Joseph's Fall Picks 2024

Miscellaneous

Dear Listeners, Joseph back for the final part of my Fall Picks weekend. The first installment showcased recent and upcoming hip-hop/beat/adjacent music, while this batch has less holding it together. There’s a fair amount of improvised music, some that leans closer to noise, and a bunch of records that could fall under modern composition, electronic, experimental, etc. It’s obviously quite idiosyncratic, basically just a bunch of records I’m enjoying or looking forward to.

Miscellaneous, Improvisation, and Noise

here’s another baker’s dozen of recent and upcoming records, a pretty miscellaneous grab bag but with an emphasis on improvisation (alphabetical)

Actress ~ Statik
This was released back in June, but I’ve been slow to make time for it. Can we just say it’s more of an autumn record for me? While Actress’ more recent output hasn’t quite lived up to such classics as HAZYVILLE, Splaszsh, and R.I.P., I’ve remained a fan of Darren J. Cunningham’s project. Statik finds Cunningham more relaxed and austere than usual, and I’m here for it.
(Released 7 June 2024)

Anne-F Jacques ~ l'ampoule et l'insecte
Anne-F Jacques’ work is simultaneously mundane, performative, sculptural, and profound. Seeing her perform live is revelatory, watching as she coaxes sounds from unexpected objects, subtly exploring their limits and permutations. Last time I saw Anne-F perform was around the time she was recording this tape, a set which began with the syncopated rhythm of flickering lights. The album’s title translates to the light bulb and the insect, which suggests their may be some connection. But I can easily get lost in these diverse vignettes as acousmatic sound, completely unmoored from any thought of their origin. Lovely gestural lowercase soundscapes.
(Released 30 August 2024)

Ben Vida ~ Vocal Trio
Ben Vida has been a member of minimalist rock quartet Town & Country, is a maker of contemporary art, and prolific musician with solo work for the likes of PAN, Los Discos Enfantasmes, and Shelter Press, as well as collaborations with fellow Bard alum Lea Bertucci, Greg Davis, Marina Rosenfeld, Lucio Capece, and Keith Fullerton Whitman. Vocal Trio is a conceptually engrossing systems-based vocal collaboration that should cement Vida’s reputation as a composer. Vida transposes ideas from electronic synthesis to the acoustic realm, utilizing the mouth as a natural filter, exploring the rich vocal harmonics of long held vocal drones. As with all Blume new releases, this record doesn’t yet have much of a presence on streaming, and hence can be easy to overlook if you missed the physical. (Cf. Sarah Hennies’ Embedded Environments from 2018.) Sure, it will hit Bandcamp eventually, but why wait?
(Released 27 September 2024)

crys cole ~ Making Conversation
I’ve been a fan of this Canadian’s work solo and with collaborators, especially Hotel Record with Oren Ambarchi, and Sylva Sylvarum with James Rushford. cole was also involved with Winnipeg’s send + receive festival for over a decade, contributed photographs and projections to classic Canadian experimental records, and continues to be active performer and sound artist. Her third solo album for Black Truffle, Making Conversation collects three recent commissioned pieces. The side-long title piece is a stereo version of an 8-channel sound installation mounted in Spain, meant to evoke the non-human conversations of the Balinese nocturnal soundscape. “Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr… (pt. 1)” departs from Beth Anderson’s Valid for Life, cole’s cole’s contribution to an Issue Project Room commission of Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood’s Women´s Work, a 1975 collections of scores by women composers. Rather than a trio of acoustic instruments, cole realises Anderson’s score using her own idiosyncratic approach to amplified small sounds. “Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr… (pt. 2)” flips the script, as cole translates her soundworld for traditional instruments, working solely with MIDI percussion.
(Released September 20, 2024)

Derek Baron and Luke Martin ~ Distinct and Concealed
Distinct and Concealed is comprised of two side-long process-oriented explorations of dialogue between two performers. On the a-side, Derek Baron ambles playfully on the piano, while Luke Martin subtly shifts the background with restrained use of no-input mixer and cassettes. The tape otherwise features just keyboard and no-input mixer, contrasting public performance with studio research. Both sides are reduced without being minimal, with enough grit and expression to seem overly formalistic, an engrossing exercise in restraint and gesture.
(Released 28 June 2024)

