Gig #87: Of late 26: Destroyer, Dj Richard, Endon, Emptyset, TodoTodo, Frog Eyes, Shampoo Boy, Dialect, Stephen O’Malley, RF x Visionist, Years of Abuse, Big Brave, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Loren Connors & Kim Gordon, Olivia Block, Venetian Snares

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Destroyer Girl in a Sling
‘Poison Season feels like the yacht rock of its predecessor has been moved just inland, within sight of the water, but planted in an urban environment — specifically a classic version of Manhattan, one rooted in Broadway glitter and Times Square grime in equal portions. The lux saxophone that ran through Kaputt is joined by a whole flock of glam orchestral pieces, with Bejar’s characters treading the boards as if scored by Van Dyke Parks. And, true to form, characters recur, popping up in different songs but without a clear narrative. Destroyer delivers all of the flourish and drama of a big-stage production, but can’t be contained by the audience expectations that would come with it. The languid “Girl in a Sling” sighs and swoons, strings barely trailing Bejar’s vocals. That song, like most on the album and much of Bejar’s catalog, feels like a close-spoken conversation. “Girl I know what you’re going through/ I’m going there too,” he coos in that nasal, sympathetic way that only Bejar can.’ — Consequence of Sound

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Dj Richard Nighthawk
‘His beat-oriented work benefits from richness and subtlety. “Nighthawk”, “Savage Coast”, and “Bane”, in particular, are examples of how to sculpt and layer relatively simple analog sounds so that they really sing. Richard’s taste in synthesizers leans towards soft pads that beg you to sink into them, and he has a knack for contrasting those airy patches with tough, cutting drum hits that leave welts where they land. On “Nighthawk”, a stretched and sandpapered wail in the background is both harsh and enveloping—a tactic that goes to the heart of the producer’s keen sense of balance. He favors stuttering drum programming that suggests a mechanical kind of funk, and he is skilled at arranging contrapuntal lines into complicated but elegant orbits. Despite the outward simplicity of his productions, there’s always something to tip their intensity levels subtly into the red. On “Screes of Gray Craig”, it’s the slight detuning of three or four separate synthesizer parts, so that they vibrate wildly in combination. And in the closing “Vampire Dub”, a relaxing cut suffused in dreamy chords, it’s the eerie, atonal bleating that burbles on like cosmic background radiation. Still, even at their most roiled, Grind’s waters invite extended immersion. It’s both one of the year’s most sumptuous techno long-players and a masterful example of an unusual, bare-knuckled strain of ambient music.’ — Philip Sherburne

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Endon Parricide Agent Service
‘Endon are one of the most intense and chaotic bands to come out of Japan – and this is the country that gave us the likes of Hanatarash, World and The Gerogerigegege. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and I finally stumbled across a download on slsk, and…. This is fucked. Absolutely, unashamedly fucked. It’s like twenty different bands were hired to soundtrack a day in the life of a paranoid schizophrenic, but they were all made to play at the same time. Sure enough there’s elements of conventional hardcore, grindcore and black metal but for the most part it’s buried under layers and layers of chaotic noise – which is not surprising given that Endon have two dedicated noise makers in addition to a vocalist, drummer and guitarist. The furious mish-mash of electronics squeals, blastbeats, screams and guitar noise are broken up on occasion by ambient noise and drone passages, but for the most part this is pure, unsettling chaos. With no traditional song structures to speak of, and an even more unconventional band structure – Endon revel in unpredictable, terrifying audio terrorism.’ — Fucked By Noise

