Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

The Strange Walls – …Won’t Last

Posted: 23 September 2016 in Albums
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Alrealon Musique – ALRN072 – 31st October 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

New York underground act The Strange Walls aren’t conformists or readily categorised: previous releases have been called shoegaze, darkwave, post punk, art punk, experimental, outsider. I’m not even sure what ‘outsider’ is supposed to sound like, but they’re big into their pseudonyms, thus cultivating an air of mystery around the band and their music. Emerging from an ever shifting lineup, core trio of the class of 2016, consisting of Jon V. Worthley, Dan Drogenous and Regna Yates, assisted by Jimmy Ayatollah and John Spreaders have whipped up something appropriately esoteric and wide-ranging for this release.

More significantly, …Won’t Last straddles many genres and yet subscribes wholly to none. A slow, ominous echoey bassline rent with shrieking, ghostly incidentals provide the musical backing to Regina’s vocal, which sings a vaguely familiar melody. But then it’s straight into a squalling lo-fi post-punk racket reminiscent of The Jesus and Mary Chain and A Place to Bury Strangers crossed with The Pop Group. It’s hard on the ears, and the contrast is almost schizophrenic. When an album’s tracks are as diverse as this, spanning psychedelia and folk and sometimes incorporating elements of at least two or three within a single song, it’s inevitable that some tracks will appeal more than others, and this is something which is wholly subjective. Yet the fact that there are some clear standout tracks is an objective observation, and the sequencing of the tracks accentuates this fact. The bleak electro sound of ‘In Time’ combines steely synths with a dash of dark pop sensibility which calls to mind early 80s Cure, and with its primitive, distant drum sound and reverb-soaked synth oscillations, ‘White’ lands somewhere between Cocteau Twins and Silver Apples, and these tracks inevitably sound stronger against the softer, less structured folky strummers. ‘Snow Day’ leans heavily on early New Order, while ‘Yawdons’ fulfils the criteria for obligatory droning experimental piece.

The ramshackle production equally works both for and against the album as a whole. Being better suited to some tracks than others, at times adding space and partially obscured sonic depths, at other simply sounding messy. The result, then, is an album that’s a bit hit and miss. Not bad, and in places brilliant, but a few tracks that will likely become skippers after a while.

 

The Strange Walls

The Stargazer’s Assistant – Remoteness Of Light

Posted: 21 September 2016 in Albums
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House Of Mythology – 26th August 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

So, House of Mythology released two albums simultaneously in August, and having exhausted myself dissecting the David Tibet / Youth collaboration, Create Christ, Sailor Boy under the Hypnopazūzu moniker, it’s taken me a while to steel myself for this.

It’s important to be clear that this is a very different kind of album, the three (or four*) long-form tracks manifesting as darkly ambient instrumental works, which build layers of dissonance and feedback over textured drones and rumbling lower frequencies. While flickers of pan-cultural influence emerge from the thrumming layers of sound, Remoteness Of Light is entirely devoid of any of the trappings of pseudomystical bullshit.

And while ‘Agents of Altitude builds layers of sound which unsettle and unnerve, ‘World of Amphibia’ which follows, is altogether more sparse and delicate, and corresponds more obviously with the nots which accompany the album and situate it in the deep submarine world, which remain every bit as intriguing and unknown as outer space.

In describing the journey of a deep-sea dive (‘Dive a kilometre into the ocean and you leave all surface illumination behind… Descend another ten and luminous forms flicker and burst through the endless black’), The Stargazer’s Assistant contextualise Remoteness Of Light. Of course, the tribal drumming and whining pipes aren’t a literal representation of the underwater experience, but they convey the strangeness of the deep-sea world and the excitement of the decent.

