Arnold Dreyblatt and Megafaun - Appalachian Excitation

Wow. This record feels like family. I've developed a really warm relationship with this music in a short amount of time, partially because it was with me at the perfect moment for a first listen. Normally, I do all of my "serious" listening at home, preferably with a full-fi physical copy on a decent stereo, bathing in the music with undivided attention. But "Appalachian Excitation" and I first met on a return car trip from southern Missouri, via an iPod loaded with a few new albums to keep me awake.

If you've never been to those parts, there is a stretch along southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, drifting into southern Indiana and eventually into Kentucky, that feels like extended foothills to Appalachia in my mind: the rural areas are full of rolling hills and intensely curving highways where trees with tiny individual crowns crowd right to the edges of the roads, making a weird collective canopy that makes you forget about the sky. These hills begin just south of the final reach of glaciers from the last Ice Age, and both the land and the people take on a unique vibe, with the humid and ancient energy of the deep south blending into a cooler kind of remoteness I associate with more northerly regions. As a Great Plains native, I can relate to the lonely rural energy of these spaces easily, but we can see for miles in every direction on the plains. A little further south, it feels secretive in an unfamiliar way. You might assume the terrain carries on in similar fashion through the next stand of trees and over the next series of hills, but you never know--there could be crazy stuff hidden all over the place, almost on top of you. You don't know until you get there.

Normally I hate to interpret an album title so literally, but "Appalachian Excitation" falls perfectly into line with the feelings I get in those parts of the country. In a general sense, Dreyblatt's music with his Orchestra of Excited Strings has always felt both familiar and a touch alien to my ears, with just intonation tuning approaches providing an overwhelming sensation of harmony as an almost physical mass, a force that's always been there but has been hidden away to please the pianos and other equal temperament creatures of the musical world. And many of the string sounds themselves are struck rather than plucked, a kind of articulation that those of us raised on mostly Western musical traditions often hear as vaguely Asian. Specific to this new record, which feels like a close cousin of Excited Strings recordings like "Animal Magnetism," the prominent sound of banjos and country bends, along with rhythmic and harmonic nods to Appalachian and Ozark folk traditions, bring even more cultural signifiers into a complex-but-inevitable-feeling hybrid of orchestral, world, and folk musics.

And it rocks, too. Car trips aside, now that I've had the chance to sit with this music in LP format and move some serious amounts of air, I think this music works best when you can feel like you're right in the middle of a performance. As Dreyblatt put it in the liner notes to "Animal Magnetism," "This music is composed with a specific acoustic effect in mind. One should listen at maximum volume!" I think that principle very much applies to "Appalachian Excitation," too. On the surface, this is minimalist music, but the drones and simple harmonies that make up this record truly come to life when the walls of your surroundings--and your body, and your head--start to resonate in sympathetic vibration. I'm sure it's even better live, but the fine folks at Pinebox Recording in North Carolina did a wonderful job of capturing this music with a very present, "played right in front of you" kind of feel, and it's been mastered and pressed with plenty of dynamic range, so the frequent unison hits found throughout the record have a charged, intense front end that decays into satisfying chords, rich with the harmonic overtones characteristic of the "excited strings" approach.

Given the overall sound of "Appalachian Excitation," it feels natural to describe this music in terms of Dreyblatt's musical history, but serious appreciation for Megafaun's performance here needs its own mention as well. Megafaun fans might initially be bewildered by this record as a non-vocal set of pieces. And they really are "pieces," not tunes. But their commitment to this music is admirable: it takes a unique sense of "the present" to really get inside this music, as each chord, unison hit, or change in direction has a kind of holographic significance to the whole of each composition. Megafaun nails it. They're all in. It's also interesting to hear them work with some electric instruments on this record, including the super high-tech Moog lap steel, which seems to be responsible for synth sounds and almost hornlike drone moments that surface in pieces like "Edge Observation."

Recommended! Check it out at Northern Spy.

--also published at Killed in Cars

Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Rhythm Section and a Laptop: solo works from Brian Chase and Carl Testa

The history of early electronic music stayed in close alignment with "classical" music circles for many decades--the sounds were new and otherworldly, dovetailing nicely with New Music innovations from serialism to indeterminacy, and from a practical perspective, building and maintaining the first generation of synths took the kind of money one rarely finds in musicians' hands outside of academia. As time went on, and electronic instruments became both portable and affordable, they increasingly became go-to instruments in rock and pop music circles, and as we all know, the popular music of the last several generations is constructed from mountains of silicon and electricity.

As pop music took over the Moogs and the hard drives, though, the classical music world slowly shuffled its feet backwards toward the exit doors. With a few notable exceptions, most of the contemporary classical folks whose work I've admired over the years have quietly but pretty thoroughly avoided electronics, other than the occasional amplified acoustic instrument. You can see the same kind of trend in jazz music as well: other than basic amplification needs, you have to go all the way back to the 70s to find a really active period of electronics in jazz.

But as electronic instruments evolve from hardware to software, I think we're due for an invigorating electronic revival in New Music of both composed and improvised disciplines. To an extent, it seems inevitable: if you're 40 or younger, you've lived at least half of your life within the "computer age," after all. When computers are an ordinary fact of life, moving from towers in home offices to handheld devices on nightstands, it's only natural that they're going to be integrated into a wider variety of musical activities than ever before. It's a total non-issue for the youngest generation coming up: living with computers is just living.

With that in mind, here are a couple of exceptional records integrating acoustic instruments and software manipulations. Both of these records create sonic environments that remind me of "classic" eras in electronic composition and improvisation, though the primary sounds within each are triggered by activities on acoustic instruments.

Carl Testa - Iris
A phenomenal upright bass player and composer, Carl Testa's "Iris" is a document of live solo bass/electronics improvisations. Playing bass while writing live code into a SuperCollider-based software environment, these pieces outstretch into chamber group-sized acoustical spaces with an unpredictable timbral variety--a surprisingly melodic brand of electroacoustic improvisation.

Opening track "At Early Bright" is a great introduction to the concept, as it features some of the most harmonically simple bass playing on the album, against which you can develop a feel for a few of the ways this software interacts with the live-sampled fragments of sound. Working mostly with variations on a tritone-based figure (which amusingly sounds like a Black Sabbath riff early in the piece), crystalline tones four and five octaves above the source material fall into melodic patterns and shimmer in quickly-repeating delays. As the synthesized fragments continue to unwind, Testa adds more complexity into the bass parts, with some walking lines and some harsh tremolo-bowed passages. In this piece, at least, he keeps vibrato to a minimum, locking tightly into tune and working each note for pure tone.

There is some beautiful, emotive vibrato in alternating bowed/plucked passages in the next piece, "When Scattered," from which a few relatively unaffected loops are retained to build tense passages with close-voiced dissonances that would be difficult or impossible to play as doublestops. The SuperCollider setup doesn't start to have a noticeable role until halfway into the piece, where it picks up textural clouds of sound from a section of particularly bristly extended technique shredding, with fast bowing scrapes and col legno, ect. This is followed by "Diffracted," which is the most texturally-focused piece here, closer to "classic" eai with little concern for harmonic development.

My favorite track is the final piece, "And Engulfed," which evolves slowly to incorporate large aggregations of beautiful high-pitched synth chords that glisten and whirl around one another. Toward the end, it takes on somber tones that wouldn't be entirely out of place in the denouement of a Godspeed tune--amazing that all of this sound can be produced can controlled from humble bass tones with live manipulation.

It's a great-sounding record regardless of how these sounds are produced, but if you're interested in seeing a bit of Testa's setup, here's a video of him tweaking a live synth module in SuperCollider:

Edit 7/9/13: Testa has uploaded a great, informative video showing the process behind "Iris" here:

"Iris" will be released on July 16th, and you can pick it up via LockStep Records. There will be a 5.1 DVD audio mix that you can buy and download, as well as CD and mp3 formats. I only have a stereo setup, myself, but I imagine that the many fragments of granular sound manipulation would sound really amazing in full surround.

Brian Chase - Drums & Drones
As drummer in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Brian Chase is probably the most commercially successful musician whose music I've profiled here. But he's been a long-time participant in avant-garde circles, too, playing with scores of folks on the NYC downtown scene, including some seriously wicked drumming on Jeremiah Cymerman's "Fire Sign" album that I reviewed a while ago. Through a series of events that are fully detailed in the liner notes, Chase has been developing a compositional process for filtering and effecting the sounds of drums to tease out the overtones, creating electronic-sounding music in just intonation.

