Posts Tagged ‘Bloom’

BLOOM – The Improvisation Sessions (Vol I)

Posted: 12 June 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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11th June 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Some artists thrive on collaboration. Deborah Fialkiewicz is one of those. While she’s prolific as a solo artist, the volume of collaborative works in her discography is also noteworthy: when she’s not working as part of SPORE, she’s part of the ever-rotating lineup of BLOOM – and that’s before we touch on the frequent collaborations with (AN) EeL, the most recent of which was only released three weeks ago.

The Improvisation Sessions was recorded live May of this year, with a lineup of Dan Dolby, Deborah Fialkiewicz, and John Koser, marking an expansion from the duo which recorded the trilogy of Parallel Minor, Besides, and Hybrid in 2020. Fialkiewicz is without doubt an artist with range, but one who favours the dark end of the ambient spectrum more often than not, and this is very much the case here.

The Improvisation Sessions features two longform tracks which would quite nicely align with a vinyl release.

‘Chameleon Soul’, which spans a colossal continuous twenty minutes, begins with low, rumbling ominous drones, but soon escalates to a busy, buzzy criss-cross of sounds, interweaving and interlacing, leaving one’s head in a spin as if after trying to trace several flies flitting about the kitchen on a hot summer’s day for any period of time. It’s a morass of warping tones overlaying a ballast of churning noise, and any comparisons to Hull luminaries Throbbing Gristle or Merzbow are entirely justified.

The layers of distortion only grow denser and gnarlier as the track progresses, crashing waves of white noise blast in from one side and then the other as they really push to test the stamina. And then you realise we’re only six minutes in. This is a positive: plenty more left to enjoy… Enjoyment is of course subjective, and enjoyment of this requires being appreciative of a dizzying, disorientating assault simultaneous with a full-on white noise blizzard.

The momentary lulls, the spells where they pull back from the precipice of all-out aural obliteration, are far from mellow, as serrated spurs of hard-edged drones, wails of feedback and brain-melting extraneous noise conglomerate to seismic effect. There are some nasty high-end frequencies knocking about in the mix, moments were one has to check if the whistle is coming from the speakers of if it’s that troublesome tinnitus nagging again, and said frequencies rise from a battery of ugly distortion, bone-shattering blasts of which simple explode around the twelve-minute mark, and from hereon in, things only grow harsher, more corrupted, more intense, more difficult to withstand. We’d be inching into polythene bags on heads territory were it not for the variation, but the last three minutes or so are fractured, damaged, and agonizing – part power electronics, part circuit meltdown.

As the world becomes evermore and increasingly fucked up, I find words fail me more by the day. It’s harder to articulate, and this is where I’ve found that sound has come into its own. Sound as the capacity to convey something beyond words, something that lies in the most innermost parts, giving voice to the subconscious, even. On The Improvisation Sessions, BLOOM convey anxiety, gloom, pessimism.

‘The Dark Room’ is indeed dark, constructed primarily around a fixed but thick, distorted hum. Oscillators whine and whistle, and something about it calls to mind Whitehouse around the time of Never Forget Death, when they discovered low-end frequencies and restraint, the impact of a low undulating wave and subtle tweaks of reverb.

It rumbles and drones on, eddying and bouncing around in a shrilling mesh of dissonance. There isn’t a moment where this is an easy listen, and so often, it sounds as if the equipment is faulty, whether it’s a stuck loop or generating unexpected noise.

This set hangs on the edge of ambience, but be warned, it’s dark, and noisy at times, to the extend that it may shred your brain. For me personally, that’s my idea of fun, so it gets a two thumbs up, but for the more sensitive, this is a release to approach with caution.

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Bloom – The Season – Xmas mouse mix

Posted: 26 November 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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26th November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Deborah Fialkiewicz has been keeping busy – as usual. Composer of contemporary classical, ambient, and dark noise works both as a solo artist and in various collaborative permutations and guises, she’s back with a new BLOOM release in collaboration with Daniel James Dolby. And it’s a Christmas single.

I’ve never been rabid about Christmas, and the last three years have seen a succession of difficult Christmases for me personally. In December 2021, my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. We weren’t even sure if she would be home for Christmas. She was, but was incredibly weak after three weeks in hospital, and that she was able to sit at the table for Christmas dinner felt like a miracle. We were in shock, and she was clearly unwell. Having made substantial improvements in rebuilding her strength through 2022, she deteriorated with the onset of winter, and again was weak and struggling over Christmas. It still doesn’t seem real that she only had another three weeks. And so Christmas 2023 was the first with just me and my daughter, aged twelve. We made the best of it, but it wasn’t the same. I detail this not for sympathy, but purely for context. It means that while around this time of year it becomes nigh on impossible to avoid festive fervour, with adverts depicting happy couples and radiant nuclear families, all the usual Christmas tunes and an inbox busting with new ones clamouring for coverage, and Facebook friends and work colleagues are dizzy with excitement over getting their decorations up, sorting secret Santa and planning social activities, I’m not feeling much enthusiasm, concerned primarily with getting through it and hoping distant relatives don’t think I’m rude or twatty for not sending cards out for the second year in succession.

