The Answer Is In The Beat

Swartz Et: A Living Thing (Utter East, 2018)

September 26, 2018 at 8:06 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Detroit musician Steve Swartz normally plays guitar in bands like Au Revoir Borealis and For Wishes, but here he’s recorded a series of extended, immersive modular synthesizer pieces. The name Swartz Et recognizes that even though these are technically solo recordings, there’s clearly another force at play, and the album’s title nods to the generative nature of the synth. Without being blasted at a high volume, there’s a pretty dense amount of textures to these tracks, and they all take their time to evolve and grow. This is a supremely relaxing album, I’ve been putting it on to calm down or get ready to sleep a lot lately. And yet it’s not a fluffy dreamtime album. There’s a gritty crackle beneath much of it, and the slowly all-consuming “Embers” is closer to the corroded noise drone of Tim Hecker. An absolutely wonderful, marvelous release. Listen right now over at Bandcamp!

Phal:Angst: Phase IV (Bloodshed666, 2018)

September 21, 2018 at 6:01 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Austrian group Phal:Angst are somewhere in between industrial and post-rock, constructing 10-minute epics filled with gritty guitars, creeping tempos, and cinematic overtones. The film dialogue samples strewn throughout tracks like opener “On the Run” bring to mind older Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but this group generally sticks to evenly paced electronic tempos rather than lengthy crescendos. They also alternate the samples with original vocals, which are sinister and sometimes menacing, but not overly aggressive. The music itself similarly never gets into aggro overdrive; rather, it maintains a consistent mood while evolving through different atmospheric elements, incorporating instruments such as harp and metallophone along with the guitars and electronics. “Despair II” is somewhat appropriately the most emotionally devastating track, as well as the longest. This feeling of hopelessness and pointlessness is further expanded upon with “They Won’t Have to Burn the Books When Noone Reads Them Anyway”. The album ends with 2 significantly shorter remixes, the first from Will Brooks (Dälek), and the second from Justin Broadrick. Both keep within the mood of the originals, but Broadrick’s mix adds a bit more bass pressure.

Deadbeat Beat: Tree, Grass & Stone 7″ (Crystal Palace, 2018)

September 21, 2018 at 4:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The latest single from Detroit rough riders Deadbeat Beat alludes to Swedish psych legends Träd, Gräs Och Stenar. As natural-sounding as its title, the song is a steady, upbeat trip, starting out with a bit of a sunshine chorus and verse before dissolving into spacey synth effects. In the spirit of numerous James Brown and P-Funk singles, the jam continues on the second side, rematerializing and fading in on a shredding astral-exploration guitar solo. Equal parts pop and psych, the record makes equal room for hooks and blissful zone-outs. Digitally available on Bandcamp.

The Burrell Connection: Hyper/Orbit 12″ EP (Craigie Knowes, 2018)

September 15, 2018 at 2:35 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The newest Burrell Connection EP starts out with crunchy broken beats, “Clear” sweeps, and an acid line snaking through everything on “Hyper 14.255”. Then “Hyper 480” starts out riding the line between atmospheric jungle and techno before some impossibly heavy breaks smash in. It all ends way too soon. “Orbit 458” is a slower, bleaker atmospheric breakbeat track with the “fuckin’ voodoo magic man” sample as made famous by Hyper On Experience’s “Lords Of the Null Lines”. “Orbit .512” is a much more hypnotic midtempo shaker with a sly acid line sparking up throughout. It somehow feels caught between dubby disco, gqom, and some sort of shamanic trance. A very well rounded, often marvelous set of tracks.

Mamuthones: Fear On The Corner (Rocket Recordings, 2018)

September 11, 2018 at 11:04 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Nearly a decade ago, I reviewed a Mamuthones album for Foxy Digitalis (R.I.P.) which was sort of a droney dark ambient work filled with clattering metal and creepy voices. I lost track of the group after that, but sometime in between then and now, the Italian group started making colorful psychedelic rock, informed by both Krautrock and Afrobeat, and they signed to Rocket Recordings. Rhythm is the focus here, and there’s pounding drums as well as marimba and other percussive instruments adding some additional flavors. There’s some noise bursts and plenty of flanged guitar effects, but the group largely don’t drown out the rhythm. “Show Me” is probably the most overtly Krautrock-sounding song, but “Alone” is a straight-up disco-punk jam. The album ends with “Here We Are”, a trance-inducing 10-minute procession which is roughly as frightening as the album’s cover art.

Fritz Welch: A Desire To Push Forward Without Gaining Access To Anything LP (Radical Documents, 2018)

September 11, 2018 at 10:14 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Former Peeesseye member Fritz Welch presents an album of totally off-the-wall vocal pieces. Double-tracking and processing his voice, he starts out speaking normal words but quickly goes off the rails into elastic-faced jibber-jabber and primal gobbledygook. The fact that there’s two of him making these alien cartoon noises only increases the nuttiness of it all. I’m not an expert on dadaist sound poetry so I have no clue who to compare this to — other than weird voices I come up with when I think nobody’s around. He breaks slightly from the madness with the brief “Tamio’s Prison Song”, a listing of several prisons described as “a poetic response to a song often performed by Tamio Shiraishi”. The second side is my favorite of the two, because his voice is aided by electronics, so he’s grunting and shouting into the void, and then his voice comes back to haunt him. Definitely recommended for fans of the vocal stylings of Dylan Nyoukis and Aaron Dilloway. Listen and buy from Bandcamp, if you dare.