Gareth Davis and Steven R. Smith

Westering and The Line Across are two albums of scorched explorations for guitar and clarinet, courtesy of Gareth Davis and Steven R. Smith and released only in limited edition vinyl form. Davis's clarinet is a mournful, dissonant force, while Smith's guitar shifts from smokey Americana to sweeping harmonic drone and back again. With their deep, evocative, and gorgeously textured soundscapes, these albums would make the perfect score to some desolate surrealist Western.

Buy

Download

Buy

Download

Scenes from "Airplane" (1980)

Nest - Retold and Body Pilot

Nest is the musical project of Deaf Center's Otto Totland and Serein's Huw Roberts.

Body Pilot begins with "Stillness." Built on a foundation of shimmering, sustained strings, a mournful piano traverses this frosty soundscape, solemn and deeply meditative. "The Dying Roar" is treated strings and horns melding and shifting into a undulating thrum, Totland's piano returning around the 2/3rd mark to usher the piece into silence. "Koretz's Meteor" is awash in a deep droning hum, with scattering, shuffling, almost percussive tones sounding from far beneath accompanied by field recordings of what seem to be camera shutters and distant voices. Body Pilot closes with "The Ultimate Horizon," a beautiful piece of frosty drifting textures, distant and melancholy, pulsing as the overlapping sounds modulate in speed and a static pulse beats. At only four tracks and around 20 minutes, Body Pilot is stunning but altogether too brief.

Buy

Download

Thankfully, Retold is more of a proper album, with eleven tracks running around 55 minutes. Retold finds the duo exploring a broader sonic range. "Lodge," the opening track, features Totland's plaintive piano over a quietly shifting sea of sonic echo, violin, human breath, and what sounds like rainfall. It's clearly a meticulously constructed piece but never laborious or stuffy. "Marefjellete" is propelled forward by an almost dubby, plucked bass note, static creak, rustling wind, metallic pings, and a slowly whirling, almost whimsical piano. "Whetstone" is a gorgeous bit of modernist chamber music, with piano, cello, viola, and sustained horns layered over an alien soundscape that slowly but surely builds into an echoing expanse before fading into rainfall and and hushed static. And so on.

Deeply atmospheric, both albums here are a successful blending of the neo-classical with the ambient and drone, in a way that will speaks to fans of Jacaszek, Deaf Center, Tim Hecker, Stars of the Lid and the like. Highly recommended stuff.

Buy

Download

Ibex - Two Videos

Two video collages created and scored by Ibex. The first features sounds from "War Zone Pirate Radio Transmissions Sent and Received." Eventually, each track from that album will have a video of its own. The second video features sounds from "Their Copy Hearts Beat at their Chests." Perhaps more videos from there to follow as well. All footage was taken from the Internet Archive.



Ibex Video 1 from Ibex on Vimeo.


Ibex video 2 from Ibex on Vimeo.

Steven Hess and Christopher McFall - The Inescapable Fox

This collaboration between Steven Hess (a percussionist and sound artist from Chicago) and Christopher McFall (a composer from Kansas City who crafts his pieces largely from field recordings, saxophone, piano, and phonograph noise all captured on chemically decayed tape) is a truly phenomenal record. Released last year on the always excellent (but sadly under-appeciated) Under the Spire imprint, these two side-long pieces, divided into five total movements, represent perhaps the finest of McFall's many collaborations to date. The result is a wonderfully textural exploration of light and dark sonic palettes. The natural reverb, decay, and static wash of hyrdolytically treated analog tape lends a haunting, compelling quality to the pieces, as metallic creaks, murmuring brass, ghostly vocal tones, and water-logged piano ebb and flow throughout the crumbling soundscapes. Using decayed tape is not a new trend. William Bazinski's "The Disintegration Loops" is perhaps the most famous contemporary example, but artists like The Caretaker and Oneohtrix Point Never are known for the technique as well. McFall's approach, which decays tape in a very specific manner, is novel nonetheless. His sounds are studies in deeply submerged minimalism and truly reward a patient ear. Hess's percussive elements add a whole new level of dynamism to the proceedings. Together, the pair have crafted a series of elusive, enigmatic soundscapes. Just when a piece threatens to become too academic, or too bogged down, some new element is introduced to pull listeners back in - a brush of piano keys, perhaps, or a voice keening in the sonic mist. Among all the tape hiss, crumbling mechanical thrum, and sinister static tangle, there are moments of true beauty and sadness. "The Inescapable Fox," which draws its title from the myth of Lealaps, is sublimely haunting, a melancholy, surreal, and captivating piece of music, and one of the unsung great albums of last year.

Download

Buy (US)

Buy (EU)

Selected Gojira Monsters 1954-1966

Nate Wooley, Paul Lytton, and Ikue Mori - Live at The Chapel of the Holy Innocents, Bard College, 03/08/2011

Trumpeter Nate Wooley, percussionist Paul Lytton, and electronics/laptop noise-ateer Ikue Mori came together at Bard College in the spring of 2011 for this 40-minute improvised set, and I’m fairly sure this is the one and only recording that exists of the performance (thanks to Goro, I believe, for capturing it). Lytton's drumming swings from propulsive and cacophonous to nuanced and textural. Mori's electronics are scattering, piercing, and industrial-ish, with whooshing swarms of feedback and crumbling static thrum. Wooley, as always, proves himself to be an incredibly exciting horn player, relying almost as much upon the instrument to modify the sound of his breath as the opposite, and seamlessly shifting between dizzying free-jazz assaults and far subtler, more textural sound explorations. There is very little friendly about this piece. It’s unsettling, even hostile, and at times downright ferocious. It’s a thrilling listen, however, in part because all three performers seem truly in sync with one another on a really meaningful level, taking the piece in unexpected directions that just work. This kind of music and approach to performing can so easily fall flat and become aimless and meandering if all the performer’s aren’t at the top of their game. Luckily (and not at all surprisingly) Wooley, Lytton, and Mori knock it out of the park. 

