#alex cunningham

Back in the day, Shippy used to play with US Maple. While he’s no longer confined by the need to frame a singer, he retains a very rock-derived commitment to forward momentum. He knows the effectiveness of a big, solid sound, as well as the communicative effectiveness of a climax-oriented arc of events. Cunningham, on the other hand, has worked mainly in freer contexts, having recorded with Damon Smith and Patrick Shiroishi. During the encounters documented on this LP, each musician contributes tune-fragments that you might recall, rhythms that can be felt even when they can’t be counted and alloyed tones that are sound-worlds unto themselves.

Both of them make ample use of amplification to stake their claims on available space, and effects to fill said space with attention-getting activity. Shippy’s amply processed signals range from trebly, blurred notes to melting memories of rockabilly twang to woofer-ripping bursts of synthetic sound. Cunningham uses pedals to shift his instrument’s pitch into the floor-rattling range, giving this record a bass presence you would not expect from a violin-guitar duo. With pedals engaged, his playing swells and hums restlessly, using pitch-shifting to lend ballast and gravity to Shippy’s echo-enshrouded, not-quite-repeating patterns. But he can also flip to the other extreme, offering unprocessed bowing and plucking that dances agilely upon the guitarist’s unstable sound surfaces, and spark flicking formations that wreath Shippy’s more progression-oriented passages like St. Elmo’s fire sparking around a clipper ship’s rigging. Whether jointly hurtling or patiently drifting, leave a wake worth exploring.

Chat Pile — “Tenkiller / Lake Time” (The Flenser)

Hear those lurching, filthy tones in the background of the official trailer for indie horror movie Tenkiller? See the kid with the skateboard’s shirt? “Are you scared?” Well, if you’re a fan of Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile and not a fan of twang, maybe you should be given the b-side to The Flenser’s latest cassingle that excerpts two cuts from the film’s official soundtrack — all of which Chat Pile is responsible for. The eponymous a-side is far more in the expected vein of what the band most recently (and successfully) pulled off on God’s Country over the summer, but “Lake Time (Mr. Rodan)” is akin to how The Men opted out of harsher noise-rock territory for the breezier spaces of countrified/country-fried jangle. “This is gonna be fun,” says a character toward the end of the trailer. And doesn’t it feel that way when these guys are involved? Yeehaw!

Patrick Masterson

 Cunningham / Nguyen / Shiroishi — Basket of Knives (Astral Editions) 

Basket of Knives by Cunningham / Nguyen / Shiroishi

This cassette documents the first-time convergence of three busy American improvisers from as many time zones. Drummer Thom Nguyen lives in Asheville NC, violinist Alex Cunningham resides in St Louis MO, and alto saxophonist (this time, anyway) Patrick Shiroishi is a Los Angeleno. But they were definitely in the same space when they made this recording, tuning into each other’s idiosyncratic improvisational approaches. Nguyen’s body-blow drumming draws on heavy rock parameters, but retains the suppleness of free improvisation, and the other two make judicious use of effects to warp and broaden the resources of their respective instruments. On the final track, it’s hard to say exactly how Shiroishi makes the sounds that he makes, but the vocal quality of his contributions combine with a drizzle of gong and cymbal tones to impart a ceremonial air.

Bill Meyer

 Epectase — Nécroses (Frozen Records)

Nécroses by Epectase

<p><iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=332432060/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://epectase.bandcamp.com/album/n-croses">Nécroses by Epectase</a></iframe></p>

