Sound designer and electronic artist Ricardo Donoso has been racking up a pretty sizeable discography of vinyl and tape releases on Digitalis the past few years, but now he’s branching out with an LP on his own label and a free digital EP on Denovali, in anticipation of a new album for the label next year. A Song For Echo is a 7-part epic work which touches on rhythmic pulses but never fully immerses itself into structured beats. The album mostly focuses on dark and mysterious, yet bright and alluring synthetic atmospheres. Parts 1 and 6 have some clattering moments, 3 dips a little bit into shuddering beats, and the final part centralizes a fast, gabber-like beat, surrounded by dark synth clouds and metallic squealing.
Ricardo Donoso: Beginning Of The Shape EP
Beginning Of The Shape is centered around 7-minute “Shape Collateral”, a moody, cavernous piece which sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a particularly illuminating documentary about space or nature. There’s also a darker, more desolate “Condemned Version” of the piece as the EP’s final track. In between is “The View Of The Overlook (Rendition)”, an icy-cold beatless variation on the “Shape Collateral” melody. This EP sounds like it’s sure to be the beginning of something vibrant and intriguing.
3:00 AM Scott Walker & Sunn O))) ~ Herod 2014 ~ Soused ~ 4AD
3:12 AM Pharmakon ~ Bestial Burden ~ Bestial Burden ~ Sacred Bones
3:19 AM Wrekmeister Harmonies ~ Then It All Came Down (excerpt) ~ Then It All Came Down/You’ve Always Meant So Much To Me ~ Thrill Jockey
3:37 AM Dreamcrusher ~ Ghost Orchid ~ Suicide Deluxe ~ Hausu Mountain
3:41 AM Patrick Harsh ~ Not For Laptop Activists ~ It’s So Weird In The D ~ Trashfuck Records
3:52 AM Broken Bone ~ Blood On Your Hands ~ Willowbrook ~ Aperture
4:01 AM Korma ~ Mech ~ Skyline ~ Car Crash Set/Ice Rink
4:05 AM redHat ~ Tmrw ~ Rave 2.0 ~ Footwork Jungle/Dred Collective
4:11 AM Ricardo Donoso ~ Shape Collateral (Condemned Version) ~ Beginning Of The Shape ~ Denovali
4:15 AM ACI_Edits ~ side B track 3 ~ tape ~ Aught
4:17 AM Mark Barrage ~ Hestisol ~ Surplus Behaviour ~ Endless Melt
4:20 AM Piper Spray And Benzaldehyde Monster ~ Between Breeze And Rain ~ Piper Spray And Benzaldehyde Monster ~ Singapore Sling Tapes
4:22 AM Hudson Mohawke ~ Brainwave ~ Chimes ~ Warp
4:24 AM M. Geddes Gengras ~ New Process ~ Collected Works Vol. 2: New Process Music ~ Umor Rex
4:27 AM Ballerine Nadiya ~ We Are Joan And Marie ~ Ballerine Nadiya ~ Singapore Sling Tapes
4:36 AM Klara Lewis ~ Msuic 3 ~ Msuic ~ Peder Mannerfelt Production
4:40 AM Nathan Mc Laughlin ~ Night Shades II ~ Nothing To Be Sad About ~ Eilean Records
4:44 AM Bastian Void ~ Real Talk (Versicolor Controller Mix) ~ Compilation 1 ~ Noumenal Loom
4:51 AM Negativland ~ The Way We Know Things ~ It’s All In Your Head FM ~ Seeland
5:05 AM Slowdive ~ When The Sun Hits ~ Souvlaki ~ Creation
5:09 AM Slowdive ~ Crazy For You ~ Pygmalion ~ Creation
5:15 AM His Name Is Alive ~ Wall Of Speed ~ Stars On ESP ~ 4AD
5:17 AM Weyes Blood ~ Some Winters ~ The Innocents ~ Mexican Summer
5:24 AM Excepter ~ Song To The Siren ~ Familiar ~ Blast First Petite
5:27 AM Locust ~ Under Still Waters ~ After The Rain ~ Editions Mego
5:30 AM Tochigi ~ The World Is Coming To An End ~ The Gang East Of The River ~ Tochigi Records
5:38 AM SBTRKT ~ Everybody Knows ~ Wonder Where We Land ~ Young Turks
5:41 AM Flying Lotus ~ Turkey Dog Coma ~ You’re Dead! ~ Warp
5:44 AM Soft Vision ~ Electrophilia ~ Soft Vision ~ Acoustic Division/Hi-Definition
5:47 AM The Pen Test ~ CEO ~ Interstate ~ Moniker
5:51 AM Dream Police ~ Let It Be ~ Hypnotized ~ Sacred Bones
