06 November 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

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.

Beacon Sound/Ruptured

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.

Listen here.

06 November 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

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.

Students of Decay

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.

Listen here.

06 November 2022

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Dave Clarkson is a gem who has flown under my—far from infallible—radar for about 30 years. There are upwards of 40 releases emanating in his impressive catalog, from the Cavendish House studio, including many of these Guides which have focused on everything from beaches, caves, forests, and lighthouses, with tangents to rain, ghost stories and illness. That another of his albums, For Horselover Fat by Eye In The Sky has a bash at honoring the concerns and creativity of the astonishing Philip K. Dick is right up my alley.

Cavendish House

I love everything about A Pocket Guide To Dreamland: the concept and how it sounds of course, but equally the perfect anorak-fetishistic packaging of the physical release with badges, a transparent orange cassette, postcards, and its cover label paying homage to Ordnance Survey maps above images depicting the almost psychedelic childlike thrill of a seaside funfair along with a gritty high rise apartment block tower. I almost expected some recreated cut-out coupons from The Eagle * comic for a day at Butlins Holiday Camp (Admit Family of 4 to unglamorous Skegness location).

The recording is topped and tailed by tracks featuring a wheezing fairground organ (aptly appalling and eerily comforting in equal measure), and it is an album of two halves. The first half could serve as a brash snapshot of these coastal locations in their heyday with the annual influx of pleasure-seeking holidaymakers frantically rushing to disappointment. The title of the brief opening piece, "Organ Donor," clues us to the field-recording aspect of Clarkson's methodology but "Rollercoaster Ghost" soon shows the range of his production techniques, blending clattering rhythms, unbridled screams, and the calm resolution which can only come from the plucked strings of an acoustic guitar. His choices always work, whether sources are untouched, blended together, or processed to the point of virtual obliteration.

On "Spectral Pier Ballroom," Clarkson patches together what sounds like demolition noise and the sound of crashing waves with three musical recordings of his late father and grandparents. A vivid sense is created of something being swept away, part the pathetic cruelty Pinky the pathetically cruel gangster from Brighton Rock and part the doomed unspoken romance of Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton from Remains of The Day, but brutal either way.

The second half of this excellent album starts with "Penny Arcade in the Rain," where he makes something great from thunder, coins dropping into greedy game machines, a breezy, sweeping tempo, and a few mocking caws from seagulls. From that point a softer wave of memory washes gently back and forth. "Tiny Lights (Magic in a Child's Eyes)" is well titled, a sound reminder of why parents dragged themselves annually to these towns in the first place.

Midway through the blissful "Coastal Ghost Towns," I had become an eight year old again, walking with our family friends along the seafront at night between Sutton-on-Sea and Mablethorpe, could literally feel my teeth crunching through the hard shell of a toffee apple and see my sister's mouth chasing the evaporating pink fluff of candy floss, while my father's irrepressibly exuberant voice somehow stands out over the waves crashing violently into the seawall.

[*The Eagle was also home to heroic Dan Dare and his alien nemesis The Mekon, the latter the inspiration for the group originally from Leeds.]

Listen here.

06 November 2022

Eve McGivern

Albums and Singles

As John Jagos sings "Save me from the grip of the modern age" early on in "Tangerine," the opening track of the latest from his alter-ego Brothertiger, three words spring to mind: sparkling, honest, and nostalgic. Indeed, the music hearkens back to the ilk of carefully crafted new wave sounds in the vein of ABC and Spandau Ballet, minus any flamboyance and serving up no pretentiousness. What remains is perfectly composed chill electronic pop, melody at the forefront. With sounds like summer wafting wistfully through headphones as I write, this is music perfect for road trips in the middle of nowhere, lounging on a beach recliner while the waves roll in, or simply snuggling under a blanket with the music present like a good friend.

