A CLOSER LISTEN weekly #15
Summer's End
Dear Listeners, I hope you didn’t mind the unscheduled week off. I kept up the bi-weekly schedule while schlepping across Europe, but somehow a visit home to New York knocked me off my routine. All of which means, we’ve got more to cover then usual, so let’s get into it.
For the remainder of August, digital copies of Healing Together: a compilation for mental health recovery will be ‘Name Your Price’ on Bandcamp. Net profits of the compilation will go to Sounds of Saving, a non-profit fueling hope for mental health both by celebrating the power of human connection to music and directing people towards the resources they need before it’s too late. Includes tracks from Drum & Lace, more eaze, Patricia Wolf, Ai Yamamoto, and many others. If you have yet to add this soothing 23-song compilation to your collection, this is a perfect time to support. If you have already graciously purchased, it would also be an excellent time to gift someone this incredible compilation!
I also need to mention GENG PTP’s Slowness as the Vehicle: Portishead Forever. Each installment in the series had been better than the last, but this one is particularly special. Using a 4-track Tascam and pitch-shifting cassette player, GENG weaves a catalog-spanning portrait of Bristol’s greatest band, recorded straight to cassette. Presale is now available for this Portishead shirt. Previous installments of Slowness is the Vehicle have served as fundraisers for GENG’s Sound Practice course. Unfortunately this mix has a more tragic backstory, dedicated to MELS ONE, with proceeds going to his memorial fund. Gene Fowler, vocalist of NYC noise metal band, Wetnurse, passed earlier this summer.
Jaimie Branch (17 June 1983–22 August 2022)
Tributes have been pouring in from all corners of our musical community following the death of New York trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Jaimie Branch (Fly Or Die). Branch was a prolific collaborator with strong ties to Chicago, releasing records on International Anthem and working with Angel Bat Dawid and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, among many others. The Wire has made Branch's Invisible Jukebox interview from November 2019 available. RIP.
“Free jazz is a real reflection of the times and everything that’s going on [...] It puts beauty back into the world, it vibrates, I think it works on an anatomical level.”
ODDS & ENDS
If you’re in New York, take note of this upcoming concert at ISSUE Project Room.
FRED MOTEN, BRANDON LÓPEZ & GERALD CLEAVER / PAMELA Z / SYANIDE Sat 10 Sep, 2022, 7pm ($30 - 20)
First Unitarian Congregational Society Saturday, September 10th, at 7:30pm ET
The trio released their Moten / López / Cleaver LP on Derek Baron’s Reading Group label earlier this year to critical acclaim.
DYSTROPICALíA
Atom™ is included in our recent reviews, so I should mention he recently shared the excellent Dystropicalía A Tapeless Mixtape by Normal Ones.
This is number one in a potential series of AAA mixtapes. Normal Ones will kick this off with “Dystropicalía” – a colourful ride through the depths of an imaginary latin mind space. This 78 minute mix taps deep into the Archive and re-contextualizes some of Atom™’s most classic latin and lounge-infused musical compositions into a feature-length tropical sound expedition. And as the Naturalist put it best… “why don’t you simply sit back, relax and have a coffee.”
SAMPLING ETHICS
Hii Magazine recently re-published this interesting short podcast from Max Alper aka La Meme Yo.”ung on “The Nuanced Ethics of Sampling in the Age of (Audio) Information.” Max was the subject of “UNFOLLOW ME,” episode 19 of my Sound Propositions podcast. Despite that title, I really do recommend you follow him. LMY has become much more than a meme account. Max has built a remarkable community exploring music and sound pedagogy together.
UNTIL THE QUIET COMES
I really enjoyed Marcus J. Moore’s “Revisiting Flying Lotus' Mystical Dreamscape, A Decade Later,” published via his newsletter, The Liner Notes. This in turn sent me on a FlyLo discography-spanning re-listening session. Maybe you’d like to do the same.
