February 28, 2021 at 12:58 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Jeff Greinke: Other Weather (Spotted Peccary, 2021)
Like his previous album, 2018’s marvelous
Before Sunrise, Jeff Greinke’s
newest work blends ambient soundscapes with intimately recorded acoustic instruments. This album sounds further from dark ambient and space music, and closer to neo-classical and chamber music. Continuing the longstanding weather theme present throughout his discography (just look at his past album titles:
Cities in Fog,
Big Weather,
Moving Climates, etc.), the album is filled with rolling textural clouds and melodic figures which convey various weather patterns and phenomena. There’s more downcast tracks like the slowcore trudge of “Rain Through the Night” as well as more dramatic, swelling epics like “Snow Across a Windswept Plain”. “Clouds Like Flying Saucers” is more mysterious and hard to grasp, with delicate notes tripping over each other, but in a way that’s obviously deliberate and purposeful, making you ponder what exactly is occurring. The piano-driven “After the Rain” immediately hits a sort of mood similar to Aphex Twin’s “Fingerbib”, but more unbound and meandering. Tracks like that one and “Across the Sky” certainly feel like staring up at the clouds and noticing weird shapes, yet the music itself is far from being random and formless.
February 27, 2021 at 1:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Northwoods Improvisers Quartet/Quintet: Raft
Longrunning Detroit jazz ensemble Northwoods Improvisers return with their first recording since the 2012 death of Griot Galaxy legend Faruq Z. Bey, whom they regularly collaborated with since 2000. They’ve been playing strictly acoustic instrumentation since the early 1980s, but the music is charged with enough energy that it often seems electric. Each piece has a writing credit, and many of them are composed, structured, and melodic, like “Ethiopia” (which definitely sounds inspired by the music of the country it’s named after) and the slow river float of “Raft”. “Burgundy and Green” starts out with a flurry of drumming which continues underneath the sax and flutes, which diverge from a sorrowful, weary duet into wild improvisations. “Woodfire” is an expressive audio painting which instantly transports you to a remote environment far from civilization. “R.M.” is a short, frantic, angular burst accompanied by a poem in the inner sleeve, although the audio is instrumental. “19 Moons” is a Faruq Z. Bey composition, and the mournful “Tasbih'” is dedicated to him. The busier, more sprawling “Witnessed” is for Mike Carey, another longtime group member who does not appear on this album.
February 26, 2021 at 6:58 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
James Bangura: E-FAX009
James Bangura’s
latest EP has six tracks which casually fold shuffling breaks into refreshingly lush textures, then delicately heat up the club without getting dramatic about it. “Denitia Junction” is blown-out, spludgy hip-hop with wind-rush jungle synths and dubby vocal echoes. Then there’s more upbeat yet spacious, resonant club tracks like “Interpretive Dance” and “Incoherent Response”. The producer doesn’t go for big, heavy sounds or commanding basslines, or anything else that would make for obvious floorfillers, but the songs are so intricately arranged that they give your mind as much of a workout as your body.
February 25, 2021 at 5:52 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
William St Hugh: Terra Former
The fourth album from this mysterious Massachusetts-based composer is a set of dark, cinematic neo-classical pieces which vary between rising-and-falling ambience and more bombastic fanfares (like “Cascade”). The brief “Blinking Drops” is more twitchy, jittery, and IDM-y, with a menacing kick drum pounding nervously away underneath. The shivering, cavelike “Diluted” is like Popol Vuh by way of the KLF’s
Chill Out. “Gone to Ground” is maybe the most ominous and dark ambient-sounding piece here, a dreadscape of metallic whirring and stirring void. “Terra Former” contains at least a tiny glimmer of hope, and “Elevation” is a grand shining of horns and strings. “Dust Queen” is one last turn of the tide, casting a glance back on the themes of the album as the moonshadows fall.
February 24, 2021 at 6:41 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Good Willsmith: HausLive 2: Good Willsmith at Sleeping Village, 4/25/2019
Good Willsmith started off this year with this
live tape of a 2019 gig, and it’s instantly my favorite release by them. Really inventive incorporation of drum machine rhythms and colorful, joyous, heartfelt melodies, yet still coming from a jammy psych-rock background. The first track is just really expressive, melodic, and even danceable, and it’s just really delightful. “The Burning Orphanage Sidequest” is more twisted, more angular, noisier, more technological, and just a tad bit scary, but still the right sort of challenging. “Third Eyebrow” is a bit similar but funky and polyrhythmic, mixing up wah-wah guitar effects, Zappa-style percussive escapades, and motorik trance rhythms without biting off more than they can chew. It retains the looseness and spontaneity of their other releases, and the bootleg-style presentation keeps it underground while documenting a unique, special happening.
