#air waves

Acausal Intrusion — Seeping Evocation (I, Voidhanger)

Seeping Evocation by ACAUSAL INTRUSION

The tech death weirdos in Acausal Intrusion are back with another record of forbiddingly complicated and completely bananas music. On Seeping Evocation, Nythroth and Cave Ritual (yep, those are the names we have to work with) have pushed their singular death metal further out into abstract territory. The music is knotty, angular and seemingly extruded through some set of anomalous conditions in our space-time continuum. The lyrics? Try this, from “Ostensible Implanted Inheritance”: “Precisely veridical justification deductive fallibilism reliablism affirming assassination components inductive internally consistent meet characteristic different suitably in simple theory…” It’s hard to say where to insert line-breaks, since Cave Ritual’s guttural growls operate at considerable distance from syntax and normative rhetorical inflections. The music is even more dizzying and disorienting. But if you’re looking for an acrobatically adventurous hour of highly idiosyncratic metal — somehow seriously spacy and nauseously damp at the same time — Acausal Intrusion have your ticket stamped. Bring your own vomit bag. The turbulence gets rough.

Jonathan Shaw

 Air Waves — The Dance (Fire)

The Dance by Air Waves

The new album from Air Waves features a host of notable collaborators, including Cass McCombs and Luke Temple. Nicole Schneit’s music is simple and direct, the chord changes akin to The Pixies minus the distortion, which suggests the listener could pick up a guitar at home and easily strum along with the changes. The cadence of Schneit’s vocal melodies closely follows the contours of the chords, gently rising on occasion in husky, questioning phrases. The songs’ arrangements are fleshed out with beats, keys and a glowering low end that skews the music away from indie-pop towards an arch, mature sound. The best song is probably “Alien,” the one with Cass McCombs, which begins innocently enough, but subtly builds into a menacing, addictive little art-pop tune. Though The Dance is tightly written, vividly produced, and occasionally rather catchy, by the end of the album’s 25 minutes it feels curiously insubstantial.

Tim Clarke

 Almond Joy — Oh Henry!

Oh Henry! by Almond Joy

Almond Joy, the candy bar, coated a sticky sweet coconut filling with bittersweet chocolate. Almond Joy, the Bay Area band, works a similar strategy, wrapping sugary melodies in just enough scratch and clatter to cut through. The band, comprised of SF underground regulars from Rays, Cool Ghouls and other outfits, trips and grooves on “Oh Henry!” which doubles down on the candy metaphor. The song floats dizzying pop tuneful-ness across rackety drums and twittering organ for a carnival ride aura, which breaks, a couple of times for dream pop drift and glide. A passing nod to “Wanna Be Your Dog,” establishes punk connections without making too much of them. “San Francisco” is even more fluid and lyrical, with its spun out, harmonized refrain of “I…wanna move to the city,” and its extended Frampton-Comes-Alive-ish guitar solo. A sugar high but tasty.

Jennifer Kelly

 Eric Arn and Eyal Maoz — Kost Nix (Feeding Tube)

Kost Nix by eric arn & eyal maoz

Two seasoned veterans of the experimental guitar join together in free improvisation in a set recorded late last year at the experimental arts space VEKKS Vienna. Eric Arn got his start in the early Wayne Rogers band Crystalized Movements and later headed the sublimely heavy Primordial Undermind. Eyal Maoz is best known for his collaboration with John Zorn. Here, together, their work is alternately cerebral and torrid, abstract and antically physical. “Quiet Concessions” operates at a low volume, as its title suggests, but it is anything but reserved, containing lightning runs and tone-warped blasts of distorted sound. “Luminous Motion” sets up a dynamic of dueling flurries and tamped down dissonances. One player hazards a chaotic motion, the other mirrors it backward, distorted or at a funhouse angle. “Optimus Locus ad Finem,” runs slower and more lyrically, but still bristles with sharp conflicting ideas. Not an easy record, but a fascinating one.

