AHHH! Modular synth percussion mixed with physical percussion (I think?)! Alternating vocals! Colin Stetson! He's on something this ridiculously fun and bouncy! How?! LAUGHING DUDE FROM WIPEOUT! A BRIDGE ABOUT A BRIDGE!
I am riding this enthusiasm through the entire discog today. Well, the main 9.
Last edited by Tap on 12/04/2015 07:06; edited 1 time in total
This album is a collection of some political electronic music from Swiss composer Max E. Keller. And although I'm sure some of the specifics of the politics might be more significant to me if I understood the language of the assorted spoken word components, I can still get by because there is a political element to the shape of this music. And also I have the liner notes. "The aim of the composition is to represent in music this monotonous, tormenting, lifeless, unchanging economic process, the victims of which are human beings, and thereby to enable the bourgeois listener to experience this process" he says about the first track, Sicher sein ... (1976). When later writing about how this relates to minimal art, he makes clear that "the intention is not to narcotize but to awaken the listener." And this work certainly gets difficult. That first piece is maybe the easiest to get into actually, lots of cut up tape action, and I think he made the forces of torment a bit more active and interesting than he would have you believe. It was also the only thing on here that was previously released so maybe I'm just used to it by now. Once things get into Grundgesetze III (1977), I'm in unfamiliar territory, but still, it is some considerably more difficult music. This piece also seems to have something to do with the market economy/capitalism, but the monotonous unchanging nature is much better realized. There's like these two metronome rhythm synths slowly drifting out of phase, drawing from 19 different pitches across the whole frequency range, with a gradual development. And then more spoken word on top. It's not an easy listen but there is something interesting in hearing how the selection of which pitches to layer for each strike evolves over time. There's also a track that starts off really electronic "ironic nuclear energy promotional music" and turns into something made from improvisation at home with everyday objects. And then a piece that takes the account of a Chilean citizens experience being tortured by the fascists that many other countries supported, accompanied by a plunderphonic/collaged national anthem constructed from the ones belonging to those accountable countries. I don't know if I would understand as much as I do about the political intent here without the liner notes, and honestly I thought that 2nd track was one of the most annoying things I'd heard in a while the first time I heard it (I can hang with it now tho), but this does feel like the politics are embedded in the music itself rather than simply in some text with a soundtrack. Some very compelling stuff.
After an extended absence, Leafcutter John is back doing his wild max/msp mangled songcraft! His albums Microcontact and The Housebound Spirit blew my mind back in the early 00's, but then he put more emphasis on acoustic guitar and singing songs, and I disconnected. But now he's back with some full on digital/acoustic mixture, and I'm on board again. He'd always incorporated some acoustic guitar and vocals for bits, and had lots of rhythm stuff that dipped into idm at times, which made for a very accessible sort of heavily composed experimental electronic music. And as the title suggests, that mode is fully resurrected here, made all the more vivid with the advancements in production technologies. The album is bookended by 10+ minute epics, starting with one that runs the gamut from heavy hitting stuttering beats to drawn out, granular drones and light drumming accompanied by guitar, both parts washed in electronics. Fragments of voice and guitar signal the next track, which builds up with some Fenneszesque distortion before settling into a lightly glitched groove and moaning vocals, as solidification comes and goes via bass. The structure ebbs a little but mostly the 8 minute running time is spent riding the groove while everything is changing in shape. After that the utterly gorgeous Music Under The Water slows everything down with amazing processed guitar, the way the clusters of delayed notes hit it's like a paint bomb going off in my head, covering the walls. The next track brings things back up slowly at first, with some distorted field recordings that have a rhythm carved out of them with silence, starting slow at first but then establishing a form that allows for bursts of intensity, and eventually accompanied by more functionally wordless vocals (I dunno maybe there is words). And then we get to the 11 minute clarinet driven closer. It's some other guy playing it, doing this interesting sort of stuttering repetitive two note phrase, which gradually gets overtaken by gorgeous infinity drones, slow enough to where you can still hear the noise part of the timbre of the clarinet poking thru for a bit. After some time under the waves, the clarinet comes back as an equal. The song is called Gulps, and maybe it's about drowning? Because the struggle of the stuttering phrase only brings about further rushes of drone down the throat, which brings about the extended drone oblivion that finishes the album. Bad move if you're actually drowning, but in a musical context it really works out pretty nicely. Overall this is an excellent return to form, not just a return but a progression. I hope there is more to come.
