Gig #113: Of late 24: Juana Molina, Anthony Pateras, Aaron Dilloway, Chino Amobi, Alex G, Huxley Anne, Forest Swords, Carla dal Forno, Loke Rahbek, Jlin, WaqWaq Kingdom, Pharmakon, Organ Tapes

Juana Molina
Anthony Pateras
Aaron Dilloway
Chino Amobi
Alex G
Huxley Anne
Forest Swords
Carla dal Forno
Loke Rahbek
Jlin
WaqWaq Kingdom
Pharmakon
Organ Tapes

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Juana Molina Cosoco
‘Since her early gem Segundo, Juana Molina has twisted acoustic and synthesized sound into fitful creations that underscore her narratives; with this work, she’s reached a zen place where the very texture of a tone becomes its own language. In her music, the “meaning” of a song can come from lyrics or gibberish rhythmic syllables, from radio static or synthesizer sounds that droop like tree branches made heavy by rain, or layered voice chorales that suggest whip-poor-wills in conversation. None of the sounds or the melodies that occupy the foreground of Halo last too long, and that gives the music an arresting quality: You want to pin it down and dissect its components, and the more you try, the more elusive it becomes.’ — First Listen

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Anthony Pateras Autophagy
‘Composer, improviser, and electro-acoustic music maker Anthony Pateras has for the better part of two decades continued to make forward thinking uncompromising music in a variety of guises. Whether it’s via one off collaborations or his various bands including Pateras/ (Sean)Baxter/(David) Brown, Thymolphthalein with Natasha Anderson, Will Guthrie, Jérôme Noetinger, and Clayton Thomas, PIVIXKI with Max Kohane, the Pateras/(Robin)Fox duo, North of North with Scott Tinkler and Erkki Veltheim or tetema with Mike Patton, Will Guthrie and Erkki Veltheim, you know that the involvement of Pateras ensures the result will be music quite unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.’ — Cyclic Defrost

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Aaron Dilloway Born In A Maze
‘Hundreds of releases and countless live performances littered the path that lead to 2012’s Modern Jester, artist Aaron Dilloway’s last major artistic statement as a solo artist and one his most well received documents since leaving Wolf Eyes, the prolific noise troupe that Dilloway co-founded in the late 90’s with musician Nate Young. Introducing itself with the cover image of a posed dummy ready for his yearbook portraiture, The Gag File pick up right where Modern Jester left off; its identity is directly tied to an absurdly uncomfortable head shot that stays permanently fixed in the listener’s mind whenever the album is summoned.’ — dais records.com

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Chino Amobi Kollaps
‘Experimental producer and NON co-founder Chino Amobi’s new album is described as “a musical epic set in a distorted Americana populated by a cast of sirens, demons, angels, imps, priests, hierophants, monsters and peasants” and features a long list of NON members and likeminded contemporaries including Elysia Crampton, Rabit, Haleek Maul and Dutch E Germ (aka Tim DeWit of Gang Gang Dance).’ — Fact Magazine

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Alex G Sportstar
‘On Rocket, his latest with Domino, Alex G dives deeper into his insular world while also expanding his palette, experimenting with jazz, country R&B, and noise rock. While the entire album is unmistakably him, no two songs are alike. The angst-filled fury of “Brick” finds Giannascoli screaming over a muddled production as if Lil Ugly Mane produced a Trapt single. On the next song, “Sportstar”, he sings an Auto-Tuned ballad about a destructive, one-sided relationship over hypnotic keyboards. “Proud” proves he could make a tremendous alt-country record one day if he wanted to, and there’s a saxophone on closer “Guilty” that would make Dev Hynes and Carly Rae Jepsen blush. Giannascoli’s gift is that he can manage these wild shifts in tone without ever losing sight of his vision. It’s purposefully scattered, not so much showing off as a desperate search for the right way to express himself at any one time.’ –– Consequence of Sound

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Huxley Anne Nin
‘Music was the grounding influence in my life as I grew up. I started dancing at age 3, piano at age 6, was on Napster torrenting albums at age 8. My diary was full of moody adolescent songs by age 12, shitty bands at age 16, then lots of lyrics & poems, half-hearted attempts at singing, finally opening Garageband in the desert on an iPad at 20 years old where I realized making electronic music was the medium I’d been searching for. Everything felt sort of scattered and unfocused before that—I always knew I wanted to pursue music, but I didn’t know how to translate the sounds I hear in my head until I started using a computer to do it. Synths work, too.’ — L.A. Taco

