Raster-Noton co-founder Frank Bretschneider teamed up with field recording/found-sound artist Steve Roden for this session of manipulated sounds and electronics, which was commissioned for a 2004 festival at a church in Berlin, and was recently unearthed and released. The recording features the 22-minute live session as well as a 30-minute rehearsal. Both sessions feature Bretschneider’s sine-wave/clicks’n’cuts electronic tones (typical of the labels he’s recorded for, such as Mille Plateaux, 12k, Raster-Noton and Line) along with Steve Roden’s found sounds and recordings. About two minutes into the live session, a minimalist groove is flooded with cluttered, scattered thumb piano notes. After shuddering and glitching out, insect-like high-pitched tones crowd around miniscule convulsing beats. The sounds of a distant crowd appear around 7 minutes, before more swarms of chattering beats and drones emerge. The noise-scape widens around 10 minutes, with heavy reverberations, but nothing erupting into full-on harsh noise. A hypnotic beat underlines subtle, backwards loops, and around 16 minutes, gong-like tones emerge amongst more nervous, shaky beats/tones. A wash of small, wooden stick-like tones is poured around, and the final minutes of the session feature a warmer drone sound along with the continually chattering beats and bass tones. The rehearsal session lasts longer and explores similar terrain, but doesn’t arrive at the same conclusions (such is the nature of improvisation). If anything, it seems like this one sprawls out a bit longer, taking more time for sounds to develop. It gradually seems to drift away from rhythmic elements, until waves of feedback and quiet tones usher back in the vibrating, chattering beats. These give way to ambient droning for the session’s final minutes, with a few obscured field recordings which make you wonder what’s happening in the scenes being recorded.
Mic break sounds: Chilling, Thriling Sounds Of The Haunted House Hour 1
3:01 AM Goblin ~ Suspiria ~ Suspiria ~ Cinevox
3:06 AM White Noise ~ The Black Mass: An Electric Storm In Hell ~ An Electric Storm ~ Island
3:13 AM Diamanda Galas ~ Let’s Not Chat About Despair ~ You Must Be Certain Of The Devil ~ Restless
3:19 AM Coil ~ Circles Of Mania ~ Horse Rotorvator ~ Some Bizarre
3:23 AM Scott Walker & Sunn O))) ~ Lullaby ~ Soused ~ 4AD
3:33 AM Pharmakon ~ Body Betrays Itself ~ Bestial Burden ~ Sacred Bones
3:42 AM Ryoji Ikeda ~ 0º::zero degrees [3] ~ 0ºC ~ Touch
3:49 AM Frank Bretschneider + Steve Roden ~ Part 1 Live ~ Suite Nuit ~ Line Hour 2
4:03 AM Mark Robinson ~ Rindge & Latin Scuffle ~ Taste ~ Teenbeat
4:12 AM Accelera Deck ~ Sunstrings ~ Sunstrings ~ Scarcelight
4:29 AM Valiska ~ Jericho ~ Tides Sounds From The Workshop 2014 ~ CJSW
4:35 AM His Name Is Alive ~ Mirror Trampoline ~ Dark Reflections ~ cd-r
4:39 AM All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors ~ Linear Force ~ Straight Blue Line ~ Gern Blandsten
4:43 AM His Name Is Alive ~ See You In A Minute ~ Tecuciztecatl (vinyl LP) ~ London London
4:50 AM Godz ~ White Cat Heat ~ Contact High With The Godz ~ ESP-Disk
4:52 AM Sun Araw ~ Huff ~ Belomancie ~ Sun Ark Hour 3
5:03 AM Negativland ~ Wildlife Tonight ~ It’s All In Your Head FM ~ Seeland
5:11 AM Steve Reich ~ Piano Counterpoint ~ Radio Rewrite ~ Nonesuch
5:25 AM John Schooley & Walter Daniels ~ Dead Mall Blues ~ Dead Mall Blues ~ 12XU
5:34 AM Squarepusher ~ Theme From Goodbye Renaldo ~ Plays ~ Rephlex
5:40 AM Ricardo Donoso ~ A Song For Echo (Part 7) ~ A Song For Echo ~ Kathexis
5:43 AM Locust ~ Shadows Cast By Planes ~ After The Rain ~ Editions Mego
5:51 AM Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band ~ Yellow Square ~ Intensity Ghost ~ No Quarter
Sound designer and electronic artist Ricardo Donoso has been racking up a pretty sizeable discography of vinyl and tape releases on Digitalis the past few years, but now he’s branching out with an LP on his own label and a free digital EP on Denovali, in anticipation of a new album for the label next year. A Song For Echo is a 7-part epic work which touches on rhythmic pulses but never fully immerses itself into structured beats. The album mostly focuses on dark and mysterious, yet bright and alluring synthetic atmospheres. Parts 1 and 6 have some clattering moments, 3 dips a little bit into shuddering beats, and the final part centralizes a fast, gabber-like beat, surrounded by dark synth clouds and metallic squealing.