Satanic Panic

Compiling tracks previously released as singles on his Bandcamp page, Brothertiger showcases the continued growth Jagos displays following stellar releases Paradise Lost and Out of Touch. The catchiness of Jagos' melodies belies the potent, often dark underpinnings of his art through his use of lyrics. Take "Be True" as an example, leading off like an anthem to struggling youth learning to find themselves: "Always be true, Ring true like a bell, Resonate through you, Elevate myself" but injecting caution into the manifesto in the chorus: 

"I finally built the walls around me 
Completely up surrounding 
Finally built the walls around me 
Completely up."

Jagos is unafraid to make forays into deeper topics like the dissolution of relationships ("Torn Open"), the desire to escape one's own life ("Wallow." "Summer Wave '98"), and in "Heaven," a disenchantment with faith:

"They say the word becomes the weapon
How do you recognize the pain in you?
I lost my way to heaven
A new state of mind that I fell into"

The love-be-damned "Torn Open" is wildly contrasting as guest Yvette Young sings her impassioned heart out with Jagos, the song sounding like an homage to eternal love, melodically bursting with joy and positive expectations. Listen closely to the lyrics, and it is anything but this: "Do you remember / Rain or shine / We'd be together every day / Now ever day I cry / Feeling I could die / Cuz the pain inside never goes away." Pristine, undistilled honest pop, but do "pop" singers coat their darkness in such bright and cheery trappings? Perfection never tripped me up so pleasantly.

Other songs like "Arizona" and "Dancer on the Water" have the same underlying thoughtful lyrics but are just as pleasant to take at face value. Jagos inserts what appear to be auto-biographical touches in nearly every track, but it's ok to sit back and enjoy the ride, watching the scenery as it rolls past.

The wonderful sounds of Brothertiger may be heard here.

30 October 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

I was caught completely off guard by this latest opus from Dalt, as much of it sounds more like a three-way collaboration between Astrud Gilberto, Perez Prado, and Walter Wanderley than anything resembling the warped and stark electronic pop mutations that the Colombian composer has become synonymous with. After my initial disbelief subsided, however, I quickly decided that ¡Ay! may very well be the strongest album of Dalt's career to date. I suspect Dalt herself would probably agree, as it would be fair to say that her vision remains as compelling and innovative as ever, but she has merely kicked her self-imposed artistic restraints to the curb and embraced the warmer, more sensuous, and melodic sounds that she grew up around. Or, as the album description colorfully puts it, "through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began." In any case, the end result is a wonderfully sultry and evocative collection of seductive vocals and tropical rhythms beautifully enhanced with a host of psychotropic and industrial-damaged touches. And she somehow makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world. I definitely did not expect Dalt to secretly be a tropical pop genius at all, which makes her previous albums all the more fascinating now that I know that they were made while pointedly suppressing some of her greatest strengths.

RVNG Intl.

The opening "No Tiempo" initially evokes a "late-night cable" fever dream vibe in which a Bela Lugosi vampire movie blurs into an organ-happy televangelist, but it quickly transforms into swaying tropical bliss once the flutes and the lazily sultry groove make the scene. It has the feel of a Wanderley/Gilberto collaboration that has been punched up (and sexed up) for contemporary ears by an intrepid DJ (though I was still startled by the brass finale). It is a great piece, but it is immediately eclipsed by the following "El Galatzó," which masterfully combines hushed, confessional-sounding vocals with bass strums, trilling flutes, cooing backing vox, swelling strings, industrial scrapes, strangled feedback, and killer hand-percussion to cast a sustained spell of noir-ish, cinematic seduction. While "El Galatzó" would be my personal pick for the album's reigning highlight, the album is not hurting for other hot contenders for that honor. In "Contenida," for example, a hallucinatory fog and a jazzy double bass motif cohere into some kind of humid and dubby bossa nova mindfuck, which then beautifully erupts in a viscerally clattering metal percussion frenzy. If the whole album sustained a similarly perfect balance of ambitious dub/industrial production brilliance and sultry songcraft, I would have no hesitation at all about proclaiming ¡Ay! to be the album of the year.