Moreover, there are essentially three areas which offer endless fascination, but have been wholly inadequately explored: space, the oceans, and the human mind. Remoteness Of Light delves into, and connects with, all of these:

The droning, sonorous and subtly rhythmic sonic turnings of the title track are, at times, so quiet and careful as to be barely present, but as ever, dark and unexpected, and it builds o a wheezing, whining, moaning undulation of sound, with a long, slow playout of heavy, echo-drenched percussion and a log-tapering drone. Credit where it’s due: this s sonically and texturally interesting. With a lot going on, it conforms to no specific gene, but engages the listener in unexpected ways, and the varied textures and shades of light and dark unquestionably have the capacity to tweak at the psyche.

* Track 4, ‘Birth of Decay’, is a live recording only available on the double vinyl edition, or as a download for people ordering directly from the House of Mythology web site. It wasn’t included in the digital review copy we received, so it might be awesome or utterly shit, but if it’s on a par with the rest of the album, it should be pretty good.

 

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Erik Friedlander – Rings

Posted: 19 September 2016 in Albums
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Skipstone Records – SKPST023

James Wells

Although Rings is credited to Erik Friedlander, it’s the first release from a new trio, Black Phebe, consisting of Friedlander (cello and composition), Shoko Nagai (piano, accordion and electronics) and Satoshi Takeshi (percussion) ‘with live looping as a compositional tool and featuring multiple trios within one’.

Rings is certainly a diverse album, and the trio’s multi-instrumentalism means there are a vast array of permutations for arrangements, and, in turn, styles. At times playful and whimsical, at others theatrical and dramatic and at others still mellow, Rings explores a host of different sonic experiences. With the accordion accompanied by plucked cello and tribal drumming, ‘The Seducer’ is a world/folk music crossover. Elsewhere, hints of jazz inform ‘Black Phebe’ and ‘Fracture’, the latter with a wandering bassline that sashays seductively hither and thither. Some of it’s really quite nice, and while some of it’s perhaps not so nice in the light and fluffy sense, the quality of the musicianship and the vigour of the diverse compositional styles is impressive.

 

ErikFriedlander-Rings

Bell Monks + Gregory Taylor – Brocades + Palimpsests

Posted: 16 September 2016 in Albums
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clang records – clang045 – 19th August 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

A note hangs in the air, sustaining, resonating, slowly decaying. Just before silence encroaches, the next note is struck. It hovers, hangs and gradually fades. A slow, oscillating drone crawls beneath. There is movement, but it’s evolutionary.

‘Brittle Evenings’ is led by an unfurling picked guitar line, deliberate, ponderous, reminiscent of the later Earth albums. Ghostly tones remain, sonic erasures which correspond with the idea of the palimpsest, and offer clues to the way the pieces formed. 14 short, quiet guitar pieces penned by Bell Monks for an art opening in 2012 provided the basis for the work. Later, they invited Ben Willis and Matt Sintchack (contrabass and saxophone respectively) to play over the tracks. Despite the addition of these new layers, they still felt the work seemed incomplete, and so called upon Gregory Taylor to rework the tracks digitally. Finally, with over 100 minutes of audio, it was Lars Graugaard’s editing which shaped the ten pieces which comprise the final track-listing. As such, the album is the result ofnear-infinite layering, relayering, additions and deletions.

But as to where one individual’s contribution ends and another’s begins is impossible to determine, and the beauty of the album is the way in which the parts blend, smudge, and blur together, folding into and over one another, obscuring, reshaping and remoulding to accommodate or obliterate previous layers and edits.

Each piece is also formed around shifting tones and sounds, the shapes and structures indistinct, fluid. Indeed, very little of the original guitar work is in evidence on listening to these pieces. Warm tones and an organic feel permeate the album’s fabric, although this is touched by a counterpoint of mechanical sounds, whirring, grating, rumbling. As one layer of sound fades, another emerges, leaving the shadows of the one before. Long, mournful strings quaver over rippling electronics and dulcimer-like chimes flicker in soft washes of sound. On ‘…Et Tremblant Feuilles’, perhaps the album’s most linear piece, a sonorous bass with gothic overtones builds a darkly ominous atmosphere.

