Gig #56: Of late 7: The Body, Amen Dunes, Wanda Group, Max Richter, Heterotic, Energy Gown, Nochexxx, Whirling Hall of Knives, EMA, Pyrrhon, Marching Church, Gezan, Brett Nauke, Aleksi Perälä, Cevdet Erek, Puce Mary, Datashock

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The Body Hail To Thee, Everlasting Pain
‘Perhaps extreme music is the ideal method for sublimating an unfulfilled death drive: a fantasy of death’s fascinating potentiality that mediates our access to the truth of its nothingness, accreting in the process all the symbolism that attends our visions of mortality. It’s dark, fearful, rent by screams, discordant guitar, and pounding drums. More importantly, it lasts. Unlike death, which occurs in an instant, music unfolds through time, expanding this phantasmic death into an album-length experience, a succession of death moments, or better yet, a succession of moments that teach us to crave death. The Body’s music, here compounded by The Haxan Cloak’s Bobby Krlic, exemplifies this dual process of the suicide fantasy, evoking both the surrounding “craziness” and the terrifying march toward self-slaughter.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Amen Dunes w/ Elias Bender Ronnenfelt Green Eyes
‘Over the past few years Damon McMahon’s Amen Dunes project has been serving up loose and crackly, almost improvised psych-raga jams, but where McMahon’s pumped out “largely improvisational first-take affairs, recorded in a matter of weeks at most” in the past, he says his new album Love took him close to a year-and-a-half to put together. Everything’s rubber-banded up tight by the background violin. The whole deal softly, softly chugs along partly because of that little drum beat, the one that practically lopes while it loops. It’s all quarter note snare, kick on the “ands” of three and four. One slightly more relevant things you also oughta know is that Iceage’s Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is featured on the track “Green Eyes”, and, woah buddy, he even gets his duet on with McMahon.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Wanda Group Masculinity is a Wonderful Thing
‘Louis Johnstone’s Wanda Group project has been making a growing name for itself across the course of this year. With a quick-fire succession of cryptically titled records, accompanied with greyscale collage artwork built from images of fragmented rock, he’s established a particular aesthetic that’s both unique and tough to pin down. Certain elements coincide with the styles and ideals of musique concrete, or artists like Joseph Hammer, Atrax Morgue and the school of industrial/ experimental/ minimal cassettes that cropped up in the late 80s and early 90s. But throwing names to see what sticks seems a little at odds with the nourishing aspect at the heart of Wanda Group, a certain verisimilitude that sidesteps overt abstraction towards something more beautiful. His tracks are complex, intimate structures: webs of samples stripped of their original setting, closely examined, then messily smeared and reapplied into radically new shapes. The overall approach and final appearance is closer to papier-mache than any traditional style of production.’ — The Quietus

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Max Richter Untitled Figures
‘Max Richter’s debut album Memoryhouse was originally recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in 2002 for the BBC’s Late Junction classical music label. A masterpiece in neoclassical composition, the album has languished in out-of-print obscurity since the dissolution of Late Junction as a label. Indeed, inquisitive listeners might now know Richter better for his earlier collaborations with electronic pioneers The Future Sound of London and Roni Size, as well as his elegiac score to Ari Folman’s 2008 animated documentary Waltz with Bashir. But Fat Cat Records has plucked Memoryhouse from the doldrums to introduce a new audience to Richter’s first major solo work, and give old fans an excuse to fall under its spell all over again. And what an intoxicating spell it is. A 65-minute journey through the beauty and tragedy of 20th century Europe, Memoryhouse is like an immaculately observed postcard journal, albeit one informed more by imagination than documentary accuracy.’ — BBC

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Heterotic Rain
‘Throughout his 20-year career, Mike Paradinas has peppered his fruitful career (as μ-Ziq) with a handful of collaborations that have seen the Wimbledon producer work with heady artists like Marco Jerrentrup, Speedy J and Aphex Twin. With Heterotic, Paradinas has found a musical project that seems, sonically and personally, close to his heart. Recording with his wife, Lara Rix-Martin, the music of Heterotic is a tempered blend of spacey synthesizers, analog drum machine beats and mournful vocals, courtesy of French artist Vezelay, giving each track a haunted, uneasy feeling.’ — exclaim

