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Rafael AntonIrisarri Hiatus
'Recorded over the past two years, the record bares the marks of difficult terrains – personal, political, social and cultural. It tips its hat to the complex and unpredictable dynamics of the contemporary world, correlating concerns both macro and micro. Compositionally the music mirrors the tensions of contemporary America, contrasting passages of great beauty and calm with harrowing waves of density and pressure. A Fragile Geography also charts Rafael Anton Irisarri’s personal journey of transience and tumult. His entire studio, audio archives, and possessions were stolen while moving from Seattle to New York, forcing him to rebuild from ground zero. But such a tabula rasa moment also brought with it a chance for renewal, and for reductive experimentation. This experience birthed a range of fresh approaches and ideas, many of which became central to the aesthetic pillars of this record. Empire Systems, the album’s centerpiece, perfectly encapsulates this mood of flux: a rich and harmonically saturated monolith of sound, restless and constantly reaching outwards.' -- Room 40
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Stara RzekaMałe świerki
'The disconnect between virtual and physical realities has been a prevalent theme in art and philosophy since the first humans closed their eyes, and realised the images don't necessarily disappear. Even so, it feels of even greater importance to the 21st century human being. Via digital pathways we wander a multitude of astral planes - of our very own making no less - and though largely free from the tyrannical shackles of organised religion, we remain irrevocably interleaved with some non-physical form of existence. Music itself is perhaps more trapped between real and imaginary worlds than any other art form, often manifesting itself merely as vibrations in the air; digitised recordings of recordings of recordings of amplified strings channeled through pickups. Kuba Ziołek's choice with Stara Rzeka to examine these themes via the medium of music then, is as odd as it is apt. Speaking to Joseph Burnett for tQ back in 2013, Ziołek explained: "material objects are not the neutral background of our lives, they constitute our world and our thinking of ourselves," and that certainly unlocked some of the mystery behind the patchwork of first Stara Rzeka album Cień chmury nad ukrytym polem, where semblances of soaring black and drone metal, psychedelic folk, and electronic pop all coalesced into something of a drifting album length suite, yet feelings of longing, and sheer brutal reality shone throughout.'-- Tristan Bath, The Lead Review
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Why BeWHALIN
'Snipestreet is as diseased as it is utilitarian. His rhythms generate in a manner that calls to mind the “naturalism” of stark hardware manipulation, yet there is clear digital degradation interspersed through his free use of sampled sounds that pockmark driving kicks, hi-hats, and claps. He plays with tempo modulation amidst cinematic atmospheres and often breaks firm patterns with unexpected whip cracks or Noh woodblocks. Opening track “Heroin Hat” is a fantastic revision of the groove. The kick descends heavy on the one amongst marimba covalently arpeggiated alongside the free-play of an open hi-hat; the hat is warped in such a way to suggest a breathy human voice. Intermittently, there are impact sounds culled from pirate-able sample packs, cuts of glass breaking, or pitched voices — classic rack sounds that are used both rhythmically and abstractly, not unlike the way Actress deconstructed hi-hats and fragile rack tools on R.I.P. Similarly, “Deeq” extends a driving 130bpm kick that flips forward alongside the chant of the “Ha,” the classic sample fueling a ravaged, scorched tonality. “Late (Laser Ha)” re-imagines the stomp into an anime-style “Ha” that enlivens the beat within the martial atmosphere of colored hair and blood-soaked bandages wrapped around clenched fists.'-- Tiny Mix Tapes
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Oneohtrix Point NeverMutant Standard
'Challenging listeners, intentionally or otherwise, has been a part of the 0PN aesthetic for some time. His last album (and debut for electronic stalwart Warp Records), 2013’s critically acclaimed R Plus Seven, was comprised of strangely melodic soundscapes that made for difficult listening. With Garden of Delete, out November 13, Lopatin seems keen to work against that standard, applying more rock components to his far-out, ambient style. The alien tale is actually intended to make his work more accessible. In telling the story of Ezra, who tries to be human but fails, Lopatin is attempting an autobiography of sorts, one dating back to his 1990s adolescence. “I am contemplating the person I was when I was starting to have autonomy over my own tastes in music,” he explains, building fiction out of whatever memories he can conjure. He’s comparing literal alienness to that teenage feeling of being an outsider, of not fitting in. Rejecting romantic nostalgia, Lopatin recalls watching MTV in the days of grunge as a melancholic experience, where the hip insider nature of its music coverage made him feel even more isolated. “I was never really in on anything,” he says.'-- Vulture