Félicia Atkinson ~ Space As An Instrument
We at A Closer Listen have been big admirers of Félicia Atkinson since she was releasing music under the moniker Je Suis Le petit Chevalier, a project we documented over at The Site Before as well as in our early years. I also published a long conversation with her back in 2019, and we’ve been longtime supporters of her work with Shelter Press. While we’ve grown accustomed to thinking about the spatiality of sound, the space in the title implores us to turn our gaze to the night sky.
(Releases October 25, 2024)

Karoline Leblanc / Paulo J Ferreira Lopes ~ EDGED ONCE FRACTURED
I first came to know this duo years ago through Montreal’s small but active scene of improvised musicians. They left Montreal for Portugal way before the pandemic-era influx of “digital nomads,” and while I’ve written about their work before, I gradually lost track of them. So I was happy to stumble upon this record of improvised duets, prepared piano, harpsichord, etc, and percussion, including gongs, bells, cymbals, and springs. Great sounds and a dynamic relationship between the two, check it out.

M.B. ~ S.F.A.G. 31.11.1981.
This is the first authorized re-issue of the cult noise tape from 1982. Maurizio Bianchi aka M.B. is one of the pioneering Italian artists working in Industrial and Noise since the 1970s, and Symphony for a Genocide is the defining work of his early period. S.F.A.G. 31.11.1981. departs from Symphony for a Genocide, significantly reworking and dubbing that source material, twisting it into his defining statement.
(Released 12 September 2024)

Moten / López / Cleaver ~ the blacksmiths, the flowers
Derek Baron’s Reading Group released the 2022 debut from this heavy-hitting trio, who are back with a stunning follow-up, the blacksmiths, the flowers, documenting two live performances in Brooklyn during summer 2023. A poet, a bassist, and a drummer improvising together, their rapport has grown after more years playing together.
(Released 24 August 2024)

The Necks ~ Bleed
What is there to say after all this time? If there’s a new Necks album, I’ll listen to it. I assume it’s the same for most of you, but if somehow you’ve managed to missout on this legendary Australian trio with four decades of work behind them, their most recent album is always a good place to start. Bleed finds the trio at their most patient and restrained. Sometimes stillness is the move.
(Releases 18 October 2024)

Nicola Ratti ~ Automatic Popular Music
Despite his now decades long catalogue of evolving musical styles, Nicola Ratti’s work always has retains his signature animating tension between formalism and expressionism. Sometimes more melodramatic, often austere, Ratti’s music is always structured and emotive. Five years since his last solo LP, Ratti returns with Automatic Popular Music, the inaugural release for LL edizioni. Tape loops of digital and acoustic piano are juxtaposed with rhythmic and melodic patterns generated by modular synthesizers. Repetition strains and breaks, the results much richer than the simplicity of their origins suggests.
(Released 27 September 2024)

Rubbish Music ~ Fatbergs
Rubbish Music are the duo of Kate Carr and Ian Chambers, who make music from discarded objects, just as it says on the tin. Their debut Upcycling was one of my favorite releases of 2022, three long explorations of turning garbage into treasure. For Fatbergs, the duo ruminate on the existence of sewer-clogging fatbergs, gigantic conglomerations of refuse that serve as the troll of this anti-fairytale. Five tracks showcase the duo in more digestible bites, transforming in often unpredictable ways.
(Releases 18 October 2024)

YATTA ~ Palm Wine
A departure from the poetic noise of WAHALA (2019) and Dial-Up (2020, with Moor Mother), Palm Wine finds the Sierra Leonean-American finding their roots through an exploration of the the West African genre of palm wine. Though not a literal interpretation of the genre, YATTA takes inspiration from the genre’s traditions of storytelling, lilting vocals, and playfulness. With help from pop producers including felicita (PC Music), So Drove (Cupcakke), Myles Avery (Tate McCrae), Carlos Hernandez (Princess Nokia), and Maxime Morin (Beyoncé), Palm Wine is surprisingly intoxicating.
(Releases 25 October 2024)