dusted

Melchior checked out from the world of commercial record promotion a while ago, so explication is minimal:  

Says the songwriter, “This is (yet another) LP that never saw the light of day release wise. It was recorded a few years back in Austin and San Francisco and was an attempt to get back to the old r'n'r roots. If you like songs about depression, pretending you're more popular than you are, and resenting young people this is the album for you!”

Danny and the Jupps, as you might notice in the opening “Jupp’s Theme,” is a loose cousin to Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets.” Still, while Sir Elton’s song is wildly celebratory (“She's got electric boots, a mohair suit/You know I read it in a magazine, ohh-oh”), Melchior’s is customarily tetchy, sardonic and aggressive in a bent way. It rains down hard guitar notes and blurs them with echo, vibrates with skating rink organ trills and rattles with drums. The storm barely parting enough to hear Melchior moan and bleat the title phrase. Usually, you only get one song with the band name in it, but Melchior likes this one enough to run it twice, at the beginning of Side A and the beginning of Side B.

Melchior holds much of modern life and culture in contempt, but his venom comes in entertaining packaging. He takes whatever inanity he sees with complete seriousness, and in doing so, highlights how ridiculous it is. “Internet Grief,” coming late in the album, is the best of these outraged takes, skewering the way that music internet reacts to the death of its heroes. “Everybody loves a brilliant addict, who’s had the decency to die/nobody likes a pissed off has been who insists on being alive,” he croons, before launching into a series of cliched economia (“This one really hurts,” “Rest in power, etc. etc. etc.”) .  

Clever as they are, these songs wouldn’t work without solid music, and Melchior taps into the giddy glee of 1960s garage rock. Organs wheeze, guitars clang, basses bump their body-moving refrains. “Ode to Apathy” wraps a happy Nuggets-into-Medway-Sound music around its disconsolately funny break up story (the narrator gets a dear john letter but can’t read all the big words and leaves it on the train). “Perception Management” pogoes punk-wise as it punctures the art and science of image management.  “Here Come the Creatives” spins out into psychedelic guitar overload as it considers the world’s indifference to art. You can’t have a better time thinking about how rotten things have gotten than by listening to Dan Melchior.

If you write about music for long enough, you end up with a short list of artists who should be better known than they are. Melchior is right near the top of mine, and this new Jupps record strengthens the case.

From the first track, the reissue sounds strikingly better: the piano, specifically, is more brightly mixed across a number of tracks, clarifying further the 1970s psychedelic influence with crisp flourishes and chords. Ishihara’s voice is often clearer as well; he never overpowers the instrumentals, even if he occasionally slips just underneath (see the second track, “Shadow of the Sun”). 

But the main draw here is the new second disk of three previously unreleased recordings. Two of these, the eerie “Midsummer Stroll” and “Shadow of the Sun,” offer a unique and equally compelling take on the original tracks. Both are more biting and heavier, in contrast to the mellow, if unsettling, tone of the previous disk. A strength of White Heaven is their ability to conjure impressively different atmospheres using a limited instrumental palette, which is exemplified in these two tracks. 

The other new track, a truncated version of the band’s angsty cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “The Look of Love,” doesn’t maintain the quality of the other two. An extended recording of this song is one of a few standout tracks on the original Next to Nothing, and, while it sags toward the back end of its nine minute runtime, its smoggy atmosphere is a singularity even within a singular album; it opens with a low drone that slowly builds to a howl, adorned with persistent drums and piano flourishes free-jazz-adjacent, before the vocals are even heard. This drone is gone on the new version, along with the free jazz piano and a few excellent solos. It’s not an uninteresting take, but less fresh (Ishihara sticks pretty close to the original) and enough is lost in truncation that the track mostly serves as a reminder that one could be listening to the longer, better version. Fortunately, “The Look of Love” is the second of the three new tracks, so the extra disk starts and ends strong, a productive offering that furthers the album’s atmosphere while expanding upon the band’s sound. 

Next to Nothing was originally released at a pivotal point in White Heaven’s development; the group’s preceding album, Strange Bedfellow, marked a major shift in their sound, and Next to Nothing is largely a continuation of new ideas. Their songwriting got more complex, song structures far more kaleidoscopic and Ishihara’s vocals darker and more mature. This reissue doesn’t lose sight of what the original stood for in the context of the band’s discography. The remaster brings out what was then a new level of intricacy for the band, and the second disk, from a bird’s-eye view, adds a wider and richer perspective to the project.

Orbit Changers: music, films, & books that influenced the course of my life and artistic output

1967 — The Beatles

Easily my first musical love. I was part of an a cappella quartet singing Beatles songs when I was at Mother of Sorrows boarding school ~1967. The first music to get into my soul and for good reason. Now that I know some music theory, write songs, play piano, and am composing more traditional music since 2018 I have a better understanding of the magic of these four. This book is an incredible resource for digging into why, showing simple isn’t always so. It was interesting to learn that some of the parts that always stuck with me are a little dissonant in the midst of the perfect chord or harmony, just a moment of aberration can bring home the most beautiful moment.

1970 – 2001 — A Space Odyssey

The earliest transformative experience for me was screening 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was 10. That sparked the inspiration to explore altered states of consciousness through vague storytelling using sound and visual art. This showed me the possibilities of sound as music, that every audible occurrence in a composition could lead to interesting places. Kubrick was a master at using space, silence, and music to hint at things larger than humanity, showing a way to contemplate the void in the universe and in our existence. The film set me up to love not only science fiction but to be in awe of mystery and the unexplained, especially in conjunction with dark compelling musical selections that spoke to me. It’s easy to see the trajectory from this to my need to explore challenging sound and concepts in Illusion of Safety.

