August 2, 2019 at 9:38 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Cultural Fog: NYE
Documenting a New Year’s Eve gig by the improv trio of Claire Cirocco, Emily Roll, and Fred Thomas,
this CDr contains 7 untitled tracks of sporadic, echo-slapping drums and layered synth clouds and vibrations. Roll’s heavily delayed voice often floats upward like bubbles, but it’s hard to tell what’s on her mind. Melodies and disconnected rhythms converge, and things get strangely miniature around track 4. But then 5 has wider, more piercing synth vamps and more somnambulant vocals. 6 is an uneasy reflection on the passing year, then 7 holds the energy together for another moment before it vanishes.
August 1, 2019 at 6:45 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tim Walters: Fission Cuisine
Last year, Tim Walters released a pretty exciting album of electro-shocked noise, which he made using analog synths and old SuperCollider coding. This album is heavy on analog synths, but it sounds vastly different — much friendlier, more melodic, and more driving. Opener “The Zen Gun” starts out sparse and creaky, but it surprisingly blooms into a space fighter pilot odyssey, chugging along with cosmic synths and light but propulsive beats. Tracks like “Constitutional” and “The World of Wool” are filled with the sort of childlike melodies that countless IDM artists were creating around the beginning of the millennium, but without the overt technical precision or glitch overload. There’s also ominous drone pieces like “Don’t Forget to Breathe” which fulfill the “scene from a spooky movie” quota, while others like “Connoisseurs of Human Folly” are more RPG interstitial scene music. The overall mood is more playful and adventurous rather than dark and heavy, but it does have its ponderous moments.
July 31, 2019 at 9:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Delicate Instruments: MEM-1 12″ EP
The latest release from the prolific West Coast label Shewey Trax is the first part of a full-length from Delicate Instruments, who has been steadily releasing records since 2013, including a 2017 single bearing an Octo Octa remix. These four tracks are deep but also kind of lo-fi, and even industrial-tinged. “Memory-1” is a nighttime city cruiser with a voice urging you to expand your consciousness of the world around you. “The Judgement” is much rougher and grittier, with the voices taking a much sharper tone, and the beats more clanky than smooth. “Fading Away” is back to the more meditative feel of “Memory-1”, then “Behind the Waterfall” mixes natural sounds and appropriately lush tones with a thick, distorted kick drum. A good mix of both relaxing and edgy sounds, pressed on nice, thick vinyl. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t heard more from this label before.
July 28, 2019 at 4:02 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Throwaway: WHAT?
This is the long-awaited first album from former WCBN DJ Kirsten Carey’s rock band Throwaway. Represented by a caricature of a woman with a paper bag over her head, the music has a sort of cartoonishly aggressive demeanor, which might explain how Carey ended up playing guitar on a clipping. song on the Rick & Morty soundtrack. William Hutson from clipping. adds noise to “Bonathan Jyers”, this album’s first song, which begins with Carey shrieking “THIS IS A RED ALERT!!!!” Her manic growl is utterly confrontational and commanding, and the guitar riffs are jagged and discordant, making this music impossible to ignore or listen to passively. Most of the songs are super noisy and pissed-off, but there’s still a jazz-trained sophistication to them. “The Revenge Society” is both jaunty and bitter, with Carey gleefully wailing about whipping your ass. “Exotic Bird” reflects her experience moving to Los Angeles and feeling strange and out of place. Then there’s the vicious, taunting “I Work!”, two minutes of pure rage which will leave you dumbfounded, particularly when she asks “What do YOU do???”
July 28, 2019 at 2:28 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tyvek: Changing Patterns of Protective Coating 7″ EP
The newest EP from local garage-punk heroes Tyvek launches right into it with “I’ve Not Thought Once”, a tightly wound, hook-filled tune with more thoughtful lyrics than the title implies. It ends quickly, and the band play a Neu!-ish instrumental not far from drummer Fred Thomas’ group Hydropark. The second side seems like a continuation of this (it even fades in), and then the band announces “We’re Back”, with the record’s most immediate, energetic track. They seem like they could easily knock out songs like this all day, but they have other avenues to explore, and they manage to do both on this record without taking up too much time.