Jennifer Kelly 

 Cyril Bondi & D’Incise—Le Secret (Insub)

Le secret by CYRIL BONDI & D'INCISE

The next time you hear someone holler, “more cowbell,” hand them a copy of this album. Le Secret is made up solely of the sounds of bells made for cows residing in Switzerland’s mountain pastures. The title derives from a research point; what choices go into the making of said bells? According to the notes, “It revealed to be pretty subjective, mixing parameters of sonic efficiency, financial and social reasons, and sometimes a slight touch of musicality, all of these clotted by the notion of “secret.” 

Having conducted this research, these two Swiss experimentalists then set about recording a few sets of bells that met their own subjective and secret criteria. Their selections are more reverberant and deeper in tone that the standard rock cowbell, but function justifies nomenclature, so there you go. Not all cowbells were made to choogle. The album’s four pieces have a patient, meditative quality that is far more overtly musical than your average herd’s pasture-crossing cacophony.

Bill Meyer

 Eric Chenaux — Say Laura (Constellation)

Eric Chenaux’s music is not by most metrics very ‘difficult’ and yet there’s something subtly confronting about it. He sings in a gentle, clear voice, high above woozy tangles of guitar and not much else (here he sparingly adds harmonica and various electronics, with Ryan Driver on occasional Wurtlizer). Both his singing and playing are singular and fascinating enough that Chenaux would be worth listening to if either were all he did, but it’s in the way they play off each other that his new record really blossoms. Over the course of these five tracks (ranging from 7 to 13 minutes in length) Say Laura veers from understated, whimsical songcraft to a more abstract kind of soundworld. Whether it’s stretches of the title track luxuriating in the intoxicated, stumbling sound of Chenaux’s guitar or Chenaux-as-singer locking into a breathlessly repeating groove for a full 3/4s of the 10-minute “There They Were,” what at first presents as relatively quiet and unassuming music soon starts claiming more of your attention. It’s music to smoothly reconfigure your expectations to.

Ian Mathers

 Ian William Craig — Music for Magnesium_173 (130701)

Music for Magnesium_173 by Ian William Craig

Ian William Craig has released some stunning records over the last ten years, including 2014’s A Turn of Breath, 2016’s Centres, and 2018’s Thresholder. Though his latest, Music for Magnesium_173, is an 80-minute soundtrack to a computer game, it’s distinctively the work of the same artist. There’s his unmistakable operatic singing voice, the warble and crackle of his reel-to-reel tape machines, plus some textural electronics, such as the thick surge of bit-crushed bass on “Sprite Percent World Record.” The facet of this music that feels different is the intention behind its creation. As music to accompany visual stimulus and gameplay, it’s impossible to say whether it works. As a standalone album it’s diverting enough, showcasing Craig’s enviable skill in balancing celestial beauty with ominous drone. However, compared to the majority of his formidable discography, this is probably among the least essential of his works.

Tim Clarke

 Cruz — Confines de la Cordura (Nuclear Winter)

Confines de la Cordura by CRUZ

A thrilling collection of thrashy death metal from Barcelona-based Cruz, Confines de la Cordura roils and churns with inexhaustible energy. You’ll hear plenty of buzzsaw riffage, clearly referencing the canon of Swedish classics, but the record is equally engaged with a dirty variety of muscular thrash, verging on punky vigor. If you can imagine M.O.D., c. 1989, sharing a practice space with Dismember, you’ll have the right sounds in your head. But Cruz is very much its own monster, and the songs on this record are huger, faster and nastier than just about anything either of those legendary bands put out. The crusty grandeur of the first couple minutes of the title track of Confines de la Cordura might make you wish the band would slow down every now and then, but by the time “Eones de Sangre” shifts into top gear, you’ll be having way too much fun to want anything else. Really, the record is so good that it deserves more than a Dust. But there isn’t much more to say about it beyond a couple essentials: Great record. Rage on, band.

Jonathan Shaw

  Gloria de Oliveira and Dean Hurley — Oceans of Time (Sacred Bones)

Dean Hurley is best known for his 12-year collaboration with the film director David Lynch. His partner here is a multidisciplinary artist named Gloria Oliveira, a singer, songwriter, video director and actor. Together, over a dozen atmospheric cuts, they build slow-evolving, wide-panning landscapes with some of the wonder and dread of the Lynchian universe. Some of these cuts are rather song-like in a diffuse, soft-shoe-gazing sort of way. The best of these is, maybe, “All Flowers in Time,” a swooning swirl of dream pop, whose cloudy textures are pierced through with drum machine beats and reverberating bent guitar notes. But others, just as affecting, are pure timbre and tone-wash, building greyscale monoliths out of shivering synth notes. You don’t so much listen to “Seven Summits” as breathe in its intoxicating fumes. You can’t get swept into “Astral Bodies” without feeling your feel float free of the ground. You can get lost in Oceans of Time, and maybe that’s the point. Enter this trance state at your own risk.

