Back on track.
Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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Ernest Hood is best known for the 1975 release Neighborhoods, a unique album of locations recorded during his travels through Oregon combined later with his zither and synthesizer music. It is far more common now but Hood was a pioneer in the use of "found sound." Back To The Woodlands harks from the same (1972-1982) period but has never been released until now. It is a fine addition to Hood's legacy of work which is reflective, warm, and inviting, without being easy, silly, or overly sentimental.
Neighborhoods is a classic. It was originally intended as a gift for housebound people in order that they could listen and enjoy feeling transported somewhere else. This was something dear to Ernest Hood's heart, himself having been stricken with polio since his twenties, forced to spend a whole year in an iron lung, and thereafter get around on crutches or in a wheelchair. Unsurprisingly, there is a bittersweet quality to all of Hood's music. His location recordings capture children gently mocking each other (a playground chant of "Johnny's got a sweetheart" is riffed into the 11 minute track "After School" on Neighborhoods), the thud of basketballs, birdcall, frog croak, insect chirp, snippets of conversation, an ice cream truck, screen doors, a model T driving over a manhole cover, hollers, clanging metalworking tools, small planes, tales being told, a can kicked down the road, and more. All merge with Hood's instrumentation to create a tender and tangible nostalgic sound, sound which is naturally capable of stimulating remembrance of our own childhood memories: father whistling, the smell of baking, the wet brain-damaging smack of a cement heavy caseball, the lady next door sunbathing with the radio on, and so on.
Back To The Woodlands contains field recordings which are quite different from those of its predecessor. The sounds of the small town (as if preserved in a time capsule) have been replaced by a timeless environmental ambience of nature. "Rain" for example is simply the sound of rain cascading down mixed with bright zither jangles. You could say that the track doesn't "go anywhere" but it surely can take you somewhere nice. "Into The Groves" is an evocation of sunlight winking through leaves, while "Warm Pathways" almost brings to mind the singular musical genius of gospel preacher Washington Phillips. "Pleasant, This Garden" sounds like a gentle ramble set at about the pace of a stroll in the countryside.
I love the—all too brief—contrast of "The Jantzen Rag (Racoons)," a swinging upbeat interlude which bursts in and out as if someone has turned on a television theme tune for barely a minute. "Beaver's Pond" is equally brief, with the quality of a fine pencil sketch which might have been turned into a larger picture. Indeed, the album is full of such sketches, using music to convey solitude, the sanctity of natural places, the sense of human optimism, and, this being Ernest Hood, the profound ache of nostalgia. Found sound is much less audible and prominent on Woodlands, though, to the point where I wonder if several tracks do not include any at all.
"Bedroom of the Absent Child," as evocative a title as I have ever seen, is one of several tracks which caused me to reflect. It's hard to describe, but it was like remembering with sadness and affection a group of frequently visited and occupied rooms in a house long since demolished and built over by people with no memory of those of us who lived there before.
Throughout his life Ernest Hood was a keen contributor to local life. He valued the atmosphere of community life even as he sensed it changing and disappearing. His field recordings and the art he made from them preserve the feeling of a sweet remembered childhood. A jazz guitarist in his youth, he adapted his choice of instrument in response to the illness which rendered him paraplygic. His creations sometimes resemble old half-forgotten radio and television themes, and at other times (with parts of Neighborhoods) seems as if they could be the actual audio version of a movie. He kept his sense of humor and was modest about his music, suggesting that if it sounded sour or bitter compared to the sweetness of the field recordings, it is because that is the true essence of nostalgia.
The final piece, "Untitled," is the most abstract track here, with zither notes plucked in a rather formless fashion and ending suddenly, as if suggesting unfinished business. Ernest Hood leaves behind his albums and will also be remembered for earlier radio programs (travelogs which predate his albums) and for becoming a pioneering campaigner for the right to die with dignity. As his life was coming to an end he struggled gamely to be allowed to leave it on his own terms. Eventually, he won the right to decide to discontinue medical care, and had all the details agreed including a good glass of wine. However, when the time came, his physician left him in the lurch and a covering junior doctor did not feel able to carry out his wishes. Finally, a young family member assisted and set him off on his next journey—out of this world.
With a debut in 2007, the enigmatic Darksmith has a relatively dense body of work centered around manipulated tapes and electronic excursions. Imposter is one in a series of releases sharing these qualities, as well as consistently strange artistic consistency visually. Unexpecting changes from meditative to chaotic are the norm in this chaotic, yet beautiful disc.
Originally slated to be an LP, Imposter maintains the original structure intended, presented as two side long pieces on the CD with some roughly discernable pauses where I believe original breaks were intended to be. The first half (side?), "Looking for Idiots/Problem with Everyone," is comparably the mellower one. Leading from a steady tone and flat, white noise, he builds with strange digital interference sounds and crunchy layers. With bits of field recordings weaved in and out, the first section is almost peaceful in its own, disjointed way. The second half is a bit rawer, with violent clattering, scrapes, banging, and what almost sounds like a horse running around and wrecking everything.
