Gig #59: Of late 9: Lower, Harassor, Evian Christ, Atki2, Cindytalk, Ernest Gibson, Wolves in the Throne Room, Diane Cluck, Communions, Lone, Sudden Infant, Philipp Quehenberger, copeland, White Lung

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Lower Lost Weight, Perfect Skin
‘Lower make intense music. Seek Warmer Climes, the Copenhagen quartet’s debut album, sparkles with the harmonic dissonance and high-strung urgency of their underground music forebears. But Lower ­– Adrian Toubro (vocals), Simon Formann (guitar), Kristian Emdal (bass) and Anton Rothstein (drums) – also channel the romance and drama of great singer-songwriters, from late-period Scott Walker to Bryan Ferry. The result is a hugely ambitious and affecting rock album that enters deeply personal and unusual sonic and topical spaces.’ –– Matador

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Harassor Winter’s Triumph
‘Harassor are a rare gem glinting up malevolently from one of Los Angeles’ countless dark corners. The band was formed back in 2002, and after more than a decade of dues-paying and hell-raising, they’ve finally started attracting attention for their savage extreme metal hybrid. 2011 saw their inclusion on Southern Lord’s well-received Power of the Riff compilation, and two full-lengths later, Dais came calling to secure the rights for the trio’s fourth LP. The venerable experimental/noise label and the regressive-minded metal band seem like an odd coupling, but both parties seem chuffed with the arrangement and the result of their pairing speaks for itself. Into Unknown Depths is a delightfully dynamic approach to extreme metal’s usual grim-faced presentation. No two songs sound alike, but each one sounds deadly.’ — Kim Kelly

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Evian Christ Fuck Idol
‘Evian Christ’s metamorphosis from primary school teacher to Kanye West collaborator has been swift and stunning. The 24-year-old, who first came to prominence with 2011’s druggy Kings And Them mixtape, received an email last year requesting his services as a collaborator on West’s Yeezus LP. His new EP Waterfall is his first release since. Stand out track “Fuck Idol” matches squalling synths with deliciously grinding percussion. Reminiscent in places of Pan Sonic’s blocky brutality, Burial’s sudden atmosphere shifts and Vatican Shadow’s abrasive beauty, Waterfall is as brightly promising as it is stark and cold.’ — Resident Advisor

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Atki2 Knock Knock
‘Atki2 has long been performing his unique strain of dancehall, bashment, dubstep, and jungle, yet this is the first time he has released this style on its historical format of choice, 7-inch vinyl. Having co-promoted the Ruffneck Diskotek club night (a strong factor in Bristol‘s development as one of the globe’s most exciting hubs for dubstep and bass music) for nearly a decade with Dub Boy and other local cohorts, he is deservedly a much-loved and respected member of Bristol’s music scene. See his many releases on the city’s top labels such as Punch Drunk, Idle Hands, and Immerse, as well as further afield imprints like Shadetek and Actress’ Werk Discs, for whom he first recorded way back in 2005. With long-term partner Hanuman, Atki2 also helms Steakhouse Records, and the duo have been releasing bass-soaked music under the name Monkeysteak for several years.’ — frijsfo beats

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Cindytalk Guts of London
‘I mean, I think it is probably impossible to be any kind of… – what is the word I am looking for… intuitive sort of musician, a musician who improvises, without accepting that silence is every bit as important to the sound that you are making, if not in most cases more important. This is strange for certain people, myself included, who make a barrage of noise, but then, when you do create space and silence, it is much more noticeable. It’s a question about light and dark, and playing with both, of being aware of that. You can’t have one without the other. So yes, absolutely. I also think it is to some extent the Holy Grail to most musicians, a quest. When you are younger and fumbling around to find what you are looking for, I suspect one of the things we are all looking for is silence. I know that the older I’ve got – beginning life as a punk etc – that is certainly what I’ve been looking for, stillness, space, silence. Of the recent three albums I have released on Editions Mego, the most recent one is the stillest, the quietest, almost the most at peace with itself. The first two are much more fidgety, nervous, abstract, noisy, and frenetic and I have been looking for that space. I am constantly looking for a place where you can settle down inside, where something you are having to fumble about for, is there, not so much to have control over it, but to be at peace with it.’ — Cindytalk

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Ernest Gibson Everywhere You Roam
‘Looking to genres like exotica, folk, and maybe even touches of doo-wop, Ernest Gibson is an artist who is deeply entrenched in musty old tricks and spells of time gone by, but uses that platform as a way of twisting and re-imagining the sounds of the past, assembling them into a completely new form. Something nearly unrecognized by the elements that went into it. Think of the way that Daughn Gibson stretches, samples, and loops his music to give it a time-worn vibe or perhaps the way that Dirty Beaches recreates older styles with thick, heavy layers of lo-fi modernism and you’ll be getting a vague idea of what Ernest Gibson is up to on his album. It’s sort of a cratedigger’s wet dream. A lot of the time Island Records feels like, perhaps in another life, it could easily be packed away in a box with other lost gems down in a dank basement somewhere, waiting for the day when that box falls down on some adventurous listener’s head.’ — Portals Music