I’d also like to point out the track “Adagio” from Aram Khachaturian’s Gayane Ballet Suite remains one of the most beautiful compositions I’ve ever heard. Although it’s a classical piece it dovetails into my appreciation and love of what I consider real Ambient music. This kind of beauty is what I’m after in my project Twilight Furniture without other baggage.

1971 — Black Sabbath — Paranoid

War Pigs (This version shows the lyrics, very timely):

This album hit hard. I was primed to love rock music, and the down tuned heaviness spoke to me. They were slick well-crafted songs with hints of jazz and progressive tendencies and that SOUND was infectious. I loved their first 3 albums and think this was my gateway to loving heavy rock music, planting the seed to digging Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, through to Sex Pistols, Bauhaus, Jane’s Addiction & one of the best, Slayer’s Reign in Blood.

1980 — The Shock of the New

A 1980 eight-part series on the rise and fall of the modern art movement presented by critic Robert Hughes. I already knew and loved machine art, dada, and other ground-breaking revolutionary movements but this book/TV series helped with a deeper understanding of modern art’s swings, providing context, explanation, and inspiration for my exploration of audio/visual self-expression.

Early 1980’s coincidentally was an amazing time for music; the post-punk post-industrial offerings really worked for me.

1981 — Throbbing Gristle

Funeral in Berlin (a great document of their live sound, you can almost feel the spirits soaring)

My friend Jay Closser exposed me to the “Brave New Wave” while visiting him in L.A in 1980. Tubeway Army, Tuxedomoon, Chrome, Residents, Cabaret Voltaire, L.A.F.M.S. et al. blew me away hitting the perfect nerve. But the clear winner was Throbbing Gristle. 2nd Annual Report was my introduction to this very heavy bleak soundtrack to the modern post-Industrial age. Perhaps the next leap down from the ominous 20th Century classical of 2001 direct to pure fright with no subtlety, and of course with synthesizers! There’s a place for nuance and intimation but sometimes one just needs or wants the sledgehammer. Powerful stuff for my inner demons.

1982 — Thymme Jones/CHEER-ACCIDENT

One of my best friends since meeting in 1982 during my final year studying psychology at NIU. In living true to one’s nature (through honesty, creative freedom, & provocation) and musical inspiration, Thymme has been a beacon that has significantly altered my orbit. Exposing me to progressive & other music I would likely not have checked out. Along with the other members of his band Dot Dot Dot, we became the first iteration of IOS in 1983. They later morphed into his ongoing group CHEER-ACCIDENT. His work with IOS, solo (the brilliant minimalist piano works CD While, the very exposed singer-songwriter mode of Career Move), his work with other artists (the drums and the sound of Brice-Glace is Thymme’s doing) and their creative take on prog-rock/improv/simple songs that CHEER produce continue to inspire me. They are going on tour in July and out just in time You Smile – The Song Is Over CD/DVD on Cuneiform will be their 27th full-length release. Don’t miss them.

1983 — Philip Glass Ensemble/Koyaanisqatsi

My introduction to the work of Philip Glass was Music in12 Parts while I was at NIU and I was fortunate to see them perform there during the Glassworks tour. I was immediately taken by the immersive hypnotic nature of these cyclical works which struck me as very beautiful. Sometime in the late 80’s I saw the Ensemble performing live in front of a screening of the film Koyaanisqatsi. I was stunned by the powerful images as well as perfect use of music from director Godfrey Reggio. Glass had to be persuaded to provide the soundtrack. He was adamant in not wanting to do film soundtracks until he saw the prototype and agreed. The film itself is a masterpiece for me as social commentary on nature, humanity, and technology, with the perfect soundtrack.

1984 — AMM

Here is the full recording of the concert we saw. Combine + Laminates + Treatise Live At Arts Club Chicago 5/25/84

Not sure how I became aware of them, but fortunately by the time they performed in Chicago I was hip enough to know I shouldn’t miss it. When they played at the arts club on 5/25/84 It was the trio of Keith Rowe, John Tilbury, and Eddie Prevost. It was a master class on performing intuitive minimalist improvisation (but they were quite capable of noise & chaos). They continue to be a major influence on my approach to improvisation providing a lighter more spatial balance to the chaos, electronic noise, and density of Industrial and noisier forms that I gravitate towards. It was a touchstone for me to witness those extended techniques that are now embedded in the workflow of countless improvisers while communicating and interacting in such nuanced & seemingly inevitable ways (thanks to decades of collaboration). Especially Keith and his guitar/radio/magnetic pickup/object/noise approach that Jim O’Rourke soon adopted as his main methodology. I should add that he did make that modus operandi his own and used it while working with IOS from 1988-1992.

1988 — Hafler Trio

The early work of Andrew McKenzie as H3o came across as something completely new. While he did borrow heavily from an already decades long tradition, his methodology resulted in unique work. His early releases up to 1991’s Kill the King are very interesting & opened up using reprocessed sound, field recordings, tape loops, and voice as raw materials for constructing a vague narrative. Part Industrial, part ambient with a heavy nod to musique concrète cut-up methods, it is sound design with an undercurrent of mysterious trajectory like no other.