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Energy Gown Freedose
‘It was a bit prophetic that I was reading Ginsberg prior to my interview with local experimental quartet Energy Gown, whose philosophy of embracing the now and delving into the darker echelons of the human psyche recalls the inquisitive creativity of the 1950s and 60s. Energy Gown’s quest though isn’t to bring back the flower children of bygone eras but instead probe the codes and structures that make up the human body and creative impulses of their music and audience. Although only formed less than a year ago, the group has already self-released two tapes, performed at Chicago’s strongly curated Psych Fest and are releasing their first EP I Watch The Sun on March 23. Clearly the now is truly now.’ — IMPOSE

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Nochexxx Aquaverse
‘Marshaling his battered MPC, teasing out warped grooves and punching in staggered beats that sit somewhere between vintage electro and techno – though often spiked through with pleasingly crunchy b-boy signifiers – Nochexxx tunes are idiosyncratic and heat-warped expressions of a sinister twitchy velocity. Indeed, it’s this very tension that gives Nochexxx tracks such personality; raw music that works the floor but exists on a rather different mental plane, with an oil haze cinematic undertone that’s often accentuated in his performances with distinct yellow and black visual accompaniment from Plastic Horse. This month sees the release of the Cambridge-based musician’s debut album Thrusters on Ramp Recordings. Featuring 11 tracks that solidify his vision of skewed homespun electronics, this is music in constant forward motion – a hallucinatory journey to the centre of the cactus, and an instantly recognisable audio world.’ — The Quietus

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Whirling Hall Of Knives Volaré Symptomatic
‘A collaboration between Magnetize and The Last Sound, Whirling Hall Of Knives’ harsh smouldering circuits and eruptions of panicky white noise have a profoundly unsettling quality, a sense of gnawing paranoia but interspersed with moments of almost euphoric epiphany, as if in the grip of an unshakeable 4am psychosis a growing sense that the door will be kicked in at any second and the world outside will come pouring in. Psyche electronics of a particularly greasy and grime-flecked hue. A feast of swirling hypno-psych, blown out and buried in sheets of corrosive feedback with all manner of buzzing and swirling guitars blending into a pulsing, throbbing, hypnotic and mesmerizing noise-scape underpinned by a seriously wild and propulsive groove.’ — collaged

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EMA Satellites
‘Production-wise, EMA has said she wanted her new album The Future’s Void to sound like Nine Inch Nails demos and – fair enough – this is what we hoped How to Destroy Angels would be, or what Zola Jesus might do next. That said, EMA draws on sci-fi visions of dystopia (hence names like ‘Neuromancer’, ‘Cthulhu’) rather than targeting Christianity, for a more astute criticism of the late-capitalist era. The raw, chaotic, noise-collages of her former band, Gowns, seem a long way away – but these elements are suspended to make humanity seem all the more precious. The music operates less as an end in itself and more as a counterpoint to the keening, whispering, screeching, gasping voice-as-expression-of-humanity: within the silicon maze, she suggests, there’s a ghost trying to get out. A crucial part of the EMA formula is the lullaby, nursery rhyme, or folksong updated. Her songs look back to that first moment in childhood when we realize we can be creative – that music can be democratic – and they look forward to a moment in our collective history when all the icons that have so much power over us in 2014 are just material for children’s songs.’ — Drowned in Sound

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Pyrrhon The Architect Confesses
‘Pyrrhon’s oft-suffocating, teetering-towards-self-destruction din works because they are one confident, brash group of dudes. Guitarist Dylan DiLella deftly crosses brutality with riffs that can only be described as “zippery” and “alarm-esque.” Drummer Alex Cohen’s natural prog tendencies feed off of the chances to explode with some relentless blasting. Bassist Erik Malave moves in and out of the main motifs while showing no hesitance in going as bonkers as his bandmates. (Plus, that thick bass tone may be the greatest benefit of a fine Ryan Jones production and Colin Marston mastering.) Moore uses a variety of effects to enhance his many voices – a full range of maniacal growling, screaming, yelling, ranting, and preaching – while delivering an album’s worth of nuanced, intelligent lyrics.’ — Last Rites

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Marching Church We Lose Them Through Our Hands
‘Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is probably best known for being the vocalist and guitarist of the excellent Danish post-punk band, Iceage, and probably second-best known for being the frontman for Vår (née War), the spooky electro Iceage side project. Now Rønnenfelt is releasing new music from his other musical outlet, Marching Church. The band’s new release, “Throughout The Borders,” is spooky minimal goth a la Death In June. For Marching Church, Rønnenfelt exercises a cold, dark, and dry sound, in debt to both early post-punk and dark-folk.’ — collaged

