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Alex G Bug
‘Beach Music’s songs differ in genre touchstones and instrumentation choices, like he’s scrolling through an iTunes library set to shuffle. Giannascoli has always been a voracious, omnivorous listener, drawing inspiration from every corner of the music universe, and Beach Music runs that eccentric span. The set splices together everything from a Jon Brion score to a George Harrison pop sigh, from early Animal Collective vocal tinkering to Phil Collins synth patches. But there’s a wavering instability to the tracks themselves as well, something like the tracking pattern on a cassette, a sign of wear from something beloved but also a sign of decay. Beach Music feels like the work of an artist a few steps ahead of his audience, jumping to answer their expectations of a DIY darling taking on the trappings of a label. He stuck to his roots, recorded at home, and embraced his eccentricities. Giannascoli also wasn’t afraid to go big, resulting in one of the richest, deepest-sounding albums of his catalog. With each successive record and step up the ladder, Alex G continues to impress. Witnessing his prodigious experimentation and the revelations of his unique worldview should be a treat for years to come.’ — Consequence of Sound

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JOYFULTALK Possible Futures
‘One of the great mysteries of the Canadian indie music scene is the career of Jay Crocker. The enigmatic musician has obviously flirted with occasional success: His contributions to Ghostkeeper’s eponymous album from 2010 helped it crack the Polaris Music Prize long list that same year; The Calgary Herald named his 2006 debut solo album Melodies from the Outskirts the best indie release of the year; and his jazzy NoMoreShapes project was positively reviewed by The New York Times. Yet, despite his occasional flourishes of recognition, Crocker remains a kind of musician’s musician. He never really got his big moment, seemingly unable to surf the rising wave of Calgary’s economic boom to breakthrough into the general hip conversation like similarly brilliant indie noise monger Chad VanGaalen. In search of sparser pastures, Crocker left his hometown in Alberta for a little place in Nova Scotia called Crousetown. Holed up there at his home studio, Prism Ship, with a Harry Partch-worthy collection of 14 custom-built instruments that boast names as far out as The Comb Over and The Pink Dolphin, MUUIXX sees Crocker composing and performing each of their distinctive timbres into a cohesive statement. The compositions sound generally repetitive and mechanical, yet he eschewed looping and sampling in favor of meticulous live performance governed by a circular scoring method of his own creation, which lends his quirky minimal electronic explorations even more of that essential uneven hemline of humane analog quirkiness.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Cult Leader Great I Am
‘Three-quarters of Cult Leader hail from Gaza, the defunct, progressive grindcore outfit whose 2012 swansong No Absolutes in Human Suffering wound up being the most intense thing they ever produced. Lightless Walk tops it. Gaza bassist Anthony Lucero has moved up to lead vocals for Cult Leader (with new bassist Sam Richards abetting guitarist Mike Mason and drummer Casey Hansen), and his doom-soaked howl is enough to leave you wondering what took him so long to front a band. On the mutated, d-beat-meets-blastbeats jolt that is “Walking Wasteland”, Lucero sings from his intestines instead of his lungs, letting Mason’s caustic riffs wash over him like an acid bath. “Great I Am” makes great use of space, hovering distortion, and needles of feedback that are somehow crosshatched into insidious melody. On the whole, Cult Leader is a more aggressive yet concise band than Gaza—and one that gets the notion of merciless self-editing.’ — Jason Heller

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Deerhunter Living My Life
‘Deerhunter has spent the better part of a decade creating some of the most interesting and lively records on the indie-rock scene. As the bands that made up indie rock’s celebrated mid-’00s creative renaissance continue their inevitable collective march toward middle-age comfort, Deerhunter should be applauded for refusing to rest on its laurels by actively seeking to make a record with purpose and scope. The goals and the stakes are real for them, and in Fading Frontiers, the effort is blindingly evident.’ — AV Club

