Dedekind Cut
Dead Rider
Igloohost
Sit Fast
Zen Mother
Liars
Milo
Nmesh
Fog Lake
Shit and Shine
BJNilsen
Terry
Huoratron
AnD
______________
Dedekind Cut LiL Puffy Coat
‘After exploring hip-hop, techno, and jungle, among various shades of ambient experiments, Fred Warmsley rebranded as Dedekind Cut and is now engineering a novel style of electronic music all his own. While last year’s cinematic $uccessor traced vast, sweeping, sci-fi soundscapes, Dedekind’s new EP, The Expanding Domain, promises to take the producer’s interest in texture and atmosphere to new, more demanding extremes. Its lead single, “Lil Puffy Coat,” sounds at once gothic and cutting edge, a shadowy inversion of new age’s bucolic scenery and fine-spun pastels. Fashioned from gloomy piano, coarse digital patches, and droning synths, “Lil Puffy Coat” reaches for the angular crunch of industrial and the hi-tech experimentalism of Arca and Oneohtrix Point Never. Blast furnaces roar and metallic percussion clanks as a female vocal sample floats in and out of the mix, whispering “It’s fucking cold,” in the background.’ — Jonathan Patrick
_______________
Dead Rider The Ideal
‘The unctuous lounge-lizard croon that marks the singing of Dead Rider’s Todd Rittman has started to fray on the group’s fantastic new album, Crew Licks (Drag City), as if to suggest that his sinister shadiness is getting tangled within his own web of deceit. As usual, it’s often difficult to know exactly what he’s going on about, and when there’s some relatively clear idea at work it’s unsavory. Few bands in recent memory have so effectively repurposed conventions of both classic rock and radio-friendly dance-rock into sounds that could induce nausea or seem refined.’ — Chicago Reader
________________
Iglooghost Bug Thief
‘When a pair of giant eyeballs crash into the strange, misty world of Mamu, the mysterious forces that govern nature itself are disrupted. A life cycle of transforming creatures is thrown off balance, and the odd looking inhabitants of Mamu are forced to adapt to this calamity. These inhabitants include Yomi—a multi-colored pom-pom monkm Lummo—a wise blind witch training a band of melon colored babies, and Uso— a sneaky bug thief hidden in a green cloak—as well as many others. As their respective stories begin to interlock, the mysteries surrounding the giant eyeballs are slowly revealed.’ — Igloohost
________________
Sit Fast Purcell Fantazias & In Nomines
‘There’s enough vibrancy in the playing of the five-strong viol consort Sit Fast to keep drawing the attention afresh, with the “voices” of the instruments ebbing and flowing, and with Karl Nyhlin’s lute providing extra articulation for their smoothly delivered harmonies.’ — The Guardian
_________________
Zen Mother Mantra
‘Zen Mother is the hive mind of Monika Khot and Wolcott Smith. They formed the project after trading avant-garde secrets, and quickly decided to weave those secrets together into a heavy, electronic-rock based duo, often with the addition of a cellist and drummer. The music is dynamic in nature, lending itself to sonic focus and harnessing control of the mind. Industrial harshness is paired with ambient beauty all alongside the ever-pervasive feeling of torment. Earlier this year, they were awarded the Puget Soundtrack residency to re-score the mind-expansive cult film Holy Mountain, which was foreseen by local newspapers to be a “mindfuck-redefining mindfuck.” Any band can say they’re influenced by This Heat and Igor Wakhévitch; Zen Mother actually have the torrid chops and grave intensity to live up to the lofty expectations those names inspire.’ — The Stranger
__________________
Liars No Help Pamphlet