The other half, "Personal and Embarrassing/Hold Everything," is a bit bleaker from the start. Heavy tape hiss and scattered, processed sounds come across as less ambient and more menacing. After mangling the tapes a bit, he shifts the sound shifts to rattling machinery and almost rhythmic loops of noise. The whole thing becomes rather obtuse and alien, as the shift then goes from glitching and violent outbursts back to a diverse textural crunch to conclude the piece.
Existing in a nebulous space somewhere between harsh noise, field recordings, and tape experimentations, Imposter is a strange one from beginning to end. The mix between calm textures and harsh outbursts makes for a relatively tense experience, but that unpredictability is what makes it so captivating. It is simultaneously beautiful and disgusting sounding, and to me, that's a perfect combination for this type of work.
This latest release from this eternally innovative Stockholm-based composer is a durational tour de force that first began to take shape in empty Berlin concert halls in the early months of the pandemic. While I note with grim humor that the pandemic has itself become an endlessly shifting durational tour de force, Malone’s primary inspiration came instead from the ambient sense of unreality and distorted time that became pervasive as the fabric of normal daily life quickly unraveled. Like many other artists, Malone suddenly found herself with plenty of free time during that period of dread, isolation, and uncertainty, yet she was fortunate enough to get an invitation to record new music at Berlin’s Funkhaus and MONOM and even luckier still to have some extremely talented friends around with newly open schedules themselves. In short, the stars were in perfect alignment for one hell of an avant-drone dream team to form, as Malone (armed with 72 sine wave oscillators) tapped in like-minded souls Stephen O’Malley and Lucy Railton and the expected slow-burning dark sorcery ensued. Does Spring Hide Its Joy feels like an inspired twist on the longform drone majesty of artists like Éliane Radigue, as Malone employed just intonation to layer complex and otherworldly harmonies while her collaborators gamely helped ensure that the crescendos were visceral, gnarled and snarling enough to leave a deep impression.
I have no doubt at all that Kali Malone brought her usual compositional rigor to this “study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns,” but Does Spring Hide Its Joy is more open-ended than her usual fare and leaves some welcome room for spontaneity and improvisation. Malone envisioned the piece as a puzzle of sorts that is assembled from five-minute blocks approximating a ladder that the musicians can choose to ascend or descend. The total number of blocks is fluid as well. For example, the album versions of the piece are an hour long while the live version can sometimes stretch to 90 minutes (note: the CD includes three performances of the piece while the LP includes only two). On top of that inventive structure, Malone deliberately wrote the piece with her collaborators’ styles and techniques in mind, envisioning the composition as a “framework for subjective interpretation and non-hierarchical movement.” In practical terms, that means that this piece is essentially a drone fantasia of bowed strings, smoldering distortion, and shifting harmonies that occasionally blossoms into something more fiery and transcendent. This being a Kali Malone composition, however, the organically evolving harmonies and oscillations are invariably absorbing, sophisticated, and distinctive regardless of the shape the piece takes. Notably, this album is also a bit more earthy, psychotropic and texturally varied than previous Malone opuses. It feels akin to a ghostly ballet or hallucinatory tendrils of smoke, as the sustained tones of the three players languorously intertwine and dissipate in a dreamlike haze of lingering feedback, overtones, and harmonics.
Given the inherently fluidity of that compositional approach, the album’s two or three pieces are essentially variations upon the same theme and the differences between the individual discs or LPs are largely irrelevant. They each unfold differently, of course, but they are essentially the same elements combining at different times (somewhat akin to out-of-phase tape loops). That said, there is an unconventional arc of sorts, as the drones tend to boil over into churning and howling intensity with increased frequency as each part creeps into its second and third movements (though those delineations would be hard to notice without a numbered track list as a reference). That said, Does Spring Hide Its Joy feels more akin to watching slow-motion footage of a storm forming at sea than it does a planned composition, as terms like “beginning” or “end” lose all meaning: elemental forces simply gather and dissipate at their own pace and occasionally there are metaphorical flashes of lightning or masses of dark clouds. That fundamentally unpredictability makes for an impressively absorbing listening experience, as each new harmonic development could potentially be the early stages of a howling tempest.
