September 9, 2023 at 12:28 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tomorrow Comes the Harvest: Evolution
Tomorrow Comes the Harvest originated with Jeff Mills’ collaboration with the late Tony Allen, as well as keyboard player Jean-Phi Dary. Mills and Dary continued working together after Allen passed away, and they invited other musicians into the fold.
Evolution was recorded live in Brussels in 2022, with the duo joined by Prabhu Edouard on tabla and vocals. Entirely improvised, the set is a smoothly flowing river of piano ripples and skittering techno beats, with Edouard’s tabla and rapid chanting being the most ecstatic element. The crowd gets fired up near the end of these long, stretched-out sessions, there seems to be at least one “wooooo!” during the final minutes of most tracks. “Words of Wisdom” has the heaviest techno grooves, but it feels much more spontaneous than Mills’ club-engineered tracks, particularly due to the jazzy pianos and bewildering tabla soloing near the end. “Peace Pipe” is carried by extremely soothing synth chords. “Rising Water” takes lyrics from the Ganesh Incantation, but gets carried off by the beats. A brief reprise focuses more on the incantation, potentially serving as a radio edit of the piece. In all honesty, the time I saw Mills and Dary perform with Allen, it didn’t feel like the three musicians were as much in tune with each other as the trio here.
September 8, 2023 at 7:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Meadow Argus: For the Birds tape
The
newest Meadow Argus tape melds his usual field recordings and tape loops with a particularly soothing set of organ drones, possibly made by a harmonium. The fuzzy organ rolls throughout, and cheerful conversations, birds chirping, and thickets full of insects enter the sound-picture. It’s all a pleasant stroll that gradually gets trippier, as you realize when a crowing bird echoes deep into the ether, and other sounds feel out of balance. The second side gets particularly haunting, with incoherent shrieks and sobs calling for attention, but something about it winds up being inviting. Blasted CB radio transmissions and more glimmering drones make up the final stretch of the tape, taking us far away from the family memories of the first side and into some sort of cross-country road trip, trucking on acid. This tape really builds its own distinctive world, and it’s easily one of the most impressive Meadow Argus releases yet.
August 6, 2023 at 3:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
NO EYES: idk
Just months after releasing a
devastating album with a lengthy emotional title, Atlanta’s NO EYES surfaces on Kitty On Fire with
another one with a name that suggests a careless shrug, but clearly has a lot more on its consciousness. Opener “i succ at life” starts out as a vaporwave smudge, then develops pulled-apart glitch-breaks and dovetails into harsh furious breakcore. Then later on there’s an extended monologue about reacting to racist violence by being violent against racists. “ucantsilencemii” contains a lesson about not believing predictions that don’t empower you. “lovelostbutnotforgotten” extends past 7 minutes and burns in a shoegaze fire in the most glorious way. x.nte and Elevation help add some combusting juke-core rhythms to “shitIamstillhere”, surrounding a National Weather Service announcement with monsoons of distorted breaks. “333” with Deantoni Parks piles up the data from a billion bursting screens, broadcasting the dystopian future in the present. “no home 2 go 2″… just another torrent of internal emptiness translated into a firestorm of noisy breakbeats and a rapid bitstream of decimated pop culture samples. How often are you this? Every moment of my life.
August 5, 2023 at 1:24 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
x.nte: Reimagining DB
Atlanta’s
x.nte continues making breakcore as a form of self-therapy, purging inner demons through glitched-out tracks that mutilate samples from numerous genres. There’s menacing horrorcore vocals in tracks like “mischief & mayhem”, but there’s also jazzy pianos that provide a bit of balance, because plenty of other tracks on here just rip breakbeats apart. “international” sort of comes close to atmospheric ragga-breakcore, but even more deconstructed than that description sounds. A remix of Elevation’s “Fuzakeruna” forges a destructive groove, with harsh breaks forming a fairly steady pattern. A few tracks get into screamy metalcore territory, and “Qualm” has some impressive time changes and incorporations of guitars and drums along with acid and breaks. Some of the melodramatic vocal samples on this album are a little uncomfortable, they go into a brutal self-loathing direction I’d prefer not to go down, but there’s enough tracks that aren’t like that to make it worthwhile. Also, a few tracks by other artists are curiously included at the end, including RENEGADE ANDROID, Laxenanchaos, and nohighs.