These liner notes deserve a mention all their own--they're the most extensive notes I've seen in quite some time, fully elucidating both the personal and technical developments that led to this music. At times they get quite confessional, and in reading these elaborate notes, listening to the album many times, and watching the DVD, I kind of feel like I know the guy. And I like him. Chase has created a mini-site for the record here, which has some meaty excerpts of the liner notes and a lot of additional information and samples. Very much worth checking that out.

So I'm not going to delve into heavy technical details here--the liner notes have all of the information you could hope to find about how each track was made, as well as a narrative describing the three-phase evolution of this concept over several years. Instead, I'm going to try to describe how this music sounds, and how I'd suggest listening to it at first:

The basic physics that make this music possible are pretty straightforward. When someone strikes a drum, we're all trained to think of it as a rhythmic event in which the first moment of articulation is "the money." But after the initial hit, the drum continues to resonate for quite some time, and it contains a complicated set of interlocking frequencies, partially dependent on the main resonant frequencies of the drum shell, but also quite variable depending on the tuning of the drum head.

As Chase uses a number of filtering/effect strategies to attenuate various pitches within the set of natural overtones, pure sine waves are brought into the foreground. And a lot of these waves are very, very high pitches. When you consider that the fundamental pitches of many drums are already quite high, and the lowest overtones start sounding an octave above their fundamental pitches and head toward the stratosphere from there, a lot of the most interesting melodic stuff in this music happens in the upper ranges of your hearing, approaching and sometimes crossing into the territory usually reserved for hearing test tones.

Though the track sequencing of the album is really nice on repeated listening, I would recommend starting your experience with this music on track 4, the "Bass Drum Drone." As one might expect from the low fundamental pitches of a bass drum, a lot of these overtones sit in the midrange of your hearing, making really nice washes of pure chords and rhythms that are easy on the ear. A bit of feedback finds its way into this piece at times, and it ends on a high note--literally--but I find that I get a bit of hearing fatigue jumping right into some of the pieces that start in super high pitch ranges.

Here's another weird thing about listening to high-frequency compositions: when there are moments of complex high-frequency density, you can make your own melodies simply by moving around the room or sometimes even subtly moving your head. I first became aware of how much you can control this as a listener at a Jason Zeh show last year, where he creates really rich fields of high-frequency sound with modified cassette players. Moving around in sweet spots between the cranked PA speakers, even a tilt of your head would bring out different pitches, as those tiny waves react in wildly complex and functionally unpredictable ways to volume levels, speaker placement, and the proportions and variety of reflective surfaces of the room you're in.

That's part of the big-picture challenge with getting the most out of just-intonation music: if you have the opportunity, it's nice to figure out what the strongest resonant frequencies are in whatever room you're using with the music, and then if it's possible to tweak the tuning of the music to work with those frequencies, it's a way more powerful experience with lots more sympathetic vibrations erupting into the room. For this reason, I slightly disagree with Chase's liner note recommendation to listen to this album on stereo speakers versus headphones or computer speakers. If you want to hear it "how the artist intended," I think a really good set of headphones is worth trying with this album. But you'll want to try it multiple ways. When you pump it through a stereo, experiment with variations in speaker placement if it's possible, and you'll be able to get all kinds of sounds out of this album, from crazy hornlike sounds in the middle of "Snare Brush Drone," or a perfect storm of complex pitches to try that head-tilting trick with in "Drone State of Mind, V 1."

What I'm ultimately saying is that while this is essentially a drone album, and the influence of and affinity with other kinds of just-intonation drone music is definitely present, don't expect "In C" bumped up a few octaves. This is its own thing altogether, and you have to live with it in a very unique way.

There's a great DVD of mostly black and white visuals that comes with the disc, too. Produced by Ursula Scherrer and Erik Zajaceskowski, I found it fun to play around with the album as a purely audio experience a bunch of times, trying different setups, and then checking out the video. And if you get a chance, see this live! From the couple of videos floating around online, it looks like seeing this performed with the videos projected would be an intense, beautiful experience. You can check out a couple of live videos here. Pick up the CD/DVD/liner note epic from Pogus Productions.

The Green, Green Grass of Home -- a Field Hymns overview

It's amazing how many cassette labels keep springing up all over the world. This ostensibly outdated technology, whose demise has been lamented in many mainstream news articles, is enjoying a very real renaissance. I wouldn't be surprised if a few manufacturers start building Walkman-style machines again to keep up with the demand.

In the meantime, there are zillions of decent used decks and portable machines floating around, and you can set yourself up for many hours of enjoyment with an hour or two's wages at your local pawn shop or thrift store. And sweet Jesus, you should get on it quickly if you haven't already, as a lot of the most innovative and inspiring music being created today is coming out in batches of cassette-only analog joy.

While I'm digging the collected output of a whole bunch of cassette labels these days--be on the lookout for upcoming reviews of stuff from Eiderdown, SicSic, Orange Milk, Planted Tapes, Crash Symbols, New Atlantis, Centipede Farm, Personal Archives, Constellation Tatsu, Words + Dreams and more--today I want to celebrate the back catalog of Field Hymns, whose frantic series of releases in a few short years have turned vast stretches of my life into fully satisfying synth-fueled hallucinations.

Field Hymns does things up in a most deluxe way--releases feature 4-panel J-cards, printed on both sides with excellent art by label mastermind Dylan McConnell (you can see more of his design work at Tiny Little Hammers). McConnell has a fun, recognizable style that brings continuity to the whole catalog, but he also squeezes in great individual touches that give each release an appropriate personal feel. This art is seriously beautiful. I've stared at these gorgeous tapes for hours. And I really admire the work put into these designs, while most tape labels are only rocking 3-panel, single sided J-cards.

On the practical tip, the pro-dubbed tapes of Field Hymns releases feature additional thoughtful design work on their labels, and most of the cassette shells he's chosen are the kind with screws, a nice practical feature in the event of an occasional spaghetti-tape catastrophe. You can fix yr analog "glitches," boys and girls, and have a little fun while you're doing it. And the whole label is seamlessly integrated with BandCamp, so you can have those squishy digital files for your iDevices, too, and place your orders using PayPal. It's a perfect marriage of old and new technologies: you get all of the best in www.convenience along with the inherent beauty of these albums as physical objects and analog wave-slinging vitamins via pony express just a few days later. Beautiful.

Onto the music: like most of my favorite labels, Field Hymns obviously invests a lot of energy in the curation process. These albums all feel like they belong together while leaving room for lots of diversity. Generally speaking, this catalog tends to focus on synth-based instrumental music, heavy on kosmische and avant-dance vibes, though there are some well-placed exceptions. Artists in the Field Hymns roster tend to focus on longer-form compositions that evolve patiently, but what I find unique in these selections is a shared sense of fun and adventure. While a lot of slowly-evolving, drone-oriented recordings assume fairly dark moods, I find almost every FH album I've experienced to be way more uplifting than the norm for these genres. And fresh--these albums don't want to be heard as 70s Faust outtakes; they have their own collective vibe happening that's still vital and playful.

Fortunately, all of these mood-enhancing oscillations don't come at the cost of frivolity, either. I pay special attention to any musical efforts that manage to be on the happy/dreamy side of the musical spectrum without feeling shallow or empty, and if I had to guess what curatorial standards for FH might include, they seem to recognize the significance of that difference. Another weird line to avoid in drone/ambient/electronic music is that sort of neutral, new-agey kind of inconsequential meandering--you know, that stuff on the Avalon Music comps you find on that endcap at every Target or Bed Bath & Beyond store. Needless to say, FH confidently steers well clear of that lack-of-vibe, too.

In the Field
I've listened to almost the whole Field Hymns catalog now, and while I like almost everything on the label, here are a few of my favorite artists/tapes I would strongly recommend checking out. Album titles should link you to appropriate places at Field Hymns if you want to explore them yourself.

Giant Claw - Impossible Chew
How does Giant Claw and Orange Milk Records co-founder Keith Rankin find the time to be so prolific? Hot on the heels of his film music comp on Constellation Tatsu, which I reviewed here, Giant Claw dropped a BandCamp-only EP, "Attorney Struggle," which made me feel like I was a kid playing Gogol-13 all over again, and the next cassette has already arrived via Field Hymns. If you're into previous Giant Claw efforts, you'll feel at home again in "Impossible Chew," with its many arpeggiator-fueled ostinato lines and characteristic swagger. Many of these short pieces feel like library music cues, but uniquely morphed over impossible combinations of eras: 70s Kraut synths simmer with mod wheels pushed up just a touch, but the rhythmic figures feel like exuberant mid-80s synth pop. Cluster fronted by Olivia Newton John? Amazing as always. The standout track for me is "Meal Brothers Theme," which feels like it absorbed a bit of 90s hip hop as well, with lots of portamento lines and repeated high note rhythms. A great addition to the Giant Claw discography.