On The Pen Test’s debut LP, they explore the highway as a dark, lonely, mania-inducing place. Musically, it might be indebted to Autobahn (complete with side-long opening title track), but thematically it might be a little closer to The Magnetic Fields’ The Charm Of The Highway Strip. The epic 21-minute “Interstate” has an icy pulse and Suicide-like vocals, with synth sounds approximating late-night traffic passing by in the dead of night. The song comes to a standstill around the 10-minute mark, with just a faint, nervous heartbeat, which fades away and reappears towards the end. “Za-Zen” is quirky, bloopy electro-pop with more straightforward vocals, which seem content to simply “let the interstate have its way”. “Like Machine” is a shorter track with a faster, more Drexciyan electro beat, and off-the-wall vocal stylings. “CEO” is another uptempo nervous-pop number, in which the singer claims that he’s “solving all your problems with money”, and it seems doubtful that you should trust him. The song ends with the most dramatic flute solo you could ever hope to hear from a minimal-synth song. “The Great Eroder” ends the album with some pretty credible Detroit-flavored dancefloor electro, complete with down-pitched vocals and grubby, filtered synth sweeps and arpeggios. Music to hopefully not crash your car to. Vinyl and digital available from Bandcamp.
Weyes Blood’s 2011 album on Not Not Fun, The Outside Room, was a fantastic experimental psych-folk album that I discovered 2 years after the fact (after I saw her live at SXSW) and was blown away by. This is the follow-up on a bigger label (the same one that fellow NNF alumni Peaking Lights graduated to), and it’s much brighter, clearer, and more expansive in sound. Her vibrato-laced voice sounds fantastic, and the arrangements are complex and accomplished, with bright chiming acoustic guitars and vintage synths. The tape-drift opening to 6-minute highlight “Some Winters” nods to her lo-fi tape-scene past, but it flows into some truly beautiful vocals and cascading pianos. A few other songs such as “Summer” have simpler arrangements which showcase her voice more, but the beginning of “Requiem For Forgiveness” covers her voice in eerie, Goblin-like vocoders, before stripping away the instruments and leaving her multi-tracked vocals coo “I forgive you” by the song’s end. Seasons play heavily into the album, not just with the two consecutive seasonally-titled songs near the beginning of the album, but in “February Skies”, where she sings “first day of spring, winter must bring”. “Montrose” is a drifting ambient instrumental with some film dialogue at the end, and then the album ends with another strummy, layered-vocal ballad, “Bound To Earth”. Definitely recommended for all fans of ethereal psych-folk/dream-pop artists such as Vashti Bunyan, Grouper, White Poppy, Marissa Nadler, etc.
The Men used to be a hardcore band, but now they’ve morphed into some sort of alt-country/Northern soul-influenced college-rock band. This side project shows that they’ve actually been making music even further removed from their roots. This project explores synths and drum machines, and repetitive motorik rhythms. “My Mama’s Dead” is like a 21st century update on “Hey Joe” in which the titular character becomes a woman. “Iris” is kind of a space-country ballad, as if “Planet Caravan” was written around a campfire in the desert. “Pouring Rain” is an uptempo steady drum machine driven new wave song. “All We Are” is a slower song with some wavey MBV guitar as well as acoustic guitar. “John” is kind of a bluesy stomp with organ and sliding guitar. “Let It Be” is even more of a new wave/Krautrock synthesis, with another steady drum machine beat, Neu!-like synths, and more layered guitar melodies. “Sandy” begins with tolling bells and some sort of squeezebox drone, and then turns into something approximating a droney English folk ballad, with a calm male/female vocal duet. I have to be honest and say that The Men only really caught my interest with one or two songs from one of their earlier albums and the directions they’ve gone in since haven’t really grabbed me. But this is another band entirely with several other different sounds, so I probably shouldn’t even be mentioning that it’s a side project because it can be enjoyed on its own terms.
