14 May 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Vandever's first solo album was recorded in three days and features her improvising on (mainly) trombone, effects, and voice. The improvised approach never shoves this music even an inch away from clarity, deftness, and emotional depth. Every piece feels fresh, abstract and dreamlike—as if she's channeling spirit voices from elsewhere—but all are restrained by the beguiling warmth, subtle tension, and comforting understatement of her sonorous playing. It's marvelous to hear the trombone burst, or maybe a more accurate descriptor would be slide, free of all genre association.

AKP

From the opening tune, entitled "Recollections From Shore," the album riffs off echoes and memories from Vandever's childhood in Hawaii, although this knowledge did not stop my imagination from going wherever it wished. During "Stillness In Hand" I was soon picturing steam trains huffing and puffing through a damper, gently undulating, European landscape. Then, while enjoying "Temper the Wound" I began seeing myself flying a box kite high in the sky one 1960s summer day on the East coast of England. That latter piece and also the even slower track "Held In" both give the feeling of having been created by harnessing pain or past scars to produce sounds that balance sadness with strength and survival. I have read of her mentioning waking from dreams in tears, or being comforted by visits from past memories and spirits—some when asleep and others when awake. At any rate, the softness and subtlety of this music lingers in the brain like the sound of hard-earned and humble wisdom. In Vandever's hands the trombone leaves behind any single genre or any other limitation. Effects are not overdone, and technique is hidden in plain sight as simple unhurried phrases loop, fold, or crumble slightly into themselves in a barely decipherable but extremely melodic manner.

A clear sign of a beloved record, and that's how I feel about We Fell In Turn, is when it is immediately satisfying but also slowly reveals more of itself, is deep and substantial enough to bear repeat listens yet always seems to end too soon. Engineer and producer Lee Meadvin is credited for giving valuable prompts, which presumably assisted in focusing and framing these brilliant improvisations. Hearing this was like an open goal for me, hopefully in a good way. I say that because the term "prompts" is now, of course, associated with the use of AI. To clarify: there is nothing even remotely artificial about We Fell In Turn. Furthermore, the luckiest bot program on earth could not have hit this bullseye if asked to imitate "an extremely detailed trombone recording in the style of Robbie Basho's "Orphan's Lament" and William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops along with atmospheric tones and cool yet melancholy textures." Which is not to say that methodology is everything. We read everyday about how artist x has, for instance, only used analogue equipment to create album y (but that can't save it from sounding like a huge confused messy zzzz). No such problem here as Kalia Vandever does not put a foot wrong.

At this point I could refer to such distinctive proponents of an instrument as Jan Garbarek, although Laura Cannell (cello and recorder) and maybe Kali Malone (pipe organ, synthesizer) also come to mind. Similarly, Vandever is taking the time to sincerely communicate the essence or feeling of true tales with a sonorous power, both memorable and restrained. Rather than trying to do too much, overreaching, and muddling things, she proceeds at her own pace, in her own style, and gets it just right. After hearing her solo work, I discovered that she is touring in the band of a popular artist who - let's be crystal clear - says nothing to me in my life. It would have been a grave mistake if I had allowed that fact to dissuade me from giving this album a chance; it is a contemplative work of elegant dreamscapes, a sound collage, a map of hidden feelings; organically constructed as if the puffy clouds in a clear blue sky had been blown into position by breath from ancestral lips.

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14 May 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Letters From A Forest uses snippets of conversation, sung and spoken lyrics, simple guitar and piano lines, and (as Christian puts it) fake strings, to create what we can call collage atmospherics. The sum of these parts is a tender sounding album, crammed full of romanticized lyrics with a tough, honest, edge and a wondrous stream of consciousness style. When hearing tracks like the "The Ballad of Martin and Caroline,"—a tale of fates deeply entwined in a doomed love spiral—I felt like I was half napping or jet lagged in a spare room, overhearing friends babbling to one another about deceased acquaintances,musical heroes, old records,chance meetings, and the places where it all happened. As such, Letters is an ode to an array of magnificent and magnificently flawed people (some well known, others characters from local legend). It is a sketchbook of notes, more poetic than pathetic, with a palpably emotional tug, celebrating the contradictory nature of life.