When writing about music, I am often – and perhaps increasingly – aware that how we engage with it, how it affects us, is intensely personal and involves multitudinous factors. Sometimes, it’s something as arbitrary as the mood we’re in when we hear a song that will determine our response. And the chances are – and I’m no doubt not alone in this – hearing chirpy tunes when I’m down isn’t going to cheer me up, it’s going to really piss me off, or set me off. It’s impossible to predict. To be safe, I tend to try to avoid Christmas songs, which involves avoiding TV and radio – which is surprisingly easy if you spend large chunks of your time in a small room reviewing obscure music – avoiding shops – manageable – tacky pubs – easy – and ignore review requests for Christmas singles.

But there is always space for an exception, and Bloom’s ‘The Season’ is it. Deborah may have been posting pics on Facebook of the ‘festive mouse’ in the studio to mark this release, but said mouse is looking over a piece of kit called ‘Psychosis Lab’ made by Resonance Circuits. The cuddly cartoon cover art for this release is misleading, and for that, I am grateful.

It’s five minutes of deep, hefty beats melded to a throbbing industrial synth bass. Atop this thumping dance-orientated rhythm section, there are synths which bring a dark 80s synthpop vibe. In combination, the feel is in the vein of a dance remix of Depeche Mode circa ‘85 or ’86, around the point they began making the transition from bouncy pop toward altogether darker territories. It’s repetitive, hypnotic, pulsating, big on energy. But there are eerie whispers which drift through it all, distant wails like spirits rising from their graves. These haunting echoes are more evocative of Halloween than Christmas – and this is a significant part of the appeal. It’s a curious combination of ethereal mists and hefty, driving dance groove, which is simultaneously uplifting, tense, and enigmatic. It is not schmaltzy, cheesy, twee, or saccharine. It’s the season, alright. The season to be weird, to be unconventional, to accept those darker moods and remember that they will pass. It’s a Christmas anthem for those who aren’t feeling festive. And I will most certainly drink to that.

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BLOOM – Pooch

Posted: 22 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Kalamine Records – 14th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Whether it be solo works ranging from ambience to classical, or collaborations running the full gamut in the electronic field, Deborah Fialkiewicz’s output in recent years has been nothing short of prodigious, and spanning as many forms as her work does, there is never a dull moment. This latest work, under the POOCH moniker, in collaboration with Dan Dolby (Bassist in Mastiff, Noisemonger in Catafalque and Sulphur Nurse) is no exception. It offers a set of eight dark, stark electronic compositions which owe a considerable debt to early industrial and electronic works, bringing a combination of dark atmospherics and nagging beats. Although entirely instrumental, we’re in the kind of territory occupied by the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, Test Dept, and Chris and Cosey’s Trance.

As an opener, ‘Hades’ is as dark and subterranean as the title would suggest, a bleak, murky pulsation squelching around and leading the listener down, down, down. It serves as something of a primer, a mood-setter, but doesn’t fully prepare one for the altogether steelier, starker, more rhythmic and percussion-driven pieces which follow.

The title track pairs a dense, dirty bass with clattering, metallic percussion which assails the mind like a concerted assault with the contents of a cutlery drawer, and it bashes away relentlessly for four and a half minutes straight. On paper, it might not sound much, but as an experience, it’s pretty hard-hitting. Built around short, clipped repetitions, it creates a suffocatingly claustrophobic aural space. The word ‘pooch’ evokes a cuddly companion, something friendly, but there’s nothing cuddly or friendly about this, a listening experience closer to being whipped with a chain than fussing a canine buddy.

Each composition bears a one-word title (‘GameBoy’ being a forced blend-word (it doesn’t really qualify as a portmanteau) in order to maintain the theme. Funtime bit-tunes are bent with glitches and warping drifts of darkness here, before things begin to slide further into beat-orientated minimal techno.

The steady beat which dominates and defined the spartan ‘Quazar’ is almost soporific: the track assumes something of a background position as it clicks along nonchalantly, with a low, unshifting drone hovering just around the level of register. Nothing happens. It doesn’t need to. And while the thunder which heralds the arrival of ‘Midnite’ might initially serve as an alert, the piece soon melts into abstraction. The final track, ‘Stimpy’ may be missing Ren, but hits hard, built around a strong, thudding beat and looped electronic undulations.