Gabelicious Thee Most Delicious Mix Fart Un [mix]
This mix was selected by Gabe Bogart, old friend and colleague from the site before this one, occasional contributor to ACL. Back in 2013, I asked him for some hip hop producer recommendations, and we put together these beat-centric mixes. We had talked about doing some more of those, during the pandemic Gabe sent me over a batch of tracks he’d been enjoying, which I mixed during a particularly cold winter night early in 2021. I sat on that session for a long time, went back and thought I’d mix it afresh but found I enjoyed it as is.
Ukrainian Field Notes XI
Gianmarco Del Re’s series of dispatches from the war continues, including updates on past subjects and yet another fundraising compilation.
For the current episode of Ukrainian Field Notes we speak to r.roo, who managed to reunite with his family in Germany, about the difficulty of making long term plans while Yuliia Vlaskina in Berlin talks to us about grief and putting things in perspective in the face of full scale war. We also get acquainted with the bandura, a Ukrainian plucked string instrument combining elements of the zither and lute, courtesy of Volodymyr Voyt. Back in Kyiv, Last Void Quarrel explains how war can take one by surprise even when one has been preparing for it, whereas Mark Golos explains Darkness Theory to us. And finally, Cluster Lizard talk about burnout and Westerners misconceptions while Yakiv Tsvietinskyi discusses Ukrainian jazz.
In the Art department, we’d like to highlight the work of Anton Shebetko who portrays the queer history of Ukraine with the show To Know Us Better on until 31 August at Foam in Amsterdam.
RECENT REVIEWS
Reviews are at the heart of ACL. We receive many more quality releases than we, an all-volunteer operation can hope to over, and perhaps I can find someway to share some of the records that we haven’t had time to cover here in this newsletter in the future. Please feel free to share your own recent discoveries in the comments. But for now, here are a few of my favorite reviews we posted on the blog in the last month.
THLTTLDBB ~ SeeUSearching
We like seasonally appropriate music at ACL – you may have noticed our articles about Summer and Winter music, and if not, may we suggest you take a look at them, at a time that suits? Releasing a record that fits the season plays well with us, so it is pleasing to note that the lead single for SeeUSearching is titled “Autumn,” just in time for the start of that meteorological season. It is a well-crafted portrait, in which you can imagine the breeze becoming fresher, the nights getting cooler, and the sun setting earlier.
Amirtha Kidambi & Luke Stewart ~ Zenith/Nadir
Traditionally, artists are meant to find a genre or a style and stick with it — to experiment and reinvent themselves, yes, but only within the boundaries of a trademark sound or emotional register. On their recent project Zenith/Nadir, vocalist Amirtha Kidambi and bassist Luke Stewart try a different approach: rather than stylistic cohesion, they aim for sharp contrast. The two parts of Zenith/Nadir take radically different approaches to the same instrumentation. While the first side verges on harsh noise, the second side sees the duo taking a stripped back, acoustic approach. As the artists explain in the liner notes, the goal of this approach is to give voice to “extreme contrasts of high and low” and to reflect “a time where despair and possibility were inextricable.”
Susana López ~ The Edge of the Circle / Manja Ristić ~ Him, fast sleeping, soon he found In labyrinth of many a round, self-rolled
With her 2020 album, Crónica de un secuestro, Susana López tackled the hijacking of reality by the pandemic. Her music looked unflinchingly inward, earning a place on our Top Ten Drone list of that year. The Edge of the Circle covers some shared ground, with both albums nodding to Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240), the Sufi writer and mystic from López’s native Murcia. The earlier album had one track named after ʿArabī, seeming to draw parallels between the sustained concentration of drone music and the inward reflection of Sufi practice. The new album places the soul within the wider cosmos, with artwork based on ʿArabī’s cosmograms. The programme is described as a “sound cycle”. The individual tracks also feel cyclical, with looping synth and recorded textures propelling listeners into the dizzying whirl of a dancing dervish. With each sonic turn, we move through space. But inside the ecstatic spinning, it is hard to keep track of our position.