1990’s — Burt Bacharach

Thanks to my mother Patricia Burke I inherited a creative nature and a deep love for the music of Burt Bacharach. I didn’t love it back in the day when she was playing it, and during my teenage years through my 30’s I would not have given it a chance. At some point it sank in, creative pop with beautiful melodies, rich instrumentation, emotional depth, and elaborate arrangement, what’s not to love. The songs can be deceptively very complex. I tried singing “Promises, Promises” at karaoke once, and I couldn’t do it, even though I knew the song. I later discovered that it changes time signature every measure. Burt is a personal musical hero, and I hope his influence can be heard in my own songs and compositions.

Notable mentions

It was hard to skip these influences on my trajectory: Switched on Bach & Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon= Love of synthesizers!

Kosmiche music of mid 70’s such as Cluster/Klause Schultz/Gong, because of course more (but importantly DARK) synthesizers.

So yes, there are songs about serious subjects, but that doesn’t make them any less infectious and bubbly. Willmette and his main partner in crime Tilly Harris mug and cavort and blurt out the oddest ideas about sex. “I’ve never seen your penis/I’ve never seen your dick/I’ve never seen your penis, so how can we be friends?” he burbles in “How Can We Be Friends?“ Jaunty “Make It Count” is less aggressive and indeed, charming in its naivete, as both Willmett and Harris admit their unfamiliarity and discomfort with the most basic sexual moves. “Tell me where to look, tell me where to focus on, tell me what I’m doing wrong,” they sing in tight harmonies, happily unsure of themselves and game to try.

The music ranges from warbly indie pop (“All My Clothes Fell Off”) to all-out White Stripes-ish guitar frenzy (“Semi-Automatic”), all very capably delivered. The lyrics cheekily own up to shortcomings—check out “It’s Our Manager David,” where Harris and Willmett admit to lack of career drive (“We’ve been doing nothing…at all…but we still get paid or a living”)—while producing a very assured, though oddball, record. Every Single Muscle is a tight, well-put-together album with a off-planet slacker vibe and a fit of the giggles. Doesn’t that sound like something you want to hear?

Knockout Artist — Ramshackle Deluxe (Knockout Artist)

Talk about 80s music, and you’re liable to get gushy pledges of allegiance to gated drums and gravity-defying hair. But there was a counter-movement of rock musicians who rejected artificiality by tapping into country sounds and themes. Whether by design or happy accident, Knockout Artist, a quintet from Chapel Hill NC, nails that vibe. While Phil Venable drawls alternately defiant and shame-faced sentiments, a triple front of guitars and steel snarl and spiral over crisp drum cadences that’ll dispatch rock critics of a certain age to their basements to pull out their Long Ryders, Eleventh Dream Day, and Band of Blacky Ranchette records. If those names mean nothing to you, well, maybe Knockout Artist will.

Bill Meyer

LDL — The Eerie Glow Of Jellyfish (Relative Pitch)

LDL = soprano saxophonist Urs Leimgruber + analogue synth player Thomas Lehn + amplified spinet player Jacques Demierre. This Swiss/German combo has roots in an earlier trio that, with Demierre on piano and the late, august bassist Barre Phillips occupying the space now held by Lehn, had a fine two-decade run. Changes in gear and personnel contribute to the simultaneously bruising and delicate dust-ups that play out across this concert recording. Amplified, the spinet (an old parlour harpsichord) emits a whirlwind of brittle textures that shatter and coalesce with the synth’s alien squelch. Long, lacerating sax thrusts puncture and stir the action, resulting in a group sound that is remarkably unfamiliar given how long these guys have been around.

Bill Meyer

Donny McCaslin / Ingrid Jensen / Bruce Barth / David Ambrosio / Victor Lewis — Civil Disobedience (Blue Frog Records)

Turbulent times can bring out the best in artists, encouraging them to push deeper into themselves to make art that reflects the moment. Such was the case in late 60s jazz, an era that David Ambrosio’s new quintet looks to on their new release Civil Disobedience. Think about it like this: it features a blue-chip lineup (McCaslin, Jensen, Barth, and Lewis) playing Blue Note material. But what could have been just another standards album has slightly adventurous programming: Bobby Hutcherson’s “For Duke P,” Harold Land’s “Poor People’s March,” and Joe Chambers’s “Ankara”. Both McCaslin and Jensen play well here: on “For Duke P,” Jensen’s solo has her darting around the melody and stretching out long lines with ease. Meanwhile McCaslin gets a rich, sweet tone out of his horn on “Irina” and plays some nice, almost circular figures where he goes up and down his horn’s register. And with a rhythm section that gives them plenty of space to work — Lewis’s deft touch on drums never overpowers the players and Barth’s piano keeps them from flying too far into space — it’s an engaging, occasionally exciting listen.

Roz Milner

Pefkin — Unfurling (Morc)

Gayle Brogan has been making albums as Pefkin for over 20 years now, and Unfurling displays an unhurried, patient calm that can come across as lovely or foreboding, sometimes very close together. The two extended tracks anchoring this 40-minute collection, the opening slow-building radiance of “Green Bound in Ice and Snow” and the penultimate, starkly crawling “My Breath the Sea,” show her work in its strongest form, but the more compact other four tracks expand on those strengths in varied ways (from the mournful strings of the Penda’s Fen-quoting “The Dissonance” to the relatively pastoral “Sun Flecks”). Just like her music, Brogan’s sung lines are also careful, enchantingly placed, giving Unfurling a subtly and pleasingly otherworldly feel.