Comet Gain

David Christian has been issuing records for a couple of decades or more, mostly as the group Comet Gain (which seems to have existed in an alternate reality close and concurrent to mine, but totally invisible to me), yet much of his music feels like bumping into an old friend and picking up exactly with whatever you were talking about years ago. This release hits with a wave of happy/sad reflection, full of understated emotion and unflinching humor. A highlight among many is "The Ballad of Terry Hall," a heartbreaking ode to the fallen deadpan Specials frontman—also appreciating Martin Duffy from Felt (and one or two others) along the way. Here is an unabashedly enthusiastic appreciation of music and also of being oneself however strange, shy, or weird that may be. Christian illuminates the flip side, too: the undertone of serious melancholy which no one escapes in this life. He clearly has the life experience to sound off the cuff while reeling off detailed evocations of people in a style both nostalgic and unflinchingly frank, and he grasps the minor yet essential paradox of how certain dead end jobs are a fertile breeding ground for sparks of creativity, dreams of stardom, addiction, delusion, theft, and humor.

Examples of the sound and lyrical content: "You Know (With John McKeown)" has the subterranean twang of Phantom Payn Days. "Ribbons For Mickey" celebrates the short life of a bristling local character, with a scar over his eye, "from fighting NF skins* after a Madness gig, but his sister said he fell off a piano stool when he was a kid." Elsewhere, odd rhythms surface. There is a metallic slap to "She Had Sinister Hands" and a tropical twist on "Squirrel Beach Sundown." At times the pace picks up, which adds contrast, but I think mainly because it's the flow, and Christian always goes with it in a very endearing one-take warts and all style.

The sparkling "Someone's Home But Not Mine" has a cosmic feel, and also resembles those times when the computer has opened a separate track to the one you're listening to and the combination sounds great. That sense is a constant here, as tracks echo and bleed over into other tracks in an unpredictable way with speech, strings and plonking keys going back and forth like people answering questions that haven't been asked. On "All My Diaries At Once," David Christian says "you can't talk to your past" but this record is a brilliant kaleidoscopic meditation on his.

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*National Front skinheads

30 April 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This is the second duo collaboration between Chalk and Rebilly, as the pair previously surfaced with L'état Intermédiaire back in 2018. Their shared history goes back to at least 2012 though, as they teamed up with Vikki Jackman for A Paper Doll's Whisper Of Spring. While details about Tsilla are less scarce than usual due to its release on An'archives rather than Chalk's famously terse Faraway Press imprint, I still know very little about Rebilly other than the fact that he plays the clarinet. Beyond that, I am unwilling to hazard any guesses about who is playing what here, as both artists' contributions are largely blurred into a painterly haze (not entirely unfamiliar territory for Chalk). Far more relevant than the instrumentation is the album's inspiration: engraver Cécile Reims, whose "denuded landscapes," "spiraling abstractions," and "unearthly radiance" may have inspired Chalk's visual art as well. If not, Reims is at least a kindred spirit and her collaborations with Hans Bellmer, Leonor Fini, and Salvador Dali probably make a decent enough consolation prize. Reims's deepest impact on Tsilla may have been upon the process rather than the outcome, however, as the pair set out to honor her "tender weaving of emotional complexity carved with the hand-held and simple tools of artisans" in their own way ("a similar transfiguration of base materials"). Regardless of how it was made, Tsilla is quite a unique album in the Chalk canon, as the best pieces evoke a beautifully nightmarish strain of impressionism.

An'archives

The album opens in unexpectedly tense and disturbing fashion with "Pliskiné," as shivering strings quiver in dissonant harmonies over a bed of subtle, slowly shifting drones like a swarm of hallucinatory bees with bad intentions. For better or worse, that particular descent into horror is not a representative one, though Tsilla is quite a dark and uncharacteristically heavy album for Chalk (and presumably for Rebilly as well). "Pliskiné" aside, the album's other deep plunge into nightmare territory is "Hauteville," which feels like a groaning, slow-motion descent into squirming, buzzing cosmic horror at its most exquisite. In general, the longer pieces tend to be the strongest while the shorter pieces feel more like bridges or interludes, though "Visages d'Espagne" is a notable exception that resembles a seasick duet between a koto and a vibrato pedal.

