November 9, 2020 at 7:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Rebecca Foon: Waxing Moon
Rebecca Foon has been an integral part of Montreal’s music scene for decades. She’s been part of several notable Constellation Records acts, including A Silver Mt. Zion, Set Fire to Flames, Esmerine, and Land of Kush, in addition to releasing solo electro-acoustic work as Saltland. Waxing Moon is her first album under her own name, and it’s significantly more song-driven than much of the bands she’s known for. After opening with a piano-and-strings instrumental which sounds more heavily orchestrated than it really is, most of the songs (except the last, which is a reprise of the first) are dark, dusky neo-classical folk with strings, pianos, organs, drones, double/electric bass, vocals, and usually no drums. Most of these are lyrical, but “Another Realm” is a gorgeous 3 minutes of cinematic suspense with just oooohs rather than lyrics. “Wide Open Eyes” is closer to an atmospheric ’90s alternative pop song, with just a bit of drumming keeping the pulse. The next few tracks are slower and more placid, with “Vessels” (featuring guest duet partner Patrick Watson) being the most stirring. “This Is Our Lives” starts out feeling like it’s the first part of an epic, then it ends up turning surprisingly devotional and hymn-like.
November 8, 2020 at 3:25 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Thomas Dimuzio: Balance
Longtime synth alchemist Thomas Dimuzio has collaborated with countless figures from throughout the world of experimental music, in concert and on record.
This triple CD collects choice bits from dozens of collaborative performances from 2009 to 2019, with each disc arranged by configuration. Disc one is all duos, and fittingly enough, it’s the most minimal of the three. Much of these pieces are dark drone of some sort or another, from the haunted electro-acoustic of “Gnomon” with Blevin Blectum, full of tiny shreds of voices, to the shifting sci-fi throb of “Yesterday Died and Tomorrow Won’t Be Born” with Greg Bielski (Easy Bake Oven). “Ideal Cycle” with Xopher Davidson (Antimatter) is sort of a cosmic acid rain air raid, then the almighty Wobbly turns up on “Voluntary Limit”, which starts out with blasts of shredded Booper noise before dissipating into the cold night air. His Negativland bandmate The Weatherman pops up in the intro to the following “Directions From Hangar 23A”, giving a legal station ID for KPFA, where the session was (with Lori Varga) recorded. The track is another eerie one filled with scattered voices, wild oscillations, and some strangely comforting ding-dong audio logo tones near the end. “Collecting Particles Under a Dying Sun” with David Molina (Transient) takes things in a different direction, with gentle guitar repetitions and a distant clanging rhythm, later shuddering and whirring to a close. The second disc focuses on trio collaborations, adding an extra dimension to the pieces: mangled guitar strings, momentary bass pulsations, bird chirps, extra sizzles. Wobbly returns, this time with Alan Courtis of South American legends Reynols, and it’s one of the spaciest pieces here, with a few bursts of electricity pushing it in one way or another, and some whirling guitar loops at the end. Joseph Hammer and Rick Potts, prominent members of the highly influential Los Angeles Free Music Society, contribute trails of piercing, squidging guitar noise to “Fluorescent Brown”. Both members of Matmos go into improv mode and play around with skeletal hi-hat rhythms and glitchy oscillations. The track with Aurora Josephson and Chandra Shukla (and actually a few others) is more of an industrial doom trip, before it levels off into floating, meditative vocals. The one with Alexandra Buschman and Angela Edwards is weird because it’s filled with garbled distorted tones and then there’s these sudden loud but comforting bursts that are sort of like the very beginning of “Let’s Go Crazy” and even though they aren’t harsh or noisy, they’re still super jarring when they come at you. This is definitely not easy music to fall asleep to. With the last disc, two or three musicians accompany Dimuzio, and these edge closer to free jazz-like improv, featuring more acoustic instrumentation than the first two discs, starting with a noisy, sax-shredding piece featuring Chuck Bettis, Nick Didkovsky, and Michael Lytle. Scott Amendola and Phillip Greenlief particularly shine with the whirling drums, fluttering woodwinds, and muffled voices of “Paging Rubber Chickens”, which ends up turning into a Zorn-like rage-skronk, but with extra smoldering electronics. “We Are Water” (with Emily Hay and Motoko Honda) is one of the more joyful moments, with expressive vocal acrobatics and busy pianos underscored by electronic fuzz. A bit more startling a performance art-like is “I’m One of ‘Em” (with Shelley Hirsch, Thea Farhadian, and Gino Robair), which has a few violent interjections (“You woke me out of my nightmare!”) and crooked, creaking violin. At the end, “The Talisman of Market Street” (with Scott Amendola, Jon Evans, and Ava Mendoza) ventures into more groove-based (but also heavily spacey) electric jazz improv.
November 5, 2020 at 9:42 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
v/a: HOA012
HAUS of ALTR’s
latest compilation hasn’t gotten as much attention as its previous two, but it’s still packed with quality and worthy of attention. Like the others, this one has an all-star lineup of some of the best artists making club music right now. The AceMo/AceMoMA tracks at the beginning, including collaborations with Detroit’s 2Lanes and Kanyon, all go hard with jungle hybrids. The juke/deep house/hardstep fusion of “Omnipresence” (with Kanyon) is particularly innovative and amazing. Other artists dip into spacey sci-fi techno (Akua), fractured lo-fi house (AshTreJunkins), and nosebleed hardcore techno (Buzzi x Xiorro). Escaflowne turns a freestyle hit into ecstatic breakbeat hardcore, bookworms goes electro, and Kanyon’s “Stops Rust” is breakbeat with shades of “Can You Feel It”. Kush Jones does some nice minimal jungle, and North End Track Authority gets points for sampling DBX’s “Losing Control”. Loraine James, Martyn Bootyspoon, Speaker Music (with Lamin Fofana), and others also contribute highlights.
November 1, 2020 at 12:02 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Baldi/Gerycz Duo: After Commodore Perry Service Plaza
Dylan Baldi and Jayson Gerycz of Cloud Nothings make stripped-down free jazz as a form of release when they’re not writing and performing tightly wound, hook-heavy pop/punk songs with their main band. This is their second album this year, recorded in Gerycz’s basement home studio during a single day in February, and it contains three improvised pieces, with Baldi playing saxophone and Gerycz on drums. The first track takes up 18 minutes, and it’s mostly pretty sparse and arid, at one point feeling like it’s barely scraping along and nearly out of breath, but then it explodes into color and feeling right at the end. “Frog Congress” starts out minimal as well — faint whirring of cymbals, some faint tonal color lines, clacking of the keys — and doesn’t particularly heat up, but does seem to get deeper into the physical properties of the instruments, with more crunching, clanking, rubbing, stretching. “The Holy Retrievers (In Transit)” is much shorter than the other two pieces and much more drum-heavy, and Baldi’s expressive playing takes on much more of an Albert Ayler-like tone, so it’s easily the most active and engaging piece here.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 