February 22, 2021 at 10:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
v/a: Modus Vivendi: A Benefit Compilation for Chris Phinney
The second benefit album
NO PART OF IT has released in the past few months, the proceeds of
Modus Vivendi go to longtime experimental musician and home taper Chris Phinney (Harsh Reality Music, Mental Anguish), who was left wheelchair-bound after an auto accident in late 2019 (see the Bandcamp link for more details). The collection features material recorded over the course of several decades by artists Phinney has worked before, as well as newer noise/experimental artists continuing in the spirit of the ’80s tape underground. Content Nullity (now known as Mollusk King) begins the set with a bracing, powerful piece called “Grief”, which has a familiar cinematic loop doused in distortion and surrounded by swarming tones that seem like brief snatches of voices calling out, then layered thousands of times. Far from being just a noise comp, the album features haunted drift-rock from Theatre of Ice and the more detached, atmospheric Plastic Crimewave as well as a 2002 demo by Gitane Demone, formerly of Christian Death. Ethereal wave pioneers Attrition also make an appearance, in addition to other dark and heavenly sounds by Temple Ov Saturn. Chicago industrial/gospel/performance art legends ONO provide the clanky, hair-raising highlight “Miss Rita/Popeye’s Sister”, and even more frightening are mid-album scare-the-crap-outs by Dieter Müh and risaripa. Tape scene veteran PBK contributes a furnace-blasting track of his own as well as a piece from the Minóy archives. Aaron Dilloway’s typically amazing piece possibly spins chicken clucks into head-warping tape loops. An edit of a collaboration between Phinney and label founder Arvo Zylo is one of the more aggressive noise pieces here, but also feels stark and chilling in a way. An excerpt of Gas Mask Horse’s Halloween 2019 performance on freeform station WZRD properly brings the heebie-jeebies with howling wolves, ominous bubbling, and bursts of rusty noise, as well as distorted cackling. Finally, it all ends with a brief bit of slide whistle whimsy by the inimitable Little Fyodor.
February 21, 2021 at 1:03 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Hotel Neon: Moments
Remotely recorded ambient pieces which still manage to feel like intimate snapshots of, well, moments. All tracks are titled after specific dates, and they all seem like they’re capturing a sunrise or a high tide or something else just as fleeting. The pieces with later dates are fittingly colder, but hardly Arctic. It’s still semi-warm, and it all has an autumnal glow to it. Fuzzy distortion, soothing waves, perhaps some pipe organ and just a general sense of serenity.
February 19, 2021 at 8:14 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Ambassador Hazy: Glacial Erratics
Slacker-ish lo-fi psych pop from Sterling DeWeese, formerly of several bands I’ve never heard of (Heavy Hands, Dirty Rainbow, Terrapin Gun, etc). Has sort of a Bevis Frond thing going on but without the guitar heroics. Mostly sounds like one guy doing everything, with a few friends helping out on some tracks, and the simplicity works to its advantage, as on the brief but catchy “Don’t Have a Plan”. “Easy Alibi” has some nice fuzz guitar and organ and big slappy drums. “Passing Into a Grey Area” feels like a brief part of a much longer psych jam. “Moth to the Flame” has more heavy, almost funky drums, sort of suggesting Can but not quite as superhuman. :Never to Late” starts with a vinyl spinback and pairs drum machines with live drums. “Up and Down” is a decent bummed out drifter singalong tune. “Ain’t the Same No More” has more drum machines and bottom-of-a-well echo. “Oz the Great and Powerful” is a bit weirder and more mystical, and sounds like something from a funky ’70s psych soundtrack, but with vocals referencing
The Wizard of Oz. “The World’s a Mess” has a synth intro and outro, and is a scratchy fuzz-rock nugget with lyrics such as “The world’s a mess and I need a friend”.
February 18, 2021 at 8:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
v/a: Roots, Space, Vision Vol. 1
I don’t have too much to say about
this compilation other than that it’s free and there’s a ton of great artists on it, so it’s a must download. Berlin label, events series, and Noods Radio presenter Rec Room formed in 2013 and this is their first release, and it’s just a fantastic collection of forward-thinking club music. Ray Kandinski and Jana Rush appear early on with some gorgeous hybrid footwork, and in between them is an introspective but commanding IDM/techno track from excellent newcomer Xyla. CalvoMusic lets you know that Baltimore club music is still going strong in the 2020s, even as its Jersey and Philly cousins have gotten a bit more attention during the last decade or so. Cape Town’s Cajoux stuns with the Afrobass burner “TPC”, and BADSISTA’s track is as grand as always. DJ Lycox goes hardest of all with the stomping, chant-infused “UNIQUE”, and UR’s Mark Flash closes it out with the sublime “ONE WAY TICKET TO MARS”, yet again reminding me how much I miss clubbing in Detroit.
February 18, 2021 at 7:48 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Crypticz: Between Dust & Time
Like Krust’s albums, the
first full-length by Crypticz elevates drum’n’bass to near-symphonic ambitions. Opener “Broadcast Feeling” lasts for a very tense, patient 12 minutes, only dropping breakbeats when necessary and featuring passages bathed in crackling static. Amy Kisnorbo contributes free-floating vocals on “Ocean Blue”, a fitting track title for a producer who creates these vast pieces that you can just soak in rather than dance to. “Lakutala (Version)” sits still and cave-like until a haunting flute and dub bassline emerge, then a hard “Funky Drummer” breakbeat plunks in and everything slowly rotates. “The Guided” is a chalice-bearing dub meditation, and “Journey Through the Rings of Saturn” propels through the milky way — its surging bass and galloping bongos seem to be building up to a locked-in d’n’b rhythm, but its sights are set far beyond that. “Nightshifter’s Groove” does drop some breakbeats in eventually, but it’s mostly carried by bongos and chasmic dub effects. “Lakutala” proper lands at the diced breakbeats that much of the album only hinted at, and it goes off, while still taking necessary time to pause and reflect. Some of the deepest, most ambitious drum’n’bass I’ve heard in a while.
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