Amiture’s debut album is a highly focused slab of minimal darkwave pop, filled with gloomy lyrics about lying and regret, and steadily throbbing beats and sequencers. The most unique addition is the pedal steel and fiddle which appear on several tracks, but they’re subtle enough that they don’t register as those instruments, you might just assume they’re synths. I guess you could draw parallels between goth rock and Southern gothic, but that doesn’t really fit here. Regardless, it’s fine stuff with sullen vocals, propulsive beats, and dark clouds of melodic synths. While the album is steadfast in its gloominess, “Slide In” seems at least a little playful, with lines like “I need a bagpipe so I can blow up every night”. “Operator” nails a shivery vibe pretty well, and then “Dream” is more haunting techno than darkwave. “Last Exit” is a blurry ambient daze, and then “Let’s Talk” is one of the most confident, yet most heartbroken pop songs here.
Hal Galper Quintet: Live at the Berlin Philharmonic ’77
Alright, so here’s a previously unreleased live set performed by a bunch of artists I should probably be more familiar with. This concert was recorded after Galper had just finished a tour with Cannonball Adderley, and he’s joined by Randy and Mike Brecker, Wayne Dockery, and Bob Moses. All six songs are around 10-25 minutes each, and all five musicians simply go off. Opener “Now Hear This” is just nonstop energy for 14 minutes. “Speak with a Single Voice” (the title track to the LP released by the quintet in 1979) is almost twice as long, and while there’s a few moments that seem like pauses for solos, there’s no loss in energy, it’s just configured a bit differently. Galper’s piano playing sounds particularly rabid and multi-limbed here, not to mention Moses’ drumming or Dockery’s intricate bass wrangling. The rendition of “I’ll Never Stop Loving You” isn’t full band, only sax and piano, but both Galper and Mike Brecker push hard into the outer limits, far beyond the gentle love song it seems like at the beginning. And “This Is the Thing” is the most madcap of them all, too much energy for words. The only drawback is the album’s fluctuating audio quality. It clearly sounds pieced together from different sources, and both “I’ll Never Stop Loving You” and “Hey Fool” are particularly patchy, shifting from full-bodied sound to worn-out cassette bootleg (or tinny, watery mp3) without warning. The music itself is stellar, however, and for most of the album, it’s easy to overlook the less-than-ideal fidelity.
After the unexpectedly normal-length 17, LPC returns to all-out bonus track galore hogwildness with the 20-track, 2-hour-plus 18. This one seems kind of like the last will and testament of Alex Trebek, because he’s on here a lot, and he sounds absolutely haggard and it’s more sobering than anything else. Add to that, it was clearly recorded during the height of COVID-19 lockdown, so restaurant workers aren’t too happy with his shenanigans. Honestly, I might be getting too old for this shit, but the tracks that end up with people screaming “STOP CALLING ME!!!!!” just aren’t doing it for me these days. They felt like an interesting character study sometimes before, but too often it just sounds like harassment now, and that’s not funny. That said, I will never get tired of the tracks where he just rambles off a bunch of jargon and confounds whoever he’s talking to, even those who purport to be the experts in their field (see “Shoot Smart”). And it’s always a fun time whenever the people on the other line actually realize how ridiculous he is, and either play along or recognize that it’s LPC, so they get it, and they’re super amused. The dude in “Commodore Babbit” seems pretty eager to talk about boats, until Alex unexpectedly pops up (and calls LPC a “son of a bitch”). The Game Stop call is nuts because of how he asks legitimate questions (even asking for early games like Pong and Asteroids) but then he keeps smearing his voice with all sorts of waves of echo, then ends up turning it into a sort of musical jam with a cool synth bassline, while he’s still having a conversation asking about products. “LPC 18 Theme” is a fun, crunchy guitar rock instrumental loaded with samples rapidly whizzing by. “Card Collector” is fun because of how he does the trippy delay vocal thing and then leads into him being a slick salesman type. Alex appears for a brief blip, and then LPC returns and brushes it off, like “sorry we got cut off there”. “Gentleman’s Quarters” is a sort of psychedelic pirate story, with bubbling water, fluctuating voices, “pond ramen”, and a hell of a lot of giggling from the other end. Totally fun and silly and the only appropriate reaction is to just lose your shit. And then “Wolverine” is an 11-minute train of people from bookstores talking to each other saying that someone was asking for books about subjects that happen to rhyme. Someone actually finds a book about wolverines, but then it turns out that the other person was actually asking about dopamine. And the thrash tracks are fun to just flop around to at 90 miles an hour and feel like your insides are about to burst out of your body. So yeah, he’s still got it, but it seems like the closing of a long chapter in the LPC saga, ushering in a Trebek-less future. SUBTERRANEAN TURNIPS!