Download

Altar Eagle - Nightrunners

Altar Eagle is Brad Rose (who somehow finds the time for at least a half-dozen musical projects in addition to running the excellent Digitalis label) and Eden Hemming Rose, a husband-and-wife duo out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Because Brad is best known for his work as The North Sea and with Ajilvsga, an unwary listener might sit down with an Altar Eagle album (in addition to this new one, there's also 2010's excellent "Mechanical Gardens" and a handful of cassette releases as well) prepared for nightmare dronescapes. They would be shocked then to find themselves instead listening to blissful electro-pop. Of course, this pop music is quite a bit scuzzier and more washed out than the pristine production you might find on, say, that new Purity Ring record, or the ultra-chilled sounds on the Digitalis-released "Ro Me Ro" by Paco Sala (another stellar album from this year). Industrial clatter and bitcrushed scree distort and warp these glistening pop gems, almost like someone rubbed a bunch of gravel over some long-lost Cocteau Twins LP. The husband-wife duo draws from a deep reservoir of influences here: The bass line on "Carousel Ocean" is a dub-y groove, "Digital Gold Futures" is as texturally dense as the best shoegaze, "Runaways" sounds like an ultra-cool Dark Wave classic, "No Spring Till Summer" is funky as hell, with lushly layered vocals and even some shades of New Wave, "Hologram" has an almost club friendly beat, albeit one that's deeply offset by vocodered vocals, and mangled production. It's hard to pick the standout tracks, because they're simply all so good.

"Nightrunners" is constantly surprising. Anchored more than ever by Eden's just-washed-out vocals and featuring more addictive hooks and woozily cathartic bursts than ever before, it's catchy, even danceable at times. Still, there's so much fantastic production work going on that it almost feels like time with the album is better spent picking up the nuances. In any case, the result is a gorgeous, haze-blasted piece of electro-pop. In a music scene glutted with sterilized, derivative synth-pop, it's an absolute relief when an album comes along that plays with conventions and reconfigures them in exciting ways like this one does. Maybe Brad Rose's hellish industrial soundscapes aren't too far removed after all. More than any album I've heard in recent memory, "Nightrunners" proves that there can be common ground between noise purists and indie-pop diehards. It's easily one of the best records of the year so far.

Listen and Buy (Digital)

Buy Vinyl (US)

Buy Vinyl (EU)

Ibex - War Zone Pirate Radio Transmissions Sent and Received

After a long hiatus, this post marks an attempt to restart this blog. It may be slow going at first, but hopefully posting will pick up soon. In the meantime, here's a new album to listen to.

http://ibex-band.bandcamp.com/album/war-zone-pirate-radio-transmissions-sent-and-received

Composed and recorded 2011-2012 in Upstate New York, New Jersey, and San Francisco. Music for guitar, synthesizer, found sounds, field recordings, stock audio, Buddha Box, sutra box, radio, and assorted percussion.

Best Albums of 2011 #1 Ben Frost and Daniel Bjarnason - Solaris (Bedroom Community)

As predicted, this Best of 2011 list is wrapping up well into 2012. This blog has been on hiatus because of a trans-continental relocation but now hopefully (maybe) it'll get back on track. We'll see. But at the very least I had to finish the list. In the number one spot, we have a collaboration between two of my very favorite artists courtesy of the great Bedroom Community label which, despite regularly sporting some of the worst album art in the biz, consistently release some of the most exciting albums in any given year. Consider Daniel Bjarnason's Processions, my favorite album of 2010 - a dizzying, ferocious modern classical excursion; Or Ben Frost's By the Throat, my favorite album of 2009, a serrated, brutally intense swath of industrial noise and nightmare soundscapes. No surprise then, when the two join forces with Solaris, a reworked film score of sorts for Tarkovsky's eerie sci-fi masterpiece (note the album cover homage), the result is a brilliantly crafted and beautifully deep piece of work. Frost and Bjarnason get to show off their subtle side with this collaboration. It's a definite shift from their solo work, yes, but still deeply affecting and powerful, a consistently surprising and altogether brilliant melding of man and machine. Acoustic chamber music takes an excursion into the future into some kind of deep space nightmare, grappling with electronic and computer processing, conjuring images of flickering passageways winding through seemingly abandoned spaceships, the crew mysteriously vanished. Keening, mournful suites for skittering strings and warbling, off kilter piano are filtered through gauzey swaths of rumbling drone, bleared static, menacing creaks and piercing buzz. It's a quiet album, largely lacking the earsplitting mechanical terror of Frost's work and the dizzying crescendos of Bjarnason's. But quiet hardly means static. Solaris constantly surprises the listener. A rising piano attack suddenly fractures, fragmenting into splintered notes. Violins slide down in pitch woozily off-key. The whole experience is deeply unsettling and strange. Solaris is that rare musical collaboration where neither member dominates and where the music highlights the talents of each in a cohesive new whole rather than trading off moments where one takes the fore then the other. It's a taught, compact, and bleak piece of work and easily one of the most engaging and exciting released of 2011, one I happily call Best of the Year.

Buy (US)

Buy (EU)

Link Removed by Request