The semi-industrial dark ambience of ‘Caress of Sun’ is constructed of layers of sound, heavy drones and interminably elongated scrapes, growing denser, deeper and more abstract as it progresses, emerging in a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic world. It isn’t until the album’s eighth track, ‘Sublimation Residue’, that the guitar becomes prominent once again, and once again, it gradually fades out to be engulfed by a soft sonic cloud.

 

Bell Monks Gregory Taylor

Jonty Harrison – Voyages

Posted: 15 September 2016 in Albums
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James Wells

Sometimes, arguably at its best, music has transportative qualities, either by capturing the essence of a place, or by triggering a memory which takes the listener to another time or place. On Voyages, Jonty Harrison marries these elements together.

The field recordings collaged to form ‘Espaces caches’ are eclectic, from birdsong and passing traffic to distant voices, the wash of waves, and creaking doors. Lifts and tannoy announcements, trains and miscellaneous, extraneous sounds bring the city and countryside together over a low-level hum.

‘Going / Places’ takes the travel and transportation theme further, having been inspired, Harrison explains in the accompanying notes, by contextualising the work thus: ‘One day, nearly 25 years ago, when I was recording a journey on the London Underground, a lost overseas visitor asked me directions: that incident gave me the idea for a piece based on the broad theme of travel…’

And, essentially, ‘Going / Places’, is a collection of field samples which documents a journey, or a succession of journeys, literal and mental. Because geography is a state of mind. It’s perhaps worth taking into account the fact that while the sounds were gathered from around the globe, the listening experience – even on a mobile device – is likely to e rather more fixed, geographically speaking. And the location is the context, is a way.

Although the track listing shows this as a single track with a running time of 59:55, the disc is mastered to twenty-three individual tracks, all segued, with some of the segments less than a minute long. Along the way, Harris takes sounds from different countries, and gives flavours of myriad different cultures. Ringing bells on trams, marimbas, chatter of a bustling market, birds and insects, myriad sounds of life, and life on the move. The sense are vivid, vibrant, recorded in full colour (so to speak). There’s a palpable sense of movement, of motion here, and Harrison describes the segments as ‘scenes’. In his ‘rough guide’, he lists the locations and sound sources. The notes, in their way transport you there.

With this album you may never need to leave the house to cross the oceans to explore the world. But after hearing it, you may want to.

 

Jonty Harrison – Voyages

James Harrison

Ashley Reaks – This is Planet Grot

Posted: 10 September 2016 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

Does Ashley Reaks ever sleep? Continuing his prodigious output with his ninth (?) album, his second of the year and his third in just twelve months, This is Planet Grot sees him shift from his distinctive anarchic blend of dub, ska, punk and experimental mash-up with a straight-up punk album. It’s a style that suits him well, and somewhat ironically, may stand as his most commercial album to date. Reaks’ dissatisfaction with people, politics and the world at large has been vented extensively over previously releases, but to hear him actually singing and yelling over driving guitars and thumping drums really pushes it all home.

Having recently toured as support for The Dickies (and covered vocal duties on occasion), Reaks’ knowledge and appreciation of the school of ’77/’78 is displayed abundantly here, and his knack for a chorus while still spitting bile over choppy chords owes everything to the likes of 999, The Vibrators and The Adverts and nothing to latter-day pretenders of punk like Green Day. ‘Freaks of the World Unite’ is a perfect example of an accessible yet fully punk, fist-pumping, pogotastic song which has ‘single’ written all over it, while the terrace chanting ‘Manipulator’ is, quite simply, a quintessential punk song, and clocks in at under two and a half minutes.

The production captures the vibe, too. There’s an indefinable quality to the way the instruments and vocal are mixed which (not being an engineer or producer myself) that recreates the ragged sound of the seventies without sounding artificial.