Elsewhere, "L'embouchure Du Temps" is yet another unsettling highlight, as it arguably resembles the curdled and time-stretched sounds of an infernal brass band experienced while in the throes of a fever delirium. I also noted that it sounded more like a cursed fog than a musical composition, which is probably a compliment of sorts. The closing "Retour À Kibarty" is yet another gem and a well-placed one at that, as it almost feels like a vivid sunrise is swelling from the horizon in a doomed but valiant attempt to break the album's spell and burn away all the lingering darkness and murk. That said, if it actually was a sunrise, it would probably be one with a lot of bruised purples and burning oranges, as it is still quite a haunting (and haunted) piece. In fact, it even dissipates like a ghost in the end to helpfully punctuate the disquietingly supernatural feel of Chalk and Rebilly's drones.

Needless to say, the fact that Andrew Chalk has released yet another beautifully realized, richly nuanced, and immersive album should surprise no one at this point in his career, but Tsilla nevertheless stands out as a fascinating outlier due to its unusually dissonant, smeared, and unsettling atmosphere.

Listen here.

30 April 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest LP from San Francisco-based guitar visionary Bill Orcutt is a spiritual successor of sorts to 2013's A History of Every One, as that was apparently his last solo acoustic guitar album. The resemblance between the two albums largely ends there, however, as Jump On It is as different from the deconstructed standards of History as it is from last week's Chatham-esque guitar quartet performance for NPR. While I do enjoy Orcutt's Editions Mego solo era quite a bit, there is no denying that his artistry has evolved dramatically over the last decade and his recent work definitely connects with me on a deeper level. In more concrete terms, Orcutt's work no longer resembles the choppy, convulsive, and possessed-sounding fare of History, as he has since reined in his more fiery, passionate impulses enough to leave more room for passages of tender, simple beauty. In fact, Jump On It might be the farthest that the balance has swung towards the latter, as the characteristic Orcutt violence is a rare presence in the collection of quietly lovely and spontaneous-sounding guitar miniatures.

Palilalia

The album opens in appropriately gorgeous fashion, as the first minute of "What Do You Do With Memory" is devoted to a tender, halting and bittersweet arpeggio motif, though the piece then takes a detour before reprising that wonderful theme for the finale. The detour is admittedly brief, but so is the song itself, which illustrates a central feature of this album: these pieces generally feel like a series of spontaneous snapshots/3-minute vignettes rather than fully formed compositions that build into something more. That is not meant as a critique, but it does mean that Jump On It is something other than Orcutt's next major artistic statement. I am tempted to say that most of this album feels akin to a pleasant but loose improvisation around a campfire, but there are also some pieces that evoke an usually meditative Django Reinhardt playing alone in a late-night hotel room.

The connective tissue between those two poles is, of course, casual virtuosity and that is the most readily apparent trait of Jump On It: it can feel languorous, pensive, and searching at times, but there are plenty of fiery runs, viscerally snapping bends, and surges of passion to keep things compelling and remind me that this is still very much a Bill Orcutt album. To my ears, "The Ocean Will Find Its Shore" is the album's centerpiece, as its early sense of forward motion seamlessly dissipates into a tender reverie before more intense emotions bubble to the surface for a brief but intense crescendo. "In A Column Of Air" is another major highlight, however, as a lyrical minor key melody fitfully winds through scrabbling note flurries, quivering double-stops, emphatic chord sweeps, violent bends, and sundry other dynamic flourishes (and it all ends with a killer repeating riff to boot). Unsurprisingly, the remaining pieces are all enjoyable as well, albeit with the caveat that they generally feel more like sketches or miniatures than fresh, fully articulated masterpieces.

While I still heartily maintain that just about everything released on Orcutt's main Palilalia imprint is compelling and significant, I am quite curious to see how this album in particular is received. It feels like one of his less substantial recent releases to me (particularly in the wake of Music For Four Guitars), yet it also seems like it could reach an atypically wide audience, as Orcutt's characteristically soulful and singular playing is couched in a much more casual and intimate setting than the snarling, incendiary, and more overtly avant-garde fare that he is usually associated with.

Listen here.

