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OG MacoNorth Face
'Quality Control co-owner Pierre “Pee” Thomas has gone so far as to call Maco a “black punk rock artist,” and the comparison is not without basis. We’ve already addressed his decidedly fuck-you approach to PR issues, and like a singer in a hardcore band, Maco’s vocal performances revel in the entropy of base emotion, a clamorous performance of the enraged, contradictory subjectivity that emerges when your only route to self-expression is through a culture of living memehood that co-opts your experience and relates it in a way that alienates you from your own experience. Maco is not immune to the flex escalation and fascist aestheticization emanating from his home city, but he pushes the emotive boundaries of that selfsame scene from within its constrictions.'-- Nick Henderson
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ImmuneNew Years Eve
'A mostly anonymous and reserved figure overall, Immune dropped his cult-revered debut album Night Visions with us in late 2014, and after a mostly quiet year in the shadows returns back with his sophomore follow up Breathless. As mentioned in a recent interview with Oscob, Immune worked on this album throughout 2015, taking his laptop out around the city of London and working on his album in parks, bars and coffee shops with just a pair of headphones and a copy of Reason 5. And the sound of an animated metropolis bustling with life as he looked on dreaming throughout that year, is exactly the sonic picture that this album paints. Breathless takes the ideas from Night Visions and returns to them with better focus and a more refined artistic outlook. It’s darker and at times more jarring album which tells a subtle story, but the album flows like an immense dream from beginning to end, putting the audience directly in Immune’s world for its duration.'-- Dreamcatcher
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Dark ActorsBlack Maria
'At the heart of Dark Actors – a project that has been evolving for several years, or so it seems, sits the techno-wizard Mike Eastwood, once the guiding technical light of Factory Records and, levelly, A Certain Ratio. Known as Mikey in the Factory Office, and as producer Moist elsewhere, he seemed always an amiable fountain of electro-knowledge. 'Black Maria' opens the show. A tirade of observant journalese or conspiracy babble, depending on your stance, it uses a cartoon image of the old police tactical control van – 'Black Maria'– as it's central image. This is cemented by the simplistic accompanying video which depicts the vehicle crawling through a straight line of lyric. Hypnotic indeed as image, lyric and growl combine to send your thoughts scuttling back through Britain's dark governing heart, then and now. That is the message. Then as now.'-- The Quietus
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Blithe FieldIn the Tunnels
'Blithe Field’s Face Always Toward the Sun continues the ambient musings of Spencer Radcliffe, whose Brown Horse cassette split with R.L. Kelly was a killer collection of sharp songwriting and rolling sonic chaos. His other, more emo-leaning work as California Furniture in 2013 further affirmed his songwriting chops, but Blithe Field remains Radcliffe’s solely instrumental effort. From his phenomenal split with Ricky Eat Acid in 2012 to a rich string of incredible tape collages, the Chicago musician has built something masterful through the years, looped euphoria in hazy, flattened bliss. Pairing the localized ambient tradition with that special Orchid Tapes blend of lush bedroom amateurism, Blithe Field builds its own stunning, hazy world within the Ohio town, crafting a heartbreaking collage of youth, family, intimacy, and togetherness from the ground up. Like James Joyce’s Dublin or Lou Reed’s New York, Radcliffe’s Athens is its own universe, a collegiate utopia in art, vibrant and overflowing, foam-drenched and howling on the lawn, the first big weekend of the year.'-- Rob Arcand
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400PPMChorleywood Bread
'Shawn O'Sullivan's music comes in many guises, but the common threads are easy to tease out. With one or two exceptions—a house-leaning EP on WT Records, for instance—the New Yorker's records tend to go between drone-layered techno and a spacious, immersive sound akin to Further Reductions, the duo of O'Sullivan and Katie Rose. Just-In-Time, O'Sullivan's second 400PPM record, underscores how slippery his various masks can be—it's a very different animal from its Avian predecessor, Non Nocere. Where that was basically a Shawn O'Sullivan megamix—with rich Further Reductions tones and high-strung noise set to galloping techno frames—Just-In-Time narrows its focus, yielding flintier music in the process. If O'Sullivan does one thing really well, it's give his music a generous sense of scale. He plays to this strength on "Resource Extraction," whose claps are sounded by the smack of metal on metal in some abandoned warehouse. (No doubt, the EP's title is a reference to the factory production method introduced by the Japanese auto industry.) "Chorleywood Bread," too, teems with the hum and buzz of labouring machines. It's a brisk 128 BPM, but doesn't feel quite so frenzied as its neighbors.'-- Resident Advisor