Ian Mathers

Raw Distractions — S/T (La Vida Es un Mus)

Tokyo-based Raw Distractions play a variety of punk rawk that walks (or stumbles) a fine line between pastiche and appealing artlessness. Is the band’s combination of street-punk scruffiness, Dead Boys’ energy and Johnny Thunders-style guitar heroics a calculated simulation of 1978’s overripeness, or are Raw Distractions so out of step with the contemporary that they’re really playing the music that they have to play? The riffs are sweet and then slashing, compellingly melodic and tuff — like Mick Jones working out on an early Sun Records tune. Songs like “Raw Dis” and “Midnight” have a hip-shot snottiness that’s winningly stubborn in its adulation what was so exciting about late-70s punk. But do we really need music this out of time? Aren’t we all just about out of time, as the earthball cooks and platform capitalism gleefully empties everything of real value? Maybe a raw distraction — and guitars this gloriously beat to shit — is precisely made to order for 2026. Amazon can next-day the vinyl to you.

Jonathan Shaw

Seefeel — Sol.Hz (Warp)

Though they share a label with electronic legends Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada, Seefeel have flown relatively under the radar since they first started releasing music in the 1990s. Their latest album, Sol.Hz, conjures a gaseous, shadowy soundworld that draws influence from the more minimal, industrial side of their labelmates, especially early Aphex and the more accessible side of Autechre. However, the most resonant comparison is probably Slowdive’s Pygmalion, in the way the looped, disembodied elements — synths, beats, Sarah Peacock’s ghostly voice — seem to hover apart from each other rather than locking into a rhythmic grid. “Everydays” rolls past without the individual elements coalescing; “Ever No Way” starts off-kilter, but as more elements are introduced, locks satisfying into place, like Boards of Canada’s “Jacquard Causeway.” It’s a disorientating and deeply atmospheric listen that paints a vivid picture across its runtime without overstaying its welcome.

Tim Clarke

Charles Joseph Smith — Collected Works and War of the Martian Ghosts (Sooper)

The 88 Keys That Opened Doors: An Inspiring Memoir of an African-American Man Who Achieved the Impossible Even As He Faced The Challenges of Being on the Spectrum (self-published)

Dr. Charles Joseph Smith is a living legend of the Chicago underground scene who has self-released over sixty albums on tape and cd-r. In the early 2000s I was introduced to a cassette of Smith waxing poetic on the word “Linden” through mutual friends in the Midwest noise rock scene, and it was immediately apparent that I was experiencing the work of a visionary artist. Despite being an internationally-renowned classical pianist, Smith is often found banging his head at basement noise shows and dancing at under-the-radar house music parties. This long-overdue four-sided adventure from Sooper Records compiles selections from the artist’s vast catalog created over the past thirty years, including both midi and piano realizations of Smith’s sci-fi opera War of the Martian Ghosts. It’s highly recommended that readers also pick up Smith’s autobiography, The 88 Keys That Opened Doors, to more fully understand the remarkable life of this composer. After having spent several years mute as a child, Smith astonished his family by playing perfect classical licks on the piano without previously having played a single note. While navigating the tremendous challenges presented by autism, Smith not only earned a doctorate in musical arts and traveled the world performing, but he also crafted a unique personal world through the power of music and became a beloved member of the underground community. Hopefully this beautiful collection of music becomes just one part of a multi-volume series of releases in the future.

Justin Rhody

Various Artists — Red Xerox: Chicago Youth Beat 2020-2025 (Desert Island)

Chicago’s Hallogallo scene flourished in the early 2020s, an interconnected community that played each other’s shows and sat in on each other’s bands and sometimes shared familial and romantic ties. Horsegirl, the buzzy, drone-y, all-female trio, made the first mark outside the neighborhood, but post-punk noisemakers in Lifeguard weren’t far behind (or too much ahead of poppier outfits like Sharp Pins and Friko). Yet the scene was more diverse that outsiders, perhaps, have given it credit for. This compilation yields the expected amount of fuzz and chime and agit-punk, but also a helping of confessional singer-songwriter music (Amaya Penya’s “Song for Avi,” and Free Range’s “Lost and Found”), dub (Current Union TM’s “Dukkha Coca”) and Tobin Sprout-ish lo-fi (Dwaal Troupe’ “En Utero”). The comp covers a lot of ground, but it’s carefully sequenced, It flows like a mixtape despite the diversity of ideas. And that’s maybe what makes it so special: Red Xerox tracks a scene that was exacting but inclusive, a little nerdy but full of enthusiasm. DIY, it seems, is in good hands for at least one more generation.

Jennifer Kelly

Geiger Von Müller — Neocubist Blues (Self-Release)

Guitar blues can be a traditionalist’s straight jacket, but it doesn’t have to be. In Neocubist Blues, London-based experimental guitarist Geiger Von Müller offers 14 mostly brief interludes that filter the drone and haunt and sting of blues guitar through a modernist lens. Here the slippery tones of bottleneck slide careen slightly off center, the steady thump of the Delta turns abstract and mathematical. “Toys in the Attic (Parts 10-12)” slashes and careens through heavy rhythmic territory, its percussive attack violent, almost punk. The slide gets viewed from three temporal angles: “Before the Slide,” “The Slide” and “After the Slide.” Each demonstrating considerable knowledge and skill in the blues form without pledging fidelity. Lots of guitarists follow Fahey, but few show affinity for BOTH his blues and his sonic experiments. Geiger Von Müller does, and that makes his Neocubist Blues worth exploring.