30 April 2023

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

Finally seeing the light of day after two years of production related delays, with the recordings dating back even longer than that, this collaboration between Daniel Burke (IOS) and the late Stefan Weisser (Z'EV) could almost be a time capsule, except the sound of it is entirely timeless. Recorded and mixed between 2008 and 2012, the two lengthy pieces that make up this self-titled album clearly bear the mark of both individuals, but mesh together beautifully in the very different sounding sides of the record.

Feast of Hate and Fear / Cipher Productions / Oxidation / Korm Plastics / Drone / Personal Archives / Public Eyesore / Tribe Tapes / Liquid Death / No Part of It

Although a mail-based collaboration, Z'EV and IOS's work complement each other perfectly, with the acoustic percussion from the former weaved into the electronics and field recordings of the latter, and both artists having a hand in further mixing and processing afterwards. These elements are clear on both side-long pieces that make up the album, but structurally the two halves differ rather notably.

The first piece, "A Strategy of Transformation," is the more chaotic of the two. Jerky stop/starts, abrupt percussive outbursts, and oddly processed field recordings constantly flow and keep things moving, albeit in a extremely unpredictable way. Disorienting in its structure, the piece drastically swings from violent metallic clattering to subtle synth tones and into processed field recordings. Harsh, pummeling layers of noise are quickly pulled back to leave only open space before blasting off again. At the end some of the few clearly discernable sounds come in, mostly the plucked strings of a guitar (I assume) and banging metal, but the most of what precedes that is pure ambiguity.

The other side, "Smaller Revolutions," features the two working instead with sustained, elongated structures as opposed to the chaos of the other half. Bright electronic tones underscore metallic percussion bathed in heavy reverb. Electronics tend to stay consistent, with other layers brought in and out, although less abruptly than the other side. Fragments of conversation, what could be the rhythmic clattering of a train, and the sounds of birds all appear. It might be comparably more structured, but it equally as challenging as the first half.

Apparently, this is only a portion of the recordings Burke and Weisser exchanged, so I would imagine more work is likely forthcoming. But even with just this record, the two have produced a work that balances complexity and harshness extremely well. Never full on brutal, nor purely ambient, but drifts nicely between those two extremities, and the differing structures kept it a fascinating work from the beginning all the way to the end.

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30 April 2023

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

A 10" record rigidly divided into four different pieces (each mostly around four minutes in length), this new work from the enigmatic sounding, long-standing UK project is mostly centered around the same authoritarian lyrical elements, but each differs significantly in their compositional approach. A complex mix of styles define each piece, neither of which are too similar to another, but are unquestionably Contrastate, and showcases all of the unique sounds they are known for.

Black Rose Records

The aforementioned lyrical elements are quite dystopian "You do not have the right to be free/ you do not have the right to shelter and food/You do not have the right to love/You do not have the right to work" are just a few examples and appear in various stages of processing throughout. The first of the four untitled pieces is classic Contrastate: bursts of noise, sustained digital sounds, fragments of voice, and a significant number of loops layered atop one another. Lush synth passages and bits of conversation are consistent with the trio's previous works. For the second, the use of loops continues, but with hints of melody and cut up percussion pervade, making for a more spacious and restrained feel in comparison.

On the other side, Contrastate introduces third piece with deep, pulsating electronics, melodic loops, and subtle metallic percussion, with the band going even more into ambient realms when compared to the first half. For the final song, things get almost normal sounding. The same voice samples appear but here they're cut up and processed more and make for part of a low bit rate digital mass. Everything else builds to an almost techno throb via complex drum programming that could almost be danceable. Towards the end the piece makes another shift, this time into a jazzy shuffle that's even further "out there" for the band.

The totalitarian themed voices that appear in all four of the songs on 35 Project could end up a bad cliché in the wrong hands, but the occasional bleak humor that appears throughout Contrastate's discography makes this far less of a liability and instead consistent with what I would expect. Almost like a stylistic sampler of their lengthy discography, there is a lot to be heard in the terse 16 minutes of this EP, and all of it is wonderful. It is yet another excellent work from a consistently unpredictable project.