Instead of flogging that winning formula to death, however, Dalt opted to explore some alternate flavors of dubby, industrial-gnawed seduction with the remaining pieces. On "Atemporal," Dalt strikes gold again with a simmering groove, soulful horns, and a warbly Farfisa-sounding hook. Elsewhere, "Gena" returns to languorously noir moods, resembling a deconstructed Perez Prado cut enhanced with Thirlwell-esque blurts of artificial brass and a host of texturally delightful dub flourishes. Literally every single song on the album is compelling, however, as Dalt keeps finding new ways to surprise and delight me. Sometimes she plays things almost unrecognizably straight ("Bochinche"), while other pieces pack bracingly gnarled crescendos or psychotropic flurries of panning and echoing percussion. Other times, I am blindsided by arrangements so ambitious that I would have guessed that a major motion picture studio had lavished Dalt with money to assemble her own Xavier Cugat-esque all-star orchestra. Sadly, that probably did not happen, but Dalt did enlist an impressive batch of guest musicians to bring her dream to life nonetheless. Moreover, she managed to make this album in Berlin during a pandemic rather than from a seaside town in 1960s Brazil, Colombia, or Cuba, which makes her something of a master illusionist as well. The sole caveat with ¡Ay! is that a lot of Dalt's previously distinctive idiosyncrasies are present in more muted form than usual, which may disappoint fans of her more "outer limits" tendencies. To my ears, however, Dalt has actually transcended those tendencies in inspired fashion, as ¡Ay! feels more natural and less self-consciously arty than her previous work (and it does not hurt that it is absolutely packed with hooks as well).

Listen here.

30 October 2022

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

This is Mikko Singh's best and most consistent record yet as Haleiwa. Both his first full length releases Pura Vida dude and Palm Trees Of The Subarctic were light and dreamy, while his third Cloud Formations accelerated Haleiwa onto another level, driven by good tunes and several great moments, not least the plunge through synthesizers into warm bass driven melody on the opener "HKI-97," and the digital blips of "Foggy" which (perhaps unconsciously) resembles Brian Wilson frantically transposing part of "California Girls" into morse code. That third record heralded a deeper sound, perhaps because Singh switched to analog cassette and reel-to-reel tape recording, and it also included more variety although for no clear reason. Hallway Waverider avoids that pitfall by finding a sweet spot and then showing little or no desire to move very far away.

Morr Music

Of course there is variety here, but it is subsumed beneath a definite creative vision; a vision which looks backwards. Dedicated to his mother who passed away in 2015, and inspired by his own earlier self spending winter months skateboarding in his bedroom while listening to music. The overall sound is of music for surfing, but surfing on air, memory, and metaphor, back to the halcyon days of carefreeness and family love. If there is any slight hint of original Dick Dale surf guitar twang (or even Psychocandy style surfing on polluted Glaswegian effluent) it has died peacefully and gone to heaven in a sonic envelope of featherlight fuzz.

There is a subtly brilliant motorik drive underlaying parts of the album, though, right from the anthemic first track "River Park/Sleeping Pill." This quality partly stems from the drumming, but also comes out of pulsing synthesizers, from lovely hollow bass-driven echoing melody lines, and enveloping production. All this naturally adds to the sense of continual movement going nowhere fast. If popular music, on a count of 1,2,3,4, often lurches forward in a linear fashion heading off: down the road, over the hillside, into the future, then by contrast Hallway Waverider seems to spin its wheels on the spot, staying close to zero or even shifting backwards into imaginary numbers, passing the square root of minus one on the way to nothing but itself.

