Ribosome

I’m not an expert of what’s cool in experimental music. I don’t read the magazines or most of the review sites. (Sometimes I’ll read reviews if I like an artist and want to learn more about them.)

But as a host of a regular podcast focusing on unusual sounds, I spend a lot of time digging independently through new releases. Certainly you’ll have heard of some of them. Many others are underground, self-released artists who may not yet have a lot of listeners.

In this music, I usually look for artists who try to find their own paths towards musicality and coherence, rather than jump onto an established genre and work there.

Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society “Simultonality” https://eremiterecords.bandcamp.com/album/simultonality A jazz release with tight whirling dervishes and a mix of western and Moroccan instruments. Explorations through repetition. One of the tracks seems to resemble Terry Riley’s “In C” in how the score is followed.

AGF - Solidicity https://agf-poemproducer.bandcamp.com/album/solidicity Jlin’s release is further down this list, but AGF shares a similar sensibility: fast, frenetic sampler-based dance music that treads deeply into sonic exploration and experimental sounds.

Andrea Belfi - Ore https://andreabelfi.bandcamp.com/album/ore I have a weakness for percussionists who work electronic sounds into their sets (Sven Kacirek, Erland Dahlen, Solyst, etc). Here’s one!

Apulati Bien - OO:NE https://promesses.bandcamp.com/album/oo-n Another release from this electronic dance / experimental music hybrid that’s popularized by Jlin. I’m not sure what it’s called yet, but here’s a French cassette that was also good.

Felicia Atkinson “Hand in Hand” https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com/album/hand-in-hand Felicia Atkinson’s compositions combine text passages, electronics, instruments and found object sounds in a way that make me think of carefully-constructed surrealist radio plays. This has been my favorite release of hers so far.

Bellows “Strand” https://shelterpress.bandcamp.com/album/strand A nice halfway point between 4/4 “ambient dance” music as popularized in the mid 90s, and more abstract, improvised-sounding music. This has the warm, dreamy, otherworldly quality of the former, with a sense of being in an empty, windblown warehouse.

Greg Fox “The Gradual Progression” https://gregfox.bandcamp.com/album/the-gradual-progression An energetic jazz release that brings in tight bursts of tuned electronic percussion sequences and dub influences. 

Glochids “Ni Fila” https://glopuntia.bandcamp.com/album/ni-fila Mind-expandingly abstract and bizarre sounds, but with a sense of narrative and coherence that it’s easy to forget is possibly in this kind of experimental music. The alien-ness and sense of structure remind me of Oval’s excellent run in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Grampus “Bludge” https://grampus.bandcamp.com/album/bludge-2 Grampus has a great set of trio instrumentation: trumpet, trombone, and percussion, and all 2 of the members also proficient with samplers and laptops. Their first record, while fun, focused mostly on avant-garde and graphical score composition. For their sophomore record, there’s more of a groove, more high tempo, high energy playing, giving it a sensibility common with my favorite fusion and psychedelic rock records.

Jasmine Guffond “Traced” https://jasmineguffond.bandcamp.com/album/traced Ambient sampler-based experimentalism in the vein of Jan Jelinek or perhaps Vladislav Delay. However, perhaps more composed and more suspenseful than either of those examples.

Jlin “Black Origami” https://jlin.bandcamp.com/album/black-origami My prediction is that this release will be the one that appears on the most end-of-year lists. Jlin is a producer out of Gary, Indiana, and she’s one of the premier producers of this new genre that I’ve seen cropping up over the last 2 years or so. I’m not sure what it’s called. Is it “footwork”, or is footwork simply the dance genre that it’s closest to? The rhythms seem to be inspired as much by Algerian doumbek music as anything from western electronic genres.

Audun Kleive & Jan Bang “The Periphery of a Building” https://www.amazon.com/Periphery-Building-Audun-Kleive-Bang/dp/B074KW846W A percussion/live-sampling duo from Norway. It’s hard to put into words what I love about this EP: It combines the rhythmic energy of some of the “footwork” (?) releases on this list, such as Jlin, AGF and Apulati Bien, but perhaps with a slightly more free-improvised energy.

Lepidoptera “Minus Sign” https://analogcowboyrecords.bandcamp.com/album/lepidoptera According to Bandcamp, I’m currently the only person who bought this. (That’s true of a number of these releases.) That’s a shame because it’s a wonderful ambient drone session that takes the listener to several different landscapes as it travels.