Some of the zanier, off-kilter guitar lines, coupled with the cover (one of his deranged collages) share common ground with the dark derangement of Rudimentary Peni, but for the most part, This is Planet Grot plays it straight, hard and fast, and is abrim with nifty bass runs and straining guitars. And, because it’s Ashley Reaks and because it’s a proper punk album, This is Planet Grot is unswerving in its sociopolitial contents, the anti-establishment sentiments delivered with sincerity and rabble-rousing gusto.

 

Ashley Reaks - This Is Planet Grot Cover Art

Hands Off Gretel – Burn the Beauty Queen

Posted: 9 September 2016 in Albums
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16th September 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Hands Off Gretel, formed only a year or so back, have already received frothing endorsements from Shirley Manson, Kate Nash and Linda Perry. The primary focus of such enthusiasm is nineteen-year-old Lauren Tate, who draws her inspiration from the likes of Brody Dalle and Courtney Love. It’s perhaps easy to forget that Courtney was, at one time, a formidable and fierce front woman: the first to Hole albums, Pretty on the Inside in particular, were raw, confrontational and really screamed home just tough women in rock could be.

Described as ‘a powerhouse of creativity’, Tate’s not only the band’s frontwoman and songwriter, but she also designs the band’ merchandise and is responsible for their videos, album artwork and photography. Some may say that it’s an example of control freakery, but bands tend to need someone with ambition, focus and (metaphorical) balls to make things happen, as musicians are, all too often, slack fuckers.

Without wishing to denigrate the contributions of the other band members – Burn the Beauty Queen is clearly a collective effort – and the sonic impact is more than a solo effort.

They come snarling out of the traps with high octane grunge-rager ‘Always Right’ and as much as it’s reminiscent of early Hole, L7, Babes in Toyland and Solar Race are equally a fitting comparison. There’ so much attitude here, and so much fire.

‘Always Miserable’ is so stripped back as to be no-fi to begin, but then halfway through its seven-minutes, it positively erupts in driving riffage and overloading guitar assault and vitriol. ‘bash my brains out, I’m so bored,’ Lauren sneers and hollers nihilistically amidst a tempest of driving guitars. She’s pissed off, alright. And over the course of the album, she vents on alienation, angst and (self) loathing with raw-throated rage, while the musical backing works the classic quiet / loud dynamic perfectly. And when they slow the pace and tone down the overdrive, as on ‘Little Man’ (and again, I’m reminded of Solar Race here), it’s stark and bleak as hell. It also provides a neat counterbalance to the three-chord stomp-and-holler tracks like ‘Oh Shit’, and if single cut ‘Teethin’’ is their concession to a pop track, it’s in the tradition of, say ‘Violet’ or Nymphs at their best (whatddaya mean, you’ve never heard of Nymphs? Sort it out!).

If Burn the Beauty Queen sounds like it’s from the school of ’94, that’s because what goes around comes around, and frankly, the whole pop/punk, post-hardcore and limp, packaged angst of what counts as ‘alternative’ for most of ‘the kids’ these days lacks guts and conviction. Paramore? Fuck that. The fact Lauren Tate is half my age suggests it’s not my nostalgia for the grunge era that makes me prick up my ears at Burn the Beauty Queen, but the fact there’s a new generation tapping into that primal release that only three chord and complete loathing of everything can give. And Burn the Beauty Queen is a great album: it’s got the rawness and authenticity that made grunge exciting. The fact that Tate looks the part will no doubt help Hands Off Gretel get exposure they might otherwise not have done, but to be clear, it’s the music – the power and the passion that crackles from every note – which is what makes Burn the Beauty Queen an essential album.

 

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Lies – Abuse/Plague

Posted: 8 September 2016 in Albums
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Southern Lord – 26th August 2016

James Wells

Southern Lord continue to excavate the underground for the gnarliest, angriest, most brutal, most frenetic metal with this, the latest album from Bay Area, CA hardcore act Lies. The CD version of Plague is bulked out by their debut release, the EP Abuse. So we’re being treated to 15 tracks in all, but given that the longest of those fifteen tracks, ‘Class War’ is a mere minute and fifty-three seconds in duration, it still amounts to a mere twenty minutes and four seconds of music. Yes, it would probably fit on a 7”, and most other bands’ EPs are longer.