‘Liars have been allotted something that’s both an obligation and a burden: perpetual reinvention — which is not quite the same as a drive to novelty as such, bearing more on the previous output of the artist in question than a more general or absolute conception of invention as it does. It’s a burden that they might have brought on themselves by so cruelly springing their second album (They Were Wrong, So We Drowned) on the hapless, baffled critics/populace, a feat whose subsequent repetition has turned into an expectation. But it’s an expectation that has been pretty well lived up to on albums since, even to the point where the risk of perpetual reinvention — that it will eventually undermine itself and become its own form of stagnation — has been allayed. TFCF fits in well enough with that part of the story. It has sufficient new features, sweepingly introduced so as to constitute a more-than-satisfying reinvention. So acoustic instrumentation, something Liars had hitherto generally eschewed, can be found here and found in diverse forms. There are times when it appears under the aspect of melancholy, with loops of sampled guitars plucked and echoing, but there are also times when stringed instruments of some sort are strummed, like on the two jaunty-sad tracks “No Help Pamphlet” and “No Tree No Branch.”’ — Michael J
__________________
Milo call + form (picture)
‘here’s a lot of easy copy that could go here: “milo is an enigma;” “milo makes art, not rap;” “milo’s work rewards careful listening.” It’s all true to some degree, but there’s a tendency for critics and fans alike to delineate milo’s work vs. the rap world at large — a frame that’s especially odd in light of milo’s repeated statements that who told you to think??!!?!?!?! is an album about dissolving boundaries. To an extent, milo brings it upon himself; there’s a self-styled iconoclasm underlying his creative practice, which balances fierce loyalty to his collaborators and the endless pursuit of liberation from obligation to any other entity.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes
________________
Nmesh Weed Jesus
‘Nmesh’s Pharma is like vaporwave’s answer to Soundtracks for the Blind. A massive collection of tracks that is sonically diverse and compelling, featuring tracks that put the listener in all kinds of different places, and conjures all kinds of different feelings. The music that Nmesh presents here has a very strong sense of place, and while it doesn’t bring anything entirely new to the world of sound collage and vaporwave, this is one of the most intriguing releases of this year in both of these genres, and perhaps the most interesting vaporwave album that I’ve ever stumbled across. The kind of music that Nmesh presents here might not appeal to everyone, however, from where I’m standing, this is something that I admire and enjoy for how diverse and well-executed it is. One of this year’s most necessary albums.’ — Album of the Year
_____________
Fog Lake Tolerance
‘Largely crafted by songwriter Aaron Powell, Montreal’s Fog Lake surround poetic takes on nostalgia, suffering, and lost connections with a mass of bleak rock aestheticism, the entire instrumental pallet mixed into one grim soup. Dragonchaser isn’t necessarily a concept work, but many of the songs speak about the destruction that results from being stuck in a rut of unhealthy habits. The opener pulses at a sluggish tempo with Powell repeating “I’ll just wait for Novocain,” his only solace from “such easily forgotten days.” Although frustration and darkness flow out of every crevice of the lyrics, occasional brightness comes out of the sonic offerings, framing the work as some sort of emotional journey. It’s a project to listen to in a dark room as you waste away, but the soaring atmosphere of closing acts “push” and “spectrogram” may inspire you to take that step outside.’ — Positively Underground
______________
Shit and Shine The Crocodile
‘Even among listeners whom already have demonstrably “open-minds” when it comes to experimental music, the recorded output of Texas-born, London-based noise mangler Craig Clouse can be a little…divisive. Gone are the days in which Clouse’s Shit and Shine project simply enthralled us with manic, noise-rock songs that suddenly made “Tom” your explicable favorite first name; because recently, he’s been mining a new vein of mutated dance tracks (albeit still percussion-addled ones). Listen to the 2015 release Everybody’s a Fuckin Expert, for instance, and it still sounds like “drums” are the centerpiece from which all things originate (like some ineffable Abrahamic God…or a street performer who’s, like, super good at juggling), but orbiting that cosmic centerpierce are chaotic satellites of minimalist electronics. Two years later, what new, unholy mutations can we expect from the shape-shifting likes of Shit and Shine?’ — Mike Reid
________________
BJNilsen La Descente
