PN aesthetic for some time. His last album (and debut for electronic stalwart Warp Records), 2013’s critically acclaimed R Plus Seven, was comprised of strangely melodic soundscapes that made for difficult listening. With Garden of Delete, out November 13, Lopatin seems keen to work against that standard, applying more rock components to his far-out, ambient style. The alien tale is actually intended to make his work more accessible. In telling the story of Ezra, who tries to be human but fails, Lopatin is attempting an autobiography of sorts, one dating back to his 1990s adolescence. “I am contemplating the person I was when I was starting to have autonomy over my own tastes in music,” he explains, building fiction out of whatever memories he can conjure. He’s comparing literal alienness to that teenage feeling of being an outsider, of not fitting in. Rejecting romantic nostalgia, Lopatin recalls watching MTV in th
e days of grunge as a melancholic experience, where the hip insider nature of its music coverage made him feel even more isolated. “I was never really in on anything,” he says.’ — Vulture

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Love August
‘By mid-1968, Arthur Lee was the only remaining member of the Forever Changes line-up of Love. Three LPs worth of material were recorded in a makeshift studio in a Los Angeles warehouse, with Elektra Records given the rights to first choice of tracks to fulfill Lee’s contractual obligation, and the remainder released as the Blue Thumb LP Out Here. For the album, Lee utilized double vocalization. He would play a vocal, and overdub it with another similar sounding one.’ — collaged

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Floating Points Untitled
‘It was the arrival of a Studer A80 master recorder at the front door of Sam Shepherd – otherwise known as Floating Points – that caused him to begin building the studio that led to the creation of his debut album, Elaenia (due out via Pluto in the UK and Luaka Bop in the US on 6 November). After a slight miscalculation meant that he could not physically get the thing inside his home, what happened next can only be described as a beautiful example of the butterfly effect. Breaking away from making electronic music on his laptop, the DJ, producer and composer spent the next five years engineering Elaenia, all the while deejaying in cities across the globe and working towards his PhD in neuroscience. An incredibly special album that draws inspiration from classical, jazz, electronic music, soul and even Brazilian popular music, Elaenia – named after the bird of the same name – is the epitome of the forward-thinking Floating Points vision in 2015.’ — LUAKA BOP

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Rival Consoles Walls
‘When one thinks of the consistently brilliant Erased Tapes label, it’s the likes of Nils Frahm or Peter Broderick that spring to mind first. While this is for good reason, it is easy to avoid the fact that it was Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, who was the imprint’s first signing. On his multiple releases for the label, West has established Rival Consoles as arguably the most texturally vibrant artist on the roster, each output bursting with rich electronic soundscapes and immersive glitchy aesthetics. Howl continues along the same innovative path that Rival Consoles has been heading down for some years now, delving into further levels of emotional depth in the process. There are other parallels to be drawn with some of the electronic world’s best-known innovators; Autechre, Aphex and Clark to name but a few. Yet Rival Consoles consistently demonstrates so much depth of character through unexpected combinations of sonic textures and very visual, almost tactile soundscapes that ensure that Howl is a welcome addition to the genre rather than a simple supplement.’ — The 405

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Dan Friel Life (Pt. 2), live
‘Dan Friel creates intense, colorful and intricate instrumentals that, for all their complexity, are melodic pop songs. Equally at home in the DIY scene and the contemporary art world, Friel has been at the forefront of a movement of musicians who create dance music with a clear affinity for the extremes of noise and metal, eschewing the traditional dance clubs and adhering to the ethics of the underground. On his sophomore Thrill Jockey album Life, Friel uses his surprisingly small arsenal of gear to distort and maneuver his beloved Yamaha Portasound into an expansive sound that is incredibly varied in tone and texture. This toy keyboard, his first instrument, is manipulated beyond recognition to create songs that are frenzied and epic. Life also has moments that are incredibly sweet, idyllic, and fragile – sentiments that make perfect sense coming from a new father whose instrument of choice is his childhood keyboard.’ — Thrill Jockey