PLVS VLTRA - Yo-Yo Blue
Field Hymns brings us the sophomore album by Toko Yasuda's PLVS VLTRA solo project, and it's one of those rare albums that has a strong appeal for both pop and weirdo music scenes. There are plenty of trippy backwards edits, startling punctuations of Bollywood flourishes, and modular synths galore, but most of these pieces are very beat-oriented and almost always melodic. Without being derivative of Bjork, PLVS VLTRA masters a similar unity between experimental soundscape work and very catchy songwriting. My favorite track, "ちょ-ちょ " (pronounced "Cho Cho"), has a great beat, reverse reedy-sounding synths, and a chill vocal from Nico. A great summer night jam while keeping all of your strange-music cred fully intact. This should be huge.

Black Hat - Covalence
This record is heavy on sonic contrasts, frequently traveling into darker corners than a lot of Field Hymns releases. At first it presents itself as a percussion dominated early industrial album, but the drums get out of the way by the second track, revealing wide vistas of sound incorporating lots of orchestral instruments. I don't know if they're samples or performed just for these pieces, but strings and horns and harps combine with delicate field recordings and synths to produce great pieces like "Jaune," a nurturing wash of slowly-moving melodic ideas that stays just a touch pensive. By the time percussion reappears in "The Lattice and the Comorant," the ambient textures themselves begin to absorb rhythm, flexing and pulsing in time. Using a wide dynamic range and sound sources from the conventional to pure electrical hums, "Covalence" is a sophisticated and rewarding listen.

Jonathan James Carr - Well Tempered Ignorance
If you're in the mood for a full-on psych synth blackout, "Well Tempered Ignorance" is your jam. What sounds like a warehouse full of synths begin to breathe together as Carr nests beautiful legato melodies atop the whole organism. I sometimes wish that more psych/drone albums found ways to incorporate virtuoso playing, and this album really delivers on that front. Field recordings that sound like they alternate between exotic locales and suburban back yards blend perfectly with the music, often sneaking in to delineate between musical transitions. And those sounds--pretty much every crazy patch you might hope to hear from an armada of ancient synths makes an appearance somewhere. Confidently performed and thoughtfully paced, Carr's solo debut is a real treasure.

Boron - Aria Statica
I reviewed Boron's most recent online-only effort here a few months ago, in which I lamented not having heard this sophomore release. Since then, I tracked down a copy, and I'm so glad that I did. As its name implies, this album is made of many slices of granular synth textures. Overall, it's a quiet, subtle collection of ideas, with occasional bits of radio sound or possibly other found sounds I can't quite identify. It feels like an extension of early electronic and musique concrete disciplines, suspended in time and just waiting for the right audience to catch up. Compared especially to Boron's Beige album, the hermetic focus here on a narrow palette of static-y buzzes feels a little clinical, but I get the impression that's part of the intended vibe: synths as mad science.

Mattress - Lonely Souls
This sounds like a slaying underground mid-80s album that never happened but should have: Suicide jamming with Nick Cave on vocals. Edgy vocals are draped in harsh reverb, the synth choices have the perfect amount of organ stops opened into the mix, and the whole recording is toasted to mid-fi mono perfection. Some awesome, simple-and-savage live drums surface in a few tracks, along with some gnarly live bass in the very no-wave instrumental "Dead Ends." Big organ riffs keep propelling these tracks into the rock and roll retrofuture--these are seriously great songs that anybody into Birthday Party or Love & Rockets or name your own postpunk guitargoth poison-of-choice will totally enjoy. While this isn't my usual kind of thing, it's so well executed that I find myself listening to it more than the actual famous bands I've namedropped above. A sweet surprise.

Bastian Void - Fluorescent Bells
This baby is sold out everywhere, but it's so damned fine that I just have to mention it. One of a few projects that Moss Archive's Joe Bastardo is currently rocking, Bastian Void makes intrepid synth soundscapes that unite solemn oscillating goodness with toy keyboard drum patterns and uptempo arpeggiator cycles. While this is by no means a jazz record, its earnest pace and synths that often sound like they're pumped through an overwhelmed tube PA remind me more of the urgent passions of 70s fusion than relaxed kraut ambience. And the 20-minute, 5-section ride of "In Common Outlets" approaches a prog level of compositional sophistication, though it's the most abstract and soundart-oriented section of this gratifying album. And for what it's worth, this tape has joined a small number of records receiving the "what is this, I love it" phone call award from a random listener on my radio show. This is probably my favorite Field Hymns release to date, and while the physical release seems to be sold out, you can still pick up the digital edition from the Bastian Void BandCamp. Be sure to check out the recent releases from Bastardo's other projects while you're at it: the new Homeowner album on Orange Milk, and the new Looks Realistic release on Constellation Tatsu, are both exquisite as well.

Deep Listening and serendipity: a Taiga Records overview

When I was a teenage ruffian entering music school, I loved shred guitar more than just about anything. I had hopes for a life of long solos and longer hair, and I was pumped to learn commercial composition to write the next big hits. But sometime in that first week, I was a passenger in a car with a fellow student who was jamming Gorecki string quartets and Penderecki's "Threnody" as we drove around Denver. My small-town head was blown wide open, and I changed my major to classical comp the next day. Those couple of hours completely changed my life.

I'm roughly twice that age now, and I'm amazed and excited to report that I've been feeling the same kind of all-encompassing shift in my music listening, and my life in general, after opening a box of promo records last November from Taiga Records. I've been adjusting to the aftereffects of this music for months, and the time has come to write about it.

Like all epiphanies viewed in reverse, delineation isn't perfectly clear--I had already been into some non-pop music like Zorn and Ornette and the Residents well before I hit music school, for example, and in the case of Taiga records, I was already familiar with a couple of their releases and had been following the work of Tatsuya Nakatani for a while. But there's a spark, a serendipitous moment, that draws a line all the same, and everything is different. For me, this has all happened at a nearly perfect moment where it seems like there is a renaissance of "other musics" happening: the disciplines of delicate electronic composition, lowercase improv, eai, and field recording/manipulation are all experiencing some of their best periods ever, as experienced composers and performers release some of their best work and new folks are imparting waves of fresh ideas into their scenes. These musics have been part of my aural diet for some time, but this batch of records from Taiga has done something radical to me, and I feel like I'm listening to everything with a new set of ears.

The Taiga vibe
Taiga works slowly and carefully to deliver recordings that will stay with you forever. Focusing on thoughtful curation, founder Andrew Lange has only released 25 albums over the course of 6 years. The recordings are prepared for release with audiophile care, cut with a direct metal mastering technique and pressed to very heavy vinyl--these often go beyond the 180 gram "audiophile" standard all the way to 200 grams. Every record I've spun sounds phenomenal from a production standpoint, with very low noise and incredible high-end detail, a must for the kinds of program material highlighted by the label.

Beyond the music, the attention to design details on these releases is among the best I've ever seen from any label. Every release is treated with the kind of archival-level care that most labels reserve for special occasions. While I've always admired thoughtful presentation, these records go so beyond my usual knowledge of packaging ephemera that I've picked up a whole new vocabulary just to comprehend the consistent level of production quality involved with this catalog. The jackets are made of heavyweight, rich papers. Some are Stoughton tip-on jackets, wrapped in a variety of approaches: colored papers, textured papers, metallic inks, letterpress work, etc. Many are gatefolds, and many have slipcovers or belts as well. A lot feature "flooded pockets," where color enhancements have been added to the insides of the jackets--a subtle gesture, but it really adds to the aesthetic when you remove these substantial-feeling records from their packages to play them. And the records themselves look amazing--there are black vinyl editions of the releases, but many of them are also issued with colored or clear vinyl variations that resonate beautifully with their artwork. A couple of releases have etched D-sides, too. I can't really think of a production technique that hasn't been featured in a Taiga release. Beyond the music, connoisseurs of print/packaging/design work taken to the level of fine art will find much to love in this catalog.

Where appropriate, additional written/printed materials supplement these releases beautifully. Some releases contain printed scores, essays, or additional photo/art inserts. I don't think of these additions so much as "packaging," because they're much more directly related to creating a context for understanding the music they accompany, but here too you will find thoughtfully considered papers, inks, and printing techniques. When you pull out a Taiga record, you can feel confident that you have all of the resources you need to fully get into the music, with packaging created just as attentively as the sounds it contains.