‘BJNilsen is a composer and sound artist based in Amsterdam. In 2015 he set off on a month long hiking trip in Gran Paradiso to explore the acoustic environments in the alpine landscape. Drawn to the monotonous and physical effort that mountains and high altitudes contributes, this became one of the main inspirations for the album, reflecting upon the perception of the landscape during several hours of physical difficulty, let alone rapid weather changes, horizontal thunderstorms and rock avalanches. It is also about the scope of details and perception of the path and the myth of the mountain as the accursed or sacred place.’ — Editions Mego
__________
Terry Glory
‘A lot of the best Australian underground music of the last decade has been pretty incestuous. It could be just a surfeit of ideas and energy, looking for outlets. It could be a wider sense of restlessness in that society, or the geographical isolation that means gene pools flow into each other. It could be a feeling that – like a shark – if you stop, you die. In Terry’s case, it is also about four affable and talented musicians who happen to be coupled up. The four in question are Amy Hill (of Constant Mongrel, School Of Radiant Living), Al Montfort (UV Race, Dick Diver, Total Control), Zephyr Pavey (Eastlink, Russell St Bombings, Total Control) and Xanthe White (Primo). Their offerings, in small releases and last year’s debut LP Terry HQ, showcase a band that is sardonic, shambolic and unadorned.’ — Brendan Telford
_________________
Huoratron XXVI Crimes of Love
‘In any sane universe the advent of a new Huoratron record would herald the sort of palm leaf waving that greeted Jesus when he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. As it is, XXVI Crimes Of Love seems to have slipped out unnoticed. There’s not even yet a mention of it on Wikipedia. When I listen to the Dark Lord of Finnish Techno, my mind is drawn to David Warner’s Evil Genius in Time Bandits who, from his dastardly underground lair, rebukes the Supreme Being for creating slugs, 43 species of parrot and nipples for men. “I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, day one!” he cries. As ever with Huoratron, the devil is in the detail, and the attention to detail in the music is simply staggering. But all that other stuff you have to do to promote a record these days: the social media presence, the constant touring in other regions, the blogging, the microblogging… clearly Aku Raski couldn’t care less.’ — Jeremy Allen
_________________
AnD Dusty Artefacts
‘After the bleeding-techno ‘Kundalini’ EP on Speedy J’s Electric Deluxe, and the new electronic structures presented in the FVS EP for Samurai Horo, the Manchester duo are back to REPITCH Recordings with a heterogeneous four-track EP. Speaking of power and quality going hand in hand, Esoteric Systems traces an unrivaled electronic music excursion. First track Dusty Artefacts is a classic example of Techno’s ability to overwhelm dance floors – raw-driven, hypnotic, with AnD’s classic gritty-hard-feel to its beat all the way through.’ — Repitch
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, and, yes. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I hear really not good things about the new Claire Denis. It was co-written by this French author Christine Angot who I find really tiresome, so I’m not surprised if it’s the disappointment I hear. Curious what you think. ‘Alone’, yes, I know it. I tried to do it once but the line was too long. The immersive theater style is kind of ‘the thing’ in haunted houses in the last several years, and there are a bunch of them. Well, that type and ‘escape rooms’, which are viral right now. I’ve been through one immersive type, and it was interesting although a bit heavy handed. I think there’s an ‘Alone’-type haunted house in NYC, or there was last year, if you want to see what that’s like. But, yes, with the higher aims and production values comes the higher prices. You can usually go through Home Haunts for free or by donating a can of food or something. I’m fascinated by the ‘McKamey’ type of haunted house, but I can’t imagine actually doing one because being abused is not appealing to me, but they’re impressive things, and their huge popularity is pretty interesting too. Huh, I haven’t