Atom™ ~ Neuer Mensch
The music on Uwe Schmidt’s new album was programmed, engineered, and mastered by an algorithm. And after he heard it, he was so intrigued with his performance, he finally broke free from conventional song writing culture. Here at ACL, we are no strangers to AI. See for example our warm review of Emptyset ~ Blossoms (2019). For this Atom™ record, even the press release is machine generated. Fittingly, our review also uses Artificial Intelligence. See if you can spot the cyborg sentences. Whilst advances in AI capture the public imagination, there are concerns about automating human activities. This includes artistic endeavours, where the territory between machines and creativity is still being charted. Perhaps the best you can do is build a computer that will work for you. We’re here! We’re here!
Felicia Atkinson ~ Image Language
Across her body of work, Felicia Atkinson has explored the gap between experience and its capture. She creates spacious electroacoustic soundscapes drenched in landscape and imagery, fusing a variety of sonic genres from spoken word to sound collage. Through the setting of her gentle, suggestive voice amidst a constellation of perpetually shifting sonic textures, rhythms, and harmonies, Atkinson crafts mutable forms which capture the bittersweet ache of connection, its palpability as well as its slipperiness. On her most recent release, Image Langage, Atkinson continues to explore how the voice can relate to music and sound, and how sound can relate to space and nature, while exploring environments as varied as nature, home, even painting.
Russian Circles ~ Gnosis
Chicago’s Russian Circles is back, and as strong as ever. Their newest album may replace loud-quiet-loud with loud-louder-loud, but that’s okay, because post-rock fans need this sort of outlet on the tail end (we hope) of a draining era. Gnosis means spiritual knowledge, and while one might not consider hard music a source of such knowledge, reflection often follows the spent energy of emotion. Here the trio sounds mad, yet melodic, a curious combination of forces mirroring the inner struggle of the soul.
Various Artists ~ Sounds of Absence
In the coming years, sonologists will continue to be grateful for the work of field recording artists during the pandemic. Guided by curiosity, working for the most part without pay, such artists captured aural time capsules: innumerable hours of raw material in which is encoded vital information about our species and its relationship to the biosphere. On Sounds of Absence, Peter Kiefer, head of Art-Research-Sound at the Mainz Music School, invited artists to submit recordings captured during lockdown, as well as compositions that express their impressions of the period. The result is a potpourri, from empty to packed, immobile to overworked, with an undercurrent of melancholy.
UPCOMING RELEASES
(complete list with Bandcamp links here)
String Noise & John King ~ Centripetal Light (Gold Bolus, 25 August)
BPMoore ~ The Practice of Suffering (Bigo & Twigetti, 26 August)
Brown Calvin ~ dimension // perspective (AKP Recordings, 26 August)
Bruno Duplant ~ Etats Intermédiaires (Eliane Tapes, 26 August)
Calineczka ~ ADWOS/ABWOS (Eliane Tapes, 26 August)
Cape Canaveral ~ The Observatory (Machine Records, 26 August)
Gryphon Rue ~ A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers (Not Not Fun, 26 August)
Hinode Tapes ~ S/T (Instant Classic, 26 August)
