WCBN’s former music director continues her upward trajectory in the music world, delivering easily her most accessible and most exquisitely orchestrated album to date. First-rate orchestral avant-pop with lots of strings and horns, continents away from the lo-fi stuff she was doing half a decade ago. As with all of her music, this is going to take a long time for me to fully digest and appreciate, and opener “World” doesn’t do a whole lot for me at first, but immediately “Maxim’s I” is striking me as a truly gorgeous song. “Horns Surrounding Me” starts with close-miked running and whispering, then has minimalist organ, a “Running Up That Hill” type rhythm, and all manners of experimental yet accessible textures. “In The Green World” is the first single, and seems like a peculiar choice at first; it takes a couple minutes to really reveal itself and turn into a hummable song, but it’s representative of the album in that way. “Hello Stranger” is another slowly revealing, and very gorgeous ballad draped in reverb and strings, that sounds like it’s from the most ethereal musical ever made. “Maxim’s II” is a weirder, less ethereal, more skronky and kind of dissonant version of “Maxim’s I” (same lyrics). “He’s Running Through My Eyes” is another short piano, string and vocal piece. “This Is A True Heart” starts with trombone and some synths that can’t help but remind me of certain moments of The KLF’s Chill Out, before Julia’s vocals and a drum and standup bass rhythm come in, plus some horns and mysterious background sounds (running, car horn honking, maybe). A classy, sophisticated tune. “City Appearing” is a slow, drifting tune with a calm drumbeat and standup bass. It kind of drifts away and leaves your mind somewhere else and then album ends before you know it.
Reissue of an earlier album by IDM/drone/post rock/modern classical group The Boats, originally self-released on their own label which shares this album’s name. The songs are mostly pretty short, and often contain small clicky beats, acoustic instruments (guitar, xylophones and similar things, strings), plus crackling, ambience, field recordings, etc. “You Need To See Through Better Eyes” has some humming, and “Please Return” has a little bit of vocals, but “Raindrops Remain (First)” has full vocals, and I guess is the most poppy song here by default. “We Sometimes Forget” has vocals too, and they’re somewhat filtered/phoned-in-sounding, and there’s some deep bass thuds, and some sort of melting atmosphere in the background. “Procedure Details” has some soft beats with acoustic guitars in front. “This Song Has Been Intentionally Left Blank” does have some mysterious vocals and a veil of static. “They Gave Me This To Keep Quiet” has some more (appropriately) quiet, buried vocals. Tracks after that tend to be quieter instrumentals. “Raindrops (Version)” is a more synth-heavy version of “Raindrops (First)”. “Little Song At Little Time” gets a trip-hoppy remix by Aus. “The List Of Our Mistakes (Boats Remix)” has some static-drenched vocals, strings and glitchy guitar bits. “You Didn’t Expect Me To Care” has woodwinds, small clicky beats, bass, and some filtered vocals, and these elements swirl around a bit and you’re not entirely sure if it works at first. “May Our Enemies Never Find Happiness (Boats Remix)” has more heavily static-ed vocals and a tiny beat that blips panned left/right in the speakers.
I’m not sure why I didn’t post a review of this album to this blog back when we got it into the radio station back in April, but it’s one of my favorite discoveries of the year. Noisy synth-punk. Hell yes. Surprised I wasn’t aware of this group before. Short songs, distorted vocals, lots of synths. Just as much influenced by Chrome as by minimal-synth. Great super-paranoid lyrics (“you scream and scream but no one hears ya”). “Mask” sounds a hell of a lot like Blank Dogs, who has been strangely quiet lately, so I don’t mind hearing more music like that (even if I haven’t listened to any of my Blank Dogs records in years). “Police Helicopter” and “Nightstick” are synth instrumentals with computer voices, and are as sinister and paranoid as you would expect. I can get down with this any day of the week.
This is the type of electro-acoustic/improv/experimental album that I receive and kind of assume for whatever reason that it’s going to be too difficult for my tastes, and maybe it goes over my head on first listen, but then I keep listening and I love it. Very dark, uneasy atmospheres with groaning bass sax and laptop processing, and also harp and prepared harp, which definitely gets points in my book. Not music to make you feel comfortable, but music to keep you awake at night, trembling. Those high-pitched sine waves, those sawing instruments, those alien frequencies, those queasy horns, creaking-chair strings, swarming glitch fuzz… yikes, this is brutal. Love it!