For all of its cuddly connotations, Pooch is a pretty dark album. To my mind – and it could be to my mind alone – music which is heavily beat-orientated and instrumental feels impersonal somehow, and I find it somewhat disorientating, disconnecting, alien. And so it is that the pounding beats of Pooch leave me feeling somewhat dazed, detached, even dizzy. But it’s impossible to deny the detail, the quality of the execution, or the fact that this is an outstanding work.

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Watch: ‘Jokers, Thieves and Liars’ by Soraia

Posted: 9 March 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Philadelphia rockers Soraia have dropped a music video for "Jokers, Thieves and Liars" off their recent LP ‘Bloom.’

Check out the video here:

Filmed December 10, 2022, at Kung Fu Necktie in Philadelphia, PA.

"’Jokers, Thieves, and Liars’ is the kickoff track to our newest album, "Bloom" (October 2022). It’s about all the personalities I encountered when I was falling in love with one guy, in particular. And about getting caught up in playing the game back," says front woman ZouZou Mansour.

The band will kick off their ‘Bloom’ Spring Tour on March 9th in Wayne, PA. The trek runs through May 6th, and features support from special guests The Idiot Kids.

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Photo: Cassandra Panek

Jackie-O Motherfucker – Bloom

Posted: 30 April 2018 in Albums
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Textile Records – May 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Just as I don’t really do jazz, I don’t much do country, either. But for every rule – or perhaps more of a broad, general guideline – there necessarily has to be an exception. So here I am, sipping hot black coffee having just ejected an album by Marc Sarrazy and Laurent Rochelle, which goes way over the limit on the jazzometer and has left me shaking my head and thinking there’s just no way I can review that objectively, and looking at a plain white paper sleeve stamped with six song titles under the header ‘J.O.M.F BLOOM’.

The biographical commentary that ‘the band is moving more slowly these days, with core members Tom Greenwood and Michael Whittaker living in the more rural corners f Northern California’ is perhaps an understatement: Bloom was a full three years in the making. But it’s not just its evolution that was gradual: compositionally, too, the pieces are slow-growing and sparse. The quietly picked guitar notes resonate outwards as woodwind trills over the hills on the instrumental intro piece, ‘Pipe’ It’s kinda quiet, sort of ambient. A sudden swell of noise ends abruptly to make way for the sedate country ramblings of ‘Radiating’. If you dig downbeat country tines that drag on for over eight minutes, this is going to do it for you bigtime. If you don’t… It’s laid back to the point of horizontal, the lyrics drawled rather than sung, and as such decipherable only in snippets.

But while this is very much a country album, it’s anything but conventional or straight ahead overall. ‘Wreck’ is slow-building, initially just guitar and Greenwood’s cracked croon. But before long, a tumult of crashing cymbals, overloading electric guitar feedback and straining saxophone create a glorious cacophony. Wild brass and woodwind shriek and squeal all over the raucous stomp of ‘Strike’. A sort of country/blues heart pulses beneath the chaotic racket that pummels in all directions and drives toward the horizon of abstraction. ‘Wildgeese’ brings dolorous trudging before the lo-fi plod of ‘Golden Bees’ thuds its way to the album’s conclusion in a muddy haze of echo.

On Bloom, Jackie-O Motherfucker fuse the mellowest, most downcast of country with the most awkward jazz dirges, which drone and wheeze and scrape at divergent angles across the linear country compositions. It may be country at its core, but it’s a whole lot more.

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Kim Myhr – Bloom

Posted: 1 October 2016 in Albums
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Hubro – HUBROCD2578 – 7th October 2016

Those who have heard Kim Myhr’s 2014 album All Your Limbs Singing (or his collaboration with Jenny Hval and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra) will find Bloom a rather different proposition. In place of 12-string explorations which sit between American folk and 60s avant-garde, electric guitar and electronics fuse to create something quite intriguing. There are lengthy passages which sound like formless noodling, a single chord strummed and subject to tonal variations, running through permutations of effects on a pedal board to achieve different equalisation, gain, overdrive. But while the five tracks on Bloom are clearly of an experimental and seemingly improvisational bent, there are definite structures and a sense of composition, with washes of electronic sound and layers building over one another.

‘O Horizon’ turns the focus toward rhythm, while also building ambience through long, hovering guitar sustain. The one thing Myhr does not do frequently is play the guitar conventionally: he does, however, demonstrate just how massively versatile the guitar is as an instrument. Where he does strum, as he does with a clean tone on ‘Swales Fell’, uses a zither to achieves a sound somewhere between a harp and a sitar, the notes tumbling and fluttering in gentle cascades. The scratchy tonalities and rich textures which emerge through the shimmering summery shades of ‘Milk Run Sky’ create a balance and contrast. It’s on this final track that Myhr plays most conventionally, but still filtered through a psychedelic, kaleidoscopic prism.

Bloom is a rare beast, in that it’s an album which is very much about technique, and about the effects and sounds that exploratory techniques can create. But at no point does Myhr become excessively self-focused or lose the listener.

 

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