Anenon — Dream Temperature (Tonal Union)

Brian Allen Simon’s Anenon explores the boundaries of consciousness in a sax-and-electronics ambient set of compositions. He means to evoke the borderlands between sleep and waking. And indeed, there’s a muzzy indefinition to the electronic sounds that haunt the interstices of this fourth full-length, which only serve to emphasize the clarity of organic instruments: saxophone, piano and others. “When the Light Appears, Boy” pulses with echoing, interstellar synth tones — a similar sound, believe it or not, to the opening of “Baba Yaga” — but an ancient sounding melodica winds in and around this gleaming edifice. Space and magic, starlight and gloomy drone, it’s all there in the Dreamworld.

Jennifer Kelly

Rhys Chatham & Nico Guerrero — Athanor (Erototox Decodings)

Post-minimalist pioneer and guitar army composer, Rhys Chatham, works in collaboration with French musician Nico Guerrero to construct these two side-long compositions for guitars tuned in Pythagorean intonation, alto and bass flutes, and effects. Shifting overtones, harmonic clusters, and tottering frequencies create hypnotic and ethereal macrocosmos of sound that mirror the alchemist’s self-feeding furnace referenced in the album title. Operating parallel yet distinctly unattached to Chatham’s rock-influenced works for multiple guitars (which sometimes involve hundreds of guitars), these drone-based pieces focus on textural intricacies through extended playing techniques to sculpt a euphonious air of alien origin. An elegant work of subtlety and riveting liminal vibrations from a psyche that worked with La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, helped establish the No Wave sound, and has never ceased to push itself further into new terrain.

Justin Rhody

Cronies — Demo (Ragdoll)

The internets are not forthcoming with much info about Cronies, the band that has gifted us with this glittering demo recording, tucked into a recognizable 1990s musical pocket: punk-adjacent power pop of unusual quality, previously generated by outfits like the Clean and Tuscadero. Listen closely and you’ll also catch a vibe or two from the underappreciated Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Those are fairly heavy names to be invoking alongside this slim 11-minute tape, but its four songs open the way to a variety of power-pop heaven, sweet and spiked and on repeat so long you fear you’ll squeeze all the joy out of the music too quickly. “Rose” and “MSG Cocktail” are the tape’s unassuming one-two punch, the off-the-cuff feel of which may have you flashing on early Replacements. But these Cronies sound a little less drunk and aggro, a little more sad and twee (but just a little). Apparently, the band has broken up four times, and this may be all we get. It’s not close to enough.

Jonathan Shaw

Nathaniel Dorsky & Mark Birnbaum — The Green and the Grey (Fenrick Books)

Experimental film heads will surely need no introduction to Dorsky, who (alongside his partner and fellow filmmaker Jerome Hiller) has exercised a polyvalent montage method of editing to create some of the most affecting non-narrative films of the last sixty years. However, those same heads will probably be surprised to see Dorsky’s name on a musical release, given that almost all of the filmmaker’s work has been silent. Recorded in one take in late 1978, this cassette plays out like the stylings of a locomotive calmly propelling forward in a meditative furor through an improvised, long-form composition for toy organ and bucket-bongo percussion. Sounding slightly reminiscent of Indian classical music, the notes of the chord organ reach upward in sustain while stretching across a vast expanse colored by the glorious low-fidelity of the recording method. With this cassette edition having sold out almost instantly, rumor has it that there will soon be a re-issue made available on compact disc.

Justin Rhody

Nick Fraser — Areas (Elastic Recording)

One problem with having heavy hitters is that you might not be able to get them together very often. But the advantage of a widely spaced performance schedule is that things stay fresh. Areas is the third album by Nick Fraser’s trio with pianist Kris Davis and soprano/tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby since 2015. Each has its own character, and two elements defining Areas are the contributions of electronic musician John Kameel Farah and Fraser’s own writing. Farah used some drum-sax duets as raw material for short pieces that begin, bisect, and end the record, and that give it a sonic fluidity. Fraser’s writing, on the other hand, uses Davis’s sonic expansiveness and organizational instincts to set up pieces in which one player pulls things together while the others seem to be pushing against that structural imperative. The result is music that feels both thoughtful and unstable.

Bill Meyer

Godless — Adversus Parousia (Nuclear Winter)

Death metal being what death metal is, it should surprise no one that there are or have been at least seven bands calling themselves Godless, from locations as various as Romania, Thessaloniki, Bavaria, Quebec and Hyderabad (and if you include black metal, you get outfits from Puerto Rico and Java, as well). Adversus Parousia has been released by the most venerable act claiming the name, the Godless dudes from Talca, Chile. They have been making a god-awful noise since 1997, and this record is characteristic of their unhinged noise. On Adversus Parousia there’s a blackened tinge to the sonic nihilism, and the pace frequently flirts with grind’s intensities, but the sound is death metal at its core: chunky, suppurating and generally vomitous — like a blowfly expelling formic acid in order to suck up the resulting liquefied yuck. Mmm, more please.

Jonathan Shaw

Huggy Bear — Basic Strategies for Going Out: Peel Sessions (JABS)

By the time I was old enough to become aware of Huggy Bear through their split LP with Bikini Kill, they had already met their self-prescribed expiration date of three years and broken up. But this short-lived British punk band and their fetching blend of “boy-girl revolutionary” enlightened agitation left a wide field of inspiration in their dust. And these unreleased Peel Sessions, recorded over thirty years ago for the BBC, find the band in top form — featuring classics like “Hopscorch,” an early version of “Her Jazz,” and two previously unreleased songs. It’s a shame that the Bikini Kill split LP was later re-issued without the Huggy Bear tracks, and that none of their other albums have been re-pressed (yet). They’ve always struck me as forward-thinking artists though, so perhaps it’s all by design? In any case, this is the only Huggy Bear release currently available commercially— so ya oughta bring it into your life while you can.