Oby1taopy “Tachyon” https://oby1taopy.bandcamp.com/album/tachyon As much as I enjoy experimental modular synthesizer music, many of the releases I hear for this instrument gravitate towards well-known staples and stay there: formless new-age ambient baths, storms of electronic squiggles, walls of noise, 70s Berlin-school uh… tribute artists? Oby1taopy seems to enjoy the process of exploration itself, and presents us with a collection of temporary almost-worlds.

Off World “2” https://offworld.bandcamp.com/album/2 Bucking a trend of most of the synthesizer players I hear, Sandro Perri retains the role of traditional instruments in his compositions, so you’ll hear electronic drums, approximated bass and piano sounds, and a sense of “band-ness” in this release. There are hints of fusion, early synth rock and even lounge music throughout the record. This doesn’t stop the music from being pleasurably “out there”. Recommended if you like: Herbie Hancock’s “Sextant”, Jon Hassel, Pekka Airaksinen.

Oto Hiax “s/t” https://otohiax.bandcamp.com/album/s-t A collaboration between Mark Clifford of Seefeel and Scott Gordon of Loops Haunt. This is unusual for the ways that it is both typical and atypical: The typicality comes from the individual sounds. Experienced experimental ears have heard many of these sounds before: the highly-textured guitar processing of Seefeel’s recent releases, the surf-like droning wavecrests of the genre I’ve been calling “Tim Hecker”, instruments recorded in reverberant spaces, a touch of harsh noise and a decent amount of amplified found objects and environmental sounds thrown in. What’s unusual is that a release could have all of these elements and sound as focused and purposeful as this record does. It’s a great record from start-to-finish.

Safety Scissor Death Squad “Songs for a Dying Shell Diver” https://acriacysoundlabs.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-a-dying-shell-diver One of the downsides of being a fan of experimental music is the sense that too many musicians are concerned with blowing my mind. Then once in a while a recording actually does it - in this case, this very quiet, patient, minimal recording of blown bottles, chimes, and occasional digital turntable gestures by Tennessee’s Jovontae Pride. It was originally composed as a companion piece to Nurse With Wound’s "Echo Poeme: Sequence No. 2", but I’m completely happy with it like this. Recommended if you like Steve Roden.

Schneider Kacirek “Radius Walk” https://schneiderkacirek.bandcamp.com/album/radius-walk This is one of the newest entries of a genre I’ve been following, even if I don’t know what to call it: sterile, clean synth & live drum solo and duo projects that are very subtle and gradual about how they bring in their unusual elements. Acts like Andrea Belfi (listed above), Erland Dahlen, Solyst, Kreidler and Sven Kacirek. Maybe it’s my version of easy listening. This latest is a collaboration between Kacirek and Kreidler’s Stefan Schneider. Kacirek is a specialist in carefully tuning up very specific percussive sounds - a trio of prepared piano plucks here, a snare recorded from inside a cardboard box there. This has been my favorite release from either musician in some time.

Spellling “Pantheon of Me” (LP) https://spellling.bandcamp.com/album/pantheon-of-me-2 Tia Cabral’s solo project lets you think you’re going to be settling in for an album of live looping singer-songwriter stuff, but then the other elements start to creep in - electronic sound design and instrumentation usually heard in industrial/ebm music are applied flawlessly to something more like reflective folk ballads. It keeps on surprising.

Ssifoo “LuzS” https://ssifoo.bandcamp.com/album/luzs A mysterious sample-based composer out of Mexico City, I don’t know much about Ssifoo other than the name and a couple of EPs that came out this year. Each one contains 3 instrumental songs of very thoughtful and careful musical blooms.

Colin Stetson - “All This I Do for Glory” https://colinstetson.bandcamp.com/album/all-this-i-do-for-glory You won’t believe that this is an album of songs performed in real time on sax with no loops, but it gets deep, detailed, musical and rhythmic. 

Střed Světa “Rozmístění opakováním” https://babavanga.bandcamp.com/album/st-ed-sv-ta-rozm-st-n-opakov-n-m This is probably the record on this list with easily detectable 4-on-the-floor beats, but I appreciate the artist’s approach which at turns sounds like: Various synthesized bodies falling down stairs, to a disco beat, or a collection of floating glass jars stuck in the spin cycle of a washing machine with echoes, to a disco beat.