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Gezan 『癲癇する大脳たち』PV
‘Gezan is a crazed Tokyo outfit that reconfigures the stylings of Anglo-American rock subgenres into their own delirious negation. The four-piece have been cultivating a homebound notoriety for a bonkers live set since their inception in 2009, garnering plaudits from some of the acts (Melt-Banana, Ruins, Acid Mothers Temple) whose faithful desecration of rock trademarks they’ve taken it upon themselves to extend into the second decade of the 21st century. More importantly, their accolades are fully justified by the pulverizing, anything-goes caprice of It Was Said to Be A Song, a debut LP that found a domestic release in 2012 and that begins its flight into barely contained insanity with the Babel of “Full Claw Lunar Surface.” Here, scathing guitar fireworks are pockmarked by non-sequiturs into feral tape manipulation and industrial rap, the high-pitched braying and fluid pendulations from 7/8 into 8/8 exuding a volatility that’s mouth-watering precisely to the extent that, like with so many great Japanese bands, it refuses to swear wholesale fealty to externally-imposed conventions and dictates of taste.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Brett Naucke Luau
‘If previous releases for Nihilist, Arbor and his own Catholic Tapes established Chicago’s Brett Naucke as one of the more accomplished practitioners in the American synth underground, Seed, his debut LP for Spectrum Spools, is a veritable career apex, brimming with sonic ingenuity, detail, and mastery over both instrument and musical form. It is hard to fathom due to the sheer diversity of sound and affectations of the eight individual pieces on the album, but Seed was recorded – almost impossibly – with the same synth patch, slightly modified for the unveiling of each track. This testifies to the intensity of Naucke’s macroscopic conceptual vision for Seed. Each track’s complex arc points towards a mind rooted in academic electronic processes, keenly trying to surprise and disarm by prying open new textures, rhythms and structures. But Naucke has struck a perfect balance that unites this avant-garde intuition with a compositional sophistication – bringing each unique molecule of sound into cohesive songs and further still into a supremely listenable and closed album that operates entirely on its own logic.’ — Editions Mego

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Aleksi Perälä Dynamic Light Scattering
‘The music of Finnish electronic composer Aleksi Perälä’s uses Perälä and Grant Wilson-Claridge’s custom musical scale, the Colundi Sequence. Wilson-Claridge says of their invention: “Instead of dividing the keyboard into octaves with semitones, we have chosen specific frequencies to work around… The scale is 128 resonant frequencies chosen via experimentation and philosophy, each relating to a specific human bio-resonance, or psychology, traditional mysticism or belief, physics, astronomy, maths, chemistry.” “I’ve always felt somewhat frustrated or restricted with a standard keyboard,” says Perälä, “I started exploring different TET [equal temperament scales] in 2006.” Perälä’s music is both natural and electrical, with an emphasis on sine waves of different frequencies, amplitudes and phase to demonstrate Colundi Level 1 to the listener, whatever the shape of one’s ear and one’s ability to hear may be.’ — collaged

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Cevdet Erek Room of Rhythms
‘Cevdet Erek’s (1974, Istanbul) work is characterised by a marked use of rhythm and site specificity. Erek combines video, sound and images, often in an attempt to alter the viewer’s perception and experience of a given space. The result functions as a hypothesis, probing the viewer’s instinctive logic and thus appealing to the senses. Interestingly, Erek manages to combine rational components such as references to architecture and linear time with instinctive impulses thereby levelling the gap between two supposedly opposing spheres. Part of an ongoing exploration, “Room of Rhythms 1″ is based on a conversation between Cevdet Erek and Duygu Demir that reflects on themes of sound, architecture, rhythm, measured time, dance music and site-specificity.’ — collaged