Imam Collective ~ Solitude (Worlds Within Worlds, 26 August)
Kramer ~ Music for Films Edited by Moths (Shimmy Disc, 26 August)
Matt Ulery ~ Become Giant (Woolgathering, 26 August)
Michael Mallis ~ From Darkness We Awaken (Made Now Music, 26 August)
Miguel Zenon ~ Music of the Americas (Miel Music, 26 August)
More Klementines ~ Who Remembers Light (Twin Lakes, 26 August)
Nils Quak ~ Ichi-Go Ichi-E (Eliane Tapes, 26 August)
Rachika Nayar ~ Heaven Come Crashing (NNA Tapes, 26 August)
Rudi Mahall / Michael Griener ~ Jazzpreis (Astral Spirits, 26 August)
Savvas Metaxas ~ For How Read Now (Flaming Pines, 26 August)
Sweet Juice ~ S/T (wiaiwaya, 26 August)
THLTTLDBB ~ SeeUSearching (Somewherecold, 26 August)
Viul and Benoît Pioulard ~ Konec (A Strangely Isolated Place, 29 August)
Alexandra Spence ~ a veil, the sea (Mappa, 30 August)
Andrei Rikishi ~ Caged Birds Think Flying Is A Sickness (Bearsuit, 31 August)
giant skeletons ~ * sleep tides (31 August)
Xia Ye ~ Night Swimmer (Shy People, 31 August)
Copenhagen Clarinet Ensemble ~ Organism (År & Dag, 1 September)
Eric Vloeimans & Will Holshouser ~ Two for the Road (V-Flow/Challenge, 1 September)
Absence ~ Empty Sky (Imaginary North, 2 September)
Bill Orcutt ~ Music for Four Guitars (2 September)
Concretism ~ The Thetford Beast (Castles in Space, 2 September)
Cub\cub ~ Radiant Crush (Subexotic, 2 September)
Forest Robots ~ Supermoon Moonlight Part II (Subexotic, 2 September)
Gaspar Claus ~ 2359 (InFiné, 2 September)
The Gibraltarians ~ Monitoring Station (Eureka Beat, 2 September)
James Murray ~ Careful Now (Home Normal, 2 September)
Om Unit ~ Acid Dub Studies II (2 September)
Rob Winstone ~ I dreamt we found a way (Warm Winters Ltd., 2 September)
Steve Roden (w/Jacob Danziger) ~ Dark Over Light Earth (Room40, 2 September)
OdNu ~ My Own Island (Audiobulb, 3 September)
Cyprian Busolini / Bertrand Gauguet ~ MIROIR (Akousis, 5 September)
Odd Person ~ Myths of the Crystal Plateau (Nonlocal Research, 7 September)
Alex Fournier/Triio ~ Triio – Six-ish Plateus (Elastic Recordings, 9 September)
Asmus Tietchens ~ Parallelen (LINE, 9 September)
Briana Marela ~ You Are a Wave (9 September)
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay ~ Withering Field (Cronica, 9 September)
Dario Crisman ~ The Nature of Thoughts (Bigo & Twigetti, 9 September)
Hekla ~ Xiuxiuejar (Phantom Limb, 9 September)
John McCowen ~ Models of Duration (Dinzu Artefacts/Astral Spirits, 9 September)
Manuel Mota & David Grubbs ~ na margem sul (Room40, 9 September)
OHMA ~ Between All Things (Colorfield, 9 September)
Rivers of Glass ~ By the Light of Burning Bridges (Somewherecold, 9 September)
RSS Disco ~ Mooncake (Mireia Records, 9 September)
Scaring the Mice for Revenge ~ S/T (Prohibited, 9 September)
Windisch Quartet ~ Meander (fun in the church, 9 September)
Tenka ~ Hydration (Metron, 14 September)
VISIO ~ Privacy Angels (Haunter Records, 9 September)
Aaron Turner & Jon Mueller ~ Now That You’ve Found It (American Dreams, 16 September)
Aura Gaze ~ Great Moon Essence (Somewherecold, 16 September)
Authentically Plastic ~ Raw Space (Hakuna Kulala, 16 September)
Daniel Patrick Cohen ~ We Deliver (Backlash Music, 16 September)
Dekatron ~ IV (Verlag System, 16 September)
Henning Schmidt ~ Piano Miniatures (flau, 16 September)
Joel Fausto & Illusion Orchestra ~ Deus é Cego! (Slowdriver, 16 September)
The London Sound Survey ~ From Dusk Til Dawn (Persistence of Sound, 16 September)