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Emptyset Signal II
‘Signal is an album that has no audience. For sure, it will have listeners, unwitting individuals who press “play” in good faith and who sincerely expect some appreciable form of edification, yet these quixotic souls will be completely unprepared for the abstractly encoded information that Emptyset have prepared for them. Recorded live in February at this year’s CTM Festival in Berlin, the Bristol duo’s latest offering is the upshot of transmitting radio waves from Berlin to Nauen to Issoudun (France) and then back to Berlin, and even though we can all nominally appreciate that these waves and the audio they constituted were altered en route in various ways by physi
cal fluctuations in the ionosphere and solar radiation, it’s nigh-on impossible to decipher what exactly the resulting atmospheric shudderings mean on a specifically human level. Yet rather than divorce the album from all resonance or gravity, it’s precisely this illegibility that makes the pair’s ionic oscillations and solar drones so affecting.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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TodoTodo Completamente De Rollo
‘TODOTODO was a Technorchestra which emerged on the music stage at the beginning of the eighties, just when Techno movement was the dominant one in the European music framework. Although its influences were much wider, the three members in TT were absolutely committed to the contemporarity of Techno music language and its possibilities. Every third of the trio was, in itself, an open door towards creativity and each one was concerned with a different view of the same reality, to which, through different ways, they wanted to reach all together with every song they wrote. Francisco “Paco” García, in an impossible get-together with Truman Capote, Andy Warhol and Erik Satie, translated into numbers the stave graphology, almost in a cabalistic way. Pedro “Pequi” Vidal, between Nijinsky and Isadora Duncan learnt the discipline which gives pomp and circumstance to the mise-en-escène, the ‘live’. Carmelo Hernández, not far from Debussy, spied with his binaculars, from a terrace in Montmartre, to ‘The Queen Kelly’. Yes, they were three boys un peu compliqués.’ — Domestica

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Frog Eyes Rejoinders In a Storm
‘Pickpocket’s Locket, written on an inherited acoustic guitar following the death of Mercer’s father, is an album instrumentally unlike almost anything Mercer has done in Frog Eyes. It feels warm, with pedal steel, piano, saxophone, violins. Mercer sings with the same fire, his words are of the same kind as always — that is, ornate, replete with names, highly symbolic, biblical — but like the instruments behind his voice, he seems somehow warmer, less thorny, less ascetic. While this warmth (after a Cold Spring?) is obvious, fans of Mercer’s wordplay will miss nothing here: more than ever, he can wrap poetry into melody, fit too many syllables into a line as if they belong there, until they do.’ — Fenestrix

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Shampoo Boy Riss
‘The Vienna-based trio’s second LP to date, following 2013’s crushing BEB debut Licht, Crack finds Peter Rehberg (Editions Mego), Christina Nemec (comfortzone) and Christian Schachinger leaving behind the post-everything in search of their very own neo-something: a powerful alloy of extreme electroacoustic music, luminous ambience and the mineral fundaments of rock and black metal. As before, they’re staring down the void, but this time they’re looking beyond it, too, for the fissures and faultlines that might let some light in. ‘Riss’ considers what happens if you do get away, only to find your hiding-place isn’t quite as safe or secure as you had presumed it would be. A trap? Certainly you’re being watched. Slow, ceremonial downstrokes suggest a return to the vast and uncanny woodland landscape in which the events of Licht unfolded. This time, though, the city impinges and intrudes upon the scene of pastoral unease: Rehberg seems to be scanning the airwaves, picking up unintelligible snatches of conversation and machine noise. These mingle with nameless natural currents to create pernicious hybrid forms, which curl and ricochet about the stereo field. Subterranean bass tones, meanwhile, seem to reverberate from an ancient and appalling source. The accumulation of noise and energy across 12 minutes becomes unbearably suspenseful; a reckoning seems inevitable.’ — Blackest Ever Black

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Dialect Perfume Creek
‘Opening with the ominous sound of dog barks and sirens, Dialect progressively sets Gowanus Drifts apart with the introduction of free-jazz horns and synths that continually boil and churn. “Waterfront Epiphany” opens with a similar reference to the natural world in the sound of crashing water, before swelling with Reich-like synth arpeggios and vocal interjections that seemingly emanate from an otherworldly organism of pop music. Throughout the album, Dialect rejects dichotomies, as the analogue and the digital interact harmoniously. On “Wings,” for example, acoustic guitars rest side by side with sine tones, while organically evolving forms interplay with synthetic stutters elsewhere. Although no doubt galvanized by the toxic wasteland of South Brooklyn, Gowanus Drifts also represents the formation of utopian, inclusive public space — or at least an attempt to mirror a CGI artist impression of it.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Stephen O’Malley live @ Freakout Club
‘Founder of Sunn O))), Khanate, Burning Witch, KTL, Gravetemple, Nazaronai and others; collaborator of musicians and bands such as Keiji Haino, Scott Walker, Jim O’Rourke, Boris, Ulver, Oren Ambarchi, Tim Hecker, coreographer Gisèle Vienne, sculptor Banks Violette and film director Alexis Destoop; was involved with the Southern Lord label and created Ideologic Organ – the list of his work goes on and on. Stephen O’Malley is one of experimental and exploratory music most respected father figures. A sound creator focused on detail, he has a unique way to become one with his guitar and his ominous wall of amplifiers; Stephen O’Malley delivers a solo performance that will flood the room with sub-bass sound pressure and hypnotic visuals.’ — Amplificasom