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Jefferson Airplane Two Heads
‘The adventurous Airplane took unprecedented liberties on record and in concert. Kantner came from a folk background, Kaukonen was a blues aficionado, Casady grew up playing R&B;, and Dryden boasted jazz training in his background. Balin was a pop crooner and Slick’s tastes were literary and offbeat. These various strands, brought together in the heady, experimental cauldron of San Francisco in the mid-Sixties, made for an electrifying union that moved rock music a few giant steps forward. The five Jefferson Airplane albums released from 1967 to 1969 – Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing at Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, Bless Its Pointed Little Head and Volunteers – rank among the worthiest bodies of work of that or any decade. Appearing in late 1967, after the bloom was off the flower power-themed Summer of Love, After Bathing at Baxter’s caught the Airplane at a creative zenith. An uncompromising psychedelic manifesto, its songs were clustered into five “suites” that ran for up to twelve minutes. The inspired songwriting, most of it by Paul Kantner, captured the agitated yet utopian sensibility of San Francisco in the late Sixties, best expressed in this line from “Wild Tyme”: “I’m doing things that haven’t got a name yet.” The group worked on the album from June through October of 1967, defying record company demands and deadlines. In so doing, they helped trigger a shift in sensibility that placed creative control in the hands of musicians.’ — collaged

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Russell Haswell Wholly Unaware
‘As Sure As Night Follows Day is inspired by “Mills & Hood-era Hardwax, J-noise, Midlands metal and Suffolk Cyder, and darts between outbursts of improvised noise, asphyxiated R&B;” and “thundering acid bullets that positively froth for the ‘floor. Though it follows on from last year’s 37-Minute Workout album for Diagonal, which made moves towards the dancefloor, it also incorporates sonic and stylistic elements from a storied career in the realm of extreme electronics that has seen him release on labels including Warp, Editions Mego and Downwards. The album was extracted over a fast-working period in late 2014, and is best perceived as a sort of fractured regression to his formative influences: you can hear the picnoleptic recollections of grindcore shows in the Black Country; the refracted shades of mega-raves at Coventry’s Eclipse; the conflating toxic texture-memories of early Japanese noise; and the incandescent stomp of Mills and Hood in that early 90s phase.’ — collaged

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Philip Jeck Called In
‘Philip Jeck writes: “To make this record I used Fidelity record players, Casio keyboards, Ibanez bass guitar, Sony MiniDisc players, Ibanez and Zoom effects pedals, assorted percussion, a Behringer mixer and it was edited it at home with MiniDisc players and on a laptop computer.” Philip Jeck works with old records and record players salvaged from junk shops, turning them to his own purposes. He really does play them as musical instruments, creating an intensely personal language that evolves with each added part of a record. Jeck makes genuinely moving and transfixing music in which one hears the art, not the gimmick. He started working with record players and electronics in the early ’80s and has made soundtracks and toured with many dance and theatre companies in addition to his solo concert work. His best-known work, Vinyl Requiem (with Lol Sargent), a performance for 180 ’50s/’60s record players, won the Time Out Performance Award in 1993. In 2010, Jeck won a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award.’ — Forced Exposure

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Elle Osborne Come Write Me Down
‘Elle’s 3rd solo album, It’s Not Your Gold Shall Me Entice is the first to feature her own songs. At the heart of the album is, of course, Elle’s unique vocal sound, which Alex Neilson of Trembling Bells likens to “A cross between Lal Waterson and Nico” – and which gained her a nomination for Spiral Earth’s Singer of the Year in 2012. Nine songs celebrating survivors and survival: from the opening track “I Don’t Like Sundays” wherein Elle’s protagonist beseeches a friend to hold on, as “Sundays always do this to you, darling.”, to “Toast (The Ballad of Michael ‘Mini’ Cooper)”, written in honour of ‘Mini’ Cooper, a child arsonist and unrecognised genius. “Perhaps Lincolnshire lass Elle Osborne isn’t really a folk musician, but an avant-garde experimenter using traditional tunes as vehicles for her ragged, ripe visions …. Luckily, her approach appears to be timeless.” Sunday Times’ — Cargo Records