This was a promo Foxy Digitalis sent me last year to review, back when Foxy Digitalis was a thing, and I just never got around to reviewing it. I actually still have dozens of promos they’ve sent me that I haven’t even touched. This one I listened to when I got it, but it’s been sitting around untouched for months. Anyway, it’s a new (well, as of last year) album from a German post-punk group that’s been around since the early ’80s. I’m really intrigued to hear this group’s earlier stuff, because I’m all about ’80s cassette underground type stuff, and inevitably a new album from a group from that era isn’t going to sound the same as the earlier material. But for what this is, it’s still pretty impressive. Tense, sometimes dramatic post-punk with violent noisy bursts of guitar, crashing drums, and some jittery synths. Definitely some noisy no-wave similar to Swans and Neubauten and various Nick Cave projects, but also with quieter, beauteous moments, also like those artists. Some of the more atmospheric, sublime songs remind of me of some of Coil’s similar moments as well. “Transit Town” starts with dramatic horns and vocals, and ends with violent crashing noise. “Skid Row” has kind of a tricky rhythm and rapidly pulsing synths, and ends up messy, crashy and slurry. “Oh, Yes” is softer and piano-based, and is very much reminiscent of John Balance of Coil’s more ballad-y moments, but less electronic, and with some German lyrics. “Labil” is an interlude with spoken German vocals with various distortion effects, some busy-crowd sounds, rambling piano, and a noise burst towards the end. “Parade” has grinding noise guitars but a calmer (or at least quieter) rhythm. “Do It Again” starts with a creepy whispered part, but then turns into a nice rhythm, vocals sung in English and German, and screeching guitars, and then (fake) crowd noise at the end. “Es Ist Ein Shnitter” has an odd atmosphere, droning keyboards, and uncomfortably high-in-the-mix vocals in German. “Hans Im Gluck” is kinda crashing and ambling, doesn’t seem to get off the ground. “Serenade” is an interlude of pianos, crashing drums, some sort of bleating horn, nervous canned laughter, and a small crashing burst at the end. “I Do Like This” has dramatic keyboards and vocals and occasional crashing drums. “Weg Hier” is a jumble of various voices speaking at the same time, plus pianos and feedback noise. Eventually there’s some sinister laughter in there. Gets pretty dark and heavy. “Some Sort Of Content” starts by repeating a sample of a voice saying “art is going to die very quickly”, along with a clanging rhythm and caustic guitars. A paced drum set plays a rhythm and smashes cymbals with guitar bursts, and the voice says “some sort of content.”
Someone emailed me last year saying that they wanted to send me this tape for review, but I never received it. But it’s a free Bandcamp download so I downloaded it and I’m reviewing it anyway. The Anunziata side is a 16 minute track called “Inspiration Stump”, but it seems to be like multiple tracks (or at least movements) combined into one. It starts with some mangled acoustic guitar (or other stringed instrument) and some lazy drumbeats, but then gets covered in ungodly distortion, and just gets the living hell pounded out of it. Mutated, backwards guitar is combined with softer acoustic guitar (maybe it’s a ukulele) and some wacked-out vocals come in, and then it just dissolves and turns into something else entirely. Then there’s some spare echo-covered drum machine beats and it just sounds physically ill and diseased. The beats get distorted and changed into big thick blobby shapes, there’s some muttering voices, and then harsh sickly guitars explode and scare the crap out of you. And then a lazy, sloppy indie-psych song pops up after all the diseased drum machines. A very disturbing bad trip, in the best way. Ghost In Salad has 4 shorter tracks on the tape, starting with thick harsh noise, but also throwing in confused, mumbled vocals. But then there’s a slow, crashing guitar-and-Casio bum-out, some extreme amplifier buzz with something faintly resembling a song trying to thrash its way out (and not succeeding), and then a Pumice-like minimal, broken guitar ballad.
Another wacked-out lost-in-time out-of-nowhere unearthing that I’m more than happy to have WFMU introduce me to. I don’t know who finds this sort of stuff and brings it to public awareness, but I hope they never stop uncovering genius music like this. This music is the work of a Romanian producer from the ’70s and ’80s, and none of it has been previously released. It definitely comes from a prog/psych-rock background, but there’s thick, buzzy keyboards, loads and loads of fuzz, and big blippy primitive drum machine beats. A few songs have vocals sung in Romanian, and they definitely have Eastern European folk elements to them. There’s also some strangely proto-industrial sounding synth textures. More than anything, this whole album is just incredibly fun and playful. Definitely a nice discovery for fans of weird minimal-wave stuff, but obviously a bit different than that, given the whole Romanian prog/psych-rock aspect.
Room40 has released a few recordings by Australian composer Eugene Carchesio in the past year, including 2 volumes of Circle Music. These albums consist of blippy, bubbly repetitive computer compositions which definitely have a circular feel to them. On Circle Music II, they have an almost motorik pulse to them, and a definite rhythmic drive, sometimes resembling minimal techno like Plastikman. The tracks have no titles (other than letters) and they do sometimes tend to feel like variations of each other. “B” is a short pulse which is quickly reprised and added to in “C”. “D” is nervous and jittery, almost approaching Mark Fell territory, and has slivers of hi-hats. A few other tracks could have been made from drum machines that Krautrock artists like Cluster might have used.
