Gig #153: Of late 53: Ov Pain, Billion O’Clock, Black Dice, Deerhoof, Les Filles de Illighadad, Sam Dunscombe, Grouper, Irreversible Entanglements, Maniac Squat, New Mexican Stargazers, RomaN NoN, Phew, Veilburner, James Rushford, Viktor Timofeev, Injury Reserve

Ov Pain
Billion O’Clock
Black Dice
Deerhoof
Les Filles de Illighadad
Sam Dunscombe
Grouper
Irreversible Entanglements
Maniac Squat
New Mexican Stargazers
RomaN NoN
Phew
Veilburner
James Rushford
Viktor Timofeev
Injury Reserve

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Ov Pain Daytripping
‘‘Daytripping’ is the second single from Dunedin/Melbourne experimental darkwave duo Ov Pain’s (Tim Player and Renee Barrance) sophomore album The Churning Blue of Noon (out July 2021 on It Records). The song is an incantation riding on a rising wave of drone synth and insistent drums. Mixing the Coldwave aesthetic of their older work with a shoegaze/ drone psychedelia.’ — Itrecords

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Billion O’Clock The Grief Whole – side ¤ τ
‘Through the aeons of lockdown a mysterious and ever-expanding constellation of producers, vocalists and makers of sound known as billion o’clock has been (un)quietly labouring over their debut album: a densely layered, defiantly unique noise rap opus they call ‘The Grief Whole’. In a lengthy and sometimes maddening process archives were scoured and fragments gleaned from dusty samplers to be collaged, welded and reverse engineered into a coherent yet varied album. In a sublime marriage of medium and content ‘The Grief Whole’ exists as a conceptual Möbius (tape) loop, with no officially fixed beginning or end point. The two sides are marked only with esoteric mathematical symbols that give no indication of hierarchical order, inviting the listener to choose their own starting point or simply submit to serendipity as they insert the cassette.’ — BO’C

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Black Dice Tuned Out
‘Mod Prog Sic, Black Dice’s seventh album and first since 2012’s Mr. Impossible, continues their uncompromising approach. The opening track reintroduces their predilection for shifting moods and subverting expectations several times per minute. It bursts into life with no niceties, as if it had been accumulating pressure in a laboratory vat. After an intro of sinister, prowling electronic music that recalls Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca, a buoyant, 130-plus BPM techno beat launches the track into an unsettling strain of 3 a.m. dance-floor hedonism. You don’t raise your hands in exultation to Black Dice’s club bangers; you use them to cup your skull in confusion. Like their best work, it sounds at once meticulous and reckless, sinister and goofy.’ — Dave Segal

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Deerhoof Scarcity Is Manufactured
‘When the work of the long-running experimental rock band Deerhoof finally clicks, it can feel like you are being punked by your own brain. Throughout their tenure as a group, they have remained focused on the musical margins they could overcome by constantly moving forward at a prolific, steady pace. The group can be avant-garde, full of melody, anthemic, joyous and frightening, sometimes all within the same song. On their self-produced 18th album Actually, You Can, they further justify their attempts to be all of those things at once.’ — Pat King

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Les Filles de Illighadad Inssegh Inssegh
‘Who gets to be a guitar hero? Does it happen through volume, or tone, or shredding notes like so much confetti? What about those who exist outside of Western industries, whose courage is something more than a mighty riff coursing through electric currents? Enter Les Filles de Illighadad. Led by Fatou Seidi Ghali, the group formed in Illighadad, a small village in central Niger populated by nomadic Tuareg people. They took on a utilitarian name (“the Daughters of Illighadad”), performing the music of their Saharan upbringing with an electric guitar. They made their way to Western ears through the boutique Sahel Sounds label, releasing 2016’s Les Filles de Illighadad and 2017’s Eghass Malan before touring the United States for the first time in the fall of 2019. Recorded on the Brooklyn stop of that run, At Pioneer Works documents the ensemble at a hypnotic high, far from home but well in command of an eager, inviting spirit.’ — Allison Hussey

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Sam Dunscombe Desert Disco (Excerpt)
‘Dunscombe’s first major solo release via Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label, Outside Ludlow/Desert Disco features Dunscombe’s audio experiments with a piece of quarter inch tape which the artist found tangled around a cactus when exploring the Mojave desert in California. The release also houses field recordings taken in the ghost town of Ludlow, which include the sounds of freight trains and exploding mines.’ — The Wire

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Grouper Ode to the blue
‘Many of Shade’s nine tracks feel like experiments in how much Harris can remove from her music while retaining its essential mystery. The album’s most notable development is to present her voice and acoustic guitar largely unadorned. The setting is so spare we can hear the buzz of the room and the squeak of her fingers on the frets. On “Ode to the blue” and “Pale Interior,” her words seem to dissolve as soon as they leave her mouth.’ — Daniel Bromfield

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Irreversible Entanglements Open The Gates
‘Within an Irreversible Entanglements groove, the tri-city free-jazz band expands and distorts the shape of melody, noise and heart-thumping rhythm, which the group typically stretches over long improvisations. “Open the Gates,” a new song composed by vocalist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother) and drummer Tcheser Holmes, presents the quintet under a tight three minutes. Polyrhythmic percussion jogs at a brisk pace to Luke Stewart’s whiplashed bass line as alto sax (Keir Neuringer) and trumpet (Aquiles Navarro) tangle around a regal, inciting melody that juxtaposes “Camptown Races” – a song steeped in minstrelsy – against Ayewa’s liberation poetry.’ — Lars Gotrich