Epectase’s terrific 2018 LP Astres was a continuous sequence of surprises and near-comic transitions, few of which should have worked and nearly all of which did: for example, from a recognizable variety of contemporary black metal to Southern-boogie guitar heroics, in a span of four minutes. This new record dispenses with those wacko ambitions and imaginative leaps, in favor of a much more consistent sound. It’s black metal, it flirts with a proggy cosmiche aesthetic and it mostly goes hard. On the LP’s closing track “Nécrose,” the more focused intensity is quite effective, issuing in a song that builds and thrills. But by that point, the record has already logged 34 minutes, including a scenery-chewing, goth-infused opening (full of pronouncements like, “Something calls my soul, a sacred truth / A divine black land,” delivered by what sounds like a young Francophilic Vincent Price) that’s hard not to giggle at. While the wide-open, pranksome environment of Astres could absorb that sort of thing, the more gravid sensibility of Nécroses sags under its weight. When guitarist Titouan le Gal is given space to riff and solo, the record cooks, but the histrionics fail to entertain.

Jonathan Shaw

 Lori Goldston—High and Low (SofaBurn)

High and Low by Lori Goldston

You probably think of the cello as a mellow, well-behaved instrument, its voice rich, autumnal and grounded. Well, Lori Goldston would like a word, because her cello, deployed for everyone from Kurt Cobain to Mirah to David Byrne, is an altogether unrulier beast. It’s prone to fevered moans and frantic saws, to intervals of peace bounded by wild scratch improvisations. She plays the cello like Paul Flaherty plays the saxophone, like she maybe wants to break it. High and Low captures her in full, mutinous form, slow moving but agitated in the long, freewheeling dissonances of “Real and Imagined,” taut and vibrating with unease in the whorl of “Crossing Over Place,” forthrightly mournful in the closer “We Miss You.” “Moss on Rock” is quite possibly as rock as a cello can ever be, buzzed with distortion and haunted with voice-like overtones and clattering with drums (that’s Danny Sasakie). Long live the disrupters, especially when they play orchestral instruments.

Jennifer Kelly

Raquel Gonzalez — Sonic Creations For Violin And Lyra (Trouble In Mind: Explorer Series)

Sonic Creations For Violin And Lyra by Raquel Gonzalez

The modern-day music obsessive may not be nourished by tunes alone. Recognizing that, Trouble In Mind has instituted the Explorer Series, a cassette sub-label devoted to figures on the fringe of sound shapery. Previous instalments have delved into drone, fingerstyle guitar, and home electronics. Raquel Gonzalez is a Chicago-based violinist and software engineer, but this electronic music recording is framed as a dialogue between two pieces of hardware. The titular lyra is not the ancient Greek stringed instrument, but the Lyra-8, an “organismic” synthesizer. Put crudely, the device has a mind of its own, and Gonzalez’ efforts to influence its output, either by playing the violin into the thing or tuning its knobs, are more conversations than acts of absolute control. One can hear the actions of bowing and knob-turning shaping the sounds, but there’s also an unruly quality to the resulting fizzes and buzzes that can be attributed to the synth doing what it’s going to do. For maximum effect, pop this tape into a safe-but-aged boombox, and feel the fuzz.

Bill Meyer

 Greet Death — New Low EP (Deathwish Inc.)

Michigan shoegazers Greet Death’s 2019 record New Hell (which some of us got to a bit late, ahem) was a strikingly hard-edged and bleak example of the form, with the extended workouts of the title track and “You're Gonna Hate What You've Done” leaving particularly deep bruises. As you might guess from the title of their new EP, their first as a quartet after adding Jackie Kalmink on bass, that bleakness hasn’t lessened a bit here. The surprise is that even as songs like “Punishment Existence” and “I Hate Everything” refine the mordant despair that makes Greet Death so distinctive (the band definitely makes music for listeners who can identify with lines like “I remember feeling relatively fine / part of me that died”), musically this new EP registers as much gentler than before, maybe even… pretty? Whether it’s the deceptively bright surge of “Panic Song” or “Your Love Is Alcohol”’s dissipated beauty, the result makes wallowing for 20 minutes or so feel more appealing than ever.

Ian Mathers  

 Party Dozen — The Real Work (Temporary Residence Ltd.)