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Christina Vantzou The Future
‘It’s impossible to discuss composer Christina Vantzou’s music without considering its relationship to visual art. Having studied video at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, her formative experience with music was the audiovisual project The Dead Texan, which she formed with Adam Wiltzie of Stars Of The Lid in the mid-2000s. Though The Dead Texan released their first and only album on Kranky in 2004, it would be some seven years before Vantzou struck out on her own as a musician. Prior to her work with Wiltzie, she says, “I hadn’t done anything with music before. I had done a little bit of fumbling around for soundtracks to animations and videos I was making, but I’d never sat down and composed music.” Working with Reason software and MIDI instruments for The Dead Texan piqued Vantzou’s curiosity, and she began “geeking out listening to sample libraries and getting into different virtual instruments”. Finding the sound library that came with her simple software too limited, she widened her search. “I got obsessed with collecting sounds to get just the right thing, and without realising I amassed a customised sound library that I started composing with in my free time – but I wasn’t thinking of it as composing. It was all very intuitive, one step to the next.”’ — The Wire

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p.s. Hey. An early-ish heads up that this week on the blog is going to be kind of here and there. Namely, on Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be in Geneva to give a presentation about ‘Zac’s Haunted House’, which is in competition at the Geneva International Film Festival Tour Ecrans, so you’ll get reruns and no p.s.es on those days. Then, on Friday, I’ll be back here with a p.s. and post newness. Then, on Saturday, you’ll get the month’s escort post but no p.s. because I’ve been asked to play a small, non-speaking role in a film, and my scene starts shooting early that morning. Next week, everything will be usual again. ** Michael_karo, Hey, bud! Nice to see you! Thanks a bunch. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Curious to see ‘Carol’ and figure it all out. That is a honey of a gif! I don’t know much about Amy Schumer, and I’ve only seen a couple of clips of her, which I actually thought were pretty funny, so I don’t get all the quite violent hatred directed towards her that is constantly littering my FB feed. It seems really outsized and weird, but, again, I’m not all that familiar with her. Ah, any excuse to rewatch ‘Playtime’, and finding that moment is a good one. .** Chris Dankland, Howdy, Chris! Awesome, thank you so much for your attentiveness. I think there’s this cool, extra oomph or something to the head banging ones, and well, to all of them, although sometimes a lot of motion in the gifs disguises it, because the gifs’ different lengths make the rhythms unstable and shifty. So, like in the head ones, the rhythm cycles back and forth such that the alignment that creates a steady, even rhythm only happens every several seconds before drifting off key again or something. Anyway, yeah. Those gifs on Mosquito are amazing. The grid thing is super productive. I’ve thought about opening the format up to allow for something sideways and grid-like like that in mine, but I’m resisting it. I’m being careful, maybe too careful, to maintain my gif experiments’ status as visualized fictions and keep possible referents to ‘visual art’ from interfering. I keep thinking it’s important to ‘write’ them like fiction is written, i.e. vertically on page-like spaces and maintain the ‘paragraph’ thing. Blah blah. Oh, ha ha, I have a ton of gifs on my desktop. I organize them thusly: When I make a work, I create two folders, one of gifs I end up using in the work and one for gifs I don’t end up using. So, the gifs are organized that way. I always start by searching for new gifs with each work, but I also have those folder resources to comb through, and, because the works each have a particularity or thematic, to me anyway, it all ends being pretty organized. Yeah, your smoking girl gif grouping/work is great. I stared at that for a while. Like I said, the instability of the sync is really lovable, I think. Or working with the cycling sync is super nice. Like I kind of said, I do think of working outside the stack, and of course that would open things up hugely, but, for one thing, it would involve me finding a new place to work on them because so far I use the blog space as my workspace, and it is a very limited space, design-wise, and, also, maintaining the fiction-like way of ‘writing’ them seems important. Don’t know, though. Oh, about gifs from the film … actually, we just finished editing together a deleted/bonus scene for the German DVD of ‘LCTG’, and there is one absolutely beautiful shot that we tried and tried to use, but it just didn’t fit, and we were talking bout making it a gif, so, yeah, quite possibly. Thank you, Chris. That was really wonderful and generous. ** Tosh Berman, Thank you, sir. I don’t know about blowing the