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SurgeonA1703 zD6
'While exploring new production techniques using old and unlikely hardware, the results were so unusual that I really had the sense that these pieces of equipment didn't actually create these sounds, rather they were in fact some kind of elaborate reception device that allowed me to tune into transmissions from Distant Galaxies. The music I could hear was actually the received transmissions of Pop Hits from those Distant Galaxies that were being played on their radio stations. I quickly recorded all that I could before losing the transmission. I consulted with Dr Andrew Read, the astrophysicist with whom I recorded Guitar Treatments in 1999. He has worked on the discovery of the most distant galaxies and astronomical objects in the Universe. Together we came up with a possible list of where these musical transmissions may have come from.'-- Surgeon
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Eric Copeland Elephant
'There's been a 'zero f*cks given' approach to their fifth anniversary year from LIES, which is very in keeping with the label's ethos; no resting on laurels or back slapping, just plain good music for the freaks. Having issued fine records from Antenes, Marcos Cabral, Randomer, Overdose and a whole host of others, Ron Morelli's last call of duty for the year is another mini-album shaped journey into the crazed asylum that is the mind of Eric Copeland. Six tracks deep, Jesus Freak is described as "addictive as it is confusing with its screwed vocal hooks and demented twang heard throughout," and listeners should expect more of Copeland's signature blend of cut-up samples, deranged loops, and barely-controlled chaos.'-- Juno
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Sainkho NamtchylakDance of Eagle
'With her shaved head and seven-octave range, Sainkho Namtchylak would stand out on any stage. Add her particular mix of Tuvan throat-singing and avant-garde improvisation, and she becomes an unforgettable figure. The daughter of a pair of schoolteachers, she grew up in an isolated village on the Tuvan/Mongolian border, exposed to the local overtone singing -- something that was generally reserved for the males; in fact, females were actively discouraged from learning it (even now, the best-known practitioners remain male, artists like Huun-Huur-Tu and Yat-Kha). However, she learned much of her traditional repertoire from her grandmother, and went on to study music at the local college, but she was denied professional qualifications. Quietly she studied the overtone singing, as well as the shamanic traditions of the region, before leaving for study further in Moscow (Tuva was, at that time, part of the U.S.S.R.). Her degree completed, she returned to Tuva where she became a member of Sayani, the Tuvan state folk ensemble, before abandoning it to return to Moscow and joining the experimental Tri-O, where her vocal talents and sense of melodic and harmonic adventure could wander freely. That first brought her to the West in 1990, although her first recorded exposure came with the Crammed Discs compilation Out of Tuva. Once Communism had collapsed, she moved to Vienna, making it her base, although she traveled widely, working in any number of shifting groups and recording a number of discs that revolved around free improvisation -- not unlike Yoko Ono -- as well as performing around the globe. It was definitely fringe music, although Namtchylak established herself very firmly as a fixture on that fringe. In 1997 she was the victim of an attack that left her in a coma for several weeks. Initially she thought it was some divine retribution for her creative hubris, and seemed to step back when she recorded 1998's Naked Spirit, which had new age leanings. However, by 2000 she seemed to have overcome that block, releasing Stepmother City, her most accessible work to date, where she seemed to really find her stride, mixing traditional Tuvan instruments and singing with turntables and effects, placing her in a creative firmament between Yoko and Björk, but with the je ne sais quoi of Mongolia as part of the bargain.'-- allmusic
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LycusObsidian Eyes
'The Oakland band Lycus make funeral doom that's unique and accomplished without rejecting the basic tenets of the style. The music is slow and heavy, the three-part vocals mournful and guttural, the cover art by Italian painter Paolo Girardi melancholic and romantic, the subject matter bleak. Lycus maintain a specific atmosphere—deep greens, browns, dark shadows—but find a number of paths through it. Each feels right, the blending of genres and approaches and patterns seamless. More important, though, is the effect music of this sort can have on a listener. It's highly cathartic. It will move you emotionally. At the end of the haunting closer "Obsidian Eyes," which finds the protagnist "suffer[ing] through the void/ On the perilous bridge/ Between body and spirit," the band pushes forward with all their force into a gentle cymbal wash that closes the record. It's one of the few soft moments on Chasms, and it's welcome: a place to rest your head after experiencing this overwhelming, ecstatic, surprisingly meditative album.' -- Brandon Stosuy