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Wolves in the Throne Room Celestite Mirror
‘Long tracks and slow builds have been near-constants for Wolves in the Throne Room, the Pacific Northwest band that helped push United States Black Metal to wider recognition. As you listen to “Celestite Mirror”, the debut track from their forthcoming fifth album, Celestite, you might keep expecting for the hammer to drop, for the black metal to rush in. But don’t hold your breath: Celestite follows in the grand black metal tradition of trading blast beats and suffocating guitars for pensive synths and slow motion. For “Celestite Mirror”, Wolves in the Throne Room build from an eerie drift of synth glow and gentle bass-drum booms into a Vangelis-sized organ roar. Ahead of the halfway mark, they back into a Manuel Gottsching-like series of flickers and clicks, dispersing the darkness they once conjured.’ — Grayson Haver Currin

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Diane Cluck Sara
‘After a seven-year hiatus, Boneset is the seventh album from modern folk artist Diane Cluck. Cluck’s uniquely clipped, glottal vocals and harp-like acoustic guitar embed in rich textures from cellist Isabel Castellvi and drummer Anders Griffen. Recorded to analog tape at Brooklyn’s Trout Recording, Boneset is comprised of songs written years ago, not so long ago, just recently, laid out in near-chronological order. Dark to light to dark, the album overends as a kind of mobius strip, songs seeded with birds, death, wealth, poverty, boldness and heart. “Diane Cluck is a virtuosic talent with an emotionality that feels at once ancient and alien. Her mastery of her voice as an ecstatic instrument is so compelling.” — Antony Hegarty (Antony and the Johnsons)’ — Important Records

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Communions Summer’s Oath
‘Communions is the Copenhagen-based rock band of brothers Martin and Mads Rehof, Jacob van Deurs Formann and Frederik Lind Köppen. They share a rehearsal space with Iceage and Lower at local DIY space and venue Mayhem, and recorded their debut EP, Cobblestones, between that epicenter of the city’s punk/industrial scene and Köppen’s bedroom. Communions are a band stuck between fun fun in the sun sun and their native Copenhagen’s desolate punk movement. Perhaps that’s why their music feels nuzzled by the comforting angst of pop-punk while still fraught with the yells of someone left behind in an abandoned asylum.’ — collaged

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Lone 2 is 8
‘Lone has stated that his two main role models are Boards of Canada and Madlib and Reality Testing sounds like a collaboration between those two. Madlib’s part comes into play in Lone’s expert beat making. The two singles released before the album’s drop, “2 is 8” and the 2012 house highlight “Airglow Fires”, combine ‘90s golden era hip-hop with slippery electronics. “2 is 8” is built around chiming brass and a languid synth that lazily slides around the song. The brass, when mixed with a sample of children screaming “YAY!”, make “2 is 8” sound like the soundtrack to the coolest episode of Sesame Street ever. “Airglow Fires” is a delightfully warm song that starts at a brisk, yet calming pace, before squelched keyboards come in and push the song to evolve into a dancer arena.’ — Pop Matters

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Sudden Infant Wölfli’s Nightmare
‘Industrial minimal blues noise from Switzerland’s most notorious wild man, produced by Roli Mosimann (Swans). The Cramps meets early Einsturzende Neubauten! Wölfli’s Nightmare is a major shift for Sudden Infant, as Joke Lanz is joined here for the first time by a bass player and a drummer, transforming this long-running and often underrated industrial noise project into a more avant-garde leaning mixture of experimental jazz exuberance and politically-minded vocals. It’s all very raw, sticking true to the industrial genre and punk ethics; the new formula seems to stick together well and gives birth to something which goes beyond Sudden Infant’s past while sticking true to the project’s vision and attitude.’ — collaged

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Philipp Quehenberger Uff Uff
‘Viennese-by-choice, Philipp Quehenberger counts amongst the most innovative and multifaceted figures in the Austrian electro-landscape. The ethos of this “musician coming from somewhere in the grey zone between hardcore, techno, and free jazz” (quote Quehenberger) has always been marked by insatiable experimentation, deliberate breaks in style, and a good dose of eccentricity. And anyway, what’s the point of definite form and content if it only really gets interesting when the turbulent raucous noise hits the dance floor? Or to say it in the words of the artist: “I always wanted to be pop. But under my conditions.”’ — donaufestival.au

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copeland Faith OG X
‘The clues start with the bewildering album cover, which features a strikingly abrasive, ice-cold stare from copeland, an image whose cultural implications find continuity in the music: “l’oreal” acts as both an affirmation of worth and a foil to the beauty corporation and its slogan (“Because you’re worth it”); “Fit 1” turns the objectifying Brit slang on its head; while “advice to young girls” suggests that an authoritative voice commanding empowerment is, by copeland’s own admission, a joke, even as it could be taken by listeners as a call-to-arms. With her tactics ranging from wincing sine-wave-damaged depth charges (“Faith OG X”) to the purposefully cliché (“DILIGENCE”), there’s no assurance that the listener is making a “correct interpretation” of its content (and my own here is clearly just one of many possible). But that she manages to evoke such contemplation on an album that’s only 30 minutes long, where half the songs don’t even contain vocals, is itself an incredible achievement.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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White Lung Face Down
‘I’m someone who always needs to keep moving forward and challenging myself to do something more. If you’re not going forward, you’re just standing still, and who wants to do that for too long? When White Lung started, my goal was simple: “I don’t want to be in my boyfriend’s band anymore—I want my own band that I actually like, and I want to play with Anne-Marie because she’s the fucking coolest drummer I’ve ever met in my life.” To think about where it’s at now, it’s like, “Oh god, I’m a band person now! How did this happen? Like, fuck. I chose to live like a clown for the rest of my life.”‘ — Mish Way, White Lung