m up. Interesting idea. It would change the scrolling/interactive thing, or distance it. Actually, as I mentioned up above, I’m going to Geneva where ‘ZHH’ is in the film festival, and I’m extremely curious to see how they’ve decided to present and show ‘ZHH’. I have no idea, but they having decided to project it seems like a real possibility there. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. Thanks about the gif work. Hm, I wonder if ‘Love’s’ Frenchness is having some upgrading effect on people who aren’t French or something ‘cos, yeah, I don’t get it. No, broken record alert, I haven’t read either yet, and, as ever, I’m very sorry. Every time I think I have a window, it closes. I just spent the last five days editing a deleted scene and giving and transcribing a long interview for the German DVD of ‘LCTG’ and now editing it. I’m sorry. I have become endlessly swamped, to the point where I have no time to even write my own work, but every swamp has a borderline, and I’m looking for it. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. I happened to catch your comment on Sunday, and I went ahead and submitted the film to Jed Rapfogel yesterday. So, fingers crossed. And thank you so incredibly much for telling him about the film and for encouraging the possibility of AFA showing it. That would be just amazing. The gifs are all pre-existing, so I don’t alter them at all. The looping is there already, and I just work with what I’m given and try to mess with the loops through alignments of loops that do or don’t fit comfortably together. I like dub. Lee Perry is insanely great. I just have no interest in traditional reggae at all, But dub, yeah, for sure, and, yeah, I thought about dub when I was trying to make rhythms in that experiment, ** H, Hi. Thank you so much! My weekend was packed from mornings to nights with work, and my eyes and brain are still blurry from that, but it was productive, thank you. How was yours? ** Bill, Hi, B. Thank you a lot for your thoughts on the rhythm. Your expertise on that front is a huge help. The gif duration issues are really fascinating. I’m not entirely sure how different browsers and computers alter the rhythms and durations, but I love thinking about that and trying to allow for that just in case. Me too, about the gifs’ duration and activity within being equally important. Inseparable, or irretrievably interdependent really, I guess. Yeah, the sectioning. That’s something I’ve thought about a lot, and I’ve experimented pre-publishing with different possibilities, although so far I’ve ended up making only fairly mild movements in/of the distances. I end up wanting the connections between the sections, or at least between the initial or final gif in the sequences with the surrounding sequences, or at least their heads or tails, to be easily available. Also, it’s hard to seek a lot of freedom within the blog format, and it’s hard too because I make the works on a laptop which has a limited field of vision where basically only one sequence or one plus a partial second sequence is visible at any one time. No, I don’t really have a preferred scrolling mode for the viewer. I try to make them such that a quick scrolling, with random pauses of unknown lengths, which is what I imagine most people do with them, has a particular effect, and a very gradual scrolling with stops to concentrate on the sequences and connections, has another effect. Obviously, the works are made, at their most serious and truest level, to be studied carefully and slowly. They’re heavily detailed things, packed with all kinds of effect experiments and layers and levels on which the work is functioning. So, a slow, concentrated viewing, at whatever pace that matches up with the viewer’s interest level and attention span, would be the ideal method. Thank you a lot for talking with me about that. It has really triggered and inspired me. ** Damien Ark, Hey, Damien! Thanks. The cool thing, maybe, is that that gif work had no story at all. So anything other than a rhythm construction that came through is your brain making stuff, which is really exciting to me. I’ve watched anime a lot at certain times in the past, but I haven’t watched an anime in, like, years, for no reason at all. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, you know, no surprise to you, but of course I was thinking a lot about those 12″s, for me particularly the ones in the ’90s, that had the rhythm freed up/isolated on one side. I was super into that. And, on that note, I’ll will go listen to that linked-up 2-hour beat fest at the soonest opportunity. Thank you! ** Postitbreakup, Well, hi there, Josh, old pal. Wow, that’s so cool of you to have given the work and sequences so much thinking. That’s super interesting. I just copied and pasted your thoughts into a doc so I can study them carefully when I’m not flying through the p.s. Really appreciate it, man, and what you wrote is very cool and thought-provoking. I hope you’re doing great! ** Keaton, K-maestro. Wow, cool, totally, interesting, yeah. Excellent gif ideas. I’m going to ponder them deeply once my brain has returned to a pondering-friendly state. ** Martin Bladh, Hi, Martin. Cool! All the best back to you! ** Statitick, Hey, Njr! Sweetness. Thank you. Guard changing offers the opportunity for a lovely refreshment. Almost always. In your case, clearly. Hugs to Michael. And, duh, to you. ** Misanthrope, Me? Okay, I won’t. True enough about art being an easier context for overt body mod doers. I do think its different over here. I’ve hung out with Jean Luc a fair amount, and I’ve never seen people gawk at him untowardly. That whole ‘live and let live’ French thing maybe. Wow, you think ‘excess’ tattooing and piercing reads as damaged goods to a lot of people? That’s pretty depressing, if so. In the gif work, I’m into the silence of the gifs making the viewer’s imagination ‘hear’ the sounds that would normally accompany the actions in the gifs and then making music in their heads out of how the ‘sounds’ combine vis-à-vis the juxtapositions. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. My pleasure, my gratitude re: the email and its delicious fruit. Thanks a lot, man, about the gif work thing. I hope your weekend was busy for wonderful reasons. ** Okay. From a experiment with rhythm in gifs to actual, hearable, musician-made rhythms, among other things, as I present you today with the latest gig made up of music-based things that I’m into of late. Hope you find stuff therein. See you tomorrow.