But this is all about keeping it focused, keeping it tight. The short tracks condense everything into fireballs of explosive intensity. There’s no room for gratuitous solos, muso meanderings or even time to breathe. This is claustrophobically taut and relentlessly violent. That isn’t to say there’s a lack of detail or nuance: behind the blur of noise there are some brilliant guitar lines and a good variety of sounds on top of the thousand-mile-an-hour rhythm section.

Given the impenetrability of the lyrics, it’s not easy to determine their exact political leanings through song titles like ‘White Light’, ‘Paranoia’, ‘All Hail’ and ‘Human Nature’, but they’ve played a benefit gig in support of the Homeless Youth Alliance and it seems reasonable to assume their white-hot rage is directed at the system, and the injustices it propagates. They’re the good guys – they just sound nasty. Very nasty indeed.

 

Lies

Thor & Friends – Thor & Friends

Posted: 6 September 2016 in Albums
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LM Dupli-cation – 26th September 2016

Christopher Nosnibor

Thor & Friends is the eponymous full length debut from the avant-chamber ensemble formed by its namesake, polymath percussionist Thor Harris. Anyone who has heard – or, more so, seen – Swans in their current incarnation will be aware of Thor Harris’ remarkable percussion skills, and likely know that he is a man worthy of his name: a burly, bearded, hirsute figure who appears to have been transported from the mists of Norse mythology and onto the stage, surrounded by chimes and gongs, he’s something of a drumming deity and a figure far more fearsome than Chris Hemsworth.

Swans fans may, then, be somewhat surprised by this album. Surprised, but not disappointed. Despite it being Thor’s project, the percussion is not a dominant factor: it’s very much about the contributions of his ‘friends’, namely Peggy Ghorbani on marimba and Sarah ‘Goat’ Gautier on marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, organ, voice, mellotron and piano. Harris also plays, alongside myriad percussion instruments, wind instruments including some of his own devising. The core trio are joined by Jeremy Barnes on accordion, drum, and mellotron, Heather Trost on violin, voice and marimba, John Dieterich on guitar, bass, castanets and special effects and Raven on bone flute, and electronic sounds.

The choice of instruments may provide an indication of what to expect, but to be clear, there are no thunderous crescendos to be found during the nine tracks on offer here, and Thor and Friends is a remarkably graceful, elegant and understated work. In place of volume, there is atmosphere.

Soft chimes ebb and flow and soft, supple droning tones rise and fall before soft, soothing strings layer down over them on the album’s first track, ‘White Sands’. It’s a multifaceted, mood-shifting piece which sets the album’s gentle, hypnotic tone. Airy rhythms bounce from softly struck xylophone bars, and the general leaning toward instruments fashioned from natural materials lends the pieces a soft, organic feel. Supple woodwind melodies drift and trill effortlessly through semi-ambient passages, and there’s almost a sense of playfulness about the light, skipping, rippling motifs of ’12 Ate’. Elsewhere, ‘Lullabye for Klaus’ presents a darker, more brooding outlook, but nevertheless manages to lift the listener with its cyclical motifs.

Many of the pieces would work well incorporated within film or series soundracks, and while the compositions in themselves aren’t overtly evocative of anything specific, they possess a malleability allows their context to be ascribed by the listener. If ‘pleasant’ strikes as being a wet, nondescript word, in reference to Thor and Friends it most certainly is not: we live in a world befouled by unpleasantness, we’re jaded, cynical and mean. Thor and Friends offers a rapturously pleasant listening experience, in many ways simple, natural, and honest. It’s a magnificent antidote to modern times.