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Forest Swords Raw Language
‘His first new solo material proper since the Engravings [2013, Tri Angle] album locates the Merseyside-hailing artist Forest Swords scaling up his compositions to a more layered, pinched and grandiose sound but still kept just out of reach, somewhere in the middle distance, like the outline of a sunlit mountain range in the distance occluded by a spring storm. The R&B ruggedness that was key to his cherished earlier work belies Compassion, too. Echoing a beat-driven aesthetic that resonates with the rich history of his home region, a place cleft between sprawling, sea-sprayed wilds, concrete brutalism and mock classical architecture that makes for strong allegorical comparisons with his music.’ — Boomkat

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Carla dal Forno What You Gonna Do Now?
‘Patience is the key to understanding Carla dal Forno’s solo work: You Know What It’s Like is a grower, and one that demands repeated listening. Just two or three listens is a waste of everyone’s time – the record’s comparatively short 30-minunte running means it can glide past like someone else’s shadow. It’s a secret work, too; dal Forno has clearly taken a lot of time to make this a fleeting but intriguing glance into a specific time and place. She takes care to lay out her mysterious music for us – a music that feels timeless and ancient, full of uneasy memories and dark secrets. And, further, a music that feels potent and sensual, like a slow moving river. What really gives this record its strength is the total lack of bombast. There’s no sense of braggadocio. No sense of being in the “music industry”. No striving to make a point to peers.’ — Richard Foster

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Loke Rahbek Like A Still Pool
‘Echoing the growing influence Copenhagen’s Posh Isolation have had in recent years, label co-founder and creative instigator behind many of their acts Loke Rahbek steps out with a debut solo album. Assembled over the course of 2014-16 at Stockholm’s fabled EMS studios and Rahbek’s Posh Isolation base in Copenhagen, City Of Women effectively distils aspects of the various PI projects Rahbek has been involved in over the past few years to deliver a nine-track collection that defies easy categorisation. There is romance here in this mythical city, witnessed in Rahbek’s sumptuous piano playing in both ‘Fermented’ and ‘A Word A Day’, whilst his obvious mastery of channelling extreme noise to evoke an emotional response is evident in the title track or album opener ‘Like A Still Pool’. Pitched somewhere between a wistful Varg and the post-Hype Williams abstraction of John T Gast, this is a fine statement of intent from Rahbek on perhaps his strongest and most absorbing production to date.’ — Boomkat

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Jlin Black Origami
‘Never one to rely too heavily on melodic samples, Jlin instead explores the movement and meaning to be found amongst volatile beat patterns and otherworldly fragmented sounds. And while her February 2017 EP, Dark Lotus, offered a glimpse into her evolution as a producer, this latest full-length showcases Jlin’s talent for manipulating silence as well as sounds. Tracks like “Holy Child” and “Nandi” convey spirituality through complexity, their rhythms shifting and morphing as elements like drum beats, bells, and stray vocal samples fold into each other with mathematical precision. Other tracks, like “Hatshepsut” and the album’s closer “Challenge (To Be Continued),” layer disparate elements — like whistles and percussion samples from Africa, Japan, India, and HBCU drum lines — to evoke a sort of power that is at once unencumbered, but controlled.’ — The Fader

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WaqWaq Kingdom Step Into A World
‘Seasoned King Midas Sound watchers will know that vocalist Kiki Hitomi is frequently the best thing about the gnarled trio. Her bell-clear vocals and knack for a hook cutting through the waves of dubbed-out filth on a song like ‘Aroo’ to create something that hangs around the garden of left-field pop, without ever quite making up its mind whether to come in or not. On the face of it, there are similarities between WaqWaq Kingdom – Hitomi’s new project – and her King Midas day job, with both bands skirting around the edges of reggae. But whereas King Midas Sound delight in the filthier edge of the dub spectrum, all crooked dance hall beats and dubstepped sheets of bass, WaqWaq Kingdom create something that is simultaneously lighter, more psychedelic and downright weirder than anything cooked up by King Midas producer Kevin Martin (aka The Bug). Perhaps this is to be expected from a trio that features DJ Scotch Egg, an artist who mines the unexpectedly fertile cross over between gabber and chiptune, alongside a Nils Frahm collaborator (Andrea Belfi) who plays the trimba, a kind of triangular shaped drum pioneered by Moondog.’ — Ben Cardew