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RF x Visionist AW15 TRACK
‘London-based accessories designer ROXANNE FARAHMAND takes her inspiration from East London youth culture, meshing her heavy metallic jewelry designs with racer aesthetics. Following her last presentation at Fashion East, which featured a group of Fast & Furious-looking youths hanging out in an open-top Mazda, she continues into this hyper-stylized territory with her A/W collection. For her A/W 2015 collection, she’s teamed up with video artist Kevin Bray to create a shifting 2D-to-3D world soundtracked by grime producer Visionist.’ — 032c

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Years of Abuse The Social Order
‘Along with Will Drewry (guitar/vo
cals) and Blake Ford (bass/vocals), Kieran Brindley (ex-Bastions) is back with Years of Abuse. Drawing upon a wide palette of grind and metal, Y.O.A arrive at a blistering, modern sound that is relentlessly precise in its execution. From 50-second blast bombs such as ‘Avarice’ and ‘Birkenau’ to tightly-controlled mosh detonators like ‘Track Marks’, this is a band that sound psychotically focussed from the very first moment.’ –– Holy Roar Records

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Big Brave On The By – And – By And Thereon
‘Big Brave’s Au De La resists categorisation much more than it fits into one genre. The Montreal trio combines elements of Björk, Neurosis, The White Stripes, and Sunn O))) into a cohesive whole; but this whole is an ever evolving and challenging sonic mass. Although Au De La is far from an easy listen, it’s also endlessly rewarding. ‘On The By And By And Thereon’ provides a jarring introduction to the LP. It begins with grating call-and-response guitars (the band doesn’t have a bassist) that sound like two steel mills groaning to each other. As drummer Louis-Alexandre Beauregard joins with minimalistic tom abuse, Robin Wattie provides a juxtaposition to her atonal guitar work with melodically bounding vocals, which sound like a hybridisation between those of Kathleen Hanna and Björk. ‘On The By And By And Thereon’ makes a promise that Au De La fulfills ten times over.’ — The Quietus

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Lizzy Mercier Descloux Hard-boiled Babe
‘Want to feel like you’ve wasted your life? Start by reading Vivien Goldman’s Press Color liner-notes bio of Lizzy Mercier Descloux. At 22 years of age, Descloux moved to New York during those chaotic years of the late 70s when the death throes of punk’s first wave were giving birth to its deformed children. Before the decade was over, she had roomed with Patti Smith, had a star-crossed affair with Richard Hell, and pumped out several releases on her long-time partner Michel Esteban’s too-cool-for-school label ZE Records. Descloux cut a bright and dashing figure in a scene that, even at this early stage of development, was already settling into a kind of monochromatic conformity. By the time Descloux put out her solo debut single “Fire”/”Mission Impossible,” ZE was well on its way to solidifying its identity around its patented mutant discoTM sound, thanks to artists like Cristina, Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band, and Sympho-State — acts that blurred the lines between earnest homage and outright parody. Descloux’s comparatively Spartan and angular sound put her closer to lablemate James Chance, but where Chance’s music embodied menace and a dystopian vacuity, Descloux’s was animated by a sense of playful absurdity: nonsense lyrics, left-field covers (not one, but two reworkings of compositions from Lalo Schifrin’s Mission Impossible soundtrack, and buoyant dancefloor-ready beats.’ — Joe Hemmerling

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Loren Connors & Kim Gordon live @ Issue Project Room
‘Ex–Sonic Youther Kim Gordon has staked out fresh creative territory following that band’s dissolution, gigging frequently with Body/Head and readying a new memoir, Girl in a Band, due out in February. Expect heady abstraction here, as Gordon matches wits with riveting avant-blues guitar visionary Loren Connors.’ — Time Out