 

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Iannis Xenakis – La Legende d’Eer

Posted: 5 September 2016 in Albums
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Karlrecords – KR024 – 15th July 2016

Edward S. Robinson

How I hadn’t encountered the work of Iannis Xenakis previously, I will never know. Nevertheless, it was at the 2016 European Beat Studies Network conference that I first saw – and then heard – examples of his work, courtesy of Antonio Bonome in his talk on ‘Polytopy and Burroughs’ Coordinate Points’. The crazy, three-dimensional graphs, or polytopes, which accompanied Metastasis were utterly mind-bending. Given that I’m neither a musician nor a mathematician, they didn’t mean a great deal to me, but as visual pieces, they were stunning. Conceptually, Xenakis’ fusing of two disciplines, music and architecture, breaks new ground in itself, with the combination of architecture and music translating to the architecture of music. And then Bonome played the sounds these images represented. Huge, extended, quivering, brain-draining walls of sound. Powerful, immense, they seemingly took solid physical form. This was truly something.

La Legende d’Eer was composed in 1977 and 1978, when Xenakis was in the midst of his far-reaching explorations of mythology and philosophy. La Legende d’Eer is another of Xenakis’ monumental polytopes, and was created to mark the opening of the Pompidou Centre in 1978. While previous editions have presented the music as a single track and across different releases, featuring an array of errors, this latest reissue from Karlrecords (which makes the work available on vinyl and download for the first time), uses the eight track version Xenakis himself presented at Darmstädter in 1978.

La Legende d’Eer represents one of Xenakis’ most renowned and celebrated electroacoustic compositions, and is a challenging work to sat the least. Not being musically minded in the compositional sense, or scientifically minded in the sense of the technicalities of the mechanics and frequencies and all that jazz, I’m perhaps rather ill-equipped to respond to the fullness of Xnenakis’ objectives and achievements. As such, this is less of an academic analysis and more of a straightforward review, and pulled more from the gut than drawn from anywhere else. However, this is sound which elicits a cerebral, emotional and physical response first and foremost. This is extreme music, which many would likely dispute even constitutes music, and a similarly extreme response is surely a natural one.

Those who are wired to actually derive enjoyment from it are likely a very small minority, but one I happen to belong to. The eight tracks segue together, and begins as a series of trilling whistles of feedback, building into a screeding, shrill mesh of treble, howling drones and pained hums that bow, bend and scrape. If sounds reminiscent of Whitehouse (the resemblance of ‘Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel’ to moments on track seven is remarkable, but then the twittering, jittering top-end noises Xenakis creates are also very like those which make up the majority of the Great White Death album) and the entirety of the careers of Merzbow and Kenji Siratori can be heard, then La Legende d’Eer marks the foundation stone of power electronics and noise. Amidst the earthwork rumbles and the buzzing swarms of hornets and the atomic detonations, shrieks, rattles and crashed are churned together to form a huge, excruciating aural assault.

Acute listening reveals complex internal polyrhythms of the sonic vibrations as they bounce together and against one another. And as the tones and velocity of the sounds shift, so the rhythms change. Indeed, La Ledenge d’Eer is a work in which sound is in perpetual flux. Bleeping arcade game sounds bubble from a tidal wave of noise which resembles a landfill sit’s worth of tin cans, blooping laser modulations surge and swell before devouring themselves and being carried away in an avalanche of static and pink noise. Extraneous jazz honks through a kaleidoscope of sparkling circuitry and low-end interference. In short, there’s a lot going on, and what goes on changes over the course of the piece(s).

It’s a three-dimensional attack on the senses, designed to inflict maximum disorientation and temporal dislocation. And it succeeds. It will necessarily and inevitably twist the psyche and create an almost indefinable sense of discomfort, and it doesn’t require a mathematical equation to calculate the unsettling effects of the sound on the listener. 38 years after its composition and it’s still an astounding and quite devastating work.

 

Iannis Xenakis - La Legende d'Eer

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