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Puce Mary Ultimate Hypocrisy V
‘Puce Mary is the solo project of Copenhagen-based experimental musician Frederikke Hoffmeier. Closely affiliated with the punk scene that grew out of the danish capital and spawned labels like Posh Isolation and bands like Iceage, Vår and Lust for Youth, Hoffmeier has chosen a somewhat different path. As a solo project, Puce Mary is constantly evolving and never stays in the same place for very long. Where the early tapes and vinyls on danish label Posh Isolation have been minimal with a dark edge, Hoffmeier has recently showcased her diversity through live performances and collaborations. From the concrete sound-poetry of the collaboration vinyls with swedish noise champion Sewer Election to her latest livesets of rhythmic industrial and harsh power electronics, Puce Mary never ceases to push the boundaries of contemporary noise music.’ — collaged

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Datashock Tod in der Saarvanne
‘Datashock is a ritualistic “neo-hippie-spook-folk” collective from Saarlouis, Germany. There is no constant lineup, as the group is joined by new members every now and then. Their music is defined almost entirely by psychedelic multidimensional live-improvisations stemming from 70ies krautrock influenced by contemporary electronic music and psychotic dronescapes. As a result we find complex layers of sultry muffled vibrations met by heavy waves of electronic sound experiments and strangely disfigured images. Here and there reality-distorting bits of whispers and cut-up voices are woven into the texture of these alien patterns of sound. Every step here is like nervously stumbling through the swampy ground of a jungle. Here every look is like a secret glimpse at a hidden ghost-train world.’ — nicknicknick