This unflinching attention to the multimedia level of composition in each of these releases pays off. Although many musical genres find a home together in the Taiga stable, all of this music shares an aesthetic of immersion--that is, this is deeply contemplative music. These aren't records you put on before you clean your house. They demand your attention, they beg for long-term relationships. So this kind of packaging doesn't feel like a consumer goods "vinyl fetishist" kind of thing--it's something real and substantial, creating a full and present experience in the face of a heavily mediated digital age. Since you can plan on sitting with these recordings with your full awareness, the art and liner notes and design work are there to enrich and focus your experience on repeated listenings. I'm reminded of the "slow food" movement in culinary circles. This is a great foundation for a "slow music" movement.

The Music
I'd like to highlight a few of my favorite artists who are featured in the Taiga catalog, along with a few recordings I'd strongly recommend. But again, I feel like all of this music has been commingling in my ears, mind, and heart for a while, and if you're a person who wants to fall in love with creative, inspired music again and again, I don't think you'll go wrong starting anywhere in the Taiga roster. This is a perfect example of what a great label can do through careful curation and devotion to detail. Taiga is a label I can trust.

Pauline Oliveros
The last few years have been incredible for celebrating the work of composer and improviser Pauline Oliveros. Last year's 12-disc box set on Important Records documented much of her early tape and electronics works, and her newer recordings, both under her own name and as part of the Deep Listening Band, have been  flying off the shelves at both Important and Taiga. In fact, it looks as though only one of the releases featuring her is still available directly from Taiga. The Timeless Pulse Trio, featuring Oliveros joined by percussionists George Marsh and Jennifer Wilsey, is a wonderful double-LP, rich with drones and intertwined modulating rhythms. Even though most of Oliveros' playing in this group focuses on shifting clouds of dissonance, I've been really obsessed with non-equal temperament tuning systems for several years, and as this music progresses, there are frequent triumphant moments where overtones coalesce into beautiful walls of perfectly-tuned sound, supported by perfectly-placed percussion embellishments that leave me wanting to revisit this album immediately.

I also need to mention that I've been reading Oliveros' book "Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice" in the same timeframe as my newfound love affair with Taiga, and it too is contributing to my sense of "new ears." I've found myself in the Slow Walk more than a few times with Timeless Pulse and other records, and I'm excited to continue exploring the practice of Deep Listening, which feels like a valuable system for musicians and music lovers alike. I can't express my gratitude for this music and these practices. You can find out more about Deep Listening on the Deep Listening Institute website.

Tatsuya Nakatani
As mentioned above, I've been deeply affected by the work of Tatsuya Nakatani for almost a decade. While in some ways I think seeing him work his magic in person is the best way to experience his music, many of his recordings are powerful documents of his approach, too. Tragically, it looks like his "Fever Dream" Taiga album with the MAP trio has been out of print for some time. A real shame--this collaboration with guitarist Mary Halvorson and Reuben Radding on bass is a true gem, and one of my favorite records featuring any of the three. Fortunately, though, his recent "Nakatani Gong Orchestra" release is still available, and it's a great record. While Nakatani tours the country playing almost indescribable solo percussion sets, he's also been staging "Gong Orchestra" concerts over the past few years. Using local musicians (and sometimes non-musicians) who he quickly trains to bow his collection of gongs, Nakatani conducts a chamber ensemble of performers after a brief rehearsal, drawing out a surprising variety of metallic drones and even fortuitous melodies that astonish humbled audiences in a variety of acoustic spaces. This LP seamlessly combines passages of recordings made in six cities into two sides of uninterrupted gong worship. In person, these performances feel transcendent--on record, this album feels a little more haunted at times than at least some of the live shows, but it's a powerful experience, made all the more remarkable when you consider the humble palette of sound sources and the sometimes inexperienced collaborators involved in producing the music. It looks like it's still available in a clever "gong" colored vinyl edition as well, which is a perfect way to celebrate these sounds.

Rafel Toral
Taiga has been involved with electronic musician Rafael Toral's "Space Program" series from the beginning--indeed, the first trio of releases from the label lay out the foundation of the project. However, I find it interesting that this small-run label, whose releases mostly sell out, still has remaining copies available of all six Toral releases they've done. Lucky for you, dear readers, as you can still get into the Space Program on the ground floor.

I can see how these albums can be a difficult proposition to get into, as some of the sounds coming from these experimental instruments can be harsh and foreboding at times. But in conjunction, these records combine to reveal different attributes of a galaxy of sounds that come together in the the "orchestral environment" of the "Space" album itself. The overall "program" is hard to describe briefly, but in essence you get music that combines the sound exploration of new music/eai circles with the kinds of musically communicative interactions one finds in the work of jazz outsiders. "Space Solo" albums focus on individual instruments that contribute to the whole, and "Space Elements" albums feature a variety of collaborations that put these instruments through their paces in surprising contexts.

There are "blips" and "bloops" and gnarly distorted retrofuturistic electronic sounds that split the difference between Stockhausen and Merzbow at times, especially among the "Space Solo" efforts, but it's truly amazing how diverse these instruments can get in the "Space Elements" series. And the "Space" album itself is a total must-have, uniting the many musical threads behind the whole concept. It might take some time to wrap your head around the project, but I have found that it's totally worth the effort. There is nothing quite like these beautiful and strange records.

A few other recommendations
Kayo Dot has been one of my favorite bands since their first release on Tzadik almost a decade ago, and their deluxe vinyl release of "Coyote" on Taiga is gorgeous. While a lot of the folks who got into KD largely because of their earlier avant-metal affiliations might not have vibed on this record, I think it's a great album that continues to improve with each spin. Composer/bandleader Toby Driver transitioned from guitar to bass on this recording, and horns assume an increasingly dominant musical role. In some ways, it's both the "proggiest" and "gothiest" KD album to my ears, an unusual combination of styles, but Driver's increasingly mature compositional style makes it all work.

Composer and traveling field recording archivist Douglas Quin's album "Fathom" was particularly striking to me, too. Made of underwater recordings split between the Arctic and the Antarctic, these recordings transcend the whole notion of composition. This record sounds like nothing I've ever heard within terrestrial music, and frankly it's hard to believe these sounds are happening anywhere on our planet at all. If you want feel humbled by just how little of our own world we experience under ordinary circumstances, get a taste of "Fathom."

I'll close with a few photos of these amazing records. Thanks to Taiga for turning me all the way on for a second time in my life!

Heavy, clear vinyl and a red flooded pocket on Rafael Toral's "Space Solo 1":

The beautiful gong-colored vinyl of the Gong Orchestra LP:

Interaction of beautiful letterpressed textures on "Fathom":

Little Women - Lung

Already a band I've been following for some time, I'm delighted to review the newest epic from Brooklyn's Little Women. Two years in the making, "Lung" has just been released by Aum Fidelity, and this album-length composition is easily set to be my favorite record of 2013. "Lung" is an enormous step forward, compositionally and emotionally, by a band whose previous work already forged a totally unique sound, equal parts plaintive and powerful, in the grooves of the debut EP "Teeth" and followup LP "Throat."

I've long admired the Little Women sound for a kind of feral energy few bands can achieve, steeped in an Ayler-esque free blues but with the aggression of NYC hardcore and compositional and technical rigor rarely found outside of the classical world. This band can embody many genres, but we're a full generation beyond the collage/montage approaches of bands like Naked City. Little Women transcends imitation and cultural references--having long ago fused their influences into a new essential substance, their work is forceful and direct. And even at their harshest moments, the music is driven by a deep archetypal understanding of melody--indeed, the full and unflinching devotion to melody sometimes takes the music into a violent heliosphere. In a world of cynicism and emotional detachment, Little Women plays with a raw sincerity that makes the impossible become the inevitable.

"Lung" adds a new set of dynamics to the work of Little Women in the form of patience and silence. And it's a major change in the sound--as a composition, "Lung" demands a lot of patience and incorporates a tremendous amount of silence. The opening several minutes of the piece, for example, are almost completely without sound, as occasional brushes of percussion gradually open the space into music. The first introductory section of full-band playing that follows is the most gentle recorded offering from Little Women to date, melancholy and careful and respectful of the silence from which it was born.

The vocal section that evolves out of the introduction is a major revelation all its own. The whole band intones together, becoming one, preparing to act as a unit through the upheavals and calamities to come. Vocals made a brief appearance on the debut EP "Teeth," but they were deployed as more of a weapon there, distorted, with harsh, short articulations. The long tones here bring us all together as well, band and audience, recognizing the shared experience this music demands.