Cristobal Tapia De Veer - The Girl With All The Gifts (OST) https://mondotees.bandcamp.com/album/the-girl-with-all-the-gifts-cristobal-tapia-de-veer A beautiful, mysterious, understated horror movie soundtrack, composed largely with voice loops and samplers. 

In my previous post, I mentioned the various freeware modulating synthesizers being offered by Xoxos. 

Sometimes it’s interesting when European artists create music informed/inspired by traditional musics of different regions, and sometimes it feels really exploitative and false. (Shooting a dirty look to anyone who uses the phrase “ancient traditions meet modern technology!”

This one is interesting. Peder Mennerfelt is an avid listener of those “field recordings of African tribes” records that pop up on record labels such as Nonesuch Explorer Series or Buda Musique. When he received a rare 78 of Congolese music originally published in 1950, he decided he wanted to do something with it. When he didn’t like the results of sampling the record, he decided to approach it the other way around - by performing the songs as well as he can by using only synthesizers. 

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A couple years ago, local noise musician Alexandra Buchanan aka DemonSleeper (https://demonsleeper.bandcamp.com/) mentioned a desire to make noise music mixed with Reggaeton and other Latin electronic music styles. I’m glad to see that she found a partner in another accomplished Bay Area experimentalist, Danishta Rivero. In other projects, Danishta is known for her work with a hydrophone, an instrument which I believe is of her own design (https://danishtarivero.bandcamp.com/) and in the duo Voicehandler (https://soundcloud.com/voicehandler) with percussionist Jacob Felix Heule.  After a number of live shows, their first cassette is now available. Check it out. It’s everything you want from electronic noise Reggaeton. There will also talk of an LP being released in December of this year. 

ILK ILK by GRAMPUS

You could call me a big phony, because I create improvised music and curate a music series for improvised music, but I don’t listen to a lot of free improvisation on CD. Admittedly, many of the improvised releases I get my hands on sound like some buddies got together, set up some room mics, and recorded for exactly 60 minutes, then without listening to it, decided to release the entire thing on CD.

I’m happy to say that Grampus’s “ILK ILK” CD is not one of those releases. Each track, while composed largely or entirely by improvisation, clicks in at a concise 3 to 7 minutes, and has its own distinct statement to make. And each is a joy to listen to, for experimental ears.

The band makeup is Louis Lopez on trumpet, Daniel Eaton on trombone and Michael Lockwood on percussion. One or both of the brass players also provides some Max/MSP and Jitter interactions with their instruments. The electronic processing mostly come in the form of ring modulation, granular synthesis, and layering the brass samples into subtle repeating patterns, often providing an evolving but well-formed backdrop for the much more playful live instrumentation to contrast against.

I bought this album 3 years ago when it came out, and I’m happy to report it’s still a joy to listen to. According to the band’s bio, the band is primarily an audio/visual project, where the visuals are controlled by the musical instruments. However, you won’t feel like you’re missing anything if you just hear the audio.

I mentioned in my podcast that many of Coil’s releases are available at Archive.org. Usually I have reservations about encouraging people to get their music in unofficial channels, because I like to see the artists get supported. However, in this case, both members of the band have passed away. They’ve left it up to Brainwashed.com to offer reissues of their music, but I’ve yet to see any clue that Brainwashed is actually doing so. Even when Coil’s discs were available in the USA, they were fleeting and very expensive. I remember in the late 90′s, I passed on paying $30 for one of their solstice/equinox EPs, never saw it again, and didn’t get to hear it until it popped up on this archive a few weeks ago.

I also said in my podcast something along the lines of “their best albums aren’t on the Archive site”. I was wrong. My absolute favorite Coil album, 1996′s “Black Light District”, is available at this link above. If you haven’t heard Coil before, it’s a great place to get started. It features them at the top of their game for intensely weird sound design approaches. This record features a nice mix of song-based tracks (known as ...“songs”?), drone music, and odd meter loop-based electronic pieces.

It also includes a link to that one track that you didn’t hear if you only had the CD version. Here’s a sample: 

I’ve been slacking on the new music posts quite a bit. Here’s a podcast I posted a couple of week ago, featuring a lot of the music that I should’ve been posting about.