Justin Rhody

Illusion of Safety — The Schmetterling Variations (Klanggallerie)

Daniel Burke, the sole constant member of Illusion Of Safety, is a restless sort, and that is reflected across a discography that spans over forty years and encompasses industrial, ambient and less definable stuff. The glue binding the two very different performances on this CD is temporal and geographical; they were recorded on two contiguous nights in Vienna, Austria. The first track is IOS in solo electronic mode, recorded on the occasion of Burke’s first gig in that town in many years. Over the course of half an hour it proceeds from pure, high pitches to a collage of environments and electrical emissions. It feels associative and invites the listener to drift with it, alert and uncertain, as the surroundings change. The second track presents Burke on piano, one of his favorite instruments in recent years, improvising with guitarist Eric Arn, saxophonist Michael Masen and drummer Michi Prehofer. It follows an arc that will be familiar to improv show-goers from exploratory gestures to scrabbling climax, back down and then back up again. The closer it gets to rip-snorting free jazz, the less characterful it becomes, but in the quieter passages there’s some intriguing negotiation going on.

Bill Meyer

Steve Jansen — Primitive Techno 1 + Primitive Techno 2 (That’s Cool)

In 1985 Christian Marclay released Record Without a Cover, a concept LP of sorts sold without packaging in order to designate damages accrued during the object’s life as intentional (and unique) elements of the record’s sound. Four decades later Steve Jansen’s Primitive Techno takes the next step and composes works solely from damaged 45s using a broken turntable. Prepared cassette loops and multiple delay pedals push these difficult rhythms over the cliff, where they pile up in the bloody canyon of dance music that you can’t dance to. With a rich history ranging from the relatively unknown DJ Sonyplaystation to the highly celebrated Maria Chavez, Jansen’s contributions are another notch in the belt of the widely despised field of avant-turntablism. While the rest of the world’s so-called musicians desperately post online about which streaming service subscription is most ethical, we’re passing through the peak era of possibility to be digging late-90s breakbeat records out of the trash. To the ears of a true believer, Primitive Techno is a reminder that there’s still something to believe in.

If you’re expecting another slathering of extended, guitar-centric out-disco jams from this pair of musical chameleons, think again. Most of these tracks balance dub spaciousness against gnarly electronics. They’re entrancing, multi-hued glitter bombs that are as outré and exciting as 1990s Autechre and Squarepusher and equally built for headphone consumption. Angular, skittery rhythms and squirmy squelches are front and center here. “Jackpot Pothole Eleven” tumbles like a shiny wind-up toy in traffic, gleeful and innocent with its squeaks and clatter. Taking a darker turn, “Tomber” juxtaposes a dank bass melody against coil spring clusters and machine movements. Bursts of simulated hand percussion pop up like whack-a-moles, delightful against the shadowy backdrop. At between one and three minutes long, it’s clear that Perri and Dunsmuir saw untapped potential in these song stems. When they sit side by side on G70 2, there’s a special reverie that these snippets bring about; they’re impactful as they are and have many nooks and crannies to enjoy exploring.

G70 2 does loop back to the duo’s debut release at times. Dunsmuir and Perri lend their six-string disco vibes to Arthur Russell’s “Lucky Cloud,” extending it into an 8-minute-long maelstrom. They even enlisted Russell collaborator Peter Zummo to lay down some trombone gusto. This piece leads off the album and is a fitting homage to one of Glissandro 70’s deepest muses. A ghostly reading of Moondog’s “You the Vandal” builds slowly as Perri and Dunsmuir add layers of instrumentation and voice, before a dub-wise drop out leaves only percussion and organ to close out the piece. Dan Bodan’s remix of “Bolan Muppets” from the debut swaps out the original’s wistful string hypnotism for a slippery beat-driven enchantment that closes out the proceedings on a very high note. Even after twenty years, Perri and Dunsmuir still command the dancefloor and the headphones of the avant-garde.

The two of them alternate vocals, with Lucero taking the lead in incendiary “Fade Away,” where one guitar wails and the other slashes. “I’ll fade away, you’ll fade away,” he intones in a desolate, but amped up chorus, and then, helpfully, he spells it for us. A repeated howl of “F-A-D-E away,” hammers home the point (that everything dies).

“Something’s Different,” one of the Natividad-sung tracks, brings a chiming guitar forward, bolstered by the roil of bass. Natividad’s deadpan chant comes hemmed in by furious, trebly, hyper clear guitar chords and a freight-train rush of drum and bass.

It’s possible that whoever sings lead wrote the song, but if so, there’s not a lot of daylight between Natividad and Lucero. All six tracks fuse confrontational post-punk with hardcore aggression, along the lines of Institute and Total Control. All six rumble headlong through bayonet thickets of guitar sound, taking shrapnel as they go. All six sport rousing, shout-along refrains that encourage fists in the air and full-body slamming. It might get repetitive over 10 or 15 tracks, but it’s bracing here in the EP format.

Short, but by no means sweet, it’s apocalyptic punk to shock us out of our downward spiral. The negative outlook is on the rise, Marbled Eye informs us, but the adrenaline rush they incite pushes for resilience.

 “Sheer Radical” (where that line originates) echoes one of the other great bands currently working in the style with its Protomartyr-ish mix of bright guitar and shadowy vocal. And oh, what vivid images flash by in White’s talk-sung narrative. We are “Shoving forward more or less towards the warnings explored in fiction,” says White, and yes, 1984 and other dystopian works now seem less like fiction than ever.  