Obviously, experiencing the slow-motion massing of Malone’s otherworldly harmonic clouds right from the beginning is the probably the best way to appreciate the eerie beauty of this album, but Spring is also the sort of piece in which I could drop into its shifting currents at nearly any point and find myself quickly entranced in medias res. That unusual feature did not elude Malone, unsurprisingly, as there is also an installation version of the piece that is coupled with video work from Nika Milano. I am sure I would absolutely love that, as it is doubly immersive to have a cool visual accompaniment while I dissolve into oceanic harmonic bliss, yet Spring is a mesmerizing experience as a stand-alone album too. As was the case with previous Malone classics like The Sacrificial Code, what I get out of this album depends largely upon what I put in: deep listening brings deep rewards. My gut feeling is that Spring is destined to topple that previous masterpiece as my personal favorite Malone album, as it is every bit as sophisticated as its predecessor yet has more bite and spontaneity. Then again, maybe I will conclude that I prefer the more focused and minimal pleasures of Malone by herself at a pipe organ. They both have their place, certainly (that place being “heavy rotation”). Regardless of where Spring ultimately lands in my personal Kali Malone canon, I have no hesitation at all about proclaiming this to be yet another brilliant and fascinating statement from an artist on quite an impressive hot steak.
This mammoth and category-defying opus is easily the most wildly ambitious debut in recent memory (if not ever) and also happens to be one of my absolute favorite albums of 2022. It was one hell of an enigma at first as well, as Stroom quietly released the album back in October with absolutely no background information provided at all. Given the absolutely bananas volume of material (4 ½ hours) and the consistently high level of quality, I expected that it would be revealed to be some sort of decade-spanning art project involving an all-star cast of sound art luminaries, but I turned out to be spectacularly wrong about most of that. As it turns out, Voice Actor is instead a recent collaboration between Noa Kurzweil (Supertalented) and Levi Lanser (Ludittes), neither of whom I had previously encountered. However, I was at least partially right about the “art project” bit, as Sent From My Telephone collects three years of pieces that the duo originally intended as a radio play (and there are plenty of guest collaborators involved as well). The heart of the project, however, is Kurzweil’s seductive voice and her enigmatic diaristic monologues, which makes Félicia Atkinson a close kindred spirit, yet Lanser’s varied and phantasmagoric backdrops elevate the project into a mesmerizing durational mindfuck that effortlessly blurs the lines between spoken word, plunderphonics, ambient drone, outsider R&B, psychedelia, and Hype Williams’ hypnagogic sound collage side.
The piece that immediately sucked me into the album was “Another Day,” which feels like an elegantly blurred and subtly hallucinatory channeling of a sexy French pop song before it dissolves into a mirage. In some ways, “Another Day” is far from a representative entry point into the album, as it is one of the more hook-driven and structured pieces, but it does capture the album’s sublime magic in a more general sense, as all of the best pieces resemble a decontextualized voice memo of casual, off-the-cuff beauty set to music. That sketchlike nature would probably feel a bit exasperating in lesser hands, but Lanser and Kurzweil transform their mosaic of elusive fragments into a moving and immersive tapestry of intimate and enigmatic moments. I have absolutely no idea if Kurzweil is simply talking about her daily life or playing a character, but experiencing 100+ ephemeral glimpses into that real or imagined life is quite a fascinating and oft-beautiful way to spend 4+ hours either way. I especially love how multilayered and malleable the listening experience can be, as it works as both an instantly gratifying surface experience (Kurzweil has a lovely voice and the underlying music is quite good) and as a non-linear Memento-esque narrative puzzle (What does it all mean? How do the pieces relate to each other? Where does each moment exist in space and time?). Adding to the enigmatic fun is the fact that the songs are presented in alphabetical order, so the arc is fundamentally jumbled and fragmented right from the start and lends itself nicely to endless shuffling and recontextualization.
Given the volume of material here, some pieces are inevitably much stronger than others, but that only adds to the charm for me: one man’s “too much filler” is another man’s shapeshifting durational mindbomb. That “deep plunge” approach sets the stage for plenty of surprises, as being immersed in an extended ambient daze nicely primed me to be completely blindsided by unexpected emotional bombshells, perfect pop songs, or amusingly leftfield samples. “Pelli” is a particularly striking example of the “emotional bombshell” side, as it begins as a hushed monologue over a woozy bed of drones and strangled feedback before unexpectedly blossoming into a haunting coda centered around police scanner recordings from the early moments of 9/11. My favorite of the poppier pieces is currently the looping and sensuous “Carefully,” but there are way too many highlights to list and my favorite pieces will likely be in a perpetual state of flux forever, as every listen reveals fresh details and emotional shadings that I’d previously missed. Also, focusing on any individual piece feels like missing the point, as the whole is such an absorbing and vividly realized wonderland of melodies, dream fragments, confessional monologues, pop songs erupting from radios, sublime reveries, foreign radio transmissions, and a host of blurred, stretched, hiss-soaked, or submerged sounds from city life. I can think of few (if any) other albums that evoke such a poignant and oft-gorgeous distillation of a life’s peaks and valleys. Nearly every emotional shade of life's rich pageant makes an appearance here: love, regret, ennui, anxiety, vulnerability, comedy, tragedy, sex, violence, hope, dread, and many compelling stops in-between. The voyeuristic and elliptical nature of the album is quite fascinating as well, as I feel a bit like a cab driver trying to piece together the events of a mysterious stranger’s life solely from snatches of overheard late night phone conversations. Even that analogy does the album a disservice though, as the experience feels far more like the flickering impressionist logic of a beautiful dream (albeit one with some dark passing shadows). If I were Voice Actor, I would be extremely tempted to ride off into the sunset now (or would have chosen to stay completely anonymous all along), as trying to come up with a worthy follow up to such a monster opening statement is definitely not an enviable position to be in. That said, being the people who already made Sent From My Telephone feels extremely damn enviable indeed. This album is a masterpiece.