Jennifer Kelly

 Ernesto Diaz-Infante — Vacilando EPs (Ramble)

Vacilando EPs by Ernesto Diaz-Infante

Californian improviser Ernesto Diaz-Infante has pursued many angles of inquiry over the decades, but the immediacy and sonic richness of this album make it a stand-out. Despite its humble name, it is actually a plus-sized album spanning over two hours on a pair of CDrs. Diaz-Infante is credited playing banjo, traveler guitar, Turkish electric oud and resonator guitar, but what he really plays here are strings and space. Each of the album’s 28 tracks is a pool of vibrations that invites repeated deep dives. Sonically, the album is somewhat reminiscent of Steffen Bash-Junghans’ experimental albums from the early 2000s, but the focus here is not so much on rigorous methodology as pure luxurious sonority. One caveat; music this strong deserves a more reliable format than CDr. It’s possible to get glass-mastered CDs manufactured in runs of 100, folks, so please, when you do something good, do it right.

Bill Meyer

 Bruno Duplant — Le Jour D’Après (Sublime Retreat)

Le Jour D'après by Bruno Duplant

Films can offer you world’s you’d rather live in, or worlds you really don’t want to see. This album, whose name corresponds to that of the 2004 climate disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, so you might think that Bruno Duplant has the latter cinematic sensibility in mind. But this half-hour-long recording betrays the influence of long hours spent marveling at sights and sounds so moving that you can’t stop watching them. It is made from the sounds of foot-steps on pavement, distant church bells, squeaky seagulls, melancholy strings and meandering piano notes. Duplant’s artful layering of these elements is easily as immersive as any great movie, but instead of letting the listener stay lost, he inserts signifiers of intervention — foregrounded shuffling that might represent the composer’s presence, and flutters in the string and piano tracks like those that might result from applying your finger to a turntable. In those moments, escape is withheld, challenging the listener to reevaluate their relationship to all that they hear.

Bill Meyer 

 Vinny Golia / Bernard Santacruz / Cristiano Castagnile — To Live and Breathe… (Dark Tree)

To Live and Breathe... by Vinny Golia • Bernard Santacruz • Cristiano Calcagnile

The album’s title telegraphs the seriousness with which this ad hoc, international trio approaches improvisation. But heaviness never bogs them down. If anything, they make a virtue of being light on their feet, benefitting from the elevated pitch potential of Los Angeleno Vinny Golia’s two woodwinds (soprano saxophone, piccolo) and Milanese drummer Cristiano Calcagniele’s preference for sizzle over rumble. Golia puts more wind into the endeavor’s sails by favoring quick, stabbing forays and long, hurtling lines. Santacruz is a conversational bassist, able to dish apposite asides even when he’s holding down a pulse. His solemn, solitary introduction to “Thoughts Within The Vineyard” invests the whole affair with an affecting gravity.

Bill Meyer

 Gordon Grdina / Mark Helias / Matthew Shipp—Pathways (Attaboygirl)

Pathways by Gordon Grdina Mark Helias Matthew Shipp

Both pianist Matthew Shipp and oud/guitar player Gordon Grdina make a lot of records. Probably the most remarkable thing about Pathways, their second recording with bassist Mark Helias, is how singular it sounds, even when the participants play like you’d expect them to play. Grdina is a melodist at heart, and while Shipp has refined his approach in more recent times, he still can be relied upon to invest the moment with cosmic weight. But in the company of a musician who finds ways to be equally apposite accompanying Dewey Redman and Gerry Hemingway, they’ve marked out a zone in which each gambit, no matter how classic it may be for the person playing it, advances a refreshingly unfamiliar game. Grdina and Shipp are both guys who can take up a lot of space, but they’ve found ways to make room for each other, often by arcing around each other with broad, separate gestures that are bound together by Helias’ elegant figures.