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Maniac Squat Overbevisende Mareritt
‘Maniac Squat were the art punk band from Colchester who had a cult hit with ‘F**k Off’ in the mid-90s – a record which secured them the coveted single of the week slot in Kerrang! no less. Performing over two hundred gigs, including support slots for Babes in Toyland and Zodiac Mindwarp as well as tours of mainland Europe, Maniac Squat made their last record in 1996 and promptly split. Now they are back, with three members of the original line-up reconvening to record a stunning concept album of experimental art-rock inspired by the work of eighteenth-century Christian mystic, author and philosopher, Karl von Eckhartshausen.’ — MSR

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New Mexican Stargazers SANTA FE CRUISER
‘Streaked in hiss and spliced with jump cuts, the songs snake through moonlit vistas and nameless neon truck stops, a mix of blasted keyboard cruising and planetarium parking lot raga. It’s music of delirium and dusty airwaves, homegrown and half-conscious, revved up road trip anthems melted into woozy astral Americana. A roamer’s paradise, ripping and dipping through lost lands of enchantment, until the infinite grid of freeway lights dissolves into the grainy glow of meteor showers.’ — Retrac

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RomaN NoN Mvrder Sc3ne
‘Still angry, still punk, still creeping, still mystical. These guys deliver an hypnotic EP that you didn’t know you needed. But trust me, you do.’ — golden tape

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Phew Days Nights
‘The renowned avant-garde artist Phew, described by as ‘a Japanese underground legend’, was a founding member of Osaka punk band Aunt Sally, who broke up in 1980. Since then she has worked solo and collaborated with musical luminaries including as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jim O’Rourke, Ana da Silva (The Raincoats), Seiichi Yamamoto (Boredoms) and Holger Czukay (Can).’ — Mute

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Veilburner Lurkers in the Capsule of Skull
‘Pennsylvania duo Veilburner aren’t at all sly about what to expect from their new song “Lurkers in the Capsule of Skull”. It’s a dizzying, off-kilter piece of black/death metal that attempts to portray a man’s descent into insanity. It isn’t an easy listen; through a combination of weird psychedelia and uncomfortable dissonance, Veilburner match the music to the album’s theme. Musically, Veilburner are similar to acts like Ulcerate, Imperial Triumphant and Blut Aus Nord, using a death metal base to build off of.’ — Decibel

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James Rushford U+25CF
‘Created primarily during a stay at the La Becque, an artist residency on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lake From The Louvers draws inspiration from the play of shadow and light on both the surface of the lake and the window through which Rushford viewed this lacustrine landscape. While the lake is itself at times directly audible in the form of field recordings, the image suggested by the record’s title is less directly represented than translated into sonic structures inspired, as Rushford explains, by ‘the passing of shadow through a fixed space’.’ — Shelter Records

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Viktor Timofeev Portal Of Zin I
‘Viktor Timofeev returns to Lo Bit Landscapes with “Palace of Peace and Reconciliation”, a set of odes to digital alienation. The suite of tracks form a meditative soundtrack to an ancient eon and a crumbling artifact of the electronic era where laments unto the bitrate gods bend and swirl over estranged networks, fusing forms that feel both mystical and computer-rendered at the same time. The album’s searing guitars are at times reminiscent of his critically acclaimed work on NIHITI’s sonic World War II epic “for ostland”, but here the structures are looser, the forms more misshapen, and the fidelity more abstract – more in line with the digital stutters of Timofeev’s work with Quantum Natives as Zolitude or NYC outsider house champion Bryce Hackford (DFA).’ — digitalinberlin

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Injury Reserve Superman That
‘On their first album following the death of member Stepa J. Groggs, Injury Reserve channels the spirit of Hayes’ remake, stretching their signature noise rap into freeform thickets of texture and tension. Shunning form and legibility, the Arizona group fully embraces the noise, trip-hop, and post-rock influences that loitered on the fringes of their past work.’ — Stephen Kearse

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p.s. Hey. ** David, Hi. You think? Well, maybe one day. Jeez, you have a colourful past, man. You ever thought about writing a scandalous memoir or something? ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool. Hope the essay was a help. Lutz knows sentences like nobody else. Yes, that X-R-A-Y interview is great. Weird I overlooked it in my links search. Everyone, Courtesy of Mr. _Black_Acrylic, a great, far-ranging recent interview with Garielle Lutz on the excellent site X-R-A-Y is highly recommended. Here. Thanks a lot, sir. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, I see, but twinks can dream. ** Bill, Oh, great, you read ‘Gotham Grammarian’. There aren’t many of us. I saw your email just now! But I haven’t been coffeed enough to open it yet. I will imminently, and I’ll get back to you. Awesome, thank you so much! New Grubbs: will do. He’s always worth a close listen at the very least. Thanks again, Bill. ** Dominik, Hi!!!! Ah, brain cells, I remember them, ha ha. Yes, The Beatles can sometimes seem like an internal organ or something. Years ago I had an artist friend who made his close, select friends advent calendars every year wherein every window had a different drug in it ranging from, oh, a caffeine pill to LSD to whatever else, and you were supposed to take whatever drug you got on the particular day — they were unmarked and unidentifiable to look at — and … that was a situation where you definitely didn’t want to open and empty all the windows’ contents into your mouth at the same time. A successful advent calendar. I’m glad yesterday’s love had you earmarked. Moi aussi. (He came to mind because I just found him on an escort site when I was hunting them.) I certainly can’t argue with the premise that your yesterday love would be the world’s most fabulous creature. Or at least on a par with a Lewis Romeo who had a chocolate dispensing mouth. Love’s on a roll! Love getting dyslexia and changing his name to Loev, G. ** Okay. Today I made you a gig of some new music I’ve been listening to lately and finding thoroughly interesting and/or charming or something. Check out the array. You might agree with me about one or more, you never know. See you tomorrow.