Ricardo Donoso: Beginning Of The Shape EP
Beginning Of The Shape is centered around 7-minute “Shape Collateral”, a moody, cavernous piece which sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a particularly illuminating documentary about space or nature. There’s also a darker, more desolate “Condemned Version” of the piece as the EP’s final track. In between is “The View Of The Overlook (Rendition)”, an icy-cold beatless variation on the “Shape Collateral” melody. This EP sounds like it’s sure to be the beginning of something vibrant and intriguing.
3:00 AM Scott Walker & Sunn O))) ~ Herod 2014 ~ Soused ~ 4AD
3:12 AM Pharmakon ~ Bestial Burden ~ Bestial Burden ~ Sacred Bones
3:19 AM Wrekmeister Harmonies ~ Then It All Came Down (excerpt) ~ Then It All Came Down/You’ve Always Meant So Much To Me ~ Thrill Jockey
3:37 AM Dreamcrusher ~ Ghost Orchid ~ Suicide Deluxe ~ Hausu Mountain
3:41 AM Patrick Harsh ~ Not For Laptop Activists ~ It’s So Weird In The D ~ Trashfuck Records
3:52 AM Broken Bone ~ Blood On Your Hands ~ Willowbrook ~ Aperture
4:01 AM Korma ~ Mech ~ Skyline ~ Car Crash Set/Ice Rink
4:05 AM redHat ~ Tmrw ~ Rave 2.0 ~ Footwork Jungle/Dred Collective
4:11 AM Ricardo Donoso ~ Shape Collateral (Condemned Version) ~ Beginning Of The Shape ~ Denovali
4:15 AM ACI_Edits ~ side B track 3 ~ tape ~ Aught
4:17 AM Mark Barrage ~ Hestisol ~ Surplus Behaviour ~ Endless Melt
4:20 AM Piper Spray And Benzaldehyde Monster ~ Between Breeze And Rain ~ Piper Spray And Benzaldehyde Monster ~ Singapore Sling Tapes
4:22 AM Hudson Mohawke ~ Brainwave ~ Chimes ~ Warp
4:24 AM M. Geddes Gengras ~ New Process ~ Collected Works Vol. 2: New Process Music ~ Umor Rex
4:27 AM Ballerine Nadiya ~ We Are Joan And Marie ~ Ballerine Nadiya ~ Singapore Sling Tapes
4:36 AM Klara Lewis ~ Msuic 3 ~ Msuic ~ Peder Mannerfelt Production
4:40 AM Nathan Mc Laughlin ~ Night Shades II ~ Nothing To Be Sad About ~ Eilean Records
4:44 AM Bastian Void ~ Real Talk (Versicolor Controller Mix) ~ Compilation 1 ~ Noumenal Loom
4:51 AM Negativland ~ The Way We Know Things ~ It’s All In Your Head FM ~ Seeland
5:05 AM Slowdive ~ When The Sun Hits ~ Souvlaki ~ Creation
5:09 AM Slowdive ~ Crazy For You ~ Pygmalion ~ Creation
5:15 AM His Name Is Alive ~ Wall Of Speed ~ Stars On ESP ~ 4AD
5:17 AM Weyes Blood ~ Some Winters ~ The Innocents ~ Mexican Summer
5:24 AM Excepter ~ Song To The Siren ~ Familiar ~ Blast First Petite
5:27 AM Locust ~ Under Still Waters ~ After The Rain ~ Editions Mego
5:30 AM Tochigi ~ The World Is Coming To An End ~ The Gang East Of The River ~ Tochigi Records
5:38 AM SBTRKT ~ Everybody Knows ~ Wonder Where We Land ~ Young Turks
5:41 AM Flying Lotus ~ Turkey Dog Coma ~ You’re Dead! ~ Warp
5:44 AM Soft Vision ~ Electrophilia ~ Soft Vision ~ Acoustic Division/Hi-Definition
5:47 AM The Pen Test ~ CEO ~ Interstate ~ Moniker
5:51 AM Dream Police ~ Let It Be ~ Hypnotized ~ Sacred Bones
On The Pen Test’s debut LP, they explore the highway as a dark, lonely, mania-inducing place. Musically, it might be indebted to Autobahn (complete with side-long opening title track), but thematically it might be a little closer to The Magnetic Fields’ The Charm Of The Highway Strip. The epic 21-minute “Interstate” has an icy pulse and Suicide-like vocals, with synth sounds approximating late-night traffic passing by in the dead of night. The song comes to a standstill around the 10-minute mark, with just a faint, nervous heartbeat, which fades away and reappears towards the end. “Za-Zen” is quirky, bloopy electro-pop with more straightforward vocals, which seem content to simply “let the interstate have its way”. “Like