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Olivia Block live @ the Goethe Institut
‘How exactly Olivia Block can signify an absence while presenting a continual stream of fuzz, hiss, echo, and pulsation is still something of an unexplained mystery, yet it nonetheless must have something to do with the blurriness and dimness of the tones she uses, their embodiment in soft edges and diluted borders. Throughout the 30 minutes of Aberration of Light, these borders remain permanently dissolved and faded, preventing the listener from ever outlining a clear image of their referent. Uncertain as to what they portray, this listener doesn’t experience anything definite in any definite way. Instead, she merely experiences her own inability to experience.’ — Simon Chandler

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Venetian Snares Beside The Past By A Lake
‘For about a decade beginning in the late ’90s, Aaron Funk, better known as the producer Venetian Snares, was a restless creative force—dropping album after album of breakcore beats in a deluge that resulted in some of the decade’s most arresting electronic music. At his creative peak—arguably 2005’s ambitious, classically-inspired Rossz Csillag Alatt Született—it wasn’t uncommon for Funk to issue several releases a year. But eventually, his output slowed to more human levels. Four years passed between 2010’s My So-Called Life and 2014’s My Love Is a Bulldozer and, in that time, Funk himself seemed to cede momentum to artists whose own sounds softened or refined parts of the one he helped create (Death Grips, Gobby, the Range, and the Vaporwave aesthetic all owe much to the road he paved).’ — Nathan Reese

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I think so too. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien. Have a blast doing so, and please tell all about it. ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, understood. I guess when I think of war movies, I immediately think of exceptions like ‘The Thin Red Line’, ‘The Fog of War’, etc., but I guess it takes more than the war itself to get me to see a war movie. I think the chems probably make getting slaughtered more fun or at least trippier? And, yes, there could be a big Weeknd influence going on there too. Well, I hope the hurricane is the usual overhyped not-much thing that hurricanes which reach New York seem to almost always be. ** Gary gray, HIYA to you too! Mm, don’t know about Chicago. We only have until early next year to get the film shown in the US before the DVD comes out, so I’m not sure how much we can arrange before then. Would be great if we can, obviously. I’ll ask the people who are trying to set that stuff up. Thanks about ‘Zac’s Control Panel’, if that’s what you mean. It’s not a novel, though. So, if you mean ‘ZCP’, it would have to a trance short works collection? If so, no, it’s not offensive in the slightest. Thank you, in fact. Thanks for all that love. I’ll send you as much love as I can back. Wait, that’ll take some concentration. Not to love, but to try to send it. Hold on. There, sent. ** Étienne, Hey, man! Oh, shit, you leave today? Time is way too speedy. That’s funny, I stayed at some little hotel in Roissy-en-France when my flight got cancelled once. I don’t remember it. Sle
epy? Dude, I hope you’ll keep commenting here while you’re away from Paris. It was so awesome to meet you and get to know you. I’ll keep Paris as comfy as one person can until you can get yourself ensconced here. Safe flight! Excellent in-flight movies and food! Love, me. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Thanks for pointing that out to Liquoredgoat. I’m virtually positive that the Penguin books will make a huge difference for Ligotti. Amazing, that. ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Jamie! Oh, I’m just very happy to see you! The door is always open and always flexible. Holy shit, no, I didn’t know about that 1000 year-long gif project. Wow! As you must have already imagined, that’s immensely exciting and interesting to me. I’ll go read everything there is about that. Thank you so much! How are you? What’s going on in the world in which you are situated? ** Thomas Moronic, Ahhhhh! Some total stunners in there, man. Thank you. My wowed-ness is inexpressible. Well, you know, nothing to be done about the silence. My philosophy about this place is that it will be what it will be, and I will observe and react mostly privately in accordance, or something. Thank you, dear T. ** Omar, Hey, Omar! Man, it’s a very nice thing to get to see you and read your wordage. I hope you’re having fun with Bill, and I can only assume so. Sweet, great, about the Eileen Myles stuff. Yep, you bet, totally. How the heck are you, sir? ** Misanthrope, Well, we know they can talk the talk, but can they walk the walk? So, they could technically be shy. There are really good non-blockbusters all the time, dude. Check your local listings or read Steevee’s reviews. I just found out about a new, great-seeming pastry place yesterday. I’m going to sample its theoretically amazing wares today. And it’s only two blocks from my apartment. And, yes, you should come back to Paris. ** Right. Today I am proposing a gig, a concert, an eclectic line-up of music makers, all for you. Consider it a boon, a head-scratcher, a nuisance, a golden opportunity, … it’s entirely up to you and only you. See you tomorrow.