I'm not going to do a play-by-play of this whole disc, as this is a composition that simply must be heard to realize its full impact. But I want to return to Little Women's approach to silence and patience throughout the piece, as I think the emotional impact of silence shifts between two roles as "Lung" unfolds. In what roughly amounts to the first half of the album, silence is centering, imparting a rejuvenating effect that nurtures subsequent musical sections into being. In the second half, which starts just before the literal center of the piece, moments of silence are shorter, mostly stop-time holes in increasingly-punishing rhythmic passages, and they assume a role of "negative space" analogous to its use in painting or architecture, weightless pauses absolutely alive with the anticipation of oncoming mass.

This isn't a precise division into two, but to my ears the piece coalesces around these contrasting approaches of patient anticipation and aggressive release. The band reports that the piece evolved around "Shakespearean form," following elements of beauty toward tragic ends, and the record succeeds at manifesting these contrasts powerfully, both within smaller sections and looking at its timeline folded against itself. The extreme contrasts of "Lung" make its aggressive passages feel much more piercing than their previous work, which generally stayed frantic and violent for long stretches. "Lung" invites you all the way inside.

"Lung" is a really rich, complex piece, though, and repeated listenings will reveal many kinds of narrative forms. The liner notes suggest a division into four rough sections, mirroring the passage of seasons, and the band further reports that the primary themes of this record "exist simultaneously inside every sound, every phrase, every section, and the entire piece." With such a powerful, resonant recording, finding your own ways to relate to this music is part of the process.

While it's fair to say that the dual (and sometimes duel) saxophone attack of Darius Jones and Travis LaPlante constitutes the dominant voice of Little Women, "Lung" provides more space to showcase the work of Andrew Smiley on guitar and Jason Nazary on drums than previous albums. The introductory cymbal work, for example, sets the tone for the whole first "inhalation" of the piece. And while Smiley leaves most of the melodic territory of this music to the saxes, his multifaceted approach to guitar quietly holds this piece together. With strategic chord work, weird textural approaches, and stabbing brutal riffs, mostly played through a clean sound that just begins to break up on hard attacks, guitars fill all of the right places in this music. You know you're doing a few things right when there are never any moments when you wish a bass player was sitting in with the band.

Like the previous Little Women releases, "Teeth" features freaky cover art from guitarist Mick Barr, whose instantly recognizable drawing style adds a lot of continuity to the Little Women oeuvre. And speaking of Barr, Aum Fidelity's decision to skip releasing this album on vinyl reminded me of my purchase of Orthrelm's "Ov" LP years ago. Right in the middle of that dense, relentless piece, there's a quick fade, and you have to flip the record, clean, cue, and jump in again. I love vinyl, but I always wished I'd opted for the CD version of that album--you have to stay in the zone, no distractions, to fully vibe on it. "Lung" is very much the same, demanding uninterrupted attention, and I think Aum Fidelity made the right decision sticking to CD (but still go back and pick up the previous album "Throat" on vinyl if you haven't). This is a beautifully recorded album, too, captured live in one take, and it's perfectly mixed and mastered, retaining a wider dynamic range than most orchestral albums.

It's a seriously heavy experience--do yourself a favor and spend some time with "Lung." Few bands even try to write something this musically and emotionally ambitious, and even fewer succeed. But I think fans of creative music from a wide variety of camps, metal to jazz to classical, will find this record to be a deeply moving experience.

Seaven Teares - Power Ballads

In the wake of the brilliant and ferocious Extra Life, composer Charlie Looker's attentions have turned to two new acts, the "depth metal" Psalm Zero and the (superficially) gentler Seaven Teares, whose recorded debut, "Power Ballads," recently dropped via Northern Spy. To some degree, Seaven Teares is a further distillation of some of the early-music ideals behind the Extra Life canon, and I think most fans of Extra Life will find much to like here, but there's something even darker happening in the folds of "Power Ballads."

It's probably worth addressing the John Dowland influence on this music first: the band's name references Dowland's "Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares," a set of compositions published in 1604. The Lachrimae themselves are instrumental variations on his lute song "Flow My Tears," an arrangement of which is found on this record. In his time, Dowland's tunes were quite popular, and though his lyrics tend toward the darker side of existence--loss, loneliness, sadness, etc--those kinds of subjects are so intensely universal, they never go out of style. And I think it's worth noting that much of Dowland's work was intended as dance music in the Renaissance era, particularly the slow, deliberate, melancholy vibes of the pavane. The pavane is a basse danse, where your feet are dragging across the floor, as opposed to an uptempo ho-down kind of vibe, and collectively the scene around Dowland's work seems kind of like a protogoth spectacle, where I'm sure the somber dirges of Bauhaus would have been a welcome jam if they'd had kerosene powered 8-tracks tricking out horse-drawn carriages of the day.

The orchestration for Looker's Seaven Teares project allows for an aural palette that can be relatively faithful to Dowland's music: guitar and voices dominate, percussion is generally delicate and stays out of the way, and recorders make frequent appearances. Added to the textures of early music, the droning atmospheric potential of the harmonium and simple sinewave-y synth tones sound perfectly at home here, and modern lute badass Jozef Van Wissem makes an appearance on a cover of "Them Bones" by Alice in Chains (more on that later). Like Dowland, the music of Seaven Teares draws heavily from the folk tradition, drawing from deep universal themes with a kind of direct simplicity--the more metrically complex moments of Extra Life are mostly gone in this music, replaced with an unambiguous focus on the music and the lyrics. And the recording itself sounds like it was captured mostly live, with some requisite room-reverb-mud and distortion in the mix adding to the somber vibes of the songs.

But I don't think Seaven Teares intends for this music to be taken medicinally as some kind of high-art history lesson. Dowland is part of the context, but most of these songs focus on issues that are as acutely moving today as any era. It's just interesting to note how much of the human experience stays relevant to people of any era, that we've all struggled with similar forms of despair well before the collective shift of our eyes downward into a fragmented abyss of touchscreen telephones.

The "universal feel" in the sound of Seaven Teares is greatly enhanced by dual lead vocals throughout the album: mostly relinquishing the lead singer role in this band, Looker is joined on most tunes by the voice of Amirtha Kidambi. In various configurations of singing in unison, harmonizing, or trading verses, the male/female co-vocal approach gives this music more gender inclusiveness than the often-masculine vibes of Extra Life. Charlie takes over vocals on a few noteworthy occasions, though, including the disturbing tale found in "Like Your Black Hair."

For Extra Life fans, your favorite jam on "Power Ballads" is going to be "Our Lady of Sound." Synths are more dominant here, with a sound approaching "Ripped Heart"-era Extra Life. The drums, devoid of cymbal work, have an almost country feel on this tune, and it's easily the most uptempo number found here. And the album closer actually IS an Extra Life tune: the acoustic/vocal number "Thin Veil" previously heard on the Nat Baldwin/Extra Life split LP from 2008 is recast here with recorder countermelodies and harmonium drones, heavy on unison vocals and performed at a gloomy fraction of the tempo of the original.

Perhaps the most capital-c confounding moment on the album for me is the cover of "Them Bones" by Alice in Chains. It's slowed down to about a quarter of its original tempo, the relentless vibes of the original turned into a funereal dirge. The 7/8 time of the original gets lost at this speed, instead taking on a triple meter feel on every chromatic shift of pitches in the verses. And the choruses are gentle, careful, "so alone." This weirded me the fuck out at first, remembering the acute punishment of the original and thinking of the songs creepy prescience toward Layne Stayley's early death, but after a while of swaying in its slow breeze of despair, I can vibe on it.

The packaging on this album deserves a special mention: the cover and inner jacket reproduce three paintings by Dawn Frasch, full of baroque gore rendered with a lot of purples and pinks. Like the music of Seaven Teares, Frasch's art picks up on the underpinnings of death and darkness found in a lot of Renaissance art, and amps up the gore and despair to fully occupy the painfully large voids opened into our culture by Faces of Death, or Jerry Springer, or whatever modern equivalent of the Roman Colosseum you prefer. "Power Ballads" gets darker than I generally prefer to linger, but I'm glad this band can face Gehenna without flinching.



--also published at Killed In Cars

Two from Joe Moffett

Last year, I covered a couple of excellent albums featuring Joe Moffett which you can read here--he's one of my favorite trumpet players of the last few years. His work is always very listenable, with powerful tone, a great melodic sensibility, and he can move between the idioms of jazz and lowercase improv with confidence. Here's a couple of albums featuring him as leader or co-leader, showing an even wider range of his musical skills.