Bill Meyer

 Gabriel Hassan — Two Oceans: Compositions for Six and Twelve String Guitar (Ramble Records)

Two Oceans: Compositions for six and twelve string guitar by Gabriel Hassan

This Bandcamp find is by a young guitarist with ties to Wyoming and, apparently, Australia. Hassan embraces wholeheartedly the style of Fahey and Rose and, especially, Basho. As advertised, Hassan delivers six sprawling (nine-minute-plus) epics on the instruments named in the title. The fingerpicking is intricate and assured, and the tunes build and resolve in the manner of classics such as “Voice of the Turtle” and “The Falconer’s Arm.” The effect is a little like listening to Isaiah Collier’s Cosmic Transitions: both Hassan and Collier are artists in their early 20s playing music that could pass for newly discovered outtakes recorded by their idols (in Collier’s case, Coltrane) in 1967. If the sounds are no longer revolutionary, they are delivered with no less passion, and the compositions are equal to the skill on display.

Jim Marks

 IKZ — I Heard the Cryptic Problem of My Generation Destroyed (Amalgam)

I Saw the Cryptic Problem Of My Generation Destroyed by IKZ

IKZ gets in your face with music whose stylistic address is as difficult to pin down as its postal one. The quartet looks Chicago-ish enough; everyone’s lived there at some point. But the members’ current residences range from Virginia to Oregon. Likewise, double bassist Christopher Dammann (Restroy), Kevin Davis (Locksmith Isadore, Uncle Woody Sullender), John Niekrasz (John Wiese, Methods Body), and Toby Summerfield (Princess Princess, Ex Eye) have all contributed to records you could find in a jazz bin, but if you crank this platter up, you might get your jazz school DJ privileges revoked. “Cloud In The Serpent” opens the LP with some straight-up metallic shredding courtesy of Summerfield, who has been known to do the same thing in that band he shares with Greg Fox and Colin Stetson. But where you’d expect to beat to come down slow and steady, there’s instead a dust devil-stirring whirl of activity. Call it heavy improvisation. Davis’ amplified cello is more tectonic than melodic. Dammann, whose double bass is as voltage-independent as Summerfield’s guitar is plugged in, conspires with drummer Niekrasz to rumble like a couple guys who see no conflict between collecting E.S.P.-Disks and committing flagrant fouls on the basketball court.

Bill Meyer

 KARK — The Tatooed Date of the Earthquake Across the Abdomen (Chocolate Monk)

KARK is the improvisation-oriented, guitar-free counterpart of Louisville-based Sapat. The music each combo makes is pretty different, but they share a purposeful insularity. The point is not externally generated outcomes; it is in the doing. Still, their compass points true. This hour and a third-long CDR, which compiles music recorded over 21 years, is heavy on conversational reeds, which counter assertive squiggle with confident squawk, with room for occasional saw-toothed strings, lunar synth and spasmodic percussion interventions. Periodically a passage of idiomatically faithful, swinging jazz wanders into the room, checks out the proceedings, and then moves on. It’s all filtered through a cheap-mic murk that makes the music feel a bit like what you might make if you simultaneously played records by Surface of the Earth and Slugs Saloon-era Sun Ra.

Bill Meyer

 Loop — Sonancy (Reactor)

Robert Hampson’s Loop were always a bit of an odd beast. Knocked at the time in the UK press (and sometimes by Sonic Boom) as the Spacemen 3 ripoffs they never were, at times seemingly too brutal and abstract for wide consumption, by the time of their swan song A Gilded Eternity they’d evolved to some truly stunning places (listen to “Shot With a Diamond” and wonder at what might have been). Thirty years later, after many productive years shedding the albatross of his guitar-slinging reputation in Main and with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Hampson’s not only made peace enough with the guitar to play some truly fierce shows as Loop, but there’s finally a fourth LP. But whereas the exploratory 2015 EP Array 1 felt like it was tentatively weaving something new, there’s nothing tentative about Sonancy, just 42 packed minutes of straight-down-the-middle Loop burners. If Hampson was just about the last guy you’d expect to make something that crowd pleasing (for a particular value of “crowd”), it’s hard to deny just how satisfying the result is for the converted.

