Dura/Former Selves: Triangles/Among the Lilies split tape
Kevin Greenspon’s Bridgetown label is always worth checking out, and its seasonal batches of tapes always ensure that a huge pile of goods will be delivered on a timely basis. I haven’t explored the label’s extensive catalog as much as I should, but every time I hear something droney or noisey or shoegazey from them it’s always incredible. This tape starts out with a side from Dura, who I haven’t heard before, but it’s 20 minutes of lovely layered acoustic guitar. In some ways it starts out sounding like if Mark Kozelek started making layered instrumental soundscape recordings, but then it builds from there. There’s traces of wistful steel guitar melodies in there. And then there’s chimes in the last 5 or 6 minutes. Hard to find info on this project because of the name, and this tape isn’t on Discogs yet, but I’m very impressed. Second side is by Former Selves, who doesn’t really need an introduction, but in case he does, he has dozens of tapes, splits and CD-r’s on Hooker Vision, Constellation Tatsu, Rotifer Cassettes, Lillerne Tape Club, etc. This side is a bit more minimalist and slower moving, and maybe more conventionally “droney”, but it’s also clearer and more melodic. It’s like staring out at an amazing view of a sea rather than sitting in an incredible forest, with a nice breeze rustling past you. It’s just really lovely music for you to relax and clear out thoughts to. The way it builds is remarkable. And then that ending. Buy or stream it on Bandcamp.
Our Love Will Destroy The World: Carnivorous Rainbows LP
I can’t remember if I ever listened to Birchville Cat Motel, but this is the first time I’ve ever listened to Our Love Will Destroy The World, Campbell Kneale’s main project since 2009. It reminds me of Astral Social Club’s overwhelming psychedelic rhythmic noise constructions, but a bit more refined. Still harsh and trippy, but maybe not quite so overwhelming. “Fuzz Legion Majesty” has voodoo drumming behind fluttering feedback coils and violin, and it just gets more bizarre as it goes on. “Miniature Bambi Superland” has more layers of drums and electronics with… it might be best to not even know what’s going on here. It sounds like something a lot more disturbing than it probably was. “Hades Iron Horizon” ends the album with an 11-minute trembling hellscape. One of the most disturbingly surreal pieces of audio art I’ve heard in a while, and I’m very curious to know if the rest of his stuff is like this.
This is a posthumous tape by an Australian folk/post-rock band who disassembled in 2011. Opening instrumental “Cobra” gradually layers slow-moving guitars and drums, and at its beginning, it strangely resembles a slowcore cover of Jaydee’s “Plastic Dreams” by Jozef Van Wissem, if that makes any sense. It progresses and moves into something else though, and while it threatens to get a bit heavier in the last 2 minutes, it stays pretty steady (and gorgeous) for its 7 minutes. “Walking the Plank” starts out by finding singer Brett Thompson waking from a morphine haze, saying that his head’s ok, but a few minutes later it gets bashed in with drums and keyboard. “The Plague” starts out sounding relatively jaunty, with an agreeable guitar riff and softly pounding drums, but then he sings about bringing out your dead. The second half of the song gets more abrasive and aggressive, ending up with some swarming violin attacks. It all unravels even more from there. “My Halo” is a really nice blanket of droning fuzz, but then halfway through it starts to get pitched down, melting into some sort of grotesque sound blob. The second side of the tape is taken up by “Old Crow”, which starts out as a fairly inconspicuous folk ballad, but after a few minutes of sparse guitar plucking and vocals, it gets enraptured into a full-band frenzy with uptempo drums and strings, and then it gets stuck into a pattern of slowly crashing and fading out and back in and then crashing again, and continually repeating for nearly 20 minutes, with each successive attack becoming slightly deadlier and more vicious, even as they don’t change all that much. There was nothing else this band could’ve possibly done after this than fall apart.