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Voices from the Lake Sonia Danza
‘As was to be expected they stay true to their polyphonic topography of liquid scapes: aquati
c sceneries are embedded in soaking dense atmospheres, gently gyrating us into trance. Sometimes soft echoes of sirenic voices are heard – the only remnants of human traces in these spaces that have suspended time, where smooth silky textures are being channeled into fractal structures that induce a state of transcendence. The haptic quality of their sound is adding up to a sonic matrix of metaphysic imaginary that is provoked by gentle glides and dynamic beat patterns of almost tribalistic quality.’ — Editions Mego

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Protomartyr Dope Cloud
‘In what feels like an odd moment of prescience, roughly halfway through The Agent Intellect, the harrowing third album from the Detroit band Protomartyr, the Pope pays a visit. It’s 1987 in Pontiac, Mich., and Pope John Paul II is visiting the Silverdome, delivering Mass to the 100,000 faithful who’d come to hear him speak. Among them was a young Joe Casey who, 25 years later, would grow up to become Protomartyr’s frontman. The event was historic—it set an attendance record at the arena—but what Casey remembers about it in “Pontiac 87” isn’t the beauty of the sermon or the spectacle in the ceremony, but the ugliness boiling just beneath the surface. On his way into the arena, he sees “money changing between hands,” and on his way out, a riot, where “Old folks turn brutish/ Trampling their way out the gates towards heaven.” This is the universe Protomartyr inhabits, one where violence hovers constantly at the periphery, where peace and hope gradually curdle and turn ugly, and the desperate people who once clung to them eventually fall prey to their worst impulses.’ — J. Edward Keyes

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Aïsha Devi Mazda
‘Many of the tracks on Of Matter And Spirit are deliberately provocative in their aural assault on your ears and synapses. The opening track ‘Adera’, opens up with aerated, gaseous vocals and elephantine martial trance synths that blind you with their hi-definition brilliance. And this sets the musical tone for the rest of the album. The bass and rhythmic drum patterns and percussion throughout, especially on tracks such as ‘Numan J’, ‘Initiation To An Illusion’, and ‘1%’, are cavernous with a particularly a crushing ceremonial action to them. If you’ve ever heard Devi’s previous releases on her Danse Noire label, such as the Hakken Dub/Throat Dub EP and tracks such as ‘Clean Ur Chakras’, then you will know that this is no soothing new-age mush that gently coos and caresses you. Its thrusting devotions and digital liturgies are meant to overload, tear away at shake up your senses, to flake away any toxic karma you may have lodged in any hard to reach crevices.’ — The Quietus

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M. Lamar Speculum Orum
‘Musician, composer, and performer M Lamar proudly calls himself a Yale dropout. After leaving the Ivy League school’s masters program in sculpture, he returned to San Francisco – where he’d formerly lived as an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute – and devoted himself entirely to music, creating haunting compositions that merge post-punk, goth, and heavy-metal stylings with more classical formats, from black spirituals and gospel to opera.’ — Observer

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Gnaw Their Tongues Through Flesh
‘The latest missive from the pit where Gnaw Their Tongues lurks gets at once medieval and modernist on every square centimetre of the willing supplicant’s disease-ridden flesh. Taking up the challenge so successfully laid by the likes of Khanate to make listening to music as actually unsettling and terrifying an experience as being immersed in a brutally realistic horror film can be, GTT’s torturer-in-chief (and indeed sole member) Mories lays out his latest master plan for the subjugation of humankind.’ — The Quietus

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Laurel Halo Nebenwirkungen
‘An enormously welcome return for an essential voice in techno. Halo started out making galaxy-contemplating dream-pop in 2010, eventually silencing her pipes and seguing into dance tracks. These are like novels that reveal new meanings with every reading, full of unusual instrumentation, Chain Reaction-style frosting and rhythms that are dynamic yet uncertain. On the new tracks from her double EP In Situ, things are more minimalist and mysterious than ever. “On Situation”, what sound like modular synths make inquiring bird calls, as muted rave chords play over an almost Caribbean shuffle – it’s tropical paradise in a broken VR simulator. On “Nebenwirkungen”, a bass wub keeps hesitantly dipping its toe in and out of the water, but the mid-range is more confident, piling in and chattering in an obscure robot dialect. This is the kind of dub techno that Moritz Von Oswald is a master of, but Halo’s skank is truly twisted.’ — The Guardian