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Alex G Bug
‘Beach Music’s songs differ in genre touchstones and instrumentation choices, like he’s scrolling through an iTunes library set to shuffle. Giannascoli has always been a voracious, omnivorous listener, drawing inspiration from every corner of the music universe, and Beach Music runs that eccentric span. The set splices together everything from a Jon Brion score to a George Harrison pop sigh, from early Animal Collective vocal tinkering to Phil Collins synth patches. But there’s a wavering instability to the tracks themselves as well, something like the tracking pattern on a cassette, a sign of wear from something beloved but also a sign of decay. Beach Music feels like the work of an artist a few steps ahead of his audience, jumping to answer their expectations of a DIY darling taking on the trappings of a label. He stuck to his roots, recorded at home, and embraced his eccentricities. Giannascoli also wasn’t afraid to go big, resulting in one of the richest, deepest-sounding albums of his catalog. With each successive record and step up the ladder, Alex G continues to impress. Witnessing his prodigious experimentation and the revelations of his unique worldview should be a treat for years to come.’ — Consequence of Sound

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JOYFULTALK Possible Futures
‘One of the great mysteries of the Canadian indie music scene is the career of Jay Crocker. The enigmatic musician has obviously flirted with occasional success: His contributions to Ghostkeeper’s eponymous album from 2010 helped it crack the Polaris Music Prize long list that same year; The Calgary Herald named his 2006 debut solo album Melodies from the Outskirts the best indie release of the year; and his jazzy NoMoreShapes project was positively reviewed by The New York Times. Yet, despite his occasional flourishes of recognition, Crocker remains a kind of musician’s musician. He never really got his big moment, seemingly unable to surf the rising wave of Calgary’s economic boom to breakthrough into the general hip conversation like similarly brilliant indie noise monger Chad VanGaalen. In search of sparser pastures, Crocker left his hometown in Alberta for a little place in Nova Scotia called Crousetown. Holed up there at his home studio, Prism Ship, with a Harry Partch-worthy collection of 14 custom-built instruments that boast names as far out as The Comb Over and The Pink Dolphin, MUUIXX sees Crocker composing and performing each of their distinctive timbres into a cohesive statement. The compositions sound generally repetitive and mechanical, yet he eschewed looping and sampling in favor of meticulous live performance governed by a circular scoring method of his own creation, which lends his quirky minimal electronic explorations even more of that essential uneven hemline of humane analog quirkiness.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Cult Leader Great I Am
‘Three-quarters of Cult Leader hail from Gaza, the defunct, progressive grindcore outfit whose 2012 swansong No Absolutes in Human Suffering wound up being the most intense thing they ever produced. Lightless Walk tops it. Gaza bassist Anthony Lucero has moved up to lead vocals for Cult Leader (with new bassist Sam Richards abetting guitarist Mike Mason and drummer Casey Hansen), and his doom-soaked howl is enough to leave you wondering what took him so long to front a band. On the mutated, d-beat-meets-blastbeats jolt that is “Walking Wasteland”, Lucero sings from his intestines instead of his lungs, letting Mason’s caustic riffs wash over him like an acid bath. “Great I Am” makes great use of space, hovering distortion, and needles of feedback that are somehow crosshatched into insidious melody. On the whole, Cult Leader is a more aggressive yet concise band than Gaza—and one that gets the notion of merciless self-editing.’ — Jason Heller