Now based in Pennsylvania, prolific lo-fi songwriter Graham Repulski continues to release brilliant music at an astonishing rate. His short, hissy, abstract tunes are reminiscent of ’90s indie rock at its most simultaneously catchy and experimental, with 3 minute anthems like “Octopus Bribes” sitting alongside minute-long fragments which sound like they were recorded in a laundromat. His vocals generally sit behind the wall of guitar fuzz, and sometimes they’re double tracked. Song structures can build up into something monumental, or they can just wither away and dissolve. A few tracks have drum machines, others just have severely distorted drums, and others have none whatsoever. “James Run” has the most starkly emotional lyrics and melody, and of course it’s half-hidden behind guitars and barely makes it past two minutes before it gets smashed into the flanged-out psych-pop of “Planned Blackouts”. The album gets progressively catchier from there, culminating in the bludgeoning “In Waves” which commands “I want you to kill my mind.” Rok Lok Records will be releasing the album on tape, but Graham will be self-releasing the CD through his label Shorter Recordings; it’s available to stream and pre-order on his Bandcamp page now.
With each successive release Derek Piotr puts out, the press release insists that he’s getting increasingly poppier and more accessible. There’s vocals, lyrics, and beats, and certainly less abstraction than his older releases, but this is still far too alien and strange to be played on commercial radio. Even someone like Holly Herndon, who does incredibly complex and futuristic avant-garde electronic music based around vocal manipulation, seems to have a bit more in the way of hooks (as well as energetic, danceable rhythms) than Piotr does. Having said that, this is curious glitching, sputtering machine music with 21st century Thom Yorke-style vocals and plenty of woodwind instruments. There’s some creative sample manipulation and skittering, delaying effects. 8-minute epic “Sunlight, Fruit Trees” does a pretty good job of exploring his vocal capabilities and arranging them onto rhythmic noise bursts. But there’s such a strange disconnect between his vocals and the sounds behind them. They line up in time, but something still seems detached emotionally. Having said that, even when the music seems to be constructed solely of relentlessly glitching and sputtering, as on “There Shall Be a New Earth”, it seems like there’s purpose and structure to it, it’s not strictly random noises. It’s also so minimal that there’s no way that any sounds on this album sound extraneous. Really puzzling music, to say the least.
3:00 AM Alice Coltrane ~ Hare Krishna ~ Universal Consciousness ~ Superior Viaduct
3:08 AM Michael Bundt ~ La Chasse Aux Microbes ~ Deutsche Elektronische Musik ~ Soul Jazz Records
3:16 AM Negativland ~ Watussi ~ mp3 ~ Soundcloud
3:22 AM Mike Cooper ~ Of Palm And Reef ~ Fratello Mare ~ Room40
3:24 AM Infinity Frequencies ~ Beyond ~ Into the Light ~ Dream Catalogue
3:24 AM CFCF ~ Don’t Worry ~ Night Bus 3 ~ Bandcamp
3:36 AM EH46 ~ Six Seal Sun ~ A God With Horns ~ Bridgetown Records
3:42 AM Lawrence English ~ December 24 – Frost’s Bitter Grip ~ The Peregrine ~ Room40
3:49 AM Torn Humorist ~ Great To Be Fun Again ~ Everyone Works So Hard ~ Bridgetown Records
3:53 AM Former Selves ~ Empyrean Waltzes ~ Apropos of Golden Dreams ~ Bridgetown Records
4:01 AM Robert Crouch ~ The Propaganda Of History ~ Organs ~ Dragon’s Eye Recordings
4:11 AM Kevin Greenspon ~ Scaffold ~ Maroon Bells ~ Bridgetown Records
4:15 AM Andrew Tuttle ~ Totally Wilden ~ Slowcation ~ A Guide To Saints
4:21 AM France Jobin & Fabio Perletta ~ Mimesis ~ Mirror Neurons ~ Dragon’s Eye Recordings
4:38 AM Five Star Hotel ~ Cluster ~ Outlands ~ Visual Disturbances/Emergency Tapes
4:44 AM Transllusion ~ Crossing Into The Mental Astroplane ~ The Opening Of The Cerebral Gate ~ Tresor
4:49 AM Smersh ~ Highway Surplus ~ Super Heavy Solid Waste ~ Dark Entries
4:53 AM Cignol ~ minbasic ~ Scan Transfer EP ~ Seagrave