Hour 1
10:00 Marshall Applewhite: Dimension 10
10:03 Mikaere: A Lit Circle
10:08 Nepz: Najawa (Gary Martin Remix)
10:12 Permanent Heartbreak: In Her Words
10:16 Tominori Hosoya: Chihiro
10:20 Kimekai: Mordecai
10:22 Rrose: Drowned By Sight
10:26 Simian Mobile Disco: Dervish
10:29 Blow: Monochrome
10:35 Maurizio Cascella: Black Of Mars
10:42 Ruhig: Lost In The Instability
10:44 Alphacode: The Invasion
10:46 Aphex Twin: 4 bit 9d api+e+6
10:50 Dntel: Ashby
10:53 Dronelock & Ontal: Broken Forms
10:57 Ben Long: Toltec (Darko Esser Remix) Hour 2
11:02 Esteban Adame: Home Sick (MGUN Remix)
11:08 Oscifer: dedim rip baslamak
11:14 Rumah & Progression: SC3
11:20 Servent: Compound
11:24 Surgeon: Fixed Action Pattern
11:31 Jonas Kopp: Blackbird
11:35 PVNV: Consortium (Sterac Deep Mix)
11:41 Marcelus: Worship The Bass
11:46 Pharmakon: Autoimmune
11:50 Robert Hood: Analog Track (Ghost)
11:56 The Third Man: Red Boxing
Self-described “Japanese apartment compact rock” from Seattle. Which means that the 25 songs on this 32-minute album are tightly packed and to-the-point. Some of them are punk-ish, like opener “Dictator”, but others have more of a shambling C86/Pastels vibe. Plenty of the songs cut off very suddenly and awkwardly. In some ways, this reminds me of the great, sadly-defunct Chinese noise-punk duo Pairs, except not as blown out and distorted. Scott And Charlene’s Wedding also comes to mind, for the matter-of-fact tales of mundane city life. Somehow I’m even reminded of the Dead Milkmen on some of the midtempo tracks, at least musically (I’m thinking songs like “The Thing That Only Eats Hippies”), but without overtly jokey lyrics. Like Pink Flag-era Wire and Guided By Voices, Tochigi manages to pack plenty of ideas and even time changes in these short, abstract skewed-pop songs, although these songs aren’t quite as earworm-catchy as their forebears. Still, this is a promising, slightly perplexing, certainly enjoyable effort from a group with an abundance of ideas and no time to waste. Also, bonus points for minute-long apocalypse-sigh “The World Is Coming To And End”, because I always love simple, pretty songs about the end of the world.
Last year, Thrill Jockey released Wrekmeister Harmonies’ You’ve Always Meant So Much To Me on vinyl. That was my introduction to this project and it blew me away. This week, the follow-up came out, and both albums were released on one CD. You can read my review of You’ve Always Meant…here, so I’m just reviewing the newer LP now. Then It All Came Down, like its predecessor, takes a very long time to build, with some faintly chiming bells and plucked guitars, and angelic vocals, over arctic drone. Around 10 minutes the storm sets in. Anything light and angelic goes away, and then the growling metal vocals drift in, and there’s crashing thunder sounds. Mournful strings swell up, along with guitar feedback and phantom-like non-metal vocals, and the tension just mounts. Finally, around the 19.5 minute mark, metal guitar chords and drums slowly crash in, and the vocals become more deformed and depraved, finally letting loose a scream at 21:00. Around 23.5 minutes, it fully kicks into a sludgy, torrential rhythm with abrasive guitar squeals. It seems to calm down and there’s a calm, melodic plucked guitar pattern, but that just sets the scene for even more intense screamed metal vocals and guitar blasts. It doesn’t take as long for this piece to end as it does for it to begin, it’s only a few minutes to the end after the screaming stops.
The Answer Is In The Beat 