July 30, 2023 at 4:17 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
John Wiese: Magnetic Stencil 1
John Wiese’s
Magnetic Stencil series, released on CD a few years ago and now pressed to vinyl, consists of lengthy collage pieces featuring sonic contributions from an extensive list of noise and experimental visionaries, including Aaron Dilloway, C. Spencer Yeh, C. Lavender, Lasse Marhaug, and Gilgongo’s James Fella. That’s about half the guest list on the
first volume alone. Also, the first 2 parts were composed and mixed in one day, and the third was created on another. How?!?! There’s so much going on during these records. Wiese always has fascinating ways of combining controlled, sudden bursts of sound with space, so that everything sounds clear even when it’s noisy and chaotic. Sounds shift between varying levels of clarity, across multiple layers and channels, with tape sputter, deformed human voices, and broken, struggling frequencies all appearing at will. A smudged, slowed down rhythm worms its way into the picture near the end of the first side, and I’m guessing Dilloway had something to do with it, but there’s no way of telling for sure. After it disappears, several layers of metallic buzzing emerge, and some how it’s elevating instead of headache-inducing. Side B starts out with some
A Big 10-8 Place-like voices that are zapped and splashed to oblivion. It then slithers between more tape-fried voices, more metallic vibrations, delicate string plucks, and blankets of jammed frequencies. More delicate but sharp bowing and buzzing is intercut with fluttering feedback, mutated whispers, and alien messages from dozens of different angles. There’s something symphonic about the way these sounds are paced until they converge into a violent roar. Totally bewildering.
John Wiese: Magnetic Stencil 2
features Dilloway, T. Mikawa, Joe Potts, and Robert Turman. A little different than the sporadic interjections of the first volume, this one starts out as a sort of terror scene, with dense walls of noise blazing, slowly shifting to reveal exactly what type of damage is being caused. Jammed tapes cause sudden whiplash, support systems strain and crack. A house of horrors is engulfed in flames. The second side is less panic-stricken, at least at first. It moves a lot more slowly, but it’s clearly haunted, and there are moments that bleed into heavy harshness. Mostly it’s just vast, sooty layers with buried voices, industrious hissing, and moments when half-forgotten music bubbles through. Somehow near the end, the acoustics suggest that this might be a live performance. If it was, the very end might have been something like Hanatarash bulldozing a venue.
John Wiese: Magnetic Stencil 3
features Tim Kinsella, Howard Stelzer, John Collins McCormick, and several others. Another haunted house of abrasive tape manipulations and rumbling acoustic noises, this time with some more kitchen-like sounds sprinkling and smashing in near the beginning. Some half-sliced voices semi-sing near the end of side 1, almost as if they can only communicate their message by being extremely distorted. Then a cartoonish thwack kicks it out like a football. The second side is a fog of spacey delay, pretzel twist feedback fuzz, and voices nearly ground into dust. There’s moments that elevate further, particularly the counting voice in the middle and the atmospheric drift that follows after it. Then it ends up with a particularly impressive homemade rocket blast for its ending.
July 23, 2023 at 4:06 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Golden Feelings: Better Weather
The
newest album from Golden Feelings (Dustin Krcatovich) contains recordings of “Better Weather”, a piece performed using a matrix of 64 loops, including software instruments, live instruments, and field recordings. Randomly selected cards serve as graphic scores, indicating when to use “active” and “passive” loops. The piece is never performed the same way twice. Two recordings are included along with a short interlude. There’s other generative music pieces you could compare this sort of method to, but it’s more important to just focus on the music and what’s happening and how it makes you feel. The first part mostly sounds like walking through a natural area basking in bright sunlight, and eventually happening upon a gently flowing stream. The water sounds are easy to hear, but there’s also some very soft, infrequent beats audible if you turn it up loud enough, maybe like distant footprints or objects falling from trees. The second version feels a bit lighter, a bit glassier, a bit more distant and perhaps more imaginary.