Machine” is a shorter track with a faster, more Drexciyan electro beat, and off-the-wall vocal stylings. “CEO” is another uptempo nervous-pop number, in which the singer claims that he’s “solving all your problems with money”, and it seems doubtful that you should trust him. The song ends with the most dramatic flute solo you could ever hope to hear from a minimal-synth song. “The Great Eroder” ends the album with some pretty credible Detroit-flavored dancefloor electro, complete with down-pitched vocals and grubby, filtered synth sweeps and arpeggios. Music to hopefully not crash your car to. Vinyl and digital available from Bandcamp.
Weyes Blood’s 2011 album on Not Not Fun, The Outside Room, was a fantastic experimental psych-folk album that I discovered 2 years after the fact (after I saw her live at SXSW) and was blown away by. This is the follow-up on a bigger label (the same one that fellow NNF alumni Peaking Lights graduated to), and it’s much brighter, clearer, and more expansive in sound. Her vibrato-laced voice sounds fantastic, and the arrangements are complex and accomplished, with bright chiming acoustic guitars and vintage synths. The tape-drift opening to 6-minute highlight “Some Winters” nods to her lo-fi tape-scene past, but it flows into some truly beautiful vocals and cascading pianos. A few other songs such as “Summer” have simpler arrangements which showcase her voice more, but the beginning of “Requiem For Forgiveness” covers her voice in eerie, Goblin-like vocoders, before stripping away the instruments and leaving her multi-tracked vocals coo “I forgive you” by the song’s end. Seasons play heavily into the album, not just with the two consecutive seasonally-titled songs near the beginning of the album, but in “February Skies”, where she sings “first day of spring, winter must bring”. “Montrose” is a drifting ambient instrumental with some film dialogue at the end, and then the album ends with another strummy, layered-vocal ballad, “Bound To Earth”. Definitely recommended for all fans of ethereal psych-folk/dream-pop artists such as Vashti Bunyan, Grouper, White Poppy, Marissa Nadler, etc.
The Men used to be a hardcore band, but now they’ve morphed into some sort of alt-country/Northern soul-influenced college-rock band. This side project shows that they’ve actually been making music even further removed from their roots. This project explores synths and drum machines, and repetitive motorik rhythms. “My Mama’s Dead” is like a 21st century update on “Hey Joe” in which the titular character becomes a woman. “Iris” is kind of a space-country ballad, as if “Planet Caravan” was written around a campfire in the desert. “Pouring Rain” is an uptempo steady drum machine driven new wave song. “All We Are” is a slower song with some wavey MBV guitar as well as acoustic guitar. “John” is kind of a bluesy stomp with organ and sliding guitar. “Let It Be” is even more of a new wave/Krautrock synthesis, with another steady drum machine beat, Neu!-like synths, and more layered guitar melodies. “Sandy” begins with tolling bells and some sort of squeezebox drone, and then turns into something approximating a droney English folk ballad, with a calm male/female vocal duet. I have to be honest and say that The Men only really caught my interest with one or two songs from one of their earlier albums and the directions they’ve gone in since haven’t really grabbed me. But this is another band entirely with several other different sounds, so I probably shouldn’t even be mentioning that it’s a side project because it can be enjoyed on its own terms.
The Answer Is In The Beat 