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23 April 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This eleventh album from Germany's Kammerflimmer Kollektief is not my first exposure to the project, but it did succeed in making me wonder why I have not been a passionate fan of their work before now. Admittedly, the idea of harmonium-driven free-form jazz/psychedelia is not quite my cup of tea on paper, which goes a long way towards explaining why I was so slow to embrace this project, yet the right execution can transform just about anything into gold and this foursome are extremely good at what they do. It also does not hurt that the Kammerflimmer gang have some intriguing and unusual inspirations, as they namecheck both Franz Mesmer and underheard German psychonauts The Cocoon in addition to the requisite nod to Can. Kammerflimmer Kollektief certainly assimilate those influences in a unique way though, as the best songs on Schemen sound like a killer post-rock/psych band blessed with an unusually great rhythm section and real talents for roiling guitar noise, simmering tension, and volcanic catharsis.

Karlrecords

This unique and eclectic project was founded by guitarist Thomas Weber back in the late '90s and has had a somewhat fluid membership since, but it is safe to say Heike Aumüller significantly transformed its trajectory when she joined the fold in 2002, as she is responsible for both the band's unusual cover art and the even more unusual use of harmonium. Unsurprisingly, I encounter the harmonium a lot with drone music, as it lends itself to that aesthetic perfectly, but Aumüller generally uses it for more melodic purposes and clearly has no aversion to dissonance, as it sounds like she is beating her bandmates to death with an accordion in "Zweites Kapitel [ruckartig]" and "Fünftes Kapitel [kreuzweis]." While "Zweites Kapitel" is an endearingly explosive feast of scrabbling guitar noise, clattering free-form drumming, and tormented bow scrapes, the album's stronger pieces tend to be those which take a more simmering and sensuous approach.

The two major highlights are arguably "Drittes Kapitel [ungesagt, dann vergessen]" and "Sechstes Kapitel [herausgewunden]." In the former, a soulful slide guitar melody unfolds over an understated and almost sultry drum and double bass backdrop before unexpectedly exploding into a viscerally howling noise-guitar catharsis around the halfway point. In the latter, Weber's guitar sleepily slides around over a gently smoldering groove before drummer Christopher Brunner unleashes one hell of a free drumming tour de force. I suppose my praise of those two pieces suggests that Kammerflimmer Kollektief invariably propel themselves towards the expected free music freakout, but the reality is happily more compelling and sophisticated than that, as there are often some delightful psychotropic textures and vapor trails involved, as well as an effortlessly organic "hive mind" intuition for waxing and waning intensity. Aumüller's harmonium also adds an element of temporal dislocation to the mix, as its presence often feels beamed in from a previous century. The album's remaining pieces generally tend to be either too brief or too deconstructed to make the same deep impact as the highlights, but the shapeshifting opener "Erstes Kapitel [verschliffen]" certainly has some memorably trippy and intense moments and everything adds up to an impressively strong and distinctive whole. It is quite nice to hear musicians with legitimate jazz chops devoted to such a noisy, spacey, and psych-damaged vision.

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23 April 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

In the village of Stanton Drew, and dating from around 4,500 years ago, is the third largest complex of standing stone circles in England. David Colohan visited the site one rainy morning in early 2020 and was inspired by the mix of winter sunshine and eerie ancient atmosphere to create a record of his impressions. Fair enough, since people rarely send postcards from their travels anymore. Actually, the postcard analogy only works if it allows for someone designing a postcard when they get home, since Colohan's use of field recordings is minimal and he doesn't really create music in situ. He's done this before with other locations but A Lunar Standstill is easily his most consistent recording.

Woodford Halse

Colohan uses alto saxophone, clarinet, electric guitar, field recordings, harmonium, mellotron, modular synthesizer, trombone, and voice. Maybe I am triggered in a good way by the harmonium but much of this music gives off such a warm and pleasant hum that I started dreaming about Ivor Cutler as a Druid—although I hope that does not sound trite, as Cutler's music has a spiritual grace and trusty home grown solemnity which bestows upon it a uniquely absurd sense of substance and sincerity. The more bizarre it gets the more serious it becomes. On the subject of bizarre, Colohan's "A Static Field" is strange—as if it were composed for divining sticks, ley lines, and glow worms.