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Steve Hauschildt Watertoweps
‘Throughout his tenure as a member of prolific ambient adventurers Emeralds, as well as his concurrent solo work, Steve Hauschildt has never appeared to lack creative energy. However, following the 2012 release of Sequitur, his second Kranky album, the Cleveland-based artist quietly brought that steady flow of original material to a standstill. Whether intentional or not, the break in output appears to have given Hauschildt time to examine his craft. Three years later, he’s emerged with his most distinctive record to date, Where All Is Fled. Hauschildt’s transition to slightly darker—and, at times, vaguely symphonic—sounds proves to be an excellent framework for his compositional strengths. Both in Emeralds and as a solo producer, Hauschildt has always been adept with touching melodies. A keen sense for natural progression makes his pieces continue to stand out from many ambient contemporaries. Hauschildt is also more confident than ever with his hardware: the almost entirely beatless record can be somber and deeply contemplative, but never icy. Where All Is Fled’s tones are consistently rich and warm, slathered in reverb and delay without overwhelming the details.’ — Resident Adviser

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Co La Suffering
‘Where Co La’s past work focused on rendering impressions of physical spaces, designs
and objects into broad musical forms, Papich now turns his interest inward, investigating the sensual and emotional aspects of terrestrial life. The language is basic: a sneeze, a baby’s cry, an alphabet, the biting of an apple, laughter and screams. Despite the simple signifiers, No No is inscribed with content – it points to basic fears/desires and scrambles them, creating an oddly emotional & alien dimension, an action in Club music hitherto unknown. Simple inversion is a focal point of No No. Club culture categorically offers an escape from the real world for revelers. Co La, a seminal player in Baltimore’s experimental club environment, (Club Undo), regularly abstracts the party into intellectually confrontational encounters, be it a rifle scope aimed directly on his forehead or building temporary soundsystems out of zipcars. His recorded music and performances both play with listener’s expectations by inviting drama into otherwise Cool experiences.’ — Mexican Summer

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Drrty Pharms A Lesson For Insolence
‘I believe that repression allows violent fantasies to fester inside people until they are powerless to control them. These are things that need to be expressed; ignoring them is not going to make them go away. You don’t choose and can’t necessarily control what you fantasize about, but you can find healthy outlets to express these fantasies which can help you manage your behavior. I used to struggle with intrusive thoughts about hurting people. I was convinced that, as much as i dreaded it, I would inevitably end up hurting someone. I had a lot of traumatic sexual experiences as a young kid and I worried it was a cycle I was powerless to repeat. The only thing which gave me relief from this mental torment was having artistic outlets to purge my intrusive thoughts. The more public I was able to be about my fantasies, the less they haunted me and now they rarely even cross my mind when I’m not writing music. I love the idea of parties as bacchanal autonomous zones where everyone celebrates by transgressing the rigid social codes forced on us in day-life, where people can behave like beasts without being condemned or judged. I’d like to throw more underground parties, outside of commercial spaces, where people can act crazy and do whatever they want (within reason) without it being an issue.’ — Dirty Pharms

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Ryan Hemsworth & Lucas From Grace
‘The biggest surprise here is that the largely unknown Lucas often sets the tone. Whereas Hemsworth’s recent solo work favors crisp, clean lines, these tracks tend to crackle, buzz and fade. Melodies waft in as if through an open window and often drift off just as unceremoniously. Vocals are treated past the point of intelligibility, serving as textures that rub up against other elements in the mix. Given the gauzy sonic palette, emotions feel implied, rather than announced—not a bad look for Hemsworth, who can occasionally veer into preciousness on his own. There’s a sort of hazy sheen over Taking Flight that makes even the big crescendos feel slightly blurry, like vaseline smeared on a camera lens.’ — Mehan Jayasuriya