I realized I was underrating this one, bumping it up.
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END OF WEEK 4
Listens: 62
Albums: 58
First Listens (excluding EPs and Singles): 7
In interviews, Wiese has said that some of the things on this album were already complete when his previous album was released, but that the compilation of this was waiting for more of the right parts to be completed. This is not simply the latest entry in Wiese's extended catalog, it is something patiently assembled over a long time. It's got one of the more compelling sequencings for an experimental/noise type album that I've heard in a bit. It starts off with two solo performances that have some grit and edge, but stay relatively soothing. But then the instrumentation expands dramatically for the third track, as we get into work with all sorts of performers working off of his unconventional graphical scores. The abrasiveness does take a pretty significant step up, but the initial material here still has a fair amount of space and restraint. Each track pushes the abrasiveness forward a little in different ways, until a simple piece involving gunshots signals the end of the first half (quite memorably). The restraints come off following this, and we start to see everything bundled up in more significant layers of distortion, gradually working it's way into being unrelenting harsh noise, culminating in an epic 23 minute version of Segmenting Process, which really makes the most of the allowances for chaos that have built up in its first half but dials back a bit for the ending. But that's pretty necessary, we couldn't just leave things at a chaotic peak. On this album you've got wonderful sounding contributions from Joseph Hammer, Evan Parker, Oren Ambarchi, Maja S. K. Ratkje, Pete Swanson, and like 35 other people, recorded over a long period of time and places, and somehow Wiese manages to make it all cohesive. I don't know if I can quite explain how that cohesion happens. But I think a big factor is in the impeccable sequencing, and how it seems open to me crafting this sort of narrative of sound gradually working it's way into a more abrasive, dangerous existence. One of the best constructed albums of this year, I'd say.
Full disclosure: my college had some Buchla synths and I think they sound amazing. They're modular synths that use banana plugs so you can plug plugs on top of plugs to create really elaborate patches, and have all sorts of other quirks and are a lot of fun. This is not really a "tech showcase" kind of record though. There's clearly a lot of care in how the sounds are crafted but it's not really showing off. This one's works pretty nice on vinyl, it's structured into two pretty distinct sides. On the first half, you get a lot of percussion driven songs with processed vocals, all bustling with activity but never feeling heavy. There's not a weak one in the bunch as far as I'm concerned, they've all got a bunch of really great direct melodies and manage to make themselves distinct while keeping a lot of overlap in the sound palette. And then you've got the second half, Labyrinth. It's split into 12 parts, and flips the script by going on a somewhat less busy (but not any less compelling) ambient drift. This stuff isn't exactly percussion driven but there's still a pulse to it (and sometimes some very light percussive sounds riding that pulse), and the melodies still have a lot of the directness that was seen in the first half. It's not ambient drone, it's whatever they call the other ambient. The transition between the halves is a little abrupt, but the qualities that carry over really helps hold it all together and makes taking this music in in the presented tracklist order make sense. A lot of the stuff on my list can be a bit on the difficult side, but this album is very approachable and I think this is really worth checking out for anyone on board for some synth-heavy songs.
Shapednoise - This is the most brutal thing I've heard this year.
Infinity Frequencies - Yeah, a lot of vaporwave sounds too much like the weather channel for me. There's a lot of care in the sound and the compositions in particular with this album, and there's something to the use of looping in the music and holding in a space, but I don't think I really have any way in on it.
Girl Band - This band naming trend for dudes is starting to get old, but this is some really excellent guitar rockin. Does not fuck around, it is awesome. I guess it's on that whole post-punk side of things, so I probably have biases towards that style and if you do to then you need to grab this.