Joe Moffett's Ad Faunum

Poland's esteemed Not Two Records brings us this Moffett-led quintet that explores a wide spectrum of free improvisation approaches. Compared to the "Strange Falls" record I reviewed last year, Ad Faunum stays closer to what I think of as "jazz" vocabulary, with more emphasis on exchanging phrases and less reliance on extended technique/sound exploration. That said, this album mostly eludes traditional interpretations of melody/harmony, opting instead for melodic passages evoking what Moffett calls "an almost ritualistic praise of animals" in the liner notes. I can vibe on that concept for sure: if you compare the interplay between musicians to watching animals exchanging sounds and clearly communicating their intentions, even if you don't understand what's happening word by word, you can easily get into the spirit of these improvisations. You don't need to know the "words" to follow the conversation.

Like most improv albums, this music makes the most of rich contrasts: loud versus quiet, fast versus slow, staccato against legato, textural against more melodic passages, long tones against quick flutters, etc. But like the best of improv albums, Moffett has put together an amazingly tight group whose collective improvisations frequently sound composed. Each member commits to deeper forms of listening, supporting and teasing the music ahead in the moment as one would expect, but also thinking on a larger motivic time scale that brings distinction and real communication into every piece.

There's a bit of Joe Maneri's microtonal approach here, but like the microtones of the Psychotic Quartet I reviewed a while ago, they're generally offered in the service of playing more in tune, building consonance-in-the-monent and aspiring to pre-equal temperament vibes, rather than some kind of extension of atonalism into even more potential fragments. Maneri's system itself is quite regimented, at least in theory, into 72 equal divisions of the octave, though both Maneri and Ad Faunum draw from the system more intuitively as they play. One hears the influence of microtones best in slower ensemble sections, where the combined tones of each player shift gently into ever more precise declarations of the perfect note(s) to draw every phrase in perfect detail. But microtonal thinking works its way into solo sections, too. Take Noah Kaplan's tenor solo toward the end of "Riding the Pegasus Down," for example: supported only by the double bass of Jacob William, Kaplan teases out slow phrases, carefully lipping notes up and down just between the "expected" notes, teasing out more natural overtones with overblowing and just a touch of multiphonic work.

Luther Gray's drum work on this recording is generally sparse, adding textural elements and working to subtly delineate phrases coming from the horns. That said, he lays down some serious grooves when the time is right in energetic tracks like the almost post-bop "Matador," which also features super-busy twin bass attacks and rapid-fire exchanges of short phrases between Moffett and Kaplan. As one might expect, with 2 bass players in this lineup (Giacomo Merega on electric bass and Williams on double bass), they combine to take on a particularly visible role in the rhythm section, providing equal parts countermelody and propulsion throughout the record.

To mention a few highlights, the patient development of ideas in "The Other Species" feels like the spiritual center of the album. Starting with some compelling microtonal solo tenor passages, everyone gets a chance to make a statement here, both alone and in various duet and trio configurations, with lots of cymbal work, delicately bowed double bass, and occasionally almost electroacoustic-feeling electric bass providing subtle shifts in foundational textures between solo features. And the unsung hero of this Ad Faunum session must be Giacomo Merega, whose approach to the low end changes dramatically to best articulate every shift in the ensemble. From his delicate harmonics in "The Other Species" that develop into a chord-rich solo moment, to the all-out fuzz bass heroics that build dense walls of distorted glory throughout "Dove Tail,"Merega can both support calm sections with grace and lead the group into its most aggressive moments.

Twins of El Dorado - [portend the end]

On the opposite end of the improv/composition spectrum, the Twins of El Dorado, whose debut recording recently came out via Prom Night Records, is a highly composed duo album of playful intertwined lines. Moffett's trumpet is joined by the vocals of Kristin Slipp (Art Bears Songbook, Cuddle Magic) for a real workout that remains highly melodic, evoking a diverse set of classical and pop idioms. Some pieces, like "I Will [Not Set an Emily Dickinson Poem to Music]" alternate between spoken word delivery and shifting harmonies that imply medieval motet writing. Other pieces, like the "Pond Long Song" that follows, have a contemporary art song feel, full of rhythmically complex, chromatically twisting unison lines and harmonic clusters right at home in 20th C. classical melodies.

Slipp and Moffett use a wide dynamic range throughout these pieces, but I'm amazed by just how much air they move when things get intense. Slipp has insanely great control of her voice, pulling off hundreds of wide intervalic leaps and outlining weird chords with flawless intonation. There are very few vocalists whose sense of pitch is good enough to dominate so effortlessly in this kind of duo format, tossing hocketed arpeggios between voice and trumpet, overlaying serpentine chromatic passages around one another, and reaching to stratospheric ranges in pieces like "Fare Thee" (one of the few pieces not written entirely by the duo). And neither musician hides behind a wall of vibrato--a lot of these pieces use a noticeably wide vibrato approach only for emphasis, or to evoke a quasi-operatic idiom in appropriate moments (or bugle-call moments on trumpet).

Moffett's beautiful, clear tone is on full display throughout the album as well. It's a pleasure to hear someone whose work I mostly know through improvisation delivering written passages so deeply. While these pieces don't have a lot of high density notes-per-minute firepower from a soloist perspective, they're quite virtuosic in terms of the precise intonation and rhythmic precision they require to sound so strong. There's nowhere to hide in a duet, but these Twins can handle the pressure.

I really like this album, and I've also been finding that my friends and family who aren't normally into the "weird" stuff I like really enjoy this, too. Every time I play this album, someone invariably asks me what it is and wants to know more about it. It's playful and fun and wild in all of the right places, and even if you try to put in on quietly in the background, it demands full attention and a volume increase every time. Get in on this, folks.

--also published at Killed in Cars

To the moon with Pierrot Lunaire

Lincoln drone-zoners Bus Gas released their sophomore cassette last fall on German label SicSic Tapes (last copies at the Bus Gas BandCamp), and one day last winter I found myself browsing the label's discography. I recognized a few artists in their catalog whose work I've heard on other labels and enjoyed like Guenter Schlienz and Hobo Cubes, and I was mesmerized by the bizarre artwork for a double-cassette release by Pierrot Lunaire, "This Love of Mine."

As it turns out, this is one record you can totally judge by its cover, with deep appreciation to Frédéric Cordier for his fine work on both sides of the mega-j-card gracing this wild double-height Norelco case. In fact, let's pause for a moment and admire this art:

Amazing artwork and unusual packaging aside, a quick scan of the music itself made it clear that I needed "This Love of Mine" in my brain. As luck would have it, this solo project of John Denizio has produced a large number of recordings in the last few years, most of which have now found their way to my cassette decks/turntables. Having spent a few months with this music, all of the recordings feel marvelously interrelated. Together they function as repeated iterations of a grand modern-urban-entheogenic ritual, resonating emotionally with Giraud's original "Pierrot Lunaire" poems more closely than Schoenberg's Op. 21 of the same name.

The sonic palette is modest. One finds saxophones and effects, usually with an emphasis on fast lines and short bursts of activity, looped and layered into plaintive sections. Occasionally a round of melancholy vocals gets treated to the same process. Other sections are made of old song fragments, mostly 1950s and earlier, where short phrases are repeated, contrasted, blended in reverb, filtered, and sped up and down. And there are sections of synth/oscillator sounds that can range from tonal to textural playing.

I perceive three fundamental levels of activity in Pierrot Lunaire: At the "individual composition" level, these are collage pieces in which the different "blocks" of activities (sax/found-sound/synth/voice) are pushed against one another, but they stay within their own boundaries, rarely blending into one another simultaneously. Within the sound-specific blocks, small bits of sound are looped, layered, and manipulated, drenched in reverb and delay, and captured right at the edge of distortion and microphonic feedback. 

The third level runs across all of the releases so far. Pieces tend to function as full sides of C30s, staying close to 15 minute durations each. Even "This Love of Mine" only runs a touch over 45 minutes altogether, making it clear that having one piece per cassette side was a conscious decision worth pushing the release onto double-cassette. But similar kinds of "blocks" are pushed into and around one another, piece after piece, tape after tape, creating a singular and very recognizable style. Though made by combining improvised sections, the final edits feel very controlled, each block worked and reworked thoughtfully. When new kinds of audio sources or different approaches enter the mix, or on an occasion where saxophones and thrift store cassettes cascade together into a block, they feel very significant as alterations of familiar terrain: the reverb is totally off, lots of long tones on the saxophones, some guitar playing, etc. It's an effect that reminds me of early Jandek, like a "Nancy Sings" epiphany.