I once had a weekly 2 hour radio slot (Tuesdays usually) and after some months realized that I was fond of choosing the show's final track and invariably prepared by picking that and then working backwards. Eventually I had so many final track possibilities stockpiled that any given show could consist of around 60% of these final tracks. If I were to do a show now, anything from Hallway Waverider would fit the final track bill, fading in and out as if it had already been playing and would continue to play long after it seemed to have disappeared out of earshot. The album is a consistently fine listen all the way through, as it floats through "A Bottomless Pit," picks up some static grit on "Watered Down," flips across into sublime Lynchian dream territory for "Hide Away," and arrives all too soon at the magnificent yearning final track "Hallway Waverider" itself. My only gripe is the absence of a lyric sheet, especially since from what I have seen the lyrics are entirely apt and a great addition.

"A road/Brings you forth/Levels up/Levels down/Back again/At square one/ Holding on/To Nothing."

"The sea/ You're riding in/ Will merge/ With the sky/ A slow/ Feeling calls/ You out/ Once again/ A low heaven/ Follows you/ Around/ Again."

Listen here.

30 October 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This may be Swiss pianist/composer Raphael Loher's first solo album, but he has crossed my path before with his Baumschule trio (featuring Julian Sartorius and Manuel Troller). I am much less familiar with Loher's other trio (KALI), but the importance is that he has spent time improvising with inspiring musicians and has accumulated some very intriguing compositional ideas along the way. Interestingly, Keemuun is itself a bit of an improvisatory collaboration with inspiring (if unwitting) musicians, as Loher often played along with albums by other artists while experimenting with his rapid-fire piano patterns (Beatrice Dillon's rhythmically adventurous Workaround was a particularly central touchstone). In fact, just about everything about this album's evolution feels like fertile grist for a "galaxy brain" meme: a prepared piano album…limited to only ten notes spanning two octaves…improvised against cutting edge techno rhythms…but with all of those foundational rhythms totally excised from the final recording. Needless to say, all of those factors make for a very cool album concept in theory, but I am pleased to report that Loher's brilliant execution has made this a killer album in reality as well.

three:four records

The album consists of four numbered pieces, the first of which is considerably more subdued and minimal than the others (and shorter too). To my ears, the opener lies somewhere between bleary Morton Feldman-style dissonance and a dying, slightly out-of-tune music box performing its own elegy. It makes a perfectly fine (if understated) introduction, but I doubt I would be writing about Keemuun if it did not catch fire with the second piece and sustain that white-hot level of inspiration for the remainder of the album.

That second piece opens with a rapid arpeggio pattern that quickly begins unraveling into tendrils of new melody. It packs quite a mesmerizing effect, as it feels breathless, delirious, unpredictable, and endlessly spiraling. Then, around the five-minute mark, Loher downshifts his circular patterns into a plinking simmer that calls to mind a blurred and hallucinatory twist on gamelan. Notably, two of Loher's central themes for the album were "continuous movement of the left and right hands' and "a specific technique of piano preparation," so "II" marks the first explosive realization of that vision.

The third piece is yet another stunner in a similar vein, though its spiraling arpeggios have more of a "pulsing wave" dynamic. Loher proves to be something of a genius in the realm of dynamics in general, as his subtle changes in attack and emphasis give the piece the organically kinetic feel of shifting sand dunes. Moreover, Loher's piano preparation technique works some magic of its own, as his notes have a metallic physicality and leave a smeared and lingering haze of strange harmonies in their wake. The album winds to a close with another "Feldman meets broken music box"-style piece, but it has a much darker and more sinister tone this time around. Gradually the sense of menace subsides to reveal a deep sadness, but that sadness builds to a rhythmically sophisticated crescendo of broken-sounding interwoven melodies.

In its final moments, the piece (and the album) dissolve into a simple melancholy melody that leaves a ghostly afterimage hanging in the long spaces between the notes. It makes for a lovely and quiet comedown from the technical tour de force at the heart of the album. Obviously, one more tour de force would have been just fine by me, but this is a damn-near perfect album in all respects. Notably, the conception of this album coincided with an epiphany in which Loher became less interested in "confronting" audiences with his art and more interested in creating something "beautiful but strange." I honestly do not know how Loher could have possibly done a better job at realizing that objective, as Keemuun is quite a brilliant and moving statement.