The French Standard In-Fi label has been one of my casual obsessions over the last few years and this second album from Omertà was my favorite release that surfaced from that milieu in 2022. From what I can tell as an outsider, there appears to be a loosely knit family of artists, psych enthusiasts, and avant-folk weirdos that convene periodically in varying configurations and occasionally an album will eventually surface documenting whatever magic transpired. Omertà unsurprisingly shares key members with other fitfully killer projects like France and Tanz Mein Herz, but this ensemble is an unique animal for a number of reasons. The most striking of those reasons are the breathy, sensuous vocals of Florence Giroud, who I believe is only active in this one project (as far as rock bands are concerned, at least). Giroud’s vocals aside, Omertà is also far more informed by eroticism, dream states, pop music, and chansons than the usual Standard In-Fi fare. To my ears, something compelling almost always seems to happen whenever Jeremie Sauvage & Mathieu Tilly assemble a group of like-minded artists, but Collection Particulière’s “Amour Fou” and “Moments in Love” are easily among the most beautifully distilled and haunting pieces that the label has released to date.
The album’s title translates as “private collection,” which is an allusion to the prolonged saga behind the striking and unusual cover image from Giroud’s younger days. Since the band that has existed at the nexus of art, sex, and dreams since its very beginning, Giroud had hoped to use an image from the same series for the band’s 2014 debut, but when she managed to track down the artist, she learned that a fire had destroyed his workshop and damaged the hard drive containing all the digital copies. The artist vowed to send some images when the data was recovered, but then he abruptly died instead. Later, Giroud was able to contact the artist’s daughter who was managing his archive, but she was only able to provide a photo of a single damaged piece, as the rest of the series had all found its way into private collections. In the original piece, Giroud’s torso was covered with a wax image of a playing card (“holding the ace of spades and the ace of hearts, Eros and Thanatos”), but the wax melted during the fire to become transparent. In keeping with that theme of serendipitous changes in plans, Omertà itself originally blossomed out of an opera that Giroud was working on back in 2013.
I am not sure if that opera ever surfaced in its intended form (Giroud is a sculptor as well, incidentally), but there is nothing remotely operatic about Omertà, as this latest opus feels like an inspired collision between Tortoise, Serge Gainsbourg’s work with Jane Birkin, and arty psychedelia. That marks an delightful evolution from the band’s more single-mindedly psych-focused debut album, as Omertà seem to have gotten very serious about distilling their vision into something more tight, focused, and pop-adjacent (albeit pop from another era). While I enjoy that previous album too, Collection Particulièr is on another level altogether, as Omertà definitely play to their strengths much more this time around and feel like a far more distinctive entity as a result. Unsurprisingly, the main strength is Giroud’s seductive vocals, but the band’s newly muscular rhythm section is another big improvement, as the band make extremely effective use of their two bassists (one laying down a meaty groove, the other taking a more melodic role). The strongest pieces tend to be the sexier ones (“Amour Fou” and “Moments in Love”), as Giroud is an undeniably charismatic, compelling, and sensuous vocalist, but the band’s overall vision is also extremely cool one due to the casual virtuosity of the musicians, the unusually minimalist arrangements, and the propulsive physicality of the grooves. I am normally the absolute last person on the planet who would say something like “I really dig that dude’s bass tone,” but the bass playing on Collection Particulièr has enough visceral heft and richness that it would still be a great album even if the guitar, organ, and synth vanished. Instead, however, Omertà use that simple yet killer bass and drum foundation to create a vacuum in which every cool spacy synth flourish, string scrape, or warm organ chord makes an impact. Granted, not every song quite hits the mark with a perfect bullseye, but even the lesser pieces are still quite enjoyable and the album’s highlights capture a band whose vision, execution, and control are truly on a plane all their own.