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p.s. Hey. ** Armando, Hey! Yeah, really great to see you, man! A couple of people have told me that that ‘Captain America’ movie is fun. Huh, cool. I’ll probably end up watching it on a plane because I always seem to see blockbusters on planes partly because it’s really hard to find anyone in Paris who’s into seeing them in the theater. Ha ha, wow, I love Godard. Yikes about BlB. Um, the producer of the film I’m making with Zac is the producer of almost all of BlB’s films, so I’ll stay mum on that topic, ha ha again. ‘Gone’ is a book that’s a facsimile of this scrapbook I kept in the early 80s when I was developing the George Miles Cycle. Weird that they don’t ship to Mexico. I wonder why. Maybe if you write a note to them or something? The guy who’s publishing the book reads this blog so maybe he’ll pop in to say why that is. Shit, that was one intense shrink session. I’m sorry, man. I guess it’s good that Xanax was so friendly to you. I mean to see the silver lining and all that. Anyway, yeah, really swell to get to talk with you, my friend. Take care, and come back soon, if it suits you. Love and hugs back to you! ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi, Jeff. Cool! I mean to see you! I’m good, thanks. That is a weird and most curious coincidence or something about the Ohle book. I have this odd belief or half-belief in fate and destiny and things like that, so I can buy that there’s something bigger than mere luck guiding that seeming happenstance. No, I don’t know about gnOme. A quick initial scroll through their books does indeed reveal how interesting they are. Thanks a lot! I’ll go scour the place in a bit. Everyone, d.l. Jeffrey Coleman tips you guys/me to a press called gnOme whose books look really interesting. I recommend that you follow Jeff’s lead and check them out. Yeah, great, you’re such a fount of interesting tips, man. I’ve found such terrific books and presses and music and stuff thanks exclusively to you. Take care. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. I hope the installation came together perfectly. Did it? What is it? Is Hamburg cool? I drove through there once on the way to Scandinavia but didn’t stop, and I couldn’t tell what the place was like or about. ** David Ehrenstein, I did read that about Ronet and Anna Karina, but it didn’t end up in the post for some reason. ‘Snowpiercer’, what is that? Wait, I’ll go find out when the p.s. is over (for me). Have a lovely weekend, sir. ** Empty Frame, Hi, man. I did a little check on that production of ‘The Notebook’. It looks quite promising, it’s true. Great in any case that that book is getting highlighted publicly ‘cos it’s so incredibly undervalued in a general way relative to its greatness. I’ll ask Gisele if her manager people know about Battersea Arts Centre. Yeah, the UK is really squeamish or something re: Gisele’s work. We get nibbles all the time, but nothing ever ends up happening. Maybe the new ventriloquism piece will get over there since it’s very verbal/text-oriented and the powers that be always say that the UK is all ‘we want lots and lots of talking on our stages’. If I can manage to get over for the Kristof thing, I’ll def. let you know. It’ll mostly depend on whether we’ll be shooting our film around then. Ha ha, actually that HODGKIN/ smashed piece doesn’t sound so bad in theory, but I trust your judgment implicitly. Cool that you’ll see TNP and WB. I haven’t seen either live yet. Cool, cool, cool. Ha ha, whoa: ‘DENNIS COOPER LACKS PERSPECTIVE’. I mean, sure, probably, but still. Of course now my mind is scurrying to figure out what I do that would have made her say that, which is not an unfun pursuit, I guess. Wow, trippy. I do know that there’s no place in the world where me and stuff are more actively and overtly disliked than England. Not sure why, though. But then Will Self’s old-fashioned blowhard literary antics are considered edgy and daring over there, so maybe that’s a clue. I just read this think-piece by WS this morning about how the literary novel has been killed by the internet that was so 20th century out-of-it. Anyway, blah blah, thanks for passing that quote along. Pretty funny. ** Steevee, Blb’s ‘Gerontophila’ has been kind of a success over here in France, or in Paris at least, so I’m guessing that’s why MK2 has come onboard for him? Great luck with the James Gray review. You know, I don’t believe I’ve seen any of his films, come to think of it. Would ‘The Immigrant’ be a good place to start? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Ha ha, maybe I should quickly copyright that sentence. Actually, Cory Arcangel is all over that. I think I read that he’s doing some big installation work about it. No surprise, right? ** Schoolboyerrors, Ooh, getting the LA airport in there is a nice meta-touch. The wilds of England: how wild are they? Sounds sweet. Oh, historical fiction, right, sure, got it. Nicholson Baker is great, yeah. That dude can write a mean sentence, among his other many virtues. In addition to the sex novels, I have a great fondness for his earlier novel ‘Room Temperature’. The prose in that novel is crazy pristine. And I’ve always envied that title for some reason. My day? Almost all film stuff again. It’s gonna be mostly that way for a while. Uh, Zac and I met with the guy we’ve wanted badly to play one of the roles in the scene we’re shooting in a couple of weeks, and he said yes, so we’re very happy! We have to send the producers a photo of us for use on some flyer about our film that the producers plan to circulate at Cannes, so we went through the archive of photos of us together and found a couple of maybes but decided we should get a more formal one done, which we have to do today. More film stuff: emails, phone calls. Some work on the novel. A bit of walking around in the rain. A bit of reading. Nice day, but not a day so interesting to hear about, I think. I’ll expected to hear how you coped with the wilds today when society has you in its grip once again if not before. Have huge fun! ** Sypha, No, not a fan of ‘Black Swan’ at all. You played that ‘E.T.’ game? Cool. Yeah, it looks like a tear-your-hair-out frustrating mess of a thing. I’m sorry to hear about your household full of sickness, but there’s something kind of goth and haunted house-like about it in my imagination. It seems like it would make a cool premise for a stage play. Maybe I’ll suggest it to Gisele. But, all riffing aside, I am sorry for the suffering part of that otherwise aesthetically interesting situation. Cool that you’ve managed to get your short-story collection in order nonetheless. ‘All the way back to 2010’: that’s a funny phrase. ** Magick mike, Hey, Mike! Always a great and serious pleasure to have you here! What were doing in Santa Fe? Did you see Ken Baumann? Very best to you, sir! ** Misanthrope, Yeah, that’s so, so rough about Rewritedept’s friend. Heroin is a beast. Its grip is insanely tight and its lies are horribly convincing. I think I’m kind of kerazy and goofy in my real life, so maybe that’s why I don’t notice it. Never in my life have I heard of Luke Bryan, for very good reasons, it sounds like. I’m not even going to google him. I don’t want that pollution in my memory banks. Thanks for taking his bullet, man. Okay, that week you’re over there/here is the week we’ll be rehearsing and then shooting our film unless something goes terribly awry. But there’ll be days when we’re not shooting, so, as soon as our dates are locked down, and yours too, let’s sort it out. ** Rewritedept, Hi, man. Yeah, I can’t even imagine how hard that must be to process. I don’t even know if it’ll be possible to process. I think it’s probably something you’ll more just incorporate and then move on changed in some way. My day was good. I told Schoolboyerrors about it above. Man, hang in there and do and feel the very best you can this weekend, okay? Lots of love. ** Okay. This weekend I’ve put together a slightly extra-sized edition of the only semi-/cultishly liked gig posts I do on occasion featuring new music I’ve been listening to and liking lately, and you guys who want to hear and, in some cases, also see some awesome current sonic treats can have at it until Monday. Thank you. See you when the weekend is over.