Let's look at the project in literary terms: Denizio compares his improvisation/editing process to the Gysin/Burroughs cut-up techniques, and that's precisely the vibe I get from the collective output of Pierrot Lunaire. Set aside those funky Material albums: this music is the real audio equivalent of the Word Hoard, establishing its own weird boundaries and imploding into near-infinite variations. Like the Nova Trilogy, Pierrot Lunaire evokes moments of acute emotional intensity while distorting your perception of time--are you experiencing a memory or a premonition?--and forms twist and repeat, and moments of familiar sounds, with their attendant cultural symbolism, anchor you momentarily, and they're gone as quickly as you can identify with them, and the cycle repeats.

Also like Burroughs, I think it would be a mistake to become too fixated on the formal implications of Pierrot Lunaire and miss its emotional impact. In terms of surface form and sound, this kind of collage/montage work feels very postmodern. The emotional message, though, is closer to modernism, or even "amodern," to use the term in Timothy S. Murphy's "Wising Up the Marks," which identifies the intent of the Burroughs oeuvre as collectively railing against societal degeneration, seeing through the masks of the bourgeoisie, etc. Burroughs saw through those flaws and pined for a more innocent time, though "other times" rarely turn out to be innocent in their turn. I'm sure the Symbolists like Mr. Giraud and others associated with the Fin de siecle movement would look for their conception of "innocence" still further back and further forward from their own position in history.

As for me, these Pierrot Lunaire recordings are powerful stuff toward the remembrance of "innocent times." They alter my dreams when I listen to them late in the day, and they draw out weird childhood moments that haven't entered my mind since they happened, like being scared and attracted simultaneously whenever this tripped out clip would come on Sesame Street in the early 80s:


Try to remember everything you pass
But when you go back, make the First thing the Last.

The latest from Giant Claw: Mutant Glamour and Music for Film

It's only been a year and a half since I reviewed Giant Claw's "Midnight Murder" cassette, but I'm not even sure exactly how many tapes and LPs this Keith Rankin solo project has officially issued since then: if you go by the chronology on the Giant Claw BandCamp page, there are six releases between Midnight Murder and "Mutant Glamour." Amazing!

But what's even more remarkable than Rankin's prolific nature is the persistent level of musical quality across the Giant Claw canon. All of these recordings work beautifully as self-contained suites, complete unto themselves, yet they all play nicely together as well, reaching for increasingly ambitious genre-smashing fun. And among a bunch of really great recordings, the "Mutant Glamour" LP is the best yet.

Like Pajjama, the music of Giant Claw stands out in the synths-on-cassette scene of the last few years: this music is fast, assertive, fun, and hyper-literate both musically and culturally. I love a good drone meltdown as much as the next fellow, but I can really vibe on the psychotic stylistic combinations in this music, all presented with equal parts precision and playfulness. Imagine if Yip-Yip and Wendy Carlos exchanged lycra unitards and music theory lessons: this music is purposeful even at its campiest moments.

Take opening track "Brain on Cream" for example: in under four minutes, this piece recalls workout videos, sci-fi soundtracks and haunted graveyard video games, even indulging in a showtune-esque bridge before the main theme returns at the halfway point, and it all dissolves into flurries of notes and saxophones in a long, frisky outro. Sometimes the music points toward more academic or "legit" cinematic music, evoking Peter Thomas through much of "Glitter Logic," or early computer music in the blippiest sections of "Body Science," while the addition of saxophones to almost half of the album has added a new element of Beefheart-ian whimsy in the perfect contrasting places. My favorite sax interjections on the album turn out to be tiny samples of sax players on YouTube (including Bill Clinton!) combined into the perfect reed-biting, trilling passages of obnoxiousness. Samples of mostly chromatic trumpet lines make an appearance later in "Man or Cream" as the perfect foil for some especially flatulent synth stabs.

This whole record flows together so well that "favorite track" designations don't matter much, but I really dig the album's closer, "Trapped in the Mirror." The longest track of the album, Rankin takes an epic "early electronic" approach, a touch slower than most of the album, gradually building the piece with wide electronic vibratos, layers of arrpeggios, and a driving motorik pulse. It's a rich, rewarding end to a great album.

Like previous Giant Claw releases, "Mutant Glamour" features beautiful artwork and album design by Rankin himself. I love the restraint of the black and white cover, which makes the pastel streaks of color on the back cover really stand out (not to mention the sweet center label)--but you should pick up the record and see for yourself.

As I was prepping my review of "Mutant Glamour," I was pleasantly surprised by the appearance of "Music for Film" in the February/March cassette batch from Constellation Tatsu. A collection of music made for four film projects spanning 2009-2012, these short cues reveal new aspects of the Giant Claw concept.

Using a palette of sounds one would expect to hear from Giant Claw, Rankin's film work is less dense vertically, simpler and more direct. There's a bit of everything here compositionally: "Royal Decree" sounds like mid-period Residents, "Bouncing" is almost vaudeville, and the two "Piano Synthesizer Etudes" have a contemplative melodicism that pushes into Secret Chiefs 3 territory. Other pieces sound more like they're made to supplement sound effects, like the "50s outer space" vibes of the "Century of Shame" tracks, or the clanging metal and choral synth washes of "Fear of the Dark."

There are some really beautiful melodies here, like the theremin-esque melodies of "Tears," lightly supported with block piano chords. And I love the simple melody nested in the middle voices of "Piano Etude." Above all, "Music for Film" shows how the basic building blocks of Giant Claw--cool sounds, smart writing, and a sense of humor and cultural context--still function distinctively outside of the conceptual confines of albums, or any sort of chronology when you consider that the track sequence of this tape shifts freely through different times/film projects.

As Giant Claw albums seem to appear quickly, keep your ears open--word has it that the next one will be coming from my favorite cassette label of late, Field Hymns, very soon.

Put on your Pajjamas

I was in love with Pajjama's "Starch" cassette within its first 10 seconds, a rare and beautiful thing. Skillfully combining chiptune sequencing and live rock/prog playing on guitar/bass/drums/synths, this EP swings harder than any synth-dominant project I've heard in a long time. Lots of folks are doing fine work with chiptune music, but Pajjama's work displays many bonus levels of compositional depth, making nods to influences like Chromelodeon and early YMO while drawing from a wide variety of 70s prog and 80s pop traditions. Magma-esque passages and "Uncle Meat"-era Zappa moments collide with video games and workout VHS tapes. Crazy good.

The live performance aspect of Pajjama really brings this music to life, particularly the jazz and funk-infused playing of drummer Kristian Valbo. I get the impression that all 3 Pajjama members have some background with jazz, as their unique blending of genres includes a lot of syncopation and a very confident sense of humor one often develops with a lot of practice and a lot of gigging. Primary composer Eirik Suhrke alternates between riffs and evocative chord progressions with ease, and he and Bernt Karsten Sannerud layer synth parts with great ears for mixing and balance--there's a lot happening at times, but you can hear every detail no matter how dense the music gets.

For a release that doesn't even make it to 13 minutes in length, I still find myself appreciating different aspects of the writing and arranging with every listen. The "Jean Baptiste" section and the 30-second introduction are my favorites, but the whole piece runs as a seamless suite--ah, and how can I forget those propulsive, insistent drums in "Vedaste!"--best to just listen to the whole thing. Repeatedly.

"Starch" was released in the middle of last year on Orange Milk Records, and the cassette features amazing artwork on a double-sided J-card designed by Keith Rankin (Giant Claw). The "regular" Orange Milk Page seems to indicate this album is sold out, but their StoreEnvy site shows availability? If all else fails, definitely get some Starch in your Pajjjamas via BandCamp.

February brought us the followup Pajjama EP on BandCamp, entitled "Jane Papaya," which is just as thoughtfully written and arranged, but it focuses more on 80s pop/synth idioms and somewhat less on the more aggressive prog moments of the debut. Imagine the transition between Phil Collins' mullet period to his later skullet period, and you'll get the general idea. There's sometimes a bit of a moody 80s fusion vibe, too, ala Tribal Tech and the like, especially in the outro of "Salty Price." Jane Papaya will be released on cassette later this year by Orange Milk Records, and work on a third recording has already begun. Here's the artwork for the upcoming Orange Milk release:

Related recordings: If you're digging Pajjama, you simply must dig into more of Eirik Suhrke's work as a video game composer. Working both under his own name and occasionally as Phlogiston, Suhrke has a real knack for writing simple-but-memorable melodies, perfect for game play. And he's a real connoisseur of video game music history--this is the kind of guy who can pick out the programmatic nuances between music for the SNES and the Sega Genesis in only a few notes. And he applies that knowledge toward new projects with the skill of a sommelier, balancing nostalgic and forward-thinking tones to perfectly compliment games.