The latest from this shapeshifting and anonymous southwestern psych duo marks both their return to Akuphone and the first proper follow up to 2020's landmark The Totemist. To some degree, Ak'Chamel revisit roughly the same distinctive stylistic terrain as their last LP, approximating some kind of otherworldly and psychotropic collision of Sun City Girls and Sublime Frequencies. That said, Ak'Chamel do sound a hell of a lot more like a mariachi band soundtracking a jungle puppet nightmare this time around and that festively macabre vibe suits them quite nicely. The band might see things a little differently themselves, as this album is billed as "a perfect soundtrack for the desertification of our world," but experiencing this lysergic Cannibal Holocaust-esque mindfuck is probably just the thing for helping someone appreciate the wide-open spaces and solitude of desert life. In keeping with that desert theme, there are plenty of prominent Middle Eastern melodies and instruments on the album, but Ak'Chamel is singularly adept at dissolving regional boundaries (and possibly dimensional ones as well) in their quest for deep, exotic, and oft-uncategorizable psychedelia.
The album opens in deceptively straightforward fashion, as the first minute of "The Great Saharan-Chihuahuan Assimilation" starts with a minor key Spanish guitar and hand percussion vamp. However, subtle signs of unreality gradually creep in (such as the eerie whistle of throat-singing) before the piece blossoms into a spacious and melodic interlude of Tex-Mex-style surf twang. The following "Clean Coal is a Porous Condom" is similarly musical (if unfamiliar), as Ak'Chamel sound like some kind of outernational supergroup trading Latin, Indian, and surf-inspired licks over a pleasantly lurching "locked groove"-style vamp. Both pieces are quite likable, but the album does not start to wade into the psychedelic deep end until the third piece (the colorfully titled "Amazonian Tribes Mimicking The Sound of Chainsaws With Their Mouths"). Unusually, it is a jaunty yet bittersweet accordion-driven piece at its heart, but the central motif is beautifully enhanced by layers of vivid psychotropic sounds (flutes, voices, ululating, eerie whines, pipe melodies), resulting in something that feels like a festive collision between The Wicker Man and a haunted street fair at the edge of the Amazon.
Happily, Ak'Chamel keep that phantasmagoric momentum going without interruption for the remainder of the album. In "Ossuary from the Sixth Extinction," a mournful banjo-like melody and tropical-sounding percussion lead into a harrowing rabbit hole of curdled pipe melodies, quivering strings, and an immersive mass of chants and howls. Elsewhere, the following "Soil Death Tape Decay II" begins life as dueling Middle Eastern-inspired oud solos over a bed of buzzing drones, but unexpectedly transforms into an obsessively looping melody that passes through various stages of tape destruction as voices wail and ululate around it. "Sheltering Inside a Camel" takes an even more sustained plunge into the hallucinatory (it is the longest piece on the album at nearly 11-minutes), as desert psychedelia, sinister puppet-like voices, throat singing, and a goddamn horn section collide in singularly disorienting fashion. The album then winds to a close with one last darkly hallucinatory gem, as "The Cabinet of the Atomic Priesthood" unexpected transforms from something resembling choir practice at a demonic cathedral into a sublime coda of slow, exhalation-like chords; flickering mindfuckery; and eerie pipe melodies that fade in and out of focus. Admittedly, Ak’Chamel do exceed my personal bombast tolerance at times (particularly in the closing piece), but they invariably wind up somewhere compelling and it a delight to find them in such melodic and focused form again. As with The Totemist before it, A Mournful Kingdom of Sand makes a rare and ideal entry point into this duo’s oft-prickly, bizarre, and enigmatic oeuvre and affirms once again that they are one of the most consistently fascinating and creative bands in the psych scene right now.
This latest album from Carla dal Forno is her first since relocating to a small town (Castlemaine) in her native Australia and that dramatic change in environment has understandably made quite an impact on her overall vibe (as the album description puts it, she "returns self-assured and firmly settled within the dense eucalypt bushlands"). Fortunately, it seems like the transformation was an entirely favorable one, as literally everything that made dal Forno's previous work so wonderful and distinctive (ghostly pop hooks, stark bass-driven post-punk grooves, tight songcraft) remains intact. Now, however, her bloodless pop songs are charmingly enhanced with an understated tropical feel as well. For the most part, Come Around is still light years away from anything like a conventional beach party, but songs like the title piece at least come close to approximating a hypnagogic one. Aside from that, dal Forno also displays some impressive creative evolution on the production side, as these nine songs are a feast of subtle dubwise and psych-inspired touches in the periphery. That said, the primary appeal of Come Around is still the same as ever, as dal Forno remains nearly unerring in churning out songs so strong that they truly do not need anything more than her voice, a cool bass line, and a simple drum machine groove to leave a deep impression.