listened to Big Country since back in the day. I had their first two LPs, and, at least at the time, I thought they were a very one trick pony. I can’t bear U2 anymore than anybody, but it’s hard for me to believe that if you put ‘In a Big Country’ up against ‘Boy’ that ‘Boy’ wouldn’t wipe the floor with it. Nice about the cruise/meet. Long distance relationships have their advantages and charms. I thought Laibach was fun back in the ’80s. Never much more than fun. I saw them a couple of times when they were still doing their big theatrical mock-fascist show with reindeer costumes, etc. I saw a recent clip of them live on youtube a while back and I was kind of shocked because they seemed kind of like a Eurovision Song Contest contestant. ** _Black_Acrylic. Hi. Vollmann is really singular and a very valuable figure/writer, especially amidst US fiction which had been very spotty until the wave of all the great newer, younger writers arrived. The Richardson show looks pretty in your shot. ** Ferdinand, Hi. I did. Good about the lessening blog issues, although I don’t think the overall problem is solved. Hm. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Oh, cool, yeah, it’s an awesome book. I think you’ll really like it. My laptop is still alive this morning, apparently, so here’s hoping it keeps breathing in its semi-vegetative state for another several days. I didn’t end up seeing art or anything yesterday. Plans fell through. So I just did … not much, or nothing to write home about, as they say, which was okay. Back to film work today. I’m glad that moody cloud lost interest in you. Did today give you an added lift? ** Chris dankland, Hi, Chris. Cool. ‘The Royal family’ is probably my second favorite Vollmann. I do want to read ‘The Dying Grass’. I have a copy of the original ‘RUaRD’ back in LA, and I read a bunch of it, and it’s really great, but I don’t think I’ve yet gotten through the entirety. Kudos! Thanks for his reading list. He’s awesome. I’ve read with him twice and interviewed him a couple of times, and he’s a total sweetheart. Awesome guy, great writer. Have a splendiferous day. ** Cool. I made you another gig of recent music that has been keeping me happily occupied if you’re interested and/or in need of new music to try out. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
*
Hey,
Who knows. I really have no idea what this ailment is or means or anything; *IF* it is really real at all to begin with…
“Bela Tarr. And Sade […]. I don’t think either one of them are fatalists.” Me either. At all.
“I think they’re both quite romantic if anything, just about bleak things.” Well, in the specific case of Tarr; someone who’s said things like: “I had to understand that problems are more complicated. Now I can just say it’s quite heavy and I don’t know what is coming, but I can see something that is very close – the end.” and “The key point is that the humanity, all of us, including me, are responsible for [the] destruction of the world. But there is also a force above human at work – the gale blowing throughout the film – that is also destroying the world. So both humanity and a higher force are destroying the world” I don’t think can be described as a “romantic” of *ANY* kind… Just my two cents…
“I mean my work has been called ‘fatalist’ a bunch of times, but those people are just completely missing the point.” Of course. I agree completely. I’d never say there’s absolutely anything “fatalistic” about your work.
“If nothing else, the sheer act of making art and putting it out there precludes real fatalism for me.” I’m sorry, but, could you be possibly saying “fatalism”/”fatalistic” when you really mean “nihilism”/”nihilistic”?
You don’t even like ‘Melancholia’? That’s the only von Trier I like. I like it a lot in fact.
What do you think of that worthless piece of shit tarantino making a movie about the “manson family” murders? It makes me so fucking sick. It’s time someone puts this deranged 12 year old in a padded cell…
So, is it really a gigantic pain in the ass to get a movie done in France no matter how small???
By the way, sorry, could you maybe tell Zac I sent him a message via fb, please?
Thank you very much.
Take good care,
Hugs,
Good day; good luck,
A.
Of this day so far, I’ve only heard AnD, but he is pretty great.