There’s a lot of different directions you can take a sax-and-drums duo, and the Sydney-based Party Dozen (Kirsty Tickle on saxophone, Jonathan Boulet on drums and sampler) have gone with a decidedly aggro one, as is evident as soon as “The Iron Boot” opens their third LP by kicking the listener in the face. This tight, noisy 35 minutes doesn’t lack dynamic range though; in addition to ragers like “The Worker” and “Major Beef” they deftly handle the noir-ish atmospheres of “Earthly Times” and lost 1970s horror soundtrack vibes on the closing “Risky Behaviour.” Even when they bring in Nick Cave for a brief, Birthday Party-style cameo at the end of the raucous “Macca the Mutt” one of Australia’s most indelible performers kind of just folds into the duo’s assured and frequently abrasive sound. It’s hard work, but they’re very good at it.

Ian Mathers

 Pile — “Loops” (Exploding in Sound)

Don’t let the professionally shot video and polished studio overdubbing of “Loops” fool you: Rick Maguire’s still one of America’s best songwriters, still a musician capable of contorting rock conventions amid weathered lyrics and his band’s formidable backing chops. What at first sounds like it’s going to be on the thrashier side of the quartet’s oeuvre instead mutates a different way, holding steady as a sludgy midtempo rocker that adjusts for Maguire’s slurs and soars (“Tell me, are you being honest? / ‘Cause they deserve the truth from you” he stretches out toward the end) before an almost elegiac outro hinting at a whole other solo interpretation that might, in fine Pile tradition, be the best part of the whole thing. Tracked and mixed almost a year ago now, All Fiction will see a release in February; anyone with an iota of sense ought to be excited for it.

Patrick Masterson

 PinkPantheress — “Do You Miss Me?” (Warner Music UK)

Gemma Victoria Walker broke out of the TikTok trenches with the featherweight “Pain,” but her self-christened "new nostalgic" sound that amounts to wistful bedroom dance-pop akin to Air France, Doss, Clairo, Sally Shapiro or Doja Cat when she's being coy without the pyrotechnics is slowly cohering, as evidenced by “Do You Miss Me?” The template of sneaking in a couple of verses before a hummable chorus that she immediately backs away from is still here — that half-remembered feeling could arguably be the foundation of her whole ethos — but even at a slender two minutes, you get the impression this is something more fully realized, more thought out. Maybe it’s just that there are a ton of words packed into not a lot of space to Kaytranada and Phil’s muted yet insistent thump, all airy propulsion, all tension and longing. It’s clear she’s coming into her own, even if the baby steps make it harder to see at close range.

Patrick Masterson  

 Chris Pitsiokos — The Art of the Alto (Relative Pitch)

Art of the Alto by Chris Pitsiokos

Chris Pitsiokos approaches music from several directions, using a variety of tools. But his primary piece of hardware is the alto saxophone. The Art of the Alto is not his first solo recording on the instrument, but it is, as the title suggests, a window onto his efforts to move beyond being a guy who plays the horn into the realm of being an artist who makes statements with one. This is not an easy in 2022. Giants like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell have already stomped giant footprints into the earth, and the self-aware artist knows that they stand inside the behemoths’ footprints. Pitsiokos also has an eye and ear on the work of non-alto saxophonists; in particular, one can hear the influence of Evan Parker upon “Shale” (all eight of this CD’s tracks are named after rocks). Pitsiokos may not be making unprecedented imprints upon the landscape, but he navigates the territory adroitly, ably connecting points of tone, contour, and rhythm like a navigator learned enough to know where the stars are on a given night without looking over his shoulder. The saxophone is his astrolabe, but his headspace confidently contains the star chart.