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Deantoni ParksBombay
'Deantoni Parks has a decorated background: He’s collaborated with canonical progressive acts of several different decades (John Cale, Sade, the Mars Volta, Flying Lotus) and is an astounding technical musician, as evidenced by his tenure teaching at the Berklee College of Music. Parks’ latest solo, Technoself, is above all else a showcase for what the Georgia native can do with a drum kit, a sampler, and a limited number of hands. (He only has two.) Every track here is a live recording, an astounding feat given the percussive complexity present on something like "Graphite", which with its surround-sound distortion and riffage feels as if it were carefully engineered over the course of a month of lab work. Frequently, the aggression of the drumming itself is a thrill. "Automatic" is a fantastic pump-up track, with the same wall-to-wall excitement as Eminem’s "Til I Collapse" (and none of the yelling.) The ambition on Technoself is staggering, particularly given the technical limits that Parks has imposed on himself.'-- Jonah Bromwich
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Matt KarmilSo You Say (Dirty Tape Heads Mix)
'Matt Karmil was born in 1979 near the giant pre-historic glockenspiel / mythical neolithic monument known as Stonehenge. Today he produces and plays a particular form of playful and moody dance music for some of the world's finest record labels and dance floors. Matt was a sickly, introspective child – his boyhood days were spent indoors, practising the classical guitar for endless hours. He got well in his early twenties, smashed the guitars and headed out into the big world outside Salisbury, England. Since that day, Matt follows music wherever it takes him – years of djing, record collecting and working as a producer-engineer in London, Paris, Stockholm and Berlin led to him finding a new home in Cologne by 2012. Matt soon befriended the tight-knit yet open-minded community of music lovers centred around the legendary Kompakt imprint.'-- kompakt.fm
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Lucrecia DaltOver Unity
'Along the arc of Dalt’s music, beyond what steers her so allusively away from self-repetition, there is an undefinable forward inertia. What can explain, for instance, the near absence of her voice? Is it personal interest, renunciation, an embrace? Is she driven by a backdrop of conceptualism, or is this a lyrical wandering? What we know, for starters, is that she made this album immersed in a cinema of her own, curatorial creation. Its filmic quality is a direct consequence of her turning her studio into a screening room for classic works of New German Cinema, pulling influence from directors such as Helke Sander and Werner Schroeter. As she works, she absorbs, and Ou results from a conscious staging of this process. The impact can be felt both at the levels of surface and structure. While the sound quality reflects these evocative, multi-layered scenarios, the larger departure from any of her previous works is the album’s spatial, mix-like composition, with each track being made up of several companion titles.'-- Care Of Editions
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Anna MeredithHoneyed Words
'Last August, Anna Meredith released her debut single, the mighty “Nautilus”. If J.J. Abrams is looking for new walk-on music for Darth Vader in his Star Wars reboot, John Williams can cash his severance check right now: Meredith’s opus rallies a tangle of brass fanfares before introducing a sound barrier-bending wub that feels like it could vaporize a human body at the right volume. As far as making an entrance goes, the imperial track is a monogrammed red carpet, a dozen footmen, and a billowing velvet cape-- a hell of an introduction to the London-based, Edinburgh-raised musician. “Nautilus” actually heralds the start of Meredith’s second act-- the 35-year-old is already a renowned, groundbreaking force in more rarefied fields. After several years as composer in residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the rising classical star had an original piece performed at the BBC’s prestigious Last Night of the Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall last August as well. During the concert, Meredith's “HandsFree” saw 160 members of the National Youth Orchestra lay down their instruments to click, clap, and cluck in unison, using Reichian body percussion to conjure a sound akin to waves crashing through a jungle-- a great antidote to the stuffy surroundings. “The Proms is such a weird, nationalistic thing-- I had actual proper, physical hate mail,” Meredith explains, half-impressed by the sender’s outrage.'-- Laura Snapes
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Aaron David Ross Fiscal Spliff