Listen here.

23 October 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

We seem to be in the midst of a long-overdue Delia Derbyshire renaissance at the moment due to the efforts of filmmaker Caroline Catz, Cosey Fanni Tutti, BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Mark Ayres, and others. Fittingly, this unusual and inspired album was commissioned back in 2018 as a score for Catz's similarly unconventional feature-length documentary. Sadly, it seems damn near impossible to see Catz's film at the moment (outside the UK, at least), but this soundtrack was released earlier this year to coincide with Cosey's own foray into telling Derbyshire's story (Re-Sisters: The Lives and Recordings of Delia Derbyshire, Margery Kempe and Cosey Fanni Tutti). The book, film, and album were all inspired by research into Derbyshire's archive and the voluminous recordings and writings that became available after the visionary electronic artist's passing in 2001. Apparently, copyright issues are preventing much of Derbyshire's unearthed work from seeing an official release (there are some great unofficial ones like Inventions For Radio/The Dreams out there), but this album is a compelling consolation prize: using Derbyshire's notes on her compositions and techniques, Cosey has achieved a sort of posthumous homage/collaboration in which her own aesthetic is co-mingled with Derbyshire's singular and groundbreaking techniques and sounds.

Conspiracy International

While Delia Derbyshire is far from a household name, it is something of a miracle that she ever managed to be revered at all, as her musical career only spanned 15 years and took place at a time when neither women nor electronic music were taken particularly seriously. On top of that, she also had an eccentric personality, a tendency towards alcoholism, and an employer (the BBC) who did not consider her work to be "music" enough for her to be credited as a composer. Fortunately, she was both motivated and fucking brilliant, so she still managed to make a profound impact on the evolution of music despite those incredibly long odds. And it did not hurt that she was responsible for the Doctor Who theme, which made a sizable cultural dent of its own. It is hard to say whether or not there would have been a Throbbing Gristle had Derbyshire and her Radiophonic Workshop colleagues not forced weird electronic music into the mainstream, but I do think Derbyshire might have traumatized the general populace to a Gristle-y degree in the early '60s if her gear had been more portable. Obviously, bloody-minded persistence in the face of disrespect and hostility is a relatable theme for Cosey as well, so it is hard to think of another artist who could be more naturally suited for a project such as this. In short, Catz needed appropriately "Derbyshire" music for her film, but there were very few usable Derbyshire recordings available. Introduce Cosey Fanni Tutti, who immersed herself in the archive's collection (267 reel-to-reel tapes found in cereal boxes, I believe) and Derbyshire's notes and set about casting a Delia-esque spell in her own way on her own gear (though Delia's actual voice does make some appearances). As an aside, this is not Cosey's first homage to Derbyshire, as Carter Tutti's "Coolicon" took its name and inspiration from a metal lampshade that Delia regularly used to make sounds.

Interestingly, my initial impression of the album was that it captured the whole vibe of Derbyshire's known work quite well, but it had the (brooding) "ambient" feel that plagues a lot of soundtracks by design (good composers tend to focus on crafting and sustaining moods rather than on tearing the audience's focus away from the screen images). That said, the album does begin with a piece centered around Cosey's signature cornet that feels like an excerpt from a lost TG album devoted to soulful sax melodies for lovers (that immediately curdle, smear, and get enveloped in a black ooze of electronic drones, of course). I thought a few pieces stood out as especially good, but I did not fully appreciate Cosey's vision until I listened to the album on headphones at sufficient volume. That is when I realized that this album had some serious bite and that there was considerably more depth and nuance than I was previously aware of. Apparently, the difference between decent ambient music and a compelling electronic composition can sometimes be remedied with just a volume knob.