This album starts slowly though, with the first couple of tracks seeming like elbows inching into hot water before giving the baby a proper bath, or even someone in a Zen state testing the acoustics in their tiled hallway. It's as if we're driving to the ancient stone circle but we're not there yet. After that things go up a notch: we've arrived, the weather is perfect, and the sandwiches we packed taste unusually good. The voices on "Born Over Blind Springs" seem a portal to elsewhere, to a location where human emotion intersects with history and myth, nature and spirituality. Even better is "The River Talking In It's Sleep," perhaps the most avant-piece here, suitably liquid in structure and flow—with lovely clarinet and mellotron or synth—a real golden ear point climax on the record

The Stanton Drew circles were probably first noted by the famous antiquarian John Aubrey in 1664. He recorded that the villagers were breaking stones with sledge-hammers and that several stones had recently been removed. The circles are less well known and visited than Avebury or Stonehenge, and are situated a few miles southwest of Keynsham (the town culturally immortalized in the title of an album by the Bonzo Dog Band, in reference to Horace Batchelor, a football pools predictor from Keynsham who regularly advertised his service on pop music radio broadcasts in the early 1960s. In advertisements Batchelor would spell out the town's name when reading his postal address. The album starts with a line taken from Batchelor's radio advertisement "I have personally won over..."

David Colohan has been quite prolific, and has releases available for free download. At the risk of sounding like Horace Bachelor, I have personally grabbed several and A Lunar Standstill ranks with my favorite of his works, including "Emmadorp" from Prosperpolder and also his Visitations album. It includes "The Quoit & The Cove" which has an impressive harmonic resonance, even after I realized my wife was inadvertently accompanying David Colohan on vacuum cleaner from the next room.

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23 April 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest release from husband and wife duo Zach & Denny Corsa appears to be their fifth full-length under the Nonconnah name (the duo were previously known as Lost Trail) and it is characteristically wonderful. As is the norm for Nonconnah, Unicorn Family was culled from several years of recordings featuring a host of eclectic collaborators (folks from Lilys, Half Japanese, Fire-Toolz, etc.) and those recordings have been expertly stitched together into beautifully layered and evocative soundscapes teeming with cool tape effects, thought-provoking samples, and killer shoegaze-inspired guitar work. In short, business as usual, but Nonconnah's business is consistently being one of the greatest drone projects on earth, so this is already a lock for one of my favorite albums of the year. Aside from the presence of a lovely lo-fi folk gem with actual singing, the only other notable departures from Nonconnah's existing run of gorgeous albums are shorter song durations than usual and the fact that the duo's samples have more of an eschatological bent. I suppose this album is an unusually focused and distilled statement as well, but that feels like a lateral move given how much I loved the sprawling immensity of Don't Go Down To Lonesome Holler.

Was Ist Das?

The album opens on an unusually simple and intimate note with "It's Eschatology! The Musical," which approximates a melancholy Microphones-esque strain of indie folk recorded directly to boombox. Despite its amusing title and throwaway final line of "that's how the album starts," it is a legitimately lovely, soulful, and direct way to kick off an album that is otherwise composed entirely of complexly layered soundscapes of tape loops and shimmering guitar noise. I have been an enthusiastic fan of those soundscapes for a while, of course, as well as an equally huge fan of the way the pair transform sped-up tape loops into rapturously dizzying and swirling mini-symphonies at the heart of their drone pieces. Given that, I do not have anything particularly fresh to say on those topics other than that I was newly struck by how the combination of slow drones and sped up tapes evokes the hypnotic streaking of car lights in time-lapse footage of a busy highway at night.

I was also newly struck by how singularly Nonconnah succeed at making ambient/drone music feel deeply personal and sometimes even profound. I have had similar thoughts about Celer in the past, but Nonconnah achieve the same feat in a much more direct way, as Zach and Denny often embed compelling monologues in their pieces that reveal a bit of their inner lives and existential preoccupations. In the case of this album, those monologues tend to be about religious experiences, how chance encounters with other people can completely change our lives, and how revelatory it can be when one's perspective regarding one's place in the universe is transformed. In fact, it often feels like great Nonconnah songs exist solely to frame a fleeting glimpse of deep wisdom for maximum impact. While those moments might feel like standard self-help or religious fare in a different context, their apocalyptic context here feels more like a dear friend just time-traveled back and grabbed me by the shoulders to impart something incredibly urgent and potentially life-changing.