You can also find the history of Pajjama in Suhrke's video game music: compare the recordings in Super Crate Box with the updated, Pajjama-licious Super Crate Box Special to hear how live instrumentation spices up already-solid chiptune writing. And the Spelunky score is rich with Pajjama and friends, rocking out game cues mostly under a minute in length.

And while I haven't written much about avant-black metal in a long time, I have to add that Pajjama member Bernt Karsten Sannerud's new album with Formloff, "Spyhorelandet," is probably my favorite weirdo progressive black metal album since early Ved Buens Ende. Great writing, mixing, occasional vocal harmonies, killer guitar playing and arranging, actual audible bass guitar: a real triumph all around. I haven't had much time to listen to this one yet, but I'm sure I'll be spending more time with Formloff, as well as checking out what looks to be an avant-bm supergroup including Sannerud, Self Spiller.

--also published at Killed in Cars

Killer BOB - Fear May Be a Builder

"Fear May Be a Builder" is a seriously fine debut album from Brooklyn's Killer BOB, an instrumental quartet whose compositions defy every pigeonhole. I've been digging into this music for the last few months, and though I dug this record after one spin, it continues to grow on me even more. Killer BOB is, at their essence, an avant-rock band, but they also draw heavily from minimalist classical structures and a funky, asymmetrical melodic approach from the early days of free jazz.

Though I listen to a lot of improvisation-oriented music, my heart really lies closest to heavily-composed forms of music, and Killer BOB's thoughtful and meticulous writing fills the staves of my heart with all of the right notes. Fans of Zs, especially their earlier sextet period, will really dig this music--but that's not to say it's derivative. Though both acts incorporate forms of phrase repetition and an emphasis on cycles of insistent rhythmic activity, there is a certain old-school grit to Killer BOB that reminds me of 60s mavericks like Captain Beefheart and Ornette Coleman, leaving space for moments of reckless abandon and fun.

I caught Killer BOB drummer Max Jaffe on tour with Normal Love last fall, where he was covering intricate-yet-brutal parts tracked in the studio by Eli Litwin (Intensus, Inzinzac, etc). Jaffe's ferocious and precise take on the "Survival Tricks" music led me to suspect that he was a very heavy-handed player, but his playing with Killer BOB shows his delicate side at times. Despite their name, much of Killer BOB's record is downright gentle, such as the aptly-titled triptych "Music She Can Sleep Through," and even pieces that crescendo into dense walls of sound tend to be made of many interlocking sections that include moments of ambient calm.

As a whole, this music breathes within a wide dynamic range, and almost any kind of musical contrast you can imagine is is fully and thoughtfully exploited: tempo shifts, stop/start sections, consonance and dissonance, pop/art genre references, repetition and through-composition. Structurally, the rhythm section frequently acts as musical anchor, creating steady (and relatively subdued) pulses over which guitar and saxophone work together as one pointillistic instrument, lurching between melodic fragments, quickly repeated phrases, and rhythmically dense clusters of shifting dissonance. But there are many exceptions to any generality a person can make about this album--every approach is subject to change as the music itself demands.

It's difficult for me to pick favorite tracks on this record, as it really works best as a full record, but a few highlights are tracks like "Undercoat" and "Overcoat,"in which the gentle 4-measure figure of overdubbed reeds in the former morphs into a "tough exterior" with brash-yet-plaintive guitar work in the latter. I love the simple, dirty riff that gets explored throughout "Dirt Tits," with an unusual solo drum workout of the riff for its final minute. And my overall favorite is "Sirens," which is probably the most complex composition of the whole record, raging through a series of shifting approaches between a beautiful opening/closing made of gentle, harplike guitars.

Though this is essentially an instrumental album, there is a literary undercurrent to Killer BOB: four spoken word tracks, alternately collaged and dream-journal-like, are sprinkled roughly evenly into the track sequence of "Fear May Be a Builder," presumably each representing one member of the band. And the layout of track titles on the back of the CD digipak is vertical, using a strange top/bottom justification that initially caused me to try to read the track titles horizontally: quite a Burroughsian cutup! I definitely get some Surrealist vibes from both these elements and the collage/montage approaches of this music, which are enforced by the band's press info that describes this as a record "which explores their collective subconscious dream worlds." As a huge enthusiast of Surrealist Games and other techniques for bringing subconscious and chance elements to the surface, I think this record succeeds as both a map of the dream/waking hinterlands and a fascinating bit of the territory itself. Highly recommended.

Perhaps more of the extramusical elements of this band's work will become even clearer on tour, both in live performance and through exploring a tour-only tape and a chapbook of writing/imagery made by the band. And the band is on tour right now, heading into the midwest and back to the east coast. For Lincoln folks, they'll be visiting us on Feb 18th at the Bourbon (save a tape and a book for me, guys), with King Thumper and Multidimensional Cowboy. For folks living elsewhere, this Facebook page has their full tour itinerary. And if you miss them on tour, you can (and should) get their album from Primary Records.

The Home of Easy Credit - s/t

Here's another knockout from Northern Spy. The Home of Easy Credit is the husband/wife duo of Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen and Tom Blancarte, whose intricate, dense work together is hard to define in terms of genre. This music shifts between worlds of composition and free improvisation, pop, avant-jazz, postmodern classical, psychedelic and electroacoustic work, often woven within the boundaries of each track.

Jensen primarily focuses on alto saxophone and voice performance with electronic manipulation. She builds layers of sound with live electronics and loops, over which motivic materials are often reinterpreted or extended. And Blancarte (who also played on the beautiful "Fire Sign" album from Jeremiah Cymerman that I recently reviewed) creates a powerful foundation for this music with his amplified upright bass work, mostly playing with more conventional pitched ideas to hold everything together, though he does get into extended techniques like bowed harmonics and sul ponticello passages when the music heads into more ethereal territory. The pair make an incredible amount of sound on their own, and once loop-building is added to their approach, you would never imagine this music coming from only two performers with no overdubs.

Although The Home of Easy Credit covers a wide stylistic territory, this music evolves through structured consideration: these pieces fuse raw musical materials together slowly and thoughtfully, adding and removing layers with patience. I like my share of collage/cutup compositions, but there's something about these kinds of more mature methodical fusions of sound. They tend to stay with you longer. It also invites a more participatory kind of listening--I feel like I can get "inside" these tracks, as opposed to looking at them on a wall. They're plaintive, emotional pieces, and they readily invite you inside. Check out a track from the album, "The Feast of the Meal Replacement Bars" below, and you'll see what I mean.

Usually I don't have a strong opinion about the methods used in the creation of a good recording, but in this case I think that the "no overdubs" approach contributes a lot to the emotional intelligence of this music. The band's name and the titles of the tracks all point to frustration with the shallow artifice of consumer culture, toward having genuine shared experiences instead of choosing among brightly-colored, prepackaged Mcexperiences. These pieces succeed at being very complex and nuanced without losing a sense of intimacy. I can imagine how well this music translates live, a vibe that The Home of Easy Credit sustains by selecting small, intimate venues to play: galleries, coffee shops, house shows, all places where artists and audiences can be together with a minimum of mediation.

Fortunately, I won't have to simply imagine the live performance of this music for long, and maybe you won't, either: The Home of Easy Credit is on tour right now (check out their tour dates below). And their Lincoln, NE stop will be at my house! It seemed right to start hosting occasional shows as the opportunity presents itself, as I've been co-hosting a radio show and actively writing music reviews for a few years now. If you live in the area, you can keep up with our events on this blog, or "like" our Facebook page here.

--also published at Killed in Cars

Home of Easy Credit tour dates:
10/4 San Francisco @ The Luggage Store
10/7 Berkeley, CA @ Berkeley Arts Festival
10/8 Corvallis, OR @ The Red Room
10/9 Portland, OR @ Creative Music Guild
10/10 Seattle, WA @ 1412 Gallery
10/11 Caldwell, ID @ The Bird Stop Coffee House
10/13 Denver, CO @ Plus Gallery
10/14 Lincoln, NE @ Think Tank House (my house! This will also be the debut show for local duo Moss!)
10/15 Chicago, IL @ Jerry's
10/17 Cleveland, OH @ Black Cat Factory