The opening "Side By Side" is a damn-near perfect illustration of dal Forno's distinctive strain of indie pop magic, as crashing waves give way to a rubbery, laid-back bass line and a bittersweet, floating vocal melody. Lyrically, dal Forno still seems to be in the throes of heartache, but also comes across as very clear-eyed, confident, and sensuous. That turns out to be quite an effective combination, as these nine songs radiate deadpan cool and wry playfulness while still maintaining palpable human warmth and soulfulness at their core. That alone would be more than enough to carry this album (along with all the great hooks and bouncy slow-motion bass grooves), but dal Forno is also unusually inventive with beats, psychotropic production touches, and the assimilation of unexpected influences this time around. The album's stellar title piece is a prime example of the latter, as it feels like dal Forno seamlessly mashed together The Shangri-Las and Young Marble Giants to soundtrack a surf movie for ghosts.
The album's other big highlight is "Stay Awake," which combines a minimal tropical groove with a morosely funky bass line and spacey psychedelic smears. It is admittedly a bit more overtly melancholy than some of the other pop-minded cuts, but that darker tone is nicely balanced by the propulsive riff, seductive vocals, and Latin-inspired drum machine pattern. It captures how I imagine Joy Division might have sounded post-Ian Curtis if they had relocated to Havana and enlisted a femme fatale frontwoman instead of reinventing themselves as New Order (a missed opportunity, for sure). The more upbeat "Mind You're On" is another fine would-be single, as dal Forno adds finger snaps and bird-like warbles to the mix, as well as a wonderfully poignant final hook ("it's ok, ok, ok, you're on my mind"). The remaining five songs are characteristically solid (if divergent) for the most part as well, though they tend to be a bit less hook-focused (aside from "Slumber," a duet with Thomas Bush). Obviously, some more hot singles would have been welcome, but the occasional instrumental or buzzing descent into psychedelia work quite nicely from a sequencing standpoint, as Come Around is an absorbing and evocative whole. Admittedly, I still have yet to warm to the sleepily ethereal closer ("Caution"), but this is yet another excellent album from dal Forno and easily features some of her strongest songwriting to date (at least three instant classics, by my count).
As a teenage surfer Matt McBane became obsessed with the sea and the way in which the bathymetry of the ocean floor affects the way that waves break. His composition Bathymetry mirrors that relationship, with his bass synthesizer providing the platform to shape the more trebly waves of varied percussion played by Sandbox Percussion (a well-named and playful ensemble). On the surface, this album is slightly out of my, rather idiosyncratic, comfort zone. The accompanying videos were off-putting and (politeness dictates that I cannot write what I would cheerfully do with them) ping-pong balls overused. Despite this, my listening curiosity was piqued and held steady. Then halfway through the 40 minute duration, the track "Groundswell" completely won me over, and I rode a wave of enjoyment all the way to the end. Later on, afer repeated listens, it occurred to me that the same process happens on each track, as bursts of percussive grit, pops and scrapes away, to eventually leave the rewarding pearl.
For whatever reason, I found that the second half of Bathymetry has a greater emotional and melodic impact, perhaps due to the slower pace and less cluttered soundscape. This allows the synthesizer to be more prominent and the percussion more glassy and transparent (maybe hitting bottles and bowls, or using vibraphone, instead of dropping the aforementioned balls). I have heard nurses describe conversations with certain patients as like playing table tennis with someone who rarely tries to hit the ball back and I detect a similar movement, and progression, here. As intriguing the first twenty minutes or so is, from "Groundswell" onwards it's game on. The use of a traditional drum kit there, and also on "Refraction" comes as a refreshing surprise and the effect is propulsive, as if we've been lowered slowly down into the depths of the ocean which is intriguing, but now are off and zooming around exploring in a small submarine. At several points, including "Coda", we hear what could be an underwater bell or gong; very appropriate as similar to sounds punctuating Hendrix's extended aquatic-themed pieces "1983 A Merman I Should Turn To Be" and "Moon, Turn the Tides… Gently Gently Away." The feel of Bathymetry becomes rather like improvised ambient chamber music with overtones of both dub and Harry Partch, although his percussive bowls were called cloud chamber bowls and it's possibly a breach of some critical rule to mention his name and the word "ambient" in the same sentence.
This release also got me thinking about the idiosyncrasies of taste. One example: I have always trusted the sound of murky recordings from the early 20th century and associated the accompanying vinyl crackles and scratches with a kind of primal sophistication. Those sounds trigger (in me) a stamp of approval, to certify raw soulfulness, noble creativity, and unadorned reality, all of which should be loved. The flip side of this is my subconscious mistrust of (not all) slicker recordings, and knee-jerk caution when approaching music which seems "well-dressed'' in the sense of favoring a sophistication based upon greater clarity of production and technical ability. It's a definite bias and one which I have no intention of abandoning any time soon, despite exceptions which prove the rule, such as Bathymetry.