Ian Mathers

 Rachika Nayar — Heaven Come Crashing (NNA Tapes)

Heaven Come Crashing by Rachika Nayar

Brooklyn-based electronic producer Rachika Nayar exists in the atmospheric layer between ambient electronic music and bombastic post-shoegaze haze. Her music evokes the high drama of early M83, but she imbues her songs with a softness akin to that of chilly Norwegian producer Biosphere. This liminal existence allows Nayar’s bombast from becoming bluster. Her use of dynamics is not overbearing; there’s a poignancy present that calls to mind the early days of post-rock. Desiring a continuum, Nayar weaves a few threads that she sustains throughout Heaven Come Crashing, her sophomore album. One of these pervasive, dream-like images is a scything guitar, processed into a barely present phantasm that howls as it fights to be heard among the surrounding clouds of tone. This otherworldly presence becomes incredibly dramatic when Maria BC appears. Both tracks that feature the classically trained vocalist are also coincidentally the only songs that include prominent beats. These moments — when melody, rhythm, and vocals collide — are when Heaven Come Crashing really heads skyward. Yet as lofty as Nayar’s music gets, there’s always a guitar present, tethering it to Earth.  

Bryon Hayes

 Nohmi — Bird on the Edge (ZenneZ Records)

A Bird at the Edge by NOHMI

Nohmi is a Rotterdam-based international group led by Korean pianist Miran Noh that has achieved some recognition in European jazz circles in recent years. The lineup includes, on this recording, a full (and seemingly very well-rehearsed) band, with the core trio of piano, double bass and drums augmented by tenor sax and trumpet and, on several tracks, a string quartet. This contemporary take on third stream jazz touches all the right bases (MJQ, Ravel, etc.), with interesting arrangements (such as the shifting time signatures on the version of “We See” that closes the set) and effective use of the strings (especially the opening title track). Noh has the makings of a great jazz composer, and it will be interesting to watch her and the band develop.

Jim Marks

 Various Artists — Lagniappe SuperSession :: Birthday Blues | 33 Artists Interpret The Music Of James Toth (Aquarium Drunkard)

James Jackson Toth is an extraordinarily prolific songwriter who records mostly, but not entirely, under various permutations of the name Wooden Wand. Too young, I suspect, to have been featured on the genre defining Golden Apples of the Sun compilation in 2004, he nonetheless has become a central figure in New Weird America circles. This birthday compilation of covers, organized by his wife Leah Toth (also of the very excellent Amelia Courthouse) and Ben Chasny, celebrates just under three dozen of his hundreds of songs—and, like Golden Apples in its day, does a good bit to document the ever-expanding universe of psychedelic folk. Toth has written in his Substack that he, personally, only really likes about a dozen of his own songs, and that none of these made the cut, but perhaps that all to the good. Pretty nearly every musician on this comp has found their own way in to the songs that they cover. Meg Baird sounds as shivery and folk pure singing “The Mountain” as she does performing her own work. Jerry DeCicca reaches deep into the pocket for “You Say that I Don’t Love Anything” sounding exactly as warm and relaxed and casually poetic in as he does on his solo albums. Powers Rollin Duo adds some worn-in vocals to its string blues satori, but sounds otherwise as shimmery and transcendant as ever. And what can you say about M. Geddes Gengras’ glitch-y, synthy, whispery electronic take on “Mexican Coke” or Mount’s epically ominous “What Has the Night To Do,” except that they pay tribute by taking a different tack? My two favorites among these songs bucked this trend a bit by being recognizable, but “Sun Drum Ladies” turns as delicately weightless as dandelion fluff in Woods’ hands, and “Hotel Bar” hits an unlikely equilibrium between world-weariness and revelation in Ethan Miller’s take. The songs are good, but they reverberate like a diving board as these artists bound off them in all directions. I didn’t mean to write about his comp, which is available as a free download at Aquarium Drunkard (a website that I sometimes contribute to). But while it’s an excellent birthday present and a really good covers album, it’s more than that. It’s a temperature reading on a whole loosely organized scene, and the good news is that the freak folk universe is in stupendous health.