I read a lot about the McKaney house yesterday. There are people who claim they’ve suffered physical and psychological trauma as a result of going through it, and if you look it up on YouTube, you will find a lot of people attacking the owner and the house. McKaney himself has made a lot of videos of people going through the house and posted them on YouTube – one is 4 hours long!. I tried watching one of them, but I could only watch the first 6 minutes. Essentially, it was watching someone being tortured, although more psychologically than physically, in a way that combined elements of BDSM and horror movies, but seemingly without the “sane and consensual” part being emphasized that much. (The waivers people sign at the house say it’s OK for it to break their bones, and there’s no safe word they can use!)
The recent Laibach music I’ve heard is way more pop than their early stuff, but their latest album is the score to a Nietzsche-inspired play and was done in collaboration with an orchestra. I think they might be fun to see live – one plot point in the documentary is that the North Korean government won’t allow them to use all the graphics they project behind them, like fairly innocuous images of stone statues of nude women.
I’m thinking of taking that sci-fi script idea I had and mixing it with the unfinished script I was working on last year about the man whose brother is a neo-Nazi who murdered a black man and trying to submit it as a one-act play to an annual festival of sci-fi theater. I only learned about the festival through an actor who sent me a press release about it because he’s acting in 2 plays there this weekend. Unfortunately, I can’t go because I’m seeing 3 films at the New York Film Festival this weekend and also conducting an interview. But I’d like to condense the script I was working on, which had a very trippy and nightmarish feel, amplify those elements and give it sort of a cyberpunk context. There were lots of references to hacking and the dark web already, and it was heavily influenced by the TV show MR. ROBOT, which could theoretically be taking place right now but feels like science fiction. I just need to figure out how I could set this 20 years in the future or so and make the technology believable – for instance, the protagonist eats pot brownies and has lucid dreams and then sees clues to how to find the video of his brother committing murder on his TV set. These may be hallucinations, but they offer real information. In 20 years, will TV and the dark web still exist?
Merci pour le Purcell
Bacon and Freud
Some Erotic Nonsense
I said this on Facebook, but both AnD and Huoratron would sound great on the soundtrack of a sci-fi film. I downloaded the latter’s album CRYPOTCRACY and his latest single. He doesn’t seem to have released any albums since 2012 – at least none available from iTunes – just a string of singles, including the one you linked. That video is really beautiful. I love the combo of nature and bondage imagery.
Anyway, I’m definitely seeing Mdou Moctar tonight, whose new album is pretty much the exact opposite on the tonal and emotional spectrum from dystopian techno.
I don’t know, I’m curious as to see how Tarantino will handle that Manson family movie thing. But granted, I am something of a fanatical fan of his. Don’t care what the haters say…
Dennis, at first I was going to say that you totally stumped me with today’s bands, until I saw The Liars in there. At the very least I know who they are, though I’ve kind of lost track of them over the years… like a lot of their older material, though. I quite enjoyed the Iglooghost track “Bug Thief,” I must say, and the band description sounds intriguing… they had me at giant eyeballs, ha ha.
As for myself, I’m very much looking forward to the new Miley Cyrus album coming out tomorrow.
Oh, I finished watching the first season of Twin Peaks today as well.
Hi!
Thank you for today’s gig! I liked Fog Lake’s ‘Tolerance’ the most!
Yes, I have the same feeling about ‘The Rainbow Stories’. I can’t wait to start it!
I do hope your dying laptop keeps staying strong for a little longer!!
I’m sorry about the missed art shows and the movie!
My day was okay. Luckily, I didn’t slip back into my shitty mood and I spent most of my time reading and looking for jobs – as the bookshop thing doesn’t seem to work after all.
How was the first day of the dreaded work? I hope you’ll finish it as quickly as possible!
Hey Dennis!
Apologies for having nothing to say about today’s post, but I’m looking at in work and can’t have any volume. I’ll be listening at home though. The good thing is that your blog used to be blocked on the work wifi and now isn’t. As for the blog-bug, it’s seeming okay on my laptop today, but my phone’s showing today’s post but with only one comment.
How are you? Is the neck/shoulder got any better?