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LoveAugust
'By mid-1968, Arthur Lee was the only remaining member of the Forever Changes line-up of Love. Three LPs worth of material were recorded in a makeshift studio in a Los Angeles warehouse, with Elektra Records given the rights to first choice of tracks to fulfill Lee's contractual obligation, and the remainder released as the Blue Thumb LP Out Here. For the album, Lee utilized double vocalization. He would play a vocal, and overdub it with another similar sounding one.'-- collaged
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Floating PointsUntitled
'It was the arrival of a Studer A80 master recorder at the front door of Sam Shepherd - otherwise known as Floating Points - that caused him to begin building the studio that led to the creation of his debut album, Elaenia (due out via Pluto in the UK and Luaka Bop in the US on 6 November). After a slight miscalculation meant that he could not physically get the thing inside his home, what happened next can only be described as a beautiful example of the butterfly effect. Breaking away from making electronic music on his laptop, the DJ, producer and composer spent the next five years engineering Elaenia, all the while deejaying in cities across the globe and working towards his PhD in neuroscience. An incredibly special album that draws inspiration from classical, jazz, electronic music, soul and even Brazilian popular music, Elaenia - named after the bird of the same name - is the epitome of the forward-thinking Floating Points vision in 2015.'-- LUAKA BOP
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Rival ConsolesWalls
'When one thinks of the consistently brilliant Erased Tapes label, it's the likes of Nils Frahm or Peter Broderick that spring to mind first. While this is for good reason, it is easy to avoid the fact that it was Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, who was the imprint's first signing. On his multiple releases for the label, West has established Rival Consoles as arguably the most texturally vibrant artist on the roster, each output bursting with rich electronic soundscapes and immersive glitchy aesthetics. Howl continues along the same innovative path that Rival Consoles has been heading down for some years now, delving into further levels of emotional depth in the process. There are other parallels to be drawn with some of the electronic world's best-known innovators; Autechre, Aphex and Clark to name but a few. Yet Rival Consoles consistently demonstrates so much depth of character through unexpected combinations of sonic textures and very visual, almost tactile soundscapes that ensure that Howl is a welcome addition to the genre rather than a simple supplement.'-- The 405
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Dan FrielLife (Pt. 2), live
'Dan Friel creates intense, colorful and intricate instrumentals that, for all their complexity, are melodic pop songs. Equally at home in the DIY scene and the contemporary art world, Friel has been at the forefront of a movement of musicians who create dance music with a clear affinity for the extremes of noise and metal, eschewing the traditional dance clubs and adhering to the ethics of the underground. On his sophomore Thrill Jockey album Life, Friel uses his surprisingly small arsenal of gear to distort and maneuver his beloved Yamaha Portasound into an expansive sound that is incredibly varied in tone and texture. This toy keyboard, his first instrument, is manipulated beyond recognition to create songs that are frenzied and epic. Life also has moments that are incredibly sweet, idyllic, and fragile - sentiments that make perfect sense coming from a new father whose instrument of choice is his childhood keyboard.'-- Thrill Jockey
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Jefferson AirplaneTwo Heads
'The adventurous Airplane took unprecedented liberties on record and in concert. Kantner came from a folk background, Kaukonen was a blues aficionado, Casady grew up playing R&B, and Dryden boasted jazz training in his background. Balin was a pop crooner and Slick’s tastes were literary and offbeat. These various strands, brought together in the heady, experimental cauldron of San Francisco in the mid-Sixties, made for an electrifying union that moved rock music a few giant steps forward. The five Jefferson Airplane albums released from 1967 to 1969 – Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing at Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, Bless Its Pointed Little Head and Volunteers– rank among the worthiest bodies of work of that or any decade. Appearing in late 1967, after the bloom was off the flower power-themed Summer of Love, After Bathing at Baxter’s caught the Airplane at a creative zenith. An uncompromising psychedelic manifesto, its songs were clustered into five “suites” that ran for up to twelve minutes. The inspired songwriting, most of it by Paul Kantner, captured the agitated yet utopian sensibility of San Francisco in the late Sixties, best expressed in this line from “Wild Tyme”: “I’m doing things that haven’t got a name yet.” The group worked on the album from June through October of 1967, defying record company demands and deadlines. In so doing, they helped trigger a shift in sensibility that placed creative control in the hands of musicians.'-- collaged