Eugene Carchesio: Concert For One Person In A Small Room
Concert For One Person In A Small Room seems to break things up a bit. The pieces tend to be way shorter than the longest tracks on the Circle Music albums (no titles here, but there’s 24 tracks, most of which are about a minute or 2) and some of them seem more rhythmic and beat-driven, but they also seem more warped and obtuse. 3 almost has some sort of warped 2-step beat, you could actually mix it in with a Burial track or something. A few tracks have more Autechre/Schematic-ish IDM moments. 8 even has a wet, chattery techno beat. And then there’s tracks like 13 which might as well just be an amplified recording of a shower dripping. Some of it’s a little more straightforward, and some of it sounds like the artist might just be losing his mind. Or at least, his machines would be losing their minds, if they had minds to begin with. Perplexing but mostly pretty fun.
mic break music = Charlie Slick: Mellow Marsh Hour 1
3:02 AM Marina Rosenfeld with Warrior Queen ~ New York / It’s All About… ~ P.A. / Hard Love ~ Room40
3:07 AM Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom ~ Talk 2 ~ Daytime Viewing ~ Unseen Worlds
3:15 AM Algebra Suicide ~ Recalling The Last Encounter ~ Feminine Squared ~ Dark Entries
3:17 AM German Army ~ Literacy In Opium ~ Endless Phonics ~ Monofonus Press
3:25 AM Eat Lights Become Lights ~ MOD-ULO-150 ~ Modular Living ~ Rocket Girl
3:30 AM Jon Hopkins ~ Open Eye Signal (Happa Remix) ~ 12″ ~ Domino
3:36 AM Floorplan ~ Never Grow Old ~ Paradise ~ M-Plant
3:43 AM D33J ~ Sleeping Out ~ Tide Songs ~ Anticon
3:49 AM Lafidki with Dustin Wong ~ Vong Wong ~ Absynthax ~ Orange Milk
3:53 AM Eugene Carchesio ~ 12 ~ Concert For One Person In A Small Room ~ Room40
3:55 AM CVLTS ~ Pain Management (Enduser Remix) ~ Retox 12″ ~ Retox Hour 2
4:04 AM R. Stevie Moore ~ No Body ~ Personal Appeal ~ Care In The Community
4:07 AM Scott & Charlene’s Wedding ~ Charlie’s In The Gutter ~ Any Port In A Storm ~ Fire
4:10 AM Minus9 ~ Blackwater ~ Drown ~ Flying Blood Records
4:11 AM The Octopus Project ~ Mmkit ~ Fever Forms ~ Peek-a-boo
4:14 AM Food Pyramid ~ Deep Fantasy ~ Ecstasy & Refreshment ~ Intercoastal Artists
4:17 AM High Wolf ~ R.I.P. ~ Kairos: Chronos ~ Not Not Fun
4:20 AM Symmetry ~ Heart Of Darkness ~ After Dark 2 ~ Italians Do It Better
4:24 AM Ikonika featuring Optimum ~ Mega Church ~ Aerotropolis ~ Hyperdub
4:36 AM Ken Camden ~ Spectacle ~ Space Mirror ~ Kranky
4:41 AM Shahram ~ Gorg-O Barreh ~ Shahram ~ Pharaway Sounds
4:44 AM Rodion G.A. ~ Salt 83 ~ The Lost Tapes ~ Strut
4:48 AM μ-Ziq ~ Ritm ~ XTEP ~ Planet Mu
4:51 AM Sawi Lieu ~ Tanaga Lara ~ Pasaraya ~ Constellation Tatsu
4:57 AM CFCF ~ Keys ~ Music For Objects ~ Paper Bag Hour 3
5:03 AM Sean McCann ~ This Was Nearly Mine ~ The Capital ~ Aguirre Records
5:12 AM Panabrite ~ Starlight Drive ~ Sub-Aquatic Meditation ~ Aguirre Records
5:15 AM His Name Is Alive ~ track 8 ~ Dragons Look Out Your Window ~ Silver Mountain
5:18 AM His Name Is Alive ~ Hope ~ Home Is ~ Silver Mountain
5:21 AM White Poppy ~ When I’m Gone ~ Drifter’s Gold ~ Constellation Tatsu
5:33 AM Klangkrieg ~ Korpus I ~ An Anthology Of Noise & Electronic Music / Seventh And Last A-Chronology ~ Sub Rosa
5:37 AM PAS Musique ~ Humor In The Quarry ~ Abandoned Bird Egg ~ Alrealon Musique
5:42 AM Nate Young ~ The Bastards Gums ~ Blinding Confusion ~ NNA Tapes
5:48 AM Piper Spray ~ Sigma Draconis ~ Epigraph To The Bright Star Catalogue ~ Singapore Sling Tapes
5:51 AM Ashrae Fax ~ Dynamite Dust ~ Static Crash ~ Mexican Summer
5:56 AM Shells ~ New Era ~ In A Cloud ~ Life Like
The Answer Is In The Beat 