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p.s. Hey. ** Nicki, Hi. Oh, well, it’s a positive rush, well, apart from the p.s. impact, so its positivity is imperfect, I guess. I didn’t have time yet to dip into Thramsay and get an initial, more fleshed out, personalized definition of it under my belt, as it were, but today’s easy-ish, so soon I’ll actually know what you’re talking about in a mildly back room way, hopefully. But awesome, natch, if the post fueled your writing. I mean, higher compliments don’t come in better nutshells or something. Ha ha, that’s interesting: semi-colon as image. I wonder if that’s why, or one reason why, I’m stand-offish about them, me being such a delicate flower and all that. Very cool about that book you’re planning. Fascinating and needed, as you well know. In Japan, ‘women-as-consumers/producers of gratuitously violent porn’ is a long-standing tradition, as is w-a-c/p of gay porn and ambiguously pedophiliac ‘gay’ porn too. Anyway, you being inspired, major! Thank you! ** David Ehrenstein, It’s amazing, or maybe, how many of the slaves I come across want contracts that they can’t get out of it. It’s a very common wish, and even more in the past year or so than previously. Slave profiles as litmus tests of broad societal anxiety trends or something? Almost everything is inside the computer now. Seems like nature (plants, trees, ocean, etc.) is the last hold-out. ** Bill, Hi, B. No, but I knew or at least suspected that you would suggest it could have been shorter. I think that, in that case, it needed the blather. The blathering was an unfurling mechanism. The blathering aspect was its key and inadvertent charm or something? ** Sypha, See, yeah, I’ve never played with one of those book reader things. I guess I imagined they were kind of dead like picture frames, but then again I never really imagined them fully. Huh. Geese are nice. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien. Yeah, the uncomfortable funny and disturbed at the same effect of them is part of what excites me about them. It’s an interesting combination, or at least when it’s real, or I guess I mean when it seems real since I’m virtually positive that most of those slaves are just fantasizing aloud. More interesting than the usual faked up, predictable horror movie funny/disturbing thing. Those ads you made are really nice, nicely done. ** Kier, Hi, K. Ugh, dislikable co-workers. I have one at the moment. Is that true about pigs? Interesting. Oh, actually, yeah, I think there have been killers who deliberately used pigs to cover their tracks. But I guess since I know that they must not have been so successful. You have that little poetry book? Cool. No, they said they’d send me one, and then they didn’t, and when I wrote and said, hey, where’s my copy, they said they were sold out and no copies remained. I’ll find one on eBay or something someday. I saw a picture of it. It looked pretty, I think. I loved the VK! ** Steevee, The self-described Republican slave was vortextual complex. I’ve seen the name Kratom, but I have no idea what it is. I don’t think it’s available in France maybe. What did your doctor suggest? ** Keaton, Yeah, I suppose it presupposes, but, yeah, so do I, you know, you know me. There are an incalculable number of how-to’s. It’s so fucking cool that way. Interesting that that gets on your nerves. Tropes are always bad. ‘The Bastards’ was okay. I like her work. It’s not her best by any stretch. It’s just nice to be in the presence of her doing her thing, basically. It was on the upside of okay and better. Happy … oh, it became July yesterday. I spaced out. Pay rent. (Note to self). ** HyeMin Kim, Hi. I have wireless at home only when I use the Personal Hotspot function on my cellphone, and since the landline internet here is wildly imperfect, I sometimes do, but I don’t want to get into habit of doing that for some reason. I don’t know the reason. Weird. Frozen mochi: intense, nice. ‘Double Dream’ is a great Ashbery, yeah. I don’t know if I could pick a fave book by him. I literally love every one of them. Even the so-called ‘minor’ ones like ‘Shadow Train’. ** Rewritedept, Hi. It didn’t rain at all yesterday. It looked like it was going to. The not fulfilling my expectation was nice. My yesterday was good. Zac got back from a trip to elsewhere, and we hung out, checked out the location for next week’s film shoot: the interior of a World War II bunker which will be played in our film by an old, empty storage room in the subterranean parking garage of a big artists squat here in Paris. That, plus some work, was my day. I was in a monsoon in Vegas once. It was quite awesome. Hope your Tuesday rules too. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T!  So cool about your impending Kiddiepunk haiku book. Excited! Thank you in advance for the slave haikus, yum, maestro. ** Right. There’s a gig composed of some musical stuff I’ve been into ‘of late’. Share and share alike, as they say, whatever that means. See you tomorrow.