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Deerhunter Living My Life
‘Deerhunter has spent the better part of a decade creating some of the most interesting and lively records on the indie-rock scene. As the bands that made up indie rock’s celebrated mid-’00s creative renaissance continue their inevitable collective march toward middle-age comfort, Deerhunter should be applauded for refusing to rest on its laurels by actively seeking to make a record with purpose and scope. The goals and the stakes are real for them, and in Fading Frontiers, the effort is blindingly evident.’ — AV Club

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Voices from the Lake Sonia Danza
‘As was to be expected they stay true to their polyphonic topography of liquid scapes: aquati
c sceneries are embedded in soaking dense atmospheres, gently gyrating us into trance. Sometimes soft echoes of sirenic voices are heard – the only remnants of human traces in these spaces that have suspended time, where smooth silky textures are being channeled into fractal structures that induce a state of transcendence. The haptic quality of their sound is adding up to a sonic matrix of metaphysic imaginary that is provoked by gentle glides and dynamic beat patterns of almost tribalistic quality.’ — Editions Mego

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Protomartyr Dope Cloud
‘In what feels like an odd moment of prescience, roughly halfway through The Agent Intellect, the harrowing third album from the Detroit band Protomartyr, the Pope pays a visit. It’s 1987 in Pontiac, Mich., and Pope John Paul II is visiting the Silverdome, delivering Mass to the 100,000 faithful who’d come to hear him speak. Among them was a young Joe Casey who, 25 years later, would grow up to become Protomartyr’s frontman. The event was historic—it set an attendance record at the arena—but what Casey remembers about it in “Pontiac 87” isn’t the beauty of the sermon or the spectacle in the ceremony, but the ugliness boiling just beneath the surface. On his way into the arena, he sees “money changing between hands,” and on his way out, a riot, where “Old folks turn brutish/ Trampling their way out the gates towards heaven.” This is the universe Protomartyr inhabits, one where violence hovers constantly at the periphery, where peace and hope gradually curdle and turn ugly, and the desperate people who once clung to them eventually fall prey to their worst impulses.’ — J. Edward Keyes

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Aïsha Devi Mazda
‘Many of the tracks on Of Matter And Spirit are deliberately provocative in their aural assault on your ears and synapses. The opening track ‘Adera’, opens up with aerated, gaseous vocals and elephantine martial trance synths that blind you with their hi-definition brilliance. And this sets the musical tone for the rest of the album. The bass and rhythmic drum patterns and percussion throughout, especially on tracks such as ‘Numan J’, ‘Initiation To An Illusion’, and ‘1%’, are cavernous with a particularly a crushing ceremonial action to them. If you’ve ever heard Devi’s previous releases on her Danse Noire label, such as the Hakken Dub/Throat Dub EP and tracks such as ‘Clean Ur Chakras’, then you will know that this is no soothing new-age mush that gently coos and caresses you. Its thrusting devotions and digital liturgies are meant to overload, tear away at shake up your senses, to flake away any toxic karma you may have lodged in any hard to reach crevices.’ — The Quietus

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M. Lamar Speculum Orum
‘Musician, composer, and performer M Lamar proudly calls himself a Yale dropout. After leaving the Ivy League school’s masters program in sculpture, he returned to San Francisco – where he’d formerly lived as an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute – and devoted himself entirely to music, creating haunting compositions that merge post-punk, goth, and heavy-metal stylings with more classical formats, from black spirituals and gospel to opera.’ — Observer

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Gnaw Their Tongues Through Flesh
‘The latest missive from the pit where Gnaw Their Tongues lurks gets at once medieval and modernist on every square centimetre of the willing supplicant’s disease-ridden flesh. Taking up the challenge so successfully laid by the likes of Khanate to make listening to music as actually unsettling and terrifying an experience as being immersed in a brutally realistic horror film can be, GTT’s torturer-in-chief (and indeed sole member) Mories lays out his latest master plan for the subjugation of humankind.’ — The Quietus