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p.s. Hey. Starting tomorrow, I will be taking another break, short this time, from the blog as I will be in Berlin co-hosting two screenings of Zac’s and film LIKE CATTLE TOWARDS GLOW on Friday and Saturday. If you happen to be there, here is information re: the times, location, and the ticket buying situation for the screenings. Blog-wise, this place will be in reruns with minimal, pre-set p.s.es through Monday. Then it and I will be back all new and interactive again starting on Tuesday. ** Bill, Hi. You, a traditionalist? Ha ha, that’s an interesting tidbit. Apparently the Hirst-like things are actually cakes, yes. Drenched, inaccessible cakes, it looks like. I’m quite tempted to find out if Conjurers Kitchen delivers. Bet not. Or not this far. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. As a sometimes vegan, I can assure you that it takes more than a fake steak cake to drive me, at least, around any bend. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I do think investing in a Leve book or two would be a decision you would not regret. The walkouts aren’t troublesome. It’s a pretty demanding film. I very rarely walk out of a film, although I did end up walking out on the new Noe film not long before it ended. Cinefamily would be a great place to show ‘LCTG’, of course. Do you know anybody there? ** Steevee, Hi. I saw the director’s cut of ‘Until the End of the World’ back in the very early 00’s. I had actually sort of semi-liked the film in its released version, but I found the director’s cut, which basically dragged out the things I hadn’t liked about it, just unbearable. But, yeah, it has its champions. ** Sypha, Hi, James. I actually didn’t get to see very much of Montreal, just the turf between my hotel and the theaters where our film showed, which wasn’t very much turf. It seemed all right, but I didn’t get a feel for it, really. So sorry to hear that your dad had to go through all that. Very best of luck on his recovery, and hugs to you. * Krayton, Hi, K. Missed ya too. I’m trying to figure out how to make it feel Halloween-y over here in Paris. Not easy. I think a few of us are just going to try to find/buy a scary cake and watch some horror movies. ‘In love to death’ sounds good, I think. I think I can absolutely 100% assure that I will never ever cast Ben Affleck in anything, although never say never on the gif stuff, if that counts. ** _Black_Acrylic, According to its maker or, rather, its maker’s website, no. But can it be believed? Yeah, his titles used to be pretty funny, although, in retrospect, I wonder if they were intentionally funny. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi there, Jeff! Sure wish I could see your new theater piece. How is it going, and how do you feel about it, if you can say? Bad cold, ugh, sorry. I love ‘breathless and fluid’. That’s exciting. Hm, if I know the stuff of Martin Newell/Cleaners from Venus, then I have forgotten. I’ll make a point to get to start to know him/them. The reception to the film has been very good thus far. So far, we’re really quite happy with how it’s going. We’ll see what happens this weekend. Our producers programmed the film into this Berlin Porn Film Festival thing, and I think it’s a weird, bad fit, to say the least, and fuck knows how that will go. ** Liquoredgoat, Hi, Douglas. Me too, i.e, the maggot-y, etc. ones being the most off-putting to the taste buds. Oh, shit, I still need to wrack my brains about short story collections to recommend. Sorry, I spaced, and I’m a bit too jet-lagged and preparing to leave town this morning. I will write down that I should do that, and I will. Sorry. Oh, Benjamin Weissman’s ‘Headless’ and/or ‘Dear Dead Person’. There’s one/two. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Declarative sentences, right, gotcha. Yeah, it does sound like you got fleeced on that plantation tour. Here are five haunted house things in Maryland, if that helps: Field of Screams, Frightland, Bedlam in the Boro< /a>, Legends of the Fog, Bennett’s Curse. Field of Screams is pretty famous and well-regarded. I don’t know the others. ** Right. What’s up today … Oh, a gig of new or newish stuff that I’m listening to. See if your ears align with mine to any degree. So, the blog will see you tomorrow, Saturday, and Monday, and I will see you on Tuesday. Have excellent long weekends, everyone.

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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.