Prolific artists on their own, the duo of Eric Hardiman (guitar/bass/electronics) and Michael Kiefer (drums/keyboards) have still managed to put out their third album in four years as Spiral Wave Nomads. The spacey, psychedelic tinged guitar/bass/drum excursions are of course expected by now, but the inclusion of additional electronic instrumentation makes Magnetic Sky even greater.
With six songs spread across two sides of vinyl, the duo keeps their performances somewhat succinct, given the improvisational approach. Dynamic drumming and long guitar passages tend to be the focus, but there is so much more going on in the layers beneath. Both Kiefer and Hardiman contribute electronics/synths this time around, and the watery sounds that open “Dissolving into Shape” nicely flesh out the restrained drumming and commanding lead guitar. “Under a Magnetic Sky” is also bathed in soft electronics, covering the outstretched guitar, prominent bass, and taut drumming like a warm, fuzzy blanket. “Carrier Signals” features them leaning a bit more into jazz territory, punctuated with pseudo-Eastern melodies, unconventional drumming, and sitar-like drones.
The other side of the record leads off with “Pharoah’s Lament,” an appropriately mournful guitar lead stretching through effects laden 1960s guitar fuzz. Compared to the density of the first half, there is a more straightforward structure here, with the mix overall kept tastefully sparse. The remaining two performances see the duo going in the opposite direction, turning up the abstraction and dissonance. The chaotic opening to “Rogue Wave” makes the title seem especially appropriate, as twanging bent notes and scraped guitar strings fly off in every direction. It is not an especially dense or oppressive vibe, but certainly a nice bit of messiness. Album closer “Lurking Madness” leads off with bleak electronics as guitar and drums slowly fade in. It is comparably more anomalous in structure, but by no means formless, and the heavier use of electronics throughout certainly fit the “lurking” feel conjured by the title.
Three albums in, Spiral Wave Nomads continue to impress and expand: in this case the addition of electronics and synths is notable, although does not drastically change the dynamic and instead set the foundation for which Hardiman and Kiefer improvise. The duo never seemed to have any difficulty finding their voice, and so Magnetic Sky feels in line with the previous albums, but even more varied and complex, proving the two are adept at far more than improvisation alone.
This is the first full-length collaboration between Sabra and Tabbal, but it is apparently also the sixth collaborative release between Portland's Beacon Sound and Lebanon's Ruptured Records (which was co-founded by Tabbal). While Tabbal's solo work has been a very enjoyable recent discovery for me, this is my first encounter with Julia Sabra, who is normally one-third of the excellent Beirut-based dreampop trio Postcards. The pair do have a history of working together, as Tabbal has co-produced several Postcards releases, but their creative union only began to take shape in the aftermath of Beirut's massive 2020 port explosion (which destroyed Sabra's home, badly injured her partner/bandmate Pascal Semerdjian, and displaced a whopping 300,000 people). Unsurprisingly, one of the primary themes of Snakeskin is the precarious concept of "home" and the "the disappearance of life as we know it" in a volatile and oft-violent world. Those are admittedly more urgent themes in Tabbal and Sabra's neck of the woods than some others (the album was also inspired by the 2021 Palestinian and the invasion of Armenia), but loss and uncertainty eventually come for us all and they make a universally poignant emotional core for an album. And, of course, great art can sometimes emerge from deeply felt tragedies and Tabbal and Sabra are a match made in heaven for that challenge, as Julia's sensuous, floating vocals are the perfect complement to Tabbal's gnarled and heaving soundscapes.
The first piece that Sabra and Tabbal wrote together was "Roots," which surfaced last year on Ruptured's The Drone Sessions Vol. 1 compilation. That piece is reprised here as the sublimely beautiful closer, which was a great idea as it is one of the strongest songs on the album. However, it also illustrates how this collaboration has evolved and transformed, as "Roots" has the feel of a dreamy, bittersweet synth masterpiece nicely enhanced with hazy, sensuous vocals. Execution-wise, it is damn hard to top, but the duo's more recent work feels like a creative breakthrough that is greater than the sum of its parts. Put more simply, the pair previously merged their two styles in an expected way to great effect, but then they started organically blurring into a single shared style and the results turned into something more memorable and transcendent. The first major highlight is "All The Birds," which calls to mind a collision between the murky, submerged dub of loscil and what I imagine a bossa nova album by Julee Cruise might have sounded like. As cool as all that sounds, however, the reality is even better due to the muscular, snaking synth undercurrent and surprise snare-roll groove.
As an aside, the Julee Cruise resemblance may be no coincidence at all, as one of Tabbal's earlier albums features an unambiguously Twin Peaks-inspired title.