Bill Meyer

  Seawind of Battery — Clockwatching (Island House)

IH-001: Clockwatching by Seawind of Battery

Mike Horn, a New York City guitarist who has made music with Goldkey and Sunblinders, spins out radiant, slow-moving clouds of lingering tone and this first outing as Seawind of Battery. Melodies push forward shyly out of long, pensive drones, yet the mix feels light as air and unconflicted. In “Summer Hymn,” the notes hang on, so that what you hear is a blend of what has come before and what’s happening now. Still, there’s no murk in the mesh of tones, just a bit of ambient glow to them. “Levels” sets a trebly tremor on repeat, then ruptures it with muscular runs of electric guitar, giving the whole piece an aura of anticipation and immanence. This is an extraordinarily serene and lovely album, which spreads calm all around it. As is often the case, Clockwatching makes time stand still.

Jennifer Kelly

The Senders — All Killer No Filler: 1997-2001 (Left for Dead)

The Senders shared stages with punk and proto-punk legends like Johnny Thunders and Wayne Kramer, were friendly with Blondie and played all the clubs that birthed NYC punk rock, but they weren’t punk rockers. Instead, this ragged four- (sometimes five-) some played a feral sort of blues rock, stripped down and ferocious. Though it occurred at basically the same time, their music was utterly at odds with the big ticket blues rock of ZZ Top, the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin. Phil Marcade, a Frenchman, led the band in a hoarse, incendiary growl and also played harmonica. Wild Bill Thompson played Chuck Berry-nodding riffs. Steve Shevlin, a former boxer, played bass and Marc Bourset drums. Some nights, Danny Ray blared on saxophone. The band covered blues classics like Howling Wolf’s “Killing Floor” and Fats Domino’s “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel,” and swaggering originals like “The Living End” with equal abandon. It was as raw as punk but bent like blues. This two-disc set captures the Senders in their late 1970s fury and, notably, includes previously unreleased live tracks with Johnny Thunders sitting in. The sound isn’t great, but the fire is unmistakable. A worthy, mostly forgotten chapter in New York City rock history.

Jennifer Kelly

 Patrick Shiroishi — Evergreen (Touch)

Evergreen by Patrick Shiroishi

Ed. Note: Due to some miscommunication and disorganization, we have two takes on this album.  Enjoy!  

Bill Meyer:

Throughout its 40 years of existence, Touch has carried itself more like a nexus of cross-platform, independent artistic practice than a record label. It has celebrated its 40th anniversary with a series of site-specific events, and not many artists have appeared at more than one of them. Patrick Shiroishi performed at two, in Santa Cruz and San Francisco, and has followed up with this digital-only release. Best known as an improvising saxophonist, Shiroishi’s work actually spans several genres and explores concerns with relationships, social justice, and personal and national history. Evergreen represents Shiroishi’s reaction to the Touch catalog. Made mainly from field recordings made at Los Angeles’ Evergreen Cemetery, which is the resting place of several of his relatives, and slow-moving synth melodies, it projects an uneasy ambience. Periodically a sax or clarinet surfaces in the mix, giving a sharper focus to the music’s diffuse melancholy, but the source of the sadness only materializes near the end, in the form of a relative’s recollection of the trials that Shiroishi’s ancestors faced during World War II.   

Bryon Hayes:

Evergreen is Patrick Shiroishi’s debut for the UK-based Touch label. Here he’s dialing back his reed vibrations in favor of ambient emanations in line with the imprint’s oeuvre. The music treads a similar path to that of Across Water, a split release with Jessica Ackerley that arrived earlier this year, in that it is as subtle and eloquent as it is passionate and poignant. Shiroishi’s visits to the eponymous cemetery, in which generations of his family lay resting, yielded the field recordings upon which he constructed this lengthy piece. He augmented these with synths and additional recordings, as well as his voice, sax, and clarinet. There is a bivalent nature to this composition, as Shiroishi used both diurnal and nocturnal field recordings to form the emotional core of the music. The daylight half is airy and expansive, while the sunset brings harsher timbres along with it. Each of these modes carries with it a distinctive beauty, and together they demonstrate Shiroishi’s mastery of emotional expression through sound.   

