Pete Swanson - Man with Potential (Type)
Man with Potential is the second album this year released by ex-Yellow Swans member Pete Swanson but to an unknowing listener, hearing the two back-to-back (the other was called I Don't Rock at All) you'd be hard pressed to recognize that they were the work of the same artist. With this, his debut on Type, Swanson moves away from the blazing guitarscapes of his earlier solo work (all excellent) and enters a far weirder phase, one that draws from the abrasive squall and feedback found in much Yellow Swans material but with deranged, schizoid beats heavily factoring into the mix. Explosive expanses of white noise jockey with sonically flayed techno and mutilated house music to stunning effect. Like diving into the ocean and hearing a rave on an imploding submarine a mile beneath the waves.
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Deaf Center - Owl Splinters (Type)
Deaf Center - the duo of Erik K. Skodvin (Svarte Greiner, the Miasmah label) and Otto Totland (Nest) - hails from Norway. The endless winters, months of darkness, and vast, frozen landscapes of that country can be intimately felt throughout this haunting, mysterious work that combines neo-classical with drone and abstract noise to create something deep, dark, and decidedly beautiful. Creaking, scraping cello from Skodvin and plaintive piano from Totland weave between powerful, rumbling bass drones and vast, swelling walls of noise. Huge and densely cacophonous, Owl Splinters pummels the listener, allowing small gasps of air with lovely intermittent solo vignettes for cello or piano. But these are brief and soon gripping darkness settles in once more. A crumbling, echoing, scorched epic, Owl Splinters is miles ahead of Deaf Center's excellent debut from several years back. The wait for this followup was long but well worth it.
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Buy
Download
Buy
Deaf Center - Owl Splinters (Type)
Deaf Center - the duo of Erik K. Skodvin (Svarte Greiner, the Miasmah label) and Otto Totland (Nest) - hails from Norway. The endless winters, months of darkness, and vast, frozen landscapes of that country can be intimately felt throughout this haunting, mysterious work that combines neo-classical with drone and abstract noise to create something deep, dark, and decidedly beautiful. Creaking, scraping cello from Skodvin and plaintive piano from Totland weave between powerful, rumbling bass drones and vast, swelling walls of noise. Huge and densely cacophonous, Owl Splinters pummels the listener, allowing small gasps of air with lovely intermittent solo vignettes for cello or piano. But these are brief and soon gripping darkness settles in once more. A crumbling, echoing, scorched epic, Owl Splinters is miles ahead of Deaf Center's excellent debut from several years back. The wait for this followup was long but well worth it.
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Motion Sickness of Time Travel - Luminaries and Synastry (Digitalis)
After a slew of tapes on a number of labels - including her own excellent imprint, Hooker Vision - the vinyl debut (excluding a vinyl reissue of the Seeping Through a Veil in the Unconscious cassette) of Rachel Evans' Luminaries and Synastry marks the best release yet from her Motion Sickness of Time Travel solo project. Employing a cosmic tapestry of endlessly looping and scattering arpeggiated synths and ethereal wordless vocals, Evans evokes spacewalks and dreamstates almost simultaneously. The music manages to often be both the most song-y of Evans' career (for example her vocals are more prominent here than ever before, less distant and more direct) and still maintain the floating, atmospheric daze of her earlier work. Luminaries and Synastry is perhaps the album that most deserves the adjective "sublime" out of everything released this year.
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Richard Knox and Frederic D. Oberland - The Rustle of the Stars (Gizeh)
The title of this stunning collaboration refers to a phenomenon that occurs in the Arctic when the collision of particles in one's breath with particles in the frigid air can actually be faintly heard by the naked ear. It's a telling title for an album that is about "a polar journey to the ends of the earth." Among the many instruments and sounds employed - including strings and choral work from a number of contributors - are field recordings, processed guitar, and bowed glockenspiel from Knox, and piano, guitar, dulcimer, harmonium, and analog electronics from Oberland. The result is bleak and beautiful, an exploration, it seems, of both the physical darkness of polar winter and the inner darkness that surely grows from being trapped in a world of ice and snow at the ends of the earth. With strings and swelling, textured guitar dominating these barren soundscapes, Knox and Oberland have crafted one of the finest ambient/classical albums since Stars of the Lid's "And Their Refinement of the Decline."
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Download
Buy
Richard Knox and Frederic D. Oberland - The Rustle of the Stars (Gizeh)
The title of this stunning collaboration refers to a phenomenon that occurs in the Arctic when the collision of particles in one's breath with particles in the frigid air can actually be faintly heard by the naked ear. It's a telling title for an album that is about "a polar journey to the ends of the earth." Among the many instruments and sounds employed - including strings and choral work from a number of contributors - are field recordings, processed guitar, and bowed glockenspiel from Knox, and piano, guitar, dulcimer, harmonium, and analog electronics from Oberland. The result is bleak and beautiful, an exploration, it seems, of both the physical darkness of polar winter and the inner darkness that surely grows from being trapped in a world of ice and snow at the ends of the earth. With strings and swelling, textured guitar dominating these barren soundscapes, Knox and Oberland have crafted one of the finest ambient/classical albums since Stars of the Lid's "And Their Refinement of the Decline."
Download
Buy
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