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Pharmakon Nakedness Of Need
‘The release date of Contact marks the ten-year anniversary of Margaret Chardiet’s project, Pharmakon. While working on her newest release, she began to evaluate the project as a whole. Though the content of each record has been very different and specific, the pervading question, which has underlined them all, is what is means to be human. Her last album, Bestial Burden, focused on the disconnect between mind and body, looking at the human as an isolated consciousness stuck inside of a rotting vessel. For Contact, she wanted to look at the other side of the spectrum – the moments when our mind can come outside of and transcend our bodies.’ — Sacred Bones Records

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Organ Tapes w/ Andrew Thomas Huang Fire Cock
‘Organ Tapes communicates with the listener obliquely. His music is painterly, operating through gesture and refraction. His vocals are slurred and auto-tuned, his beats amorphous and textured. On Words Fall To Ground, his second collection of original material, his sound continues to expand and accrete, filling up space gaseously, pregnant with affect, linear propulsion subsumed by drift and swell.’ — Rafael Lubner

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p.s. Hey. ** Liquoredgoat, Hi, D. Before I forget, thanks a ton and a half for the awesome and super fresh guest-post. It’ll launch here a week from this coming Friday, on the 16th. Sweet! Very nice about scoring the Duvert. On the same wavelength, I just got a galley of Duvert’s novel ‘Atlantic Island’ that Semiotext(e) is putting out this fall. It’s said to be one of his greatest, so I’m petty psyched to finally get to read that. Bon day! ** David Ehrenstein, My great pleasure, David. Proust and the Dreyfus case, okay, I’m curious. Thanks, I’ll read that when I get my next bit of clear sailing. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! What a nice day (yours): working on your book and your magazine. Like heaven. And fantastic news about the Hobart pub. date! Yes, yes, please hook us/me up as soon as it’s up there. All is good. We did get the extra editing time, an additional week (meaning an extra five days)! So we’re relieved about that. I, of course, just edited the film with Zac all day into the evening. Our production manager came by to look at some footage, and she seemed pretty pro about it, so that’s good. Oh, and the writer Christopher Higgs wrote very smartly and nicely about my GIF novel ‘Zac’s Freight Elevator’ and a few other things, and that went up at Entropy yesterday, and that made me very happy. It’s here if anyone’s interested. So, yes, and back to the editing races again I go in a few minutes. What did Wednesday deliver to you? ** Sypha, Hi. It’s an amazing post for sure. Definitely very happy to get it back in the public eye again. I wish I was the kind of writer who could write a novella on vacation. Your discipline and tempo when disciplined are very admirable, sir. ** Jamie, Hi, Eimaj! Ha, the editing room is not unlike a little mine actually, or it’s dark and stuffy at least. The mining — and the editing is not unlike mining now that I think about it — goes well. Oh, god, yes, I know very, very much about having budgetary perimeters lorded over you. In film stuff, you just try to keep the script/plan as complicated as originally planned and cut down the shot list, simplify the shooting location, and stuff like that, but I guess it’s not that simple in animation where elements aren’t as easily separable, or so I imagine. Are you working on the script revision now? Yesterday’s editing went well. We’re refining everything and shortening/lengthening, and moving things about a little. No big problems so far. Sometimes the scenes just won’t become what we wanted them to be, so we’re having to reinvent them to make them work, and that’s interesting. Anyway, blah blah. I hope Glasgow has heavily and passionately welcomed you back. Any progress on the new home front? Stop: Madeleine -> metro line 8 -> Stop: Chemin Vert love, Dennis. ** _Black_Acrylic, Highty-ho, Ben. ** Steevee, Hi. No, I haven’t done a Frank Perry Day, and that’s an excellent idea. I will. Thank you! Good, tentatively very good news on the stabilizing of your emotions! ** Misanthrope, Hi, George. Good until the evening isn’t good enough, man. That simply has to be righted. Your doctor guy got his degree to do that and earns his keep doing that and it is his solemn duty to sort that shit out. End of story. You saw that Mr. E reviewed ‘Handsome Devil’? There was a link here to his review, uh, two days ago? ** S., Hey. My heaven would be a no seafood zone. Seafood makings could live their happy, pre-seafood little lives in it though. No story is bad until it’s finished, and probably not even then. That’s my motto or something. Haunted bookstore: now you’re talking. ** Okay. I made one of my gigs for you today so try to find some time and space in your busy lives to test out its offerings if you can and are okay with that idea. Thanks. See you tomorrow.