July 15, 2023 at 8:17 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The Gray Field Recordings: She Sleeps to the Sound of Knives
R. Loftiss’s avant-folk project returns after more than a decade since their last album. I actually haven’t listened to them before, but they were on the
Gold Leaf Branches comp on Digitalis back in 2005, and had CD-Rs on labels like Reverb Worship. There’s elements of Coil alchemy, but also Natural Snow Buildings drone-folk and surreal collage poetry, incorporating unique instruments and sometimes children’s voices. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is the album’s 18-minute centerpiece, and it’s a cryptic, hypnotic web of sometimes-reversed text, dulcimer vibrations, and cracked transmissions. “Verdant Green” has sharp clanging for percussion but has a sort of sweet vocal melody, making it one of the most inviting moments on the album. “Sex Flowers” starts out with whirring noises that sound like bees buzzing, then has sensual poetry, rubbery synths, and thumpy beats at the end. “Who Will Bright the Light?” is a much darker, more haunting drone, and then the sparse, creeping title track is as disturbing as its title. Lastly, “Wilderness Takes Over” begins delicate and intimate, then ends up unhinged and noisy, but the glowing synth trail makes it feel like it’s staying on a tightrope during a storm.
July 12, 2023 at 7:52 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Gate: The Numbers LP
First released last year on
Bandcamp, this 2012 recording from Michael Morley of the Dead C has now been pressed to vinyl thanks to Birdman. Morley dials his drum machine down to a click, making it imitate a lethargic drummer, and his guitar blusters and blares on top of it as if he’s setting off smoke bombs every time he touches the strings. The vocals stumble through the fog just as much, and it all feels like someone barely holding their mind together. The rudimentary drum machine really helps guide the current here, if it was a real drummer the musician would probably have the urge to over-play or freak out, and it just works better as a dead, stiff trudge like this. “Land” has a particular way of making the mind fuzzy, and then “Clouds Again” has something resembling a trip-hop beat, which throws things out of wack even further. “Film Envy” has some of the most overwhelming, overdriven noise on the album, and it finds a clever way to escape at the end.
July 1, 2023 at 3:55 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
v/a: Raymond Scott Reimagined
Bandleader, pianist, saxophonist, and former Warner Brothers Animation composer Gordon Goodwin presents new arrangements of some of Raymond Scott’s most well-known compositions — the ones you’ve heard in cartoons your entire life. Most of the songs are performed by Gordon’s Big Phat Band and Quartet San Francisco, with vocal sextet Take 6 joining in on a few numbers. I’ve listened to
Reckless Nights & Turkish Twilights more times than I can count, and these are faithful but still exquisitely performed, embellished arrangements of the songs. Of course “Powerhouse” kicks off the show, and the main melody is quoted a few other times throughout the program, including on the next track, one of several selections of Raymond Scott interviews backed with newly recorded music. “Toy Trumpet” has a nice bit at the end that switches through a few brief, distinct parts, with a very low-attention-span cartoon feel. “Cutey and the Dragon” is actually an unfinished Scott tune written for his granddaughter, finished by Goodwin (but also borrowing bits from “Powerhouse”) and given a big band reading that has all the whimsy of Scott’s classics. “The Quintette Goes to a Dance”, which has a bit of a Western swing feel to it, is preceded by an interview clip in which Scott doesn’t remember making a song with that title. “Twilight in Turkey” goes all out with a stage-ready arrangement, while “Serenade” is a gentle, harp-driven lullaby.
June 25, 2023 at 1:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Matt Robidoux: Music For Aluminum Corn
Matt Robidoux’s
newest album is named for a touch-controlled aluminum synthesizer shaped like two corn cobs, which is featured prominently throughout these compositions. It has some nice fizzy, stringy modular textures, modeled after a Buchla, but this album isn’t just a showcase for a new toy. These are inventive, playful chamber-ish compositions including woodwinds, horns, xylophone, strings, and other instruments. “Shrimp Dance” is a playful, ringing xylophone-driven piece with whirling, spinning synths and post-industrial rhythms. Other tracks like “Escalator from Dreamworld” and “Bottle Garden” are like visits to partially holographic nature areas. “Green Corn Moongreen Corn Moon” feels like a pleasant twilit stroll through a farm, then gets blitzed by fractalized electronics in the middle. The following tracks are more string-based and pastoral, and “Green Corn” has frogs throughout its second half, while “Danse Des Crevettes” combines lush strings with acidic, crunchy electronics. “Cobwork” starts with gentle rainfall, then gains criss-crossing horns and synths, and also strings and guitars and bells, creating a half-synthetic patchwork. Finally, “Precita Morning” is a more celebratory fanfare, with gliding synths and horns as well as jazzy drums that start out laid-back and eventually get more excited and raucous as the music flutters up, turning into something akin to a hyper form of birdsong.
« Previous Page —
Next Page »
The Answer Is In The Beat 