4:57 AM Derek Piotr ~ Day Residue ~ Bahar ~ Bit Phalanx
5:00 AM Kevin Greenspon ~ Rust Eagle ~ To Leave A Mark ~ Bridgetown Records
5:03 AM Georgia ~ Be Ache ~ Georgia ~ Domino
5:07 AM Braer Rabbit ~ Allez-Z ~ Welcome To My World ~ Irritant
5:13 AM Donna Summer ~ Who Wants To Be An American Idol ~ Who Wants To Be A Millionaire ~ Klangkrieg
5:16 AM Blackcell ~ Moon Musiq (I Hate Sunlight Mix by Syphilis Sauna) ~ Mixed In Black ~ Backwards Records
5:19 AM Venetian Snares ~ Stockpiles of Sentiment ~ Your Face ~ Planet Mu
5:23 AM Five Star Hotel ~ Fail Safe (Version) / Work ~ #HOTELSEASON ~ Visual Disturbances
5:25 AM Five Star Hotel ~ Body ~ #HOTELSEASON ~ Visual Disturbances
5:27 AM Five Star Hotel x Pivotal ~ Fire Hazard ~ #HOTELSEASON ~ Visual Disturbances
5:28 AM Five Star Hotel ~ Ecrit Elon ~ #HOTELSEASON ~ Visual Disturbances
5:29 AM Five Star Hotel ~ Eols (Alt Take) ~ #HOTELSEASON ~ Visual Disturbances
5:32 AM Dura ~ Triangles ~ split tape w/ Former Selves ~ Bridgetown Records
5:49 AM Rob Mazurek/Exploding Star Orchestra ~ Free Agents of Sound ~ Galactic Parables: Volume 1 (disc 2) ~ Cuneiform
The three lengthy pieces on this album attempt to draw connections between organs of the body with the musical instrument known as the organ. The first track (“Somniloquy (an egg): A Choreography of Emancipation”) features recordings of Crouch playing a broken church organ, and it has such a strange crushed decaying sound to it. There’s also distant birds, conversation, and even other music faintly playing in the background, underneath the organ drone landscape and the crunching, deconstructing sound of the broken organ. It swells up towards the end, and as it fades away, there’s some sort of distant clapping rhythm. “The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.” is nearly a half hour long, and has a tense throbbing rumble throughout its first part, but this gradually clears out to more glacial, soothing drones, which are still in the distance buried amongst field recordings. “The Propaganda of History” is much shorter at only 10 minutes, and is built around an oblong loop of fireworks exploding, giving it another odd rhythm. This one also swells up with organ droning, becoming immersive and expansive.
Formerly known as Anonymeye, Andrew Tuttle has been creating a unique brand of electro-acoustic folk music for years, with scads of albums and EPs to his name. This tape continues experimental avant-(Australian-)Americana, blending banjos and Fahey-style acoustic guitar with analog synths and drifting tape drone. MC Schmidt of Matmos plays acoustic guitar on “Post Meridiem Construction”, and the connection makes perfect sense, given some of their folk/acoustic/Americana experiments. This tape has such a warm, natural blend of earthy acoustic instruments and fluttering, exciting electronics. He’s just so good at this it’s astonishing. The second half of the tape focuses less on acoustic instruments, and the final track is a shimmering Laurie Spiegel-scape. Excellent tape.
Vaporwave, I have to admit, is a genre that I don’t always get and honestly think there’s far too much of out there. Way too much of it just seems lazy and derivative and cheesy and like not a whole lot of effort was put into it. I’m sure a bunch of nerds will argue that that’s all exactly the point, in which case I would just rather listen to something real. Not all vaporwave (or whatever nebulous internet non-genre gets used to describe stuff like this) comes off this way to me though, some of it seems like it’s doing something different. Japanese producer Infinity Frequencies has released some recordings that have caught my attention. I feel like this artist is maybe a little closer to something like The Caretaker, but only slightly. There’s still plenty of slowed down elevator music type samples, and it’s all covered in VHS hiss, but it seems to have a little bit more of an ethereal sheen to it. Actually, as I listen to it more, it doesn’t really sound all that different from most vaporwave. I just happen to enjoy it more for some reason.
The Answer Is In The Beat 