That is especially fascinating to me as a non-religious person, as I normally process visions of God and tales of the coming Rapture with a mixture of skepticism and morbid humor, but a piece like "And It Was Beautiful And Glorious" still managed to feel like a religious experience to me, as the central monologue is so movingly sincere and hopeful and surrounded by celestial shimmer. The choral samples at the core of "Heaven Becomes Apeirophobia" also stirred similarly euphoric feelings in my dark heart. In the interest of thoroughness, I should probably also mention that "A Small Wave Of Missing Pets In The Early 1980s" is yet another swoon-inducing highlight and that "We Found A Kitten Skull Painted Gold" is darkly mesmerizing, but this whole album is absolutely sublime and feels like the best kind of fever dream. I will be filing Unicorn Family right next to Nate Scheible's Fairfax on my "Albums That Are Sometimes So Profoundly Beautiful That I Feel Like I Imagined Them" shelf.

Listen here.

09 April 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest opus from Tim Hecker is amusingly billed as "a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient." Given the weighty themes of his previous albums, Hecker's actual inspiration presumably runs much deeper than that, yet the "beacon of unease" part of that claim may be more literal than it sounds, as one of the album's central features is described as "Morse code pulse programming." While I am not well-versed enough in Morse code to determine if Hecker's oddly timed rhythms are covertly incorporating text or a narrative into these warped and nightmarish soundscapes, the gnarled and harrowing melodies that accompany those erratic pulses are more than enough to make the album thoroughly compelling listening regardless. Aside from that, No Highs marks yet another significant creative breakthrough for a formidable artist hellbent on continual reinvention and bold evolution. While it is hard to predict whether or not No Highs will someday be considered one of Hecker's defining masterpieces or merely an admirable and unique detour, its handful of set pieces feel quite brilliant to me and I do not expect my feelings to change on that point..

Kranky

The general tone of No Highs feels like a continuation of the smeared, howling anguish of Konoyo and Anoyo, approximating lonely distress signals emitted from the smoldering ruins of Konoyo's planetary death spasms. Compositionally, however, No Highs feels like an entirely different animal altogether, as Hecker has swapped out roiling maximalism for simmering minimalism and distilled his palette to little more than insistently telegraph-like synth pings punctuated with occasional plunges into swirling and howling cosmic horror. In fact, the album makes me feel like I am stationed at a desolate outpost in a blackened wasteland nervously watching apocalyptic storms mass on the distant horizon. Unsurprisingly, the strongest pieces tend to be the ones where those storms reach their full fury, such as the opening "Monotony."

Like many pieces on the album, "Monotony" begins modestly with an insistently pinging synth rhythm, but that calm proves to be illusory as one hell of a howling maelstrom stealthily forms to propel the piece towards a thoroughly harrowing and gnarled climax. I am especially impressed at how thoroughly Hecker smears and warps his sounds, as they continually feel like they are fading in and out of focus (and in and out of tune) to create organically shapeshifting (and oft-ugly) harmonies and an immersively spatialized listening experience. To my ears, No Highs often evokes a nightmarish (and more visceral) inversion of Boards of Canada's sun-dappled and nostalgia-soaked "worn and wobbly tape" aesthetic.

The longest pieces tend to be the strongest as well, as lead single "Lotus Light" blossoms into yet another tour de force of smeared and undulating horror, while "Anxiety" culminates in a roiling shoegaze/dreampop finale with some help from recurring guest saxophonist Colin Stetson. I did not expect to be so excited about Tim Hecker enlisting a saxophonist, but his instincts turned out to be characteristically unerring in that regard, as Stetson's infrequent surfacings are a reliable highlight. There are a few other pleasant surprises lurking elsewhere, such as pedal steel flourishes, buried techno grooves, or fluttering Terry Riley-style sax patterns, but they are essentially just icing on an already wonderful cake (cutting edge sound design, inventively frayed and sickly textures, haunting melodies galore, etc.). While there are admittedly a few elements that make No Highs a bit less instantly gratifying than some previous Hecker classics, his absolute mastery of space, tension, texture, and catharsis is truly mesmerizing.

I can think of few artists who have managed to keep such an extended hot streak going and even fewer who potentially re-shape the future of electronic composition with each fresh statement. Tim Hecker may be two decades deep into his career at this point, yet each new album still feels like a legitimate event.

Listen here.