5-1-21
Pet Shop Boys ~ A Man Could Get Arrested
Leon Vynehall ~ Mothra
CFCF ~ Life Is Perfecto
Casper McFadden ~ ITS NOT YOUR FAULT
Naked Flames ~ Waterslug2 (Kaizo Slumber Remix)
The Tony Williams Lifetime ~ Spectrum
Eric Dolphy ~ Gazzelloni
Khruangbin/Knxwledge ~ Dearest Alfred (My Joy)
Negro Leo ~ Makes E Fakes
AceMoMA ~ 1 Million Breaks
1800HaightStreet ~ Intuitionist
California’s vt100 makes live hardware techno using analog and digital synthesizers. This is their fourth album, and it seems to somewhat jokingly comment on algorithms taking on a life of their own and controlling everyone’s thoughts and actions. The album doesn’t seem super conceptual if you’re just listening to it without paying attention to the press materials. It’s pretty straightforward techno that sounds a bit simple and retro, but not in a way that seems like it’s trying too hard to replicate ’80s glitz (i.e. synthwave) or the roughness of early techno and house. There’s steadily repetitive beats and melodies, but it doesn’t quite feel as cold and clinical as most minimal techno. The title “Techno Spaceship” sums up the album’s sound nicely, as it often has kind of a gliding feel to it. There’s some lo-bit textures on tracks like “Aztec LEDs” and “Bit Rot” but it’s still more like spacious electro-techno than chiptune. The album is quite long (over 70 minutes) and there might not be enough to hold onto for the full ride, but it’s worth taking a short trip for a few tracks.
Christopher Alan Durham co-runs the Detroit label All Gone with Travis Galloway (Traag, Siobhan), home to vinyl and cassette releases by Pure Rave, The Intended, Tarpit, and tons of other noise, noisy techno, and crud-rock acts from around the city. He also makes abstract electronic sounds as Church Shuttle and DJ Bando, and has played in several lo-fi rock bands like Quilt Boy and Roach Clip. This new single follows a solo tape on Soft Abuse and a single-sided tape pumped out during quarantine. The A-side, “Gratiot Crawl”, feels a bit slow and slurry even when played at 45, and he has a sort of exaggerated Iggy drawl, but even though he sounds kind of off his gourd, there’s still something pleasant about the way he traipses toward the general direction of the Eastern Market. “50’s House Blues” is way more down in the dumps, as he gets drunk off potato vodka on the porch and laments being broke and stuck in his run-down old home, feeling too burnt out to try and work towards making his dreams come true.
Heartfelt, lovingly crafted neo-soul with lush live instrumentation and gorgeous multi-tracked self-harmonies. Opener “Honey” is a really enticing, inviting song thanking a potential lover for showing genuine interest in her. “Sirens” is more sultry, demanding your instant attention and legs around her waist. “Check On Yo Friends” is more acoustic guitar-based and a bit more hip-hop-influenced with its beats and cadences. “I’m Tired” lets off some steam without getting aggressive. “Just Hold On” is more creative, especially the way the rhythm switches up later on. “Wings” is a bit more intricate and bossa nova-shaded, and it has the most uplifting lyrics on the entire album.
Kill Alters’ Bonnie Baxter and Machine Girl’s Matt Stephenson debuted their Prolaps project last year with Pure Mud Volume 7, a psychotic hellrave explosion stuffed with ideas and manic energy. This year, they’re releasing a quarterly series of 2-hour tapes, and the first one landed at the beginning of spring. Vernal Birth is a bit closer to their Guilted Hexitation mix from earlier this year than the bratty digital hardcore/electro-punk of their album from last year, constantly flowing through ideas like a live set. The gonzo lyrics and kind of gross-out humor of the first album is pretty much absent here, which is fine because I’m more into this project for the beats anyway. But it’s essentially a nonstop train ride of neon-streaked radioactive kick drums and rapidfire triggered samples, for the first part at least. Around the center it dips into slower, sludgier rhythms but then sometimes flips faster breaks on top of them, causing some bursts of dissonance. “Oversoul Deprogammer” is 16 minutes of extreme K-hole tripping which seems to be pulling in several directions in an oblong motion, and the vibe changes a little after that. There’s still energy but they take the long way around rather than bounce and stomp through everything quickly. It definitely feels worn down after a hard night of raving by the end, but even then it’s determined not to stop until everyone’s collapsed on the ground. Can’t wait to do this again when summer hits.
Rich Pellegrin’s last album was performed with the quintet he’s been playing with for a decade, with one piece performed by a contemporary classical ensemble from the University of Missouri. His newest release, however, consists entirely of solo piano improvisations recorded in a church in Washington. The majority of them are brief, encountering a momentary idea and then expressing it and letting it be. Many of them resist easy patterns or melodies and sort of exist in their own space, but a few are more contemplative and have a radiant glow, like “Improvisation VII” and “XV”, and these are some of the standout pieces. “XI” is particularly inspired, lasting a towering 6 minutes and having an almost heroic sort of drive without hammering you with pomposity. “XXIV” hints at a darker mood, but also not in an overbearing way that brings the listener down. I also appreciate how the final piece sounds like a clear ending, a definite “that’s it”.
4-24-21
Vapour Theories ~ Unoccupied Blues
Yaya Bey ~ september 13th
Yoshinori Hayashi ~ Shut Up
Nero’s Day at Disneyland ~ Family Lying Face Down in Living Room
Caterina Barbieri/Baseck ~ Fantas Hardcore
Thomas Fehlmann ~ Umarmt
Asmus Tietchens ~ Fast Food
Algebra Suicide ~ One Night I Fell in Love
Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt ~ The Thing Itself
Jihee Heo ~ Trust
Phelimuncasi ~ Sesi Gora (Prod by DJ MP3)
Suzi Analogue ~ W0RK XPERIENCE
Biosphere ~ The Clock and the Dial
The Answer Is In The Beat 