This is all new material, ripped fresh from our blighted existence and expressed in knotty verse. None of these songs made an appearance on the live album Enough: One Night at the Daisy Chain from 2024, which we parsed for signs of Patois Counselor’s future direction. The new material on that disc was “lusher and more ruminative,” I decided, but it was a red herring. These songs rattle and bluster and clatter as hard as the bangers from Proper Release. White may be honing his literary skills, but this is no poetry reading.

And yet, and yet, there is poetry here. Even rowdy, boot-kicking “Generational Riffs” has its contemplative side, considering the balance of art and commerce and history that makes songs hit. The songwriter strives toward, “accomplishing a jingle to jingle on the chain of all kinds of tradition” leaning on “the generational riffs” that “give sound advice.” The language has its own rhythm, working in conjunction with the tight and hammered Patois Counselors’ sound.

White’s band has fluctuated somewhat over the years, but here he fields a familiar, locked in crew: Lenny Muckle, bassist Robin Doermann, synthesist Krizia Torres and drummer Taylor Knox. They lock in on “Cop City,” which borrows a melody from the Stones’ “Paint it Black,” but roughs it up mightily, as White considers the militarization of local police forces (“It’s looking like a Who’s Who of opportunistic industrialists out here selling the hell out of tactical…for what?”). It’s complicated and thoughtful and artfully phrased, none of which prevents the song from moving like a monster truck. Buckle up, it’s Patois Counselors again.

The album opens with “Badlands” and its “big disaster we call home.” The challenge of sorting a big, beautiful life out of a demanding world runs throughout the album. Morby sings, “I can't tell if I'm in heaven or if I'm in the badlands.” He sounds puzzled, but he knows the truth: he's in both. He feels gratitude even for survival (“Die Young”), largely because he's found a way to fulfilling domesticity even as he's pursued his art, fully aware of the hurt around him, but persisting in the knowledge that “to live is to fly” (even if death offers a similar liftoff).

Morby gets help here from producer Aaron Dessner, who's rich pop sensibilities bring a new tone to the artist's typically midtempo music. The tone wouldn't have worked on 2016's haunted Singing Saw or 2022's Memphis-based This Is a Photograph; now, it's a perfect fit. Little Wide Open is middle America indie rock reaching outward, expanding without losing its groundedness. Likewise, the guest musicians (Meg Duffy, Justin Vernon, and others) make the album bigger without distracting from its specificity, even if it’s hard not to notice Lucinda Williams' vocals.

That specificity turns out to have a universal urgency, frequently based in the idea that time passes quickly and “takes its toll.” There's “a void” as wide as the Midwestern skies that gets us all. One option is to try to escape where we are. That's the sentiment on “Cowtown,” and when Morby wants to fly away, it's hard to be sure he means it in a life-affirming way. There are better options, though, mainly in recognizing the paradox of Heaven and the badlands being the same place, and digging into the life that we find there, grasping it in its fleeting time.

It's the sort of question that motivates closing track “Field Guide for the Butterflies.” Morby sings, “Is it suicide if I die out chasing thrills / Or is it just me trying to grow wings?” It's part of living large in your small space, a big life in the little wide open. It takes some poetry, some friends, some prayer. It's “a world that kills,” but it's also one full of breezes and partnership and tiny bits of bliss that outgrow everything else. Morby sounds at peace in his restlessness and wondering, and he's captured that feeling, even as it comes in all sizes.

Effigy’s music is fairly easy to parse with the kinds of subgenre savvy we possess with our digitally mediated relations to music history. We can navigate from an early Killing Joke single to a stream of Abrasive Wheels’ Black Leather Girl to the Smiths’ winningly low-grade video for “Hand in Glove” in seconds. Follow the algorithm and you might eventually end up watching bootlegged footage of a Christian Death gig during the Catastrophe Ballet period. Effigy located themselves somewhere amid those punk and post-punk sounds, but one imagines they fought a lot harder to hear and express the sounds they wanted to make. There are occasional traces of a goth sensibility (check out the refrain for “Reaching for the Light” and the riffs of “Wicca Man”), and the recording, originally self-released on cassette and sold at gigs by the band, has the sort of rawness we might associate with the anarcho-punk of the period — vocalist Birdy recalls Eve Libertine’s most stately turns.

The very obscurity of Burnt Offerings may increase its appeal, and for sure there’s a musicological relevance to pressing the record and putting the songs back into circulation. London, Leeds and Manchester get a lot of the attention in historical narratives of post-punk’s development, and deservedly so. But it’s also crucial to account for more localized events, like walking around a small city or market town in the early 1980s, spiked hair and layered black. Take note, from Effigy’s stand-out track “Ghosts”: “Her eyes were sunken and piercing / She was thin and so spare / She was concealed in a sombre scarf / Her robe was flowing and long…” It could be a goth girl on the high street or a revenant out of a Horace Walpole story. In any case, Effigy’s songs have been exhumed, and we know more about the shape of English music. We can dance to it, too — just don’t step on my sombre scarf, punk.

Poss will be familiar to habitues of New York’s no wave minimalist scene. In addition to the multi-guitared Band of Susans, he has collaborated with Rhys Chatham and Phill Niblock. E-Clark Cornell is less of a known quantity, though he has an extensive discography under the latome2 name and has collaborated with cosmic electronicists including Hans-Joachim Roedelius of CLUSTER, HaDi Schmidt, and Michael Hoffmann. The two first joined forces for 2024’s Definitive Spaces, a four-cut EP of extended meditations in tone wash, piano and clattering percussion.