In any case, this album is a sustained plunge into a rabbit hole of retro-futurist psychedelia, cryptic voice fragments, and cool electronic sounds. It works nicely as an immersive whole, but several individual pieces come and go quite a bit quicker than they deserve. The one-minute lysergic cabaret of "Psychedelic Projections," for example, sounds like a would-be highlight from Love's Secret Domain. Elsewhere, I quite liked the psychotropic air raid nightmare of "Sirens" and the wonky Ghost Box-adjacent cosmic horror of "Four Bebe." That said, there are plenty of other wonderfully unique and warped moments strewn throughout the album, as my notes are filled with phrases like "a horse dissolves into extradimensional ghost dust," "a cold wind blows through an empty shack where something bad happened," "subterranean exotica by nightmare people," and "sounds like a creepy fairytale about a sneezing gnome." Anyone who can convincingly evoke even one of those scenes is probably deserving of my undying respect and Cosey manages to nail like ten of them here. This is an impressively alien album.

Listen here.

23 October 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

When I first heard the thumping house/disco EP Was It Ever Real?, I had a very hard time believing that it could possibly be a teaser for something more substantial, as much of that EP felt like top-tier Soft Pink Truth that leaves very little room for improvement. If those songs did not make the cut for the full-length, I felt the album surely had to be either absolutely brilliant or absolutely wrong-headed with no possible middle ground. As it turns out, I was at least right about the "little room for improvement" bit, as Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? is not noticeably stronger than the preceding EP. Instead, it feels more like a lateral move, taking Drew Daniel's star-studded house party in a more kaleidoscopically arty and eccentric direction. Unsurprisingly, Deeper features roughly the same international cast of talented guests as the EP, but there are some noteworthy new additions as well, such as Nate Wooley, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, and Jaime Stewart (Xiu Xiu). The result is a bit less "all killer, no filler" this time around, but the trade-off is that Deeper is an appropriately deeper and more immersive plunge into Daniel's psyche, touching upon everything from Barry White to George Bataille to krautrock while still managing to be functional, forward-thinking, and archly fun dance music.

Thrill Jockey

The album kicks off in style with its first certified banger, "Deeper," which deceptively fades in with bleary drones before launching into a straight up classic disco groove with all the requisite hand claps and funky guitars. There is enough subtle dissonance to give it a somewhat delirious and unreal feeling right from the jump, but things do not get truly art-damaged until an unexpected church bell passage subsides. While the groove remains unswervingly propulsive for a bit longer, the insistent sexy thump is increasingly mingled with generous helpings of kitschy string stabs, tropical-sounding guitars, hazy flutes, and a host of other inspired psych touches before it all dissolves into smeary abstraction. I suppose the extended running time and ambient comedown preclude "Deeper" from being a hot single, but several of the pieces that immediately follow gamely rekindle the dancefloor fire. "La Joie Devant La Mort" is one of the album's more "perverse pop moments," as Jaime Stewart sings a George Bataille line about being in search of joy before death over an endearingly weird groove that calls to mind Coil's Love's Secret Domain album colliding with "A Fifth of Beethoven" and a chorus of tiny frogs. Wasner then takes the mic for the breezily sensuous "Wanna Know," which milks the album title's question for all its worth over a groove that could have been plucked from a Love Unlimited Orchestra album. The following "Trocadero" then pays homage to the "sleaze" disco subgenre synonymous with the titular SF club before "Mood Swing" ends the first half with a killer slow-building disco fusion of spiritual jazz, gurgling psychedelia, and Reich-ian piano patterns.