July 27, 2019 at 8:49 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Storm Ross: Home
The newest tape from formerly Michigan-based guitarist Storm Ross is “A Living Room Romance in Eight Parts”. Following the urgent but hopeful
Welcome, Sunshine from a few years ago, this is another excellent collection of instrumentals. It kicks off with the monolithic “The Inevitability”, which begins acoustic before launching into a Godflesh-like drum machine beat and layers of guitars which just get heavier and more commanding. “A Park Encounter” is a strange, kind of fun industrial march with loads of shredding. “Playtime” is lighter, and more of a dazed daydream, while “The Turning Point” is more manic, with punkish drums and guitars that swarm and shriek like bats. On the second side, “An Understanding” laces acoustic guitars with ominous feedback, then “Sam Ascends the Invisible Path” starts out with nearly poppy-sounding synths before mesmerizing guitars take over. “Half Our Lives” is another 10-minute epic, this time with live drums instead of a drum machine. It’s much freer, sort of approaching a very electrified sort of jazz, but with guitar fireworks that nearly sound patriotic. It all comes full circle with the sparse acoustic guitar piece “Home”, making it feel like we’ve safely returned from battle.
July 19, 2019 at 6:39 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Debugger: Thread Safety EP
Microhouse is back!? This EP is a flashback to the sort of micro-edit-riddled click-house you probably haven’t even thought about since Akufen’s heyday. This artist doesn’t do the “surfing the dial” random samples the way Marc Leclair did, but he has a similar knack for twitchy yet danceable rhythms which slip in the occasional jazzy organ, soul vocal, or other traces of humanity into the android deep-house rave. Certainly this sound has been done before, but it was such a niche style then, and it’s been dormant for so long that it just ends up sounding like the future again.
July 19, 2019 at 6:17 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Minimal Violence: InDreams
Vancouver duo Minimal Violence have made the undisputed best dark rave album of the year. Using nothing but analog hardware, they play fast, heavy, nightmarish techno that seems designed to trigger fear and excitement in equal measure. They mix vaguely trancey synths and gabber-ish beats on tracks like the punishing “June Anthem” and it never sounds contrived or cheesy. Then there’s “New Hard Catch”, which is somewhere between EBM and breakbeat hardcore, and just as awesome. “InDreams” is the album’s anthem, with an instantly iconic melody, and a remix by Cardopusher is rawer and more goth. Fantastic stuff.
July 19, 2019 at 5:53 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Sam Hooker: On the Water
Well known throughout the Detroit noise scene for his solo project Tarpit, Michigan Underground Group member Sam Hooker’s
latest album bears his own name. This is a disorienting set of pieces filled with ghastly tape loops, murmuring voices, and a constant feeling of being distracted and swept away, yet you’re still right in the center of everything. After the nearly nightmarish opening track, “Moving in the Way” is a flurry of detuned clatters and clangs with a sinister, tape-smudged monologue buried underneath. “On the Water” is a bit less musique concrete-sounding, with bells floating around scratchy, drawn-out guitar notes and resonations. “Smoke Downstairs” mixes creaking sounds with swerving bass and the vaguest hint of a bubbling melody, and sounds really bizarre, mysterious, and beautiful. “Seven Cars” had lots of wayward echo along with its lumbering thumps and sinister muttering. “Dock” feels like it was recorded on one during a coming storm, with splashing joined by booming noises with accelerate near the end. “Warm Down” is one of the trippiest tracks here, filled with ominous piano notes and some absolutely mutilated noises. A must for anyone who appreciates Aaron Dilloway, and other noise artists who focus more on tape manipulations and voices rather than harshness.
July 12, 2019 at 8:50 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Rafael Anton Irisarri: Solastalgia
Rafael Anton Irisarri continues to tower over everyone in his ability to build these dense, overwhelming, abundantly emotional musical environments. The title
Solastalgia refers to mental or existential distress caused by environmental change, and that could refer to the entire globe, but it takes on a more personal tone knowing Irisarri’s recent past (all of he and his wife’s belongings were stolen when they were preparing to move a few years ago). Either way, this is heavy, devastating stuff, compounding gloom and hope and anger and despair until it all just becomes this giant all-consuming force. If you’re familiar with his other Room40 releases like
The Unintentional Sea and
A Fragile Geography, this is a similar type of experience, and just as vital.
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