That’s very cool about showing the Sundance curators PGL in a theatre! Will that be the first time you’ll see it on a big screen? Actually, when you do all the work you’ve been doing, what size of screen do you watch it on? Hope they love it.
I didn’t get to enter the SBT competition. I was a bit under the weather yesterday and the extract I’d chosen needed a shocking amount of work and I just didn’t have the time or the energy to make it good. Oh well.
What was your Thursday like? Mine involved blood tests, toilet cleaning, a flu jab, two books of DFW essays for a fiver and an as yet uneaten quiche.
May your Friday feel like you’ve just scored a last minute buzzer beater for the whole day.
Superheroic love,
Jamie
I met Eyal again, and something serious is definitely happening. This lunch felt like a date, and we talked about a lot of stuff that got at the roots of our experiences as gay men. We are tentatively getting together again on Monday (to see a press screening of Ai Weiwei’s doc about refugees) and then. he has to fly back to Tel Aviv the next day. I don’t know what to do. We are definitely attracted to each other. He told me that he was in a 2-year long-term relationship with a German man in Berlin. He also told me he wishes he could travel to New York more often. A friend looked up flights to Tel Aviv and said “During Passover, they’re as little as $600,” and even that’s a bit out of my budget (if I want to make a film the same year.) I know how difficult long-term relationships can be and I must confess I don’t even know how to use Skype, but I definitely want to pursue this. By the way, he’s an actor, and when he returns to Tel Aviv, he is embarking on a one man show. His Facebook page is very bare bones, with almost nothing but promo material for plays he’s acted in (in Hebrew.)
I like the AnD track because it’s techno that does what it says on the tin.
Happy to report that on Saturday Alexandra will be here in Dundee to attend the Yuck ‘n Yum meeting, so that means we’ll have just about a full complement of YNY crew on board. Plus it’s Alex’s birthday so we’re all off to see It at the cinema afterwards. I’m not a superstitious person but do have this belief in certain alignments that create a kind of positive energy or something. I dunno, what I’m saying is that I have a good feeling about this.
Hey Dennis, your gig reminded me of a question I had been meaning to ask for a bit. On a post a while back you mentioned a band that had influenced Garbage to the point of maybe Garbage stealing their thing. I remember liking them, but I can’t for the life of me remember their name, any chance you know who I’m talking about just from that? Their name started with an S I think.
@EWA,
Hello,
Sorry for intruding, but, perhaps Dennis was referring to Spoon? All Spoon fans claim Garbage stole *EVERYTHING* from them.
Again, sorry for intruding and also for being wrong if that happened to be the case,
Best greetings,
Armando.
No it wasn’t Spoon. This band was also fronted by a gal.
Although that’s interesting about Spoon fans and Garbage. I don’t think I’d pick up on any similarities honestly.
Thanks though!
Dennis, I fell out like a motherfucker last night. Tired as hell. The late-night football games on Sunday and Monday killed me. Ugh.
Yeah, that dude was picking the shit out of his dick. Or just picking and flapping at it. Maybe he hadn’t bathed in a while. It was interesting to watch for about 5 seconds, and then it got annoying.
A trip to California will happen someday. Do you know how it was supposed to happen? This was my plan: Yury would get into the US and get citizenship and all that, and you two would move back to CA. Then I’d find an excuse to go out there -a theater piece, a reading, something- and see you in your element, and then try and visit the Marcures and Jarod as a side trip. It was years ago that I had that all worked out.
Well, plans change, no? But I’ll get out there someday.
Here’s my Gay City News overview of the 2017 New York Film Festival: http://gaycitynews.nyc/hollywood-mia-lincoln-center/
Hi Dennis, wow. I like everything today. Perfect gig. Thank you! How are you with the sound work? I’m so sorry, I couldn’t look at your recent past PS, which is so rude (to myself). Will try soon. Much work to do here these days, and trying to spend time alone in my new room to get used to it, which feels strange, loopy and still linear. I like it, seems like an important step after move