 Heather Trost—Desert Flowers (BaDaBing)

Desert Flowers by Heather Trost

“Frog and Toad Are Friends” whorls and billows with euphoria, its giddy synths twining out like plastic tendrils, its vocals denatured to breathy “ahs” and buried back in the mix. There is no audible trace of Heather Trost’s other instrument, the occasionally melancholy violin. This hand-clapped, wordless tribute to a well-loved children’s book has a fantastical air, as does, indeed, the rest of this wide-eyed with wonder collection. Trost’s voice is high and calm and uninflected, a la Julee Cruise; she could be singing for children. “Blue Fish,” the one from the Flux Gourmet soundtrack, proceeds in a stately, harpsichord-ish fashion, its weirdness (which, by all accounts, echoes the film) subterranean, unconfrontational and unsettling. Trost works again with her husband and Hawk and Hacksaw Partner, Julian Barnes, to create tiny, glowing paradises that are just a little off.  

Jennifer Kelly

 Use Knife — The Shedding of Skin (Viernulvier)

Use Knife started out as a Belgian modular synth duo, but before this, their debut album, they met Brussels-based Iraqi musician Saif Al-Qaissy, who quickly became part of the band. The Shedding of Skin definitely still has plenty of that original focus on analogue, outsider electronic music, but a significant and successful infusion of influences, forms, and instruments from Arabic music gives the trip real distinctiveness and bite. Mixed at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango by Jerusalem in My Heart’s Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (who also plays buzuk and synth on the Coil-esque centrepiece “To Feed the Gentry”), the six songs here (including a brief, yearning reading of traditional song “Ed Wana Ed”) aim somewhere between the club and the experimental atelier, or possibly some kind of ritual space. The real success here is making music that feels like it would work equally well in any of those areas, even if you’re just listening on headphones.

Ian Mathers

 Yard Act Vs. Mad Professor — “Pour More” (Rough Trade)

Post-punk’s affinity for dub goes right back to Public Image Ltd.’s earliest experiments fucking around on Richard Branson’s dime (RIP Keith Levene), so there shouldn’t have been any shocked faces in the house hearing how Leeds’ Yard Act enlisted legendary producer Mad Professor to remix The Overload as The Overdub (natch). The latter — who’s worked with Lee “Scratch” Perry, Sly and Robbie, Sade and Massive Attack — gives “Pour Another” the dub touch by minimizing James Smith’s garrulous observations and emphasizing the rhythm section in a rework that wouldn’t sound out of place at a DFA party 20 years ago or upstairs at Eric’s 20 years before that. Available exclusively on vinyl through Rough Trade at the moment, but like everything else, that’ll surely change in due course.

Patrick Masterson  

 Yleiset Syyt — Toisten Todellisuus (La Vida Es Un Mus)

Toisten Todellisuus by Yleiset Syyt

This raucous compilation release from rousing punks Yleiset Syyt may have you flashing on 1984 — not for the street punk vibes (although you can hear some echoes of Oi! in this Finnish band’s sing-along choruses), more so for the thrilling realization that many 1980s kids (ahem) had upon reading the international scene reports in MRR. “Holy shit! There’s hardcore bands in Ljubljana! A-and in Helsinki!” Yep, still are, as this record evidences, and Yleiset Syyt are a mighty outfit. The band synthesizes some of the best elements of street punk, melodic hardcore and anarcho-punk, creating songs with hummable parts and lots of lose-your-shit moshpit moments. Toisten Todellisuus (roughly “the reality of others”) includes the band’s S/T EP from 2019 and Umpikujamekanismi from 2021, for 20 minutes of unstoppable punk energy. These Laplanders play fast and hard, providing as much pleasure as punishment in their tough tunes. Check out the killer guitar work in “Bileet Ohi” and the crazy great riffs in “Jatkuvaa Sotaa.” Punk’s not dead, America. Better listen up.