Snakeskin's other immediately gratifying stunner is "In Our Garden," as ugly viscous synth sludge blossoms into an incredibly haunting vocal piece that grows steadily more compelling with psychotropic bird-like flickers and flutters, seismic crunches, and a delirious synth crescendo of swooning romantic grandeur shot through with deep sadness. That feat is immediately followed by my personal dark horse candidate for the album's centerpiece, "One By One." The thread that holds the piece together is Sabra's half-unsettling/half-mantric repetition of the title phrase, but the pair unleash one hell of a roiling and lysergically smeared maelstrom around it. Moreover, the production is absolutely dazzling, as it feels like an impossibly complex living tapestry of visceral textures and churning, heaving movement (and it somehow ends feeling akin to a hallucinatory bell ceremony in a lost mountain temple). Notably, there are only eight songs on the album, so Snakeskin would still be half-brilliant even if all the remaining songs sucked, but the other four songs are just a slightly lower tier of greatness, ranging from gnarled, feedback-ravaged ritualistic drone ("Snakeskin") to something resembling chopped, screwed, and deconstructed Crystal Castles ("Signs"). With eight songs and eight hits, this is a serious album-of-the-year contender.
I was a bit later to the Angelo Harmsworth party than I would have liked, but the Berlin-based American composer has been fitfully releasing very distinctive blown-out "ambient" albums for about a decade now on an array of hip and discriminating small labels (Opal Tapes, Vaagner, enmossed, Psychic Liberation, etc.). Harmsworth's latest is his first for Students of Decay and marks a rare vinyl outing, as most of his previous physical releases have been limited to cassette. According to the label, Singe "may be the high water mark" of Harmsworth's career to date, which does feel like a completely plausible claim, but one that is very hard to confidently echo given how many killer Harmsworth pieces already exist. Even if Singe fails to conclusively eclipse all of Harmsworth's past triumphs, however, it does seem to be one of his most consistently strong releases and an ideal starting point for the curious. Notably, describing Harmsworth's vision as "ambient" or even "power ambient" feels cruelly reductionist, which is probably why he amusingly titled a 2020 release Fully Automated Luxury Ambient. That imaginary subgenre feels much closer to the mark, as the intensity and textural inventiveness that Angelo brings to these compositions shares far more common ground with artists like Tim Hecker or Fennesz (or collapsing power lines during a live volcano) than it does with anyone trafficking in droning, meditative loops.
Those craving the aforementioned "collapsing power lines" vibe will have a mercifully short wait, as the opening "Igniting the Periphery" calls to mind buzzing high tension wires swayed by a deep seismic shudder as the surrounding buildings collapse in slow motion. There are some other elements as well, like fragments of twinkling piano and warm waves of frayed drones, but the viscerally heaving, buzzing, and gnarled wreckage at the heart of the piece is the showstopper—everything else is just there to color the mood. That balance holds true for the rest of the album as well, as the Singe experience feels akin to wandering through six cataclysmic yet weirdly beautiful natural disasters. For example, the crackling and hissing "Frothed" evokes slow jets of magma breaking through a buckling, blasted landscape, while "Drip Motion" has the feel of a storm slowly forming and then slowly dissipating. In short, Harmsworth harnesses the proverbial "force of nature" and wields it beautifully. That said, "Drip Motion" is an album highlight for more conventionally musical reasons as well, as it resembles the burning and heaving wreckage of a killer Porter Ricks cut fading in and out of focus. "A Twofold Excess" then ends the album's first half with yet another gem, as it feels like slowed-down footage of a tornado ripping apart a sawmill before dissolving into a sublime coda of sputtering static, tender piano, and warbling, whimpering streaks of psychedelia.
Somehow, the weather forecast only gets crazier for the album's second half, though that is hardly surprising given that "Aporia" seems to not even be earthbound anymore, as Harmsworth conjures a buzzing and shuddering alien landscape of strangled static and quivering feedback. In addition to that, there are some elements that sound like field recordings of a welding crew on the Death Star along with a guest appearance by Felisha Ledesma. Sadly, Ledesma does not stick around very long (I'm a big fan of her Fringe album), but a human voice emerging from the howling industrial ruin was unexpected enough to leave an impression regardless. Elsewhere, "Reversing the Procession" calls to mind flickering ghosts in the burning, buckling hull of a sinking shop and probably marks the album's zenith as far as sheer churning physicality is concerned. The closing "Scope Neglect" may be the album's zenith beauty-wise though, calling to mind slow-motion footage of a burning spacecraft breaking apart as it falls to earth. Hell, I'll even throw in a dramatic sunset as a backdrop, as "Scope Neglect" is an absolutely gorgeous example of Harmsworth's vision of elemental power and blackened beauty. And Singe is one hell of an album. In fact, I would be hard pressed to think of another artist who could have made an album in this vein without lapsing into unlistenable bombast or erring too much into the "noise" or "ambient" side of the delicate balance. In Harmsworth's hands, however, Singe feels like a series of vivid field recordings taken from the end of the world.