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Russell HaswellWholly Unaware
'As Sure As Night Follows Day is inspired by “Mills & Hood-era Hardwax, J-noise, Midlands metal and Suffolk Cyder, and darts between outbursts of improvised noise, asphyxiated R&B” and “thundering acid bullets that positively froth for the ‘floor. Though it follows on from last year’s 37-Minute Workout album for Diagonal, which made moves towards the dancefloor, it also incorporates sonic and stylistic elements from a storied career in the realm of extreme electronics that has seen him release on labels including Warp, Editions Mego and Downwards. The album was extracted over a fast-working period in late 2014, and is best perceived as a sort of fractured regression to his formative influences: you can hear the picnoleptic recollections of grindcore shows in the Black Country; the refracted shades of mega-raves at Coventry’s Eclipse; the conflating toxic texture-memories of early Japanese noise; and the incandescent stomp of Mills and Hood in that early 90s phase.'-- collaged
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Philip JeckCalled In
'Philip Jeck writes: "To make this record I used Fidelity record players, Casio keyboards, Ibanez bass guitar, Sony MiniDisc players, Ibanez and Zoom effects pedals, assorted percussion, a Behringer mixer and it was edited it at home with MiniDisc players and on a laptop computer." Philip Jeck works with old records and record players salvaged from junk shops, turning them to his own purposes. He really does play them as musical instruments, creating an intensely personal language that evolves with each added part of a record. Jeck makes genuinely moving and transfixing music in which one hears the art, not the gimmick. He started working with record players and electronics in the early '80s and has made soundtracks and toured with many dance and theatre companies in addition to his solo concert work. His best-known work, Vinyl Requiem (with Lol Sargent), a performance for 180 '50s/'60s record players, won the Time Out Performance Award in 1993. In 2010, Jeck won a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award.'-- Forced Exposure
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Elle OsborneCome Write Me Down
'Elle's 3rd solo album, It's Not Your Gold Shall Me Entice is the first to feature her own songs. At the heart of the album is, of course, Elle's unique vocal sound, which Alex Neilson of Trembling Bells likens to "A cross between Lal Waterson and Nico" - and which gained her a nomination for Spiral Earth's Singer of the Year in 2012. Nine songs celebrating survivors and survival: from the opening track "I Don't Like Sundays" wherein Elle's protagonist beseeches a friend to hold on, as "Sundays always do this to you, darling.", to "Toast (The Ballad of Michael 'Mini' Cooper)", written in honour of 'Mini' Cooper, a child arsonist and unrecognised genius. "Perhaps Lincolnshire lass Elle Osborne isn't really a folk musician, but an avant-garde experimenter using traditional tunes as vehicles for her ragged, ripe visions .... Luckily, her approach appears to be timeless." Sunday Times'-- Cargo Records
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Christina VantzouThe Future
'It’s impossible to discuss composer Christina Vantzou’s music without considering its relationship to visual art. Having studied video at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, her formative experience with music was the audiovisual project The Dead Texan, which she formed with Adam Wiltzie of Stars Of The Lid in the mid-2000s. Though The Dead Texan released their first and only album on Kranky in 2004, it would be some seven years before Vantzou struck out on her own as a musician. Prior to her work with Wiltzie, she says, “I hadn’t done anything with music before. I had done a little bit of fumbling around for soundtracks to animations and videos I was making, but I’d never sat down and composed music.” Working with Reason software and MIDI instruments for The Dead Texan piqued Vantzou’s curiosity, and she began “geeking out listening to sample libraries and getting into different virtual instruments”. Finding the sound library that came with her simple software too limited, she widened her search. “I got obsessed with collecting sounds to get just the right thing, and without realising I amassed a customised sound library that I started composing with in my free time – but I wasn’t thinking of it as composing. It was all very intuitive, one step to the next.”'-- The Wire