'ADR’s ability to compositionally teleport between musical spaces has deftly demonstrated an inherent voyeurism. He can nimbly maneuver between jazz flute and scatt be-bobbing (scaled in between the partitions of a white-walled gallery space), to expensive bass vibrations (shaking the knobby, black obsidian hilt of a sorcerer’s emblazoned sword). In the past, this exploration has existed between monikers; with Deceptionista, it’s between seconds of time. That voyeurism is also shown in Deceptionista’s employment of free online app Vpeeker, software “which provides a feed of the most recently uploaded Vine clip at any given moment.” As PAN has expressed, there is decentralized value in discovering “an untapped world of internet detritus… [where] …the internet voyeur is no longer carefully curating their content consumption from safely behind a screen.” The theme of decentralization runs strong in this statement, as if to suggest a latent need for ADR to distance himself from his own distinctive authorship to reveal the value of the cultural detritus that Deceptionista consistently evokes. Although ADR’s efforts to disperse his “content curation” are admirable, it’s the synthesis between his structural and well-trained sound-sensitivity with the gesture of horizontal sound placement that makes the work so marvelous.'-- Tiny Mix Tapes
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Samuel KerridgeFLA·1
'I want the music to consume you, take you in. I want a reaction from people, for them to be taken aback, all their senses assaulted. I don't want to deliberately make harrowing music, though I see it as having a lot of emotion and soul. I hope people can express themselves when hearing it, but I also like to have that shock factor. I think techno is like any art form, an expression rather than specifically a genre. All my tracks have a strong narrative, some of which probably stems from listening to early Pink Floyd albums and so on. You take from it what you will and everyone has his or her own ideas about it. To put it bluntly, I think people are getting bored of shit music. There are too many sheep. I think the whole world is finally seeing the allure of electronic music, which is great, and for every 10,000 David Guetta fans, at least ten of them will explore new avenues, maybe buy a bass and a distortion pedal, which is of course something we should embrace.'-- Samuel Kerridge
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Flying LotusFUCKKKYOUUU
'Eddie Alcazar is the author of the short movie FUCKKKYOU, produced by Javier Lovato, which trailer has been released. Selected by the Sundance Next Festival 2015 and the Fantastic Festival 2015, this movie deals with a solitary girl who can travel in time and find some love and comfort by connecting with the past. Confronted to rejection, she fights with her identity and sexuality by trying to find her own place in a folding time. Director asked Flying Lotus to make the score of his movie.'-- fubiz
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p.s. Hey. ** Scunnard, Hey, man! Great to see you! I'm doing good, thanks. Well, yeah, you bet I'm interested in that guest post for all kinds of reasons. But I won't hold my breath. I might do breathing exercises, though. My fingers, if you want to call them that, are, as of this instant, crossed, although, looking at them, it's more like entangled, but that counts too, I think, and is probably even better despite the unpopularity of referring to so-called crossed fingers as, in fact, entangled ones. Me? I was traveling for a while. Then I stopped. Now I'm working on the usual stuff as per usual. And getting out and about a bit. Can't complain. But what about you? What uses your hours at the moment? ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi, Jeff. That's interesting timing, and why not? Well, you know how it is. There are 'release dates' for books, but, truth be told, books usually come out about a month before those dates. I'm about to start reading it, I think this weekend, if plans become things. ** Pascal, Hi, P. I think Rohmer is one of those filmmakers whose thing is either one's thing or not. I love a lot of his films. I really love the 'Tales of the Four Seasons' cycle films ('A Tale of Springtime', 'A Tale of Winter', 'A Summer's Tale', 'Autumn Tale').'The Green Ray' is one of my very favorites. I'm really fond of a film that most Rohmer fans seem to consider a failed experiment: 'Perceval le Gallois'. A lot, really. Ah, the early early Fassbinder, cool. Enjoy, man. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yeah, 'La Collectionneuse' is fantastic! ** Schlick, Hi, Uli. Oh, thanks, man, For reporting back and for liking the piece, and, of course, for fighting all that traffic to get there. Yeah, it's that 'not fully interwoven' thing that's odd about that piece, although I guess it's effective in that way or something. Before 'Kindertotenlieder', I wasn't involved in the full process of making our works from start to finish. For 'I Apologize', which was made while I was still living in LA, she and I worked together in Lyon for about four days, made an early sketch, and then I flew home, and she finished the piece on her own. For our second piece, the super-rarely seen 'Un Belle Enfant Blonde', I just sent her texts from LA, and she made the piece with Catherine Robbe-Grillet, who revised my texts and performed them in the work. Starting with 'Kindertotenlieder', we made the pieces together every step of the way. So the early ones seem different, to me anyway. Anyway, blah blah. Thanks, man. Peter's music in 'I Apologize' is so great, right? ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Oh, yeah do get over here if you get the chance. That would be really fun. Oh, good, I'm going to go catch up with the new boymuse pieces this weekend. Oh, the length thing, yeah. I guess my policy is that I just trust, or try hard to trust, where my writing seems to want to go at any time and try not to force it to, say, stretch out if that does seem natural. A fair amount of the time, I'll end up making something longer by first writing short things and then, at some point, seeing how they might be combined or add up. Like trying to see them as parts of something longer, putting them in an order that seems right and then sometimes I'll get idea about how they could connect, and I will write a piece that creates an intersection. Sometimes that will lead to a longer work. But, you know, 'long works' aka 'novels' are kind of really overhyped as being more 'serious' or 'important' than short works, and that's not true at all, you know? I think the important thing is not to fight your instinct of the moment. If short pieces are what's coming out, that's probably the natural thing. There might come a time when you literally get bored of writing short things, and that kind of boredom can be the perfect inspiration to change up your practice. If that makes any sense? Have a very fine weekend! ** Steevee, Hi, I haven't read his Zombie novelizations, but I've always been very curious to, naturally. Cool re: the review. Everyone, here's Steevee's review of the "queer soap opera" FORT BUCHANAN. No, I did not know that about Clive Barker. Huh. I know several artists and writers who've done sex work at some point. They're not public about that, but they don't seem ashamed of it. I always think of shame as being a Christian thing, or as a Christian-damage thing. I don't think I ever feel ashamed, but maybe I feel something that others would call shame and I just have other terms for it or something. ** Bill, Hi, B. Cool, thanks, sir. I'm about to starting reading the book too. Yeah, I love his piece on Ed the Happy Clown a lot too. Totally. ** Kieran, Hi. So, my sad story is that I checked yesterday and saw that the Helm/McDowell show was last night. I had other plans, but I decided to change them, only to find out that the gig was sold out. So, I was deprived due to my own laziness. On a more positive note, I really liked that Apostille track, and I'll be off to find more today. Oh, he does Night School Records? Yeah, excellent venture. Wow, nice. What an interesting guy. Thanks a lot! You have a perfect weekend if that's at all possible. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Ha ha, I like the mask. It doesn't seem dumb at all, but I don't know anything whatsoever about Samantha Cameron other than her marriage tastes. Next week! ** Misanthrope, I think you would like Evenson's work. Call it a hunch. That word gratuitous seems like the problem. A lot of people seem to think that explicit representations of even the tiniest smidgen of those things is gratuitous. I don't understand how something can be gratuitous if it's something that an artist intended. Ha ha ha, that dream. Yeah, I'm virtually positive that Zac doesn't have a son, much less an obese exhibitionist son. I love wind. Sorry. The more the better. Rip the roof off the suckers! Wind over rain. Maybe wind over hail, maybe. Wind and snow are equals. I don't know what I'm saying. ** Kyler, Hi, K! Good to see ya! I'm good, thanks. We haven't nailed down a screening of 'LCTG' in NYC yet, but we're working on it. God, the waiting, dude, horrible. We're trying to get gigs for our film, and film programmers have this horrible habit of saying, we'll get back to you shortly, and then just completely blowing you off. It's ugly. Hugs, in other words. Yeah, that Garth Greenwell novel seems to be super buzzy at the moment. I haven't read it. I'm curious to take a look or a lengthy-ish glance to see what the deal is. It doesn't sound like my thing, what with the 'new Edmund White' hype, but I don't know. Like I said to Steevee, I don't think I understand shame. The whole idea seems really strange and foreign to me. Like I kind of said, I've thought maybe that's because I've never in my life been religious in any way, and it seems like a region-based concept to me, but I could be totally wrong about that. ** Right. I made you guys another gig of new music I've been into. And I'm giving you an entire weekend to give it a chance and fish around inside it and try some things out, and I hope you will. Good weekends to you all, and I'll see you on Monday.