RA Washington/Jah Nada ~ In Search of Our Father’s Gardens (Astral Spirits, 16 September)
Salt Pig ~ The Chalk Circle (Utility Tapes, 16 September)
GHOST:WHALE ~ Echo One (Bitume, 17 September)
Maya Bennardo ~ four strings (kuyin, 17 September)
V/A ~ Rental Yields: Volume Two (Front & Follow, 17 September)
Liminal Drifter ~ Cortisol (Hidden Shoal, 19 September)
Julia Reidy / Morten Joh ~ Tape Shadow (Futura Resistenza, 20 September)
My Education ~ EMKA (Somewherecold, 20 September)
XINDL ~ 11 (STRD, 22 September)
Aaron Martin ~ The End of Medicine (Lost Tribe Sound, 23 September)
Aki Yli-Salomäki ~ Valunta (23 September)
Aleksandra Slyz ~ A Vibrant Touch (Warm Winters Ltd., 23 September)
Conflux Coldwell ~ The Phantomatic Coast (Subexotic, 23 September)
Dogs Versus Shadows ~ Oracle Mama Dot (Subexotic, 23 September)
Garcia / Navas / Reviriego / Trilla ~ Les Capelles (Tripticks Tapes, 23 September)
Gematria ~ Gematria II: The Spindle of Necessity (Nefarious Industries, 23 September)
Ian William Craig ~ Music for Magnesium_173 (Fatcat, 23 September)
Jeff Denson, Romain Pilon, Brian Blade ~ Finding Light (Ridgeway, 23 September)
Marisa Anderson ~ Still, Here (Thrill Jockey, 23 September)
Matthias Delplanque ~ Ô Seuil (Ici d’ailleurs, 23 September)
The Observatory & Koichi Shimizu ~ Demon State (Midnight Shift, 23 September)
Samuel Rohrer ~ Hungry Ghosts (Arjunamusic, 23 September)
Siavash Amini & Eugene Thacker ~ Songs for Sad Poets (Hallow Ground, 23 September)
Star Guided Vessel ~ Tethered/Severed (Somewherecold, 23 September)
Valentina Magaletti & Yves Chaudouet ~ Batterie Fragile (unjenesaisquoi, 23 September)
Adrian Corker ~ Since It Turned Out Something Else (SN Variations, 30 September)
Alien Alarms ~ 0 to 1 (30 September)
Andrew Cyrille, Elliot Sharp & Richard Teitelbaum ~ Evocation (Seams, 30 September)
Basher ~ Doubles (Sinking City, 30 September)
Ben Glas ~ Superpositional Melodies (Room40, 30 September)
Kamran Arashnia ~ Bounds Elimination (Flaming Pines, 30 September)
Saint Abdullah & Eomac ~ Patience of a Traitor (Other People, 30 September)
Thumbscrew ~ Multicolored Midnight (Cuneiform, 30 September)
Brian Harnetty ~ Words and Silences (Winesap, 7 October)
Heith ~ X, wheel (PAN, 7 October)
Peter Knight ~ Shadow Phase (Room40, 7 October)
Sofie Birch & Antonia Nowacka ~ Languoria (Mondoj, 7 October)
Alex Velasco ~ Imbued (10 October)
Deniz Cuylan ~ Rings of Juniper (Hush Hush Records, 14 October)
Giulio Aldinucci ~ Real (Karlrecords, 14 October)
Jeremy Rose ~ Disruption! The Voice of Drums (Earshift Music, 14 October)
Jonathan Higgins ~ Good thanks, you? (Flaming Pines, 14 October)
Masako Ohta, Mattias Lindermayr ~ MMMMH (Squama, 14 October)
Matthew J. Rolin ~ Passing (American Dreams, 14 October)
No Base Trio ~ NBT II (14 October)
Rival Consoles ~ Now Is (Erased Tapes, 14 October)
Tujiko Noriko & Paul Davies ~ Surge Original Soundtrack (SN Variations, 14 October)
Cindytalk ~ Subterminal (False Walls, 21 October)
Cate Kennan ~ The Arbitrary Dimension of Dreams (Post Present Medium, 21 October)
Rubbish Music ~ Upcycling (Flaming Pines, 21 October)
Takuya Kuroda ~ Midnight Crisp (First Word, 21 October)
Carbon in Prose ~ Cataclysmic System Binding Loss (24 October)
Vanessa Wagner ~ Mirrored (InFiné, 25 October)
Daniel Avery ~ Ultra Truth (Mute, 4 November)
FreqGen ~ Future 1990s (FiXT Neon, 11 November)
Terence Fixmer ~ Shifting Signals (Mute, 2 December)