Kepler’s Choice is sleeker and more elegant, its sound billowing forth like an alternative reality’s orchestral movie soundtracks. It’s not clear who did what. There’s very little in recognizable guitar tone, though that doesn’t mean Poss isn’t playing one. A Dusted review of his 2018 solo album, Frozen Flowers Curse the Day observes: “Robert Poss plays the guitar like Magritte paints smoking implements, distorting, tweaking, processing, disguising and augmenting his sound so that even when a conventional blues lick or power chord emerges, you could be forgiven for thinking, ‘This is not a guitar.’” Here the sources of sound are even more obscure; long wavery tones unfurl, scattered, sometimes, with plinks of piano or oddly tuned staccato guitar.  

“Russian Tea Room” is the album’s long centerpiece, unrolling in repeated waves, timeless, edgeless, serene with bits of discordant piano studding its ripple-less surface. We are not sure what it has to do with the NYC dining institution, Russia or tea, or indeed how it relates to the world as we know it. The artists have abstracted sound to the point of a celestial hum, beautiful but austere and lacking in real-world signifiers.

“SUBLIMATION o” winds a long organ dirge around skittery runs of what sounds like guitar, the wheezing foundation static while the play of notes churns up agitation on the surface. Flurries of staccato notes run in unexpected directions, stuttering up in question marks, bumping downward in reply. The guitar (or possibly piano or maybe even malleted percussion) sounds very improvised, incorporating half-steps and splats of conflicting notes, but the overall effect is poised and premediated.

These are long tracks that drone on without much incident. Nothing like a traditional melody emerges, and often you don’t even get much sense of a time signature. They are, instead, like the photos that come back from the Hubble Telescope, vast, mysterious, unconcerned with our scrubby human lives but animated by a spiritual presence. Kepler would be proud.

The vivid title track was the first single, deeply immersed in Tõnu Kõrvits’s rich strings. Melodically it’s reminiscent of Nick Drake’s “One of These Things First,” but reimagined with the arrangement of “River Man.” O’Brien’s vocals and guitar are buried in the mix, swimming amid the string currents and gentle burbling percussion, subsumed with feeling. After the relatively conventional, rock-leaning songs of Earth, “Blue Morpho” arrived as a wonderful surprise.

Second single and album opener “Incantations” is all cyclical slow-burn, placing O’Brien’s emotional geography front and center: “Here comes the fear and the ghosts of long ago / And all these years, I'm still running from it all / And I'll fall down, falling deep into the hole.” While the lyrics suggest an irresistible downward trajectory, the band’s steadfast repetition of the song’s melodic and rhythmic themes suggests a gradual ascent towards salvation, buoyed up during its closing stretches by tambourine and a fantastic bassline. “Teachers” has the edge of hard-driving funk to its rhythm section, while the ebullient opening stretch of closer “Obrigado” alludes to O’Brien’s time spent living in South America.

The non-album track that preceded the release of Earth, “Santa Teresa,” hinted at a sound left unexplored on that album, with its waves of atmospheric delayed guitars. Blue Morpho’s side B instrumentals, “Solfeggio” and “Thin Places,” suggest darker, more exploratory avenues, reminiscent of late-period Talk Talk. Given the backstory surrounding the album’s gestation, it would have been fitting if Blue Morpho delved further in this direction.

“Old Myth Dying” has a syncopated groove, with a descending bass-line waging for control against triplets in the guitar, all buoying a falsetto vocal in Eisenberg’s upper register. “Vanity Paradox” plays with triplets too, and there are some rosin rich string glissandos along for the ride. Pedal steel anchors the arrangement of “Another Lifetime Floats Away,” which lives up to its title’s assessment. “It’s Here” finds Eisenberg comfortable in her upper register, singing a high-lying chorus amid ambling strummed acoustic guitars. “Curious Bird” features her voice to good advantage, and there also are nimble fingerstyle passages as well as a deft string arrangement

“Will You Dare” is one of the best ballads here, and has a country-inflected chorus, teased with pedal steel and a solo on telecaster. It is followed by “The Walls,” a dreamy closer, with a murmuring vocal and jazzy strummed chords, once again accompanied by string quartet. The recording shows a compelling facet of Eisenberg’s music-making, one that complements her instrumental outings well. Glad that we don’t have to choose between her various pursuits. All are worthy of investigation.

This music results from choices of exclusion as well as inclusion. Neither Lazro’s alto saxophone, Lovens’ musical saw, nor Léandre’s voice make an appearance, and with that restriction comes a concentration on earth-moving, primal sound. The name given to each of the set’s four tracks — “Temps du Corps” (“Body Time”) — says a lot. The trio’s music is abrupt, forceful and textural. While it doesn’t conform to fire music aesthetics, it hits hard. When Lazro reaches for high notes, you can hear the effort. When he huffs, you can almost feel his breath. When Léandre lets loose a cascade of bowed shivers, you can sense her double bass shaking. And Lovens’ fleet circuit around his kit will get you in your joints, which might well twitch and stretch in sympathy with his movements, as well as your ears.

There are also choices of action. In addition to the harsh lyricism of her arco work, Léandre gets as close as I’ve ever heard her to a walking —well, make that sprinting — bass line. She and Lazro match evocations of pathos at one point, only to lurch toward a sonic depiction of plate tectonics at another. And while Lovens spends plenty of time generating a swirl of discreet sounds, he also gets positively martial. Nothing is off limits, but every gestures needs to have a reason to be there. And it does — the moment-by-moment decision-making heard on For Baritone Sax, Double Bass & Drumset is where the real composing takes place.