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Laurel Halo Nebenwirkungen
‘An enormously welcome return for an essential voice in techno. Halo started out making galaxy-contemplating dream-pop in 2010, eventually silencing her pipes and seguing into dance tracks. These are like novels that reveal new meanings with every reading, full of unusual instrumentation, Chain Reaction-style frosting and rhythms that are dynamic yet uncertain. On the new tracks from her double EP In Situ, things are more minimalist and mysterious than ever. “On Situation”, what sound like modular synths make inquiring bird calls, as muted rave chords play over an almost Caribbean shuffle – it’s tropical paradise in a broken VR simulator. On “Nebenwirkungen”, a bass wub keeps hesitantly dipping its toe in and out of the water, but the mid-range is more confident, piling in and chattering in an obscure robot dialect. This is the kind of dub techno that Moritz Von Oswald is a master of, but Halo’s skank is truly twisted.’ — The Guardian

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Steve Hauschildt Watertoweps
‘Throughout his tenure as a member of prolific ambient adventurers Emeralds, as well as his concurrent solo work, Steve Hauschildt has never appeared to lack creative energy. However, following the 2012 release of Sequitur, his second Kranky album, the Cleveland-based artist quietly brought that steady flow of original material to a standstill. Whether intentional or not, the break in output appears to have given Hauschildt time to examine his craft. Three years later, he’s emerged with his most distinctive record to date, Where All Is Fled. Hauschildt’s transition to slightly darker—and, at times, vaguely symphonic—sounds proves to be an excellent framework for his compositional strengths. Both in Emeralds and as a solo producer, Hauschildt has always been adept with touching melodies. A keen sense for natural progression makes his pieces continue to stand out from many ambient contemporaries. Hauschildt is also more confident than ever with his hardware: the almost entirely beatless record can be somber and deeply contemplative, but never icy. Where All Is Fled’s tones are consistently rich and warm, slathered in reverb and delay without overwhelming the details.’ — Resident Adviser

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Co La Suffering
‘Where Co La’s past work focused on rendering impressions of physical spaces, designs
and objects into broad musical forms, Papich now turns his interest inward, investigating the sensual and emotional aspects of terrestrial life. The language is basic: a sneeze, a baby’s cry, an alphabet, the biting of an apple, laughter and screams. Despite the simple signifiers, No No is inscribed with content – it points to basic fears/desires and scrambles them, creating an oddly emotional & alien dimension, an action in Club music hitherto unknown. Simple inversion is a focal point of No No. Club culture categorically offers an escape from the real world for revelers. Co La, a seminal player in Baltimore’s experimental club environment, (Club Undo), regularly abstracts the party into intellectually confrontational encounters, be it a rifle scope aimed directly on his forehead or building temporary soundsystems out of zipcars. His recorded music and performances both play with listener’s expectations by inviting drama into otherwise Cool experiences.’ — Mexican Summer

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Drrty Pharms A Lesson For Insolence
‘I believe that repression allows violent fantasies to fester inside people until they are powerless to control them. These are things that need to be expressed; ignoring them is not going to make them go away. You don’t choose and can’t necessarily control what you fantasize about, but you can find healthy outlets to express these fantasies which can help you manage your behavior. I used to struggle with intrusive thoughts about hurting people. I was convinced that, as much as i dreaded it, I would inevitably end up hurting someone. I had a lot of traumatic sexual experiences as a young kid and I worried it was a cycle I was powerless to repeat. The only thing which gave me relief from this mental torment was having artistic outlets to purge my intrusive thoughts. The more public I was able to be about my fantasies, the less they haunted me and now they rarely even cross my mind when I’m not writing music. I love the idea of parties as bacchanal autonomous zones where everyone celebrates by transgressing the rigid social codes forced on us in day-life, where people can behave like beasts without being condemned or judged. I’d like to throw more underground parties, outside of commercial spaces, where people can act crazy and do whatever they want (within reason) without it being an issue.’ — Dirty Pharms

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Ryan Hemsworth & Lucas From Grace
‘The biggest surprise here is that the largely unknown Lucas often sets the tone. Whereas Hemsworth’s recent solo work favors crisp, clean lines, these tracks tend to crackle, buzz and fade. Melodies waft in as if through an open window and often drift off just as unceremoniously. Vocals are treated past the point of intelligibility, serving as textures that rub up against other elements in the mix. Given the gauzy sonic palette, emotions feel implied, rather than announced—not a bad look for Hemsworth, who can occasionally veer into preciousness on his own. There’s a sort of hazy sheen over Taking Flight that makes even the big crescendos feel slightly blurry, like vaseline smeared on a camera lens.’ — Mehan Jayasuriya