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p.s. Hey. An early-ish heads up that this week on the blog is going to be kind of here and there. Namely, on Wednesday and Thursday I'll be in Geneva to give a presentation about 'Zac's Haunted House', which is in competition at the Geneva International Film Festival Tour Ecrans, so you'll get reruns and no p.s.es on those days. Then, on Friday, I'll be back here with a p.s. and post newness. Then, on Saturday, you'll get the month's escort post but no p.s. because I've been asked to play a small, non-speaking role in a film, and my scene starts shooting early that morning. Next week, everything will be usual again. ** Michael_karo, Hey, bud! Nice to see you! Thanks a bunch. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Curious to see 'Carol' and figure it all out. That is a honey of a gif! I don't know much about Amy Schumer, and I've only seen a couple of clips of her, which I actually thought were pretty funny, so I don't get all the quite violent hatred directed towards her that is constantly littering my FB feed. It seems really outsized and weird, but, again, I'm not all that familiar with her. Ah, any excuse to rewatch 'Playtime', and finding that moment is a good one. .** Chris Dankland, Howdy, Chris! Awesome, thank you so much for your attentiveness. I think there's this cool, extra oomph or something to the head banging ones, and well, to all of them, although sometimes a lot of motion in the gifs disguises it, because the gifs' different lengths make the rhythms unstable and shifty. So, like in the head ones, the rhythm cycles back and forth such that the alignment that creates a steady, even rhythm only happens every several seconds before drifting off key again or something. Anyway, yeah. Those gifs on Mosquito are amazing. The grid thing is super productive. I've thought about opening the format up to allow for something sideways and grid-like like that in mine, but I'm resisting it. I'm being careful, maybe too careful, to maintain my gif experiments' status as visualized fictions and keep possible referents to 'visual art' from interfering. I keep thinking it's important to 'write' them like fiction is written, i.e. vertically on page-like spaces and maintain the 'paragraph' thing. Blah blah. Oh, ha ha, I have a ton of gifs on my desktop. I organize them thusly: When I make a work, I create two folders, one of gifs I end up using in the work and one for gifs I don't end up using. So, the gifs are organized that way. I always start by searching for new gifs with each work, but I also have those folder resources to comb through, and, because the works each have a particularity or thematic, to me anyway, it all ends being pretty organized. Yeah, your smoking girl gif grouping/work is great. I stared at that for a while. Like I said, the instability of the sync is really lovable, I think. Or working with the cycling sync is super nice. Like I kind of said, I do think of working outside the stack, and of course that would open things up hugely, but, for one thing, it would involve me finding a new place to work on them because so far I use the blog space as my workspace, and it is a very limited space, design-wise, and, also, maintaining the fiction-like way of 'writing' them seems important. Don't know, though. Oh, about gifs from the film ... actually, we just finished editing together a deleted/bonus scene for the German DVD of 'LCTG', and there is one absolutely beautiful shot that we tried and tried to use, but it just didn't fit, and we were talking bout making it a gif, so, yeah, quite possibly. Thank you, Chris. That was really wonderful and generous. ** Tosh Berman, Thank you, sir. I don't know about blowing them up. Interesting idea. It would change the scrolling/interactive thing, or distance it. Actually, as I mentioned up above, I'm going to Geneva where 'ZHH' is in the film festival, and I'm extremely curious to see how they've decided to present and show 'ZHH'. I have no idea, but they having decided to project it seems like a real possibility there. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. Thanks about the gif work. Hm, I wonder if 'Love's' Frenchness is having some upgrading effect on people who aren't French or something 'cos, yeah, I don't get it. No, broken record alert, I haven't read either yet, and, as ever, I'm very sorry. Every time I think I have a window, it closes. I just spent the last five days editing a deleted scene and giving and transcribing a long interview for the German DVD of 'LCTG' and now editing it. I'm sorry. I have become endlessly swamped, to the point where I have no time to even write my own work, but every swamp has a borderline, and I'm looking for it. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. I happened to catch your comment on Sunday, and I went ahead and submitted the film to Jed Rapfogel yesterday. So, fingers crossed. And thank you so incredibly much for telling him about the film and for encouraging the possibility of AFA showing it. That would be just amazing. The gifs are all pre-existing, so I don't alter them at all. The looping is there already, and I just work with what I'm given and try to mess with the loops through alignments of loops that do or don't fit comfortably together. I like dub. Lee Perry is insanely great. I just have no interest in traditional reggae at all, But dub, yeah, for sure, and, yeah, I thought about dub when I was trying to make rhythms in that experiment, ** H, Hi. Thank you so much! My weekend was packed from mornings to nights with work, and my eyes and brain are still blurry from that, but it was productive, thank you. How was yours? ** Bill, Hi, B. Thank you a lot for your thoughts on the rhythm. Your expertise on that front is a huge help. The gif duration issues are really fascinating. I'm not entirely sure how different browsers and computers alter the rhythms and durations, but I love thinking about that and trying to allow for that just in case. Me too, about the gifs' duration and activity within being equally important. Inseparable, or irretrievably interdependent really, I guess. Yeah, the sectioning. That's something I've thought about a lot, and I've experimented pre-publishing with different possibilities, although so far I've ended up making only fairly mild movements in/of the distances. I end up wanting the connections between the sections, or at least between the initial or final gif in the sequences with the surrounding sequences, or at least their heads or tails, to be easily available. Also, it's hard to seek a lot of freedom within the blog format, and it's hard too because I make the works on a laptop which has a limited field of vision where basically only one sequence or one plus a partial second sequence is visible at any one time. No, I don't really have a preferred scrolling mode for the viewer. I try to make them such that a quick scrolling, with random pauses of unknown lengths, which is what I imagine most people do with them, has a particular effect, and a very gradual scrolling with stops to concentrate on the sequences and connections, has another effect. Obviously, the works are made, at their most serious and truest level, to be studied carefully and slowly. They're heavily detailed things, packed with all kinds of effect experiments and layers and levels on which the work is functioning. So, a slow, concentrated viewing, at whatever pace that matches up with the viewer's interest level and attention span, would be the ideal method. Thank you a lot for talking with me about that. It has really triggered and inspired me. ** Damien Ark, Hey, Damien! Thanks. The cool thing, maybe, is that that gif work had no story at all. So anything other than a rhythm construction that came through is your brain making stuff, which is really exciting to me. I've watched anime a lot at certain times in the past, but I haven't watched an anime in, like, years, for no reason at all. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, you know, no surprise to you, but of course I was thinking a lot about those 12"s, for me particularly the ones in the '90s, that had the rhythm freed up/isolated on one side. I was super into that. And, on that note, I'll will go listen to that linked-up 2-hour beat fest at the soonest opportunity. Thank you! ** Postitbreakup, Well, hi there, Josh, old pal. Wow, that's so cool of you to have given the work and sequences so much thinking. That's super interesting. I just copied and pasted your thoughts into a doc so I can study them carefully when I'm not flying through the p.s. Really appreciate it, man, and what you wrote is very cool and thought-provoking. I hope you're doing great! ** Keaton, K-maestro. Wow, cool, totally, interesting, yeah. Excellent gif ideas. I'm going to ponder them deeply once my brain has returned to a pondering-friendly state. ** Martin Bladh, Hi, Martin. Cool! All the best back to you! ** Statitick, Hey, Njr! Sweetness. Thank you. Guard changing offers the opportunity for a lovely refreshment. Almost always. In your case, clearly. Hugs to Michael. And, duh, to you. ** Misanthrope, Me? Okay, I won't. True enough about art being an easier context for overt body mod doers. I do think its different over here. I've hung out with Jean Luc a fair amount, and I've never seen people gawk at him untowardly. That whole 'live and let live' French thing maybe. Wow, you think 'excess' tattooing and piercing reads as damaged goods to a lot of people? That's pretty depressing, if so. In the gif work, I'm into the silence of the gifs making the viewer's imagination 'hear' the sounds that would normally accompany the actions in the gifs and then making music in their heads out of how the 'sounds' combine vis-à-vis the juxtapositions. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. My pleasure, my gratitude re: the email and its delicious fruit. Thanks a lot, man, about the gif work thing. I hope your weekend was busy for wonderful reasons. ** Okay. From a experiment with rhythm in gifs to actual, hearable, musician-made rhythms, among other things, as I present you today with the latest gig made up of music-based things that I'm into of late. Hope you find stuff therein. See you tomorrow.