The second half is a bit more abstract and eclectic, as the 13-minute "Sunwash" is a chilled out bit of synthy Tangerine Dream-inspired spaciness. To some degree, It feels like it belongs on a completely different album than everything that came before it, but it makes a fine palate cleanser and it technically is on a different album vinyl-wise (Deeper is a double LP). The languorously dub-inflected "Joybreath" extends that post-club "morning after" vibe further, as Rose E Kross whispers and murmurs Bataille lines in French as twinkling piano and bleary sax and vibraphone melodies lazily wander through a fuzzy dreamscape. I imagine it evokes the feeling of waking up on a beach at sunrise after a hedonistic night of dancing and substance abuse, but my life is far too boring for me to be entirely certain of that. A couple of curious detours then follow, but the album ends on an incredibly strong note with a swooning cover of Willie Hutch's "Now That It's All Over" that feels half "psychotropic exotica bliss" and half "Love Boat" theme. It's a fittingly beautiful and poignant end to the album, as Daniel arguably sheds all of his ironic, sophisticated, and avant-garde tendencies for six minutes of pure naked joy (albeit pure naked joy repurposed from a blaxploitation classic). In any case, it is one hell of a cover as well as the perfect end to a thoroughly enjoyable album. And, of course, both Deeper and Was It Ever Real? have earned a permanent place in my heart for being primarily inspired by an anonymous woman's decades-old grievance with a club DJ.

Listen here.

23 October 2022

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

On two distinct new albums, legendary composer Asmus Tietchens approaches different subject material with his current technique of recycling sounds beyond the point of any recognition. Schatten Ohne Licht (Shadow Without Light) is grounded in post-anthropological concepts influenced by scholar/writer Ulrich Horstmann's conceptualization of a planet devoid of biological life. Comparatively, Parallelen would seem focused on more theoretical mathematics and a greater sense of the abstract.

The opening title piece of Schatten Ohne Licht features Tietchens blending quiet tones with distant, low-end rumbles, with both the higher and lower frequencies layering and building throughout. Towards the half-way point he switches things around, using the same components but swapping around the arrangements, becoming a different sounding piece entirely. "Anthroporsaurus" follows a similar approach, pairing floating hints of melody with deep space pulsations and a machinery like chug, although the sum total of the parts is more delicate than anything else.

Black Rose

Later, "Es ist Endlich Still" (It's Finally Quiet) is a perfect example of the post-organic life themes of the album. High register crystalline sounds are joined with liquid, wet noise. Combining strange outbursts, flattened frequencies, and some occasional crackling, it sounds as empty and devoid of life as the title would insinuate. Closer "Kolosse" is an appropriately dramatic ending, all shimmering and looming space with chiming swells peppered throughout. As a whole it is more forceful and heavy compared to the other pieces on the disc, and results in a fitting climax for the album.

Comparatively, Parallelen comes across as a more purely sonic experiment as opposed to one grounded in a specific theme. The components are similar, such as the wobbling tones and occasionally shrill passages of the lead off piece "Parallele Ebene 1," but instead of conjuring desolate images of rocks and minerals, there is an almost vintage science fiction soundtrack feel, something Tietchens has used to great effect in the past. A sense of alien life and space also comes through extremely well for "Parallele 1" via guttural sounds and ringing pulsations that sound like nothing from Earth.

Line

Tiectchens also toys with conventional music elements throughout this album, such as the fragments of backwards melody that drift through the murky, interlocking layers of abstract sound throughout "Parallele Ebene 2." Ghostly tones also inhabit "Paralelle 4" quite obviously, but the musicality is most prominent on the closing "Am Fluchtpunkt." The piece features what sounds like digital low bit rate detritus molded into almost music box like melodies, resulting in a strangely active, almost carnival like atmosphere that is far lighter (and dare I say almost fun) than what preceded it.

It would seem that Tietchens utilized similar strategies to create the sounds used on both Schatten Ohne Licht and Parallelen, but it is the different approach to theme and composition that makes for two distinct works. Both, however, are indicative of Tietchens' ever evolving style and imagination. Even well over 40 years since his first recorded work, he is consistently producing new and innovative works that never feel stuck in any sort of complacency, but instead is indicative of his never-ending creativity.

Listen here.