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p.s. Hey. Starting tomorrow, I will be taking another break, short this time, from the blog as I will be in Berlin co-hosting two screenings of Zac’s and film LIKE CATTLE TOWARDS GLOW on Friday and Saturday. If you happen to be there, here is information re: the times, location, and the ticket buying situation for the screenings. Blog-wise, this place will be in reruns with minimal, pre-set p.s.es through Monday. Then it and I will be back all new and interactive again starting on Tuesday. ** Bill, Hi. You, a traditionalist? Ha ha, that’s an interesting tidbit. Apparently the Hirst-like things are actually cakes, yes. Drenched, inaccessible cakes, it looks like. I’m quite tempted to find out if Conjurers Kitchen delivers. Bet not. Or not this far. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. As a sometimes vegan, I can assure you that it takes more than a fake steak cake to drive me, at least, around any bend. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I do think investing in a Leve book or two would be a decision you would not regret. The walkouts aren’t troublesome. It’s a pretty demanding film. I very rarely walk out of a film, although I did end up walking out on the new Noe film not long before it ended. Cinefamily would be a great place to show ‘LCTG’, of course. Do you know anybody there? ** Steevee, Hi. I saw the director’s cut of ‘Until the End of the World’ back in the very early 00’s. I had actually sort of semi-liked the film in its released version, but I found the director’s cut, which basically dragged out the things I hadn’t liked about it, just unbearable. But, yeah, it has its champions. ** Sypha, Hi, James. I actually didn’t get to see very much of Montreal, just the turf between my hotel and the theaters where our film showed, which wasn’t very much turf. It seemed all right, but I didn’t get a feel for it, really. So sorry to hear that your dad had to go through all that. Very best of luck on his recovery, and hugs to you. * Krayton, Hi, K. Missed ya too. I’m trying to figure out how to make it feel Halloween-y over here in Paris. Not easy. I think a few of us are just going to try to find/buy a scary cake and watch some horror movies. ‘In love to death’ sounds good, I think. I think I can absolutely 100% assure that I will never ever cast Ben Affleck in anything, although never say never on the gif stuff, if that counts. ** _Black_Acrylic, According to its maker or, rather, its maker’s website, no. But can it be believed? Yeah, his titles used to be pretty funny, although, in retrospect, I wonder if they were intentionally funny. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi there, Jeff! Sure wish I could see your new theater piece. How is it going, and how do you feel about it, if you can say? Bad cold, ugh, sorry. I love ‘breathless and fluid’. That’s exciting. Hm, if I know the stuff of Martin Newell/Cleaners from Venus, then I have forgotten. I’ll make a point to get to start to know him/them. The reception to the film has been very good thus far. So far, we’re really quite happy with how it’s going. We’ll see what happens this weekend. Our producers programmed the film into this Berlin Porn Film Festival thing, and I think it’s a weird, bad fit, to say the least, and fuck knows how that will go. ** Liquoredgoat, Hi, Douglas. Me too, i.e, the maggot-y, etc. ones being the most off-putting to the taste buds. Oh, shit, I still need to wrack my brains about short story collections to recommend. Sorry, I spaced, and I’m a bit too jet-lagged and preparing to leave town this morning. I will write down that I should do that, and I will. Sorry. Oh, Benjamin Weissman’s ‘Headless’ and/or ‘Dear Dead Person’. There’s one/two. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Declarative sentences, right, gotcha. Yeah, it does sound like you got fleeced on that plantation tour. Here are five haunted house things in Maryland, if that helps: Field of Screams, Frightland, Bedlam in the Boro< /a>, Legends of the Fog, Bennett’s Curse. Field of Screams is pretty famous and well-regarded. I don’t know the others. ** Right. What’s up today … Oh, a gig of new or newish stuff that I’m listening to. See if your ears align with mine to any degree. So, the blog will see you tomorrow, Saturday, and Monday, and I will see you on Tuesday. Have excellent long weekends, everyone.