Death And Vanilla - Man I totally thought this was on Ghost Box when I saw the album art but I guess not, but it still totally has that "I miss Broadcast" sound. Tho mecca was dead on elsewhere calling it a cross between Silver Apples and Broadcast. If you're thinking "what, that sounds great!", it is.
Kneebody + Daedelus - I haven't done the best at keeping up with Daedelus' output, started losing connection after Denies The Days Demise, but this collab is pretty fresh sounding with all the live jazzers, this band's voice is coming thru and a big part of it too, but it still is hittin some of those old buttons for me that I'd get with Daedelus.
Rrose - This is a very peculiar sort of ambient drone, there is this sort of persistent percussive thing on the high end but it's quiet and obscured by the really bass heavy droning. It's interesting, think I'll have to visit this a few times before I really have a handle on it. Oh wait I looked up more info on this, it's a gong, that makes sense.
It seems like music is getting a lot of post-punk and also dudes doing band names that sort of ironically appropriate femininity. While the latter trend is getting old, the former is something I completely support. The whole idea of post-punk seems kind of ambiguous, but generally I notice a lot of interesting rhythm so that's cool. I don't know if this is all that innovative but it's really well done. Doesn't really seem to be much in the way of direct melodies like you'd get with Viet Cong, but also it doesn't go all linear-minded like on this year's Disappears album, there's some active song structures here. So you get these engaging song structures that keep things moving but their engine is less catchiness than it is noise and power. Some really great performances on here that make this feel more like fun than angst, good stuff.
So I've been aware of Sote for a while, he had a single out on Warp back in 02, but then he only had a couple other singles come out over the years and I lost track of him. He seems to be coming back in full force now though, having dropped an album last year that I still haven't heard and then Arrhythmia here. This is quite a bit different than what I remember from the warp single tho. I wouldn't even begin to assume anything about how the sounds are generated except that it all does seem to be synthesis, but it's some insanely complex sounding synthesis. There's something about it that sounds exaggerated, and makes for this sense of it being literally hyperbolic, and then the oxymoron makes me dizzy and I have to lie down. Sometimes people say something is a non-stop thrill ride and it's not true and it's kind of not true here, but on a more important level it is completely 100% true.
I wasn't familiar with Olivia Block's discography before this year, and it has been quite a blast working through it all. This one isn't quite on the level of her best work, but is still quite a good time. This is adapted from an installation piece she did, I remember hearing the process described but I can't quite remember exactly how it went. There's white noise that builds up slowly, pulling out qualities from the space it's being played in. This turns into these resonating drones, and we begin to hear some clarinet, and some overlapping drones begin to develop but are erased by another rise and fall of white noise, which leads into a much slower take on pulling out drones, building them out with some grit or crackle and expanding them with the additional layers of clarinet. I think some other type of noises sources might be involved too, I'm sure there's lots to the process that I'm not addressing. But, big picture: over the course of the piece's 31 minute runtime, we drift along through passages quiet and loud, with varying balances of noise and tone. The parameters seem simple, but there is a lot of nuance to how they move, and of course every sound is well recorded and with presented with clear spatialization, so it is quite the experience. And if you have your volume up loud, the ending is quite a treat. I'd bet it doesn't quite live up to being at the installation in person, but this seems like it'd be a worthy adaptation.
I've always been more into Jim O'Rourke's weirder stuff than his rock song work, so it's weird that this, maybe his most adult contemporary record yet, would click with me so much. I guess there's a lot of 70's singer-songwriter vibes on this or whatever, I'm no expert on the musical dialect tho. These songs have really clicked with me tho and soundtracked a lot of the year. I remember hearing some grumbling about the production when it first came out, but I think it really does the trick and keeps some air in even when the arrangements get dense and that the overall package is quite lush. The songs are almost straightforward, but there's always these sorts of quirks in how they develop, there'll be an unexpected leap to the front by some strings or whatever that keep things interesting, and the melodies have that feeling of being smartly composed without going too showy. And O'Rourke's voice just sounds better now with age. So while I'm normally not into the twang or some of the other cultural signifiers here, those concerns are completely absent from my mind while listening, and I'm just along for the ride.
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