#beshken

Ilia Belorukov — Someone Has Always Come (Sublime Retreat)

Someone Has Always Come by Ilia Belorukov

Evidence suggests that Ilia Belorukov is allergic to idleness. Besides running the Intonema label and playing reeds with improvisers, including Birgit Ulher, David Stackenas, Vasco Trilla and Jason Kahn, he pursues a sideline in bleakly atmospheric electronic music. Someone Has Always Come slots into the latter category. The album projects a massive presence, with long, low tones looming like moisture-burdened cloudbanks seen just before dusk. Squint with your ears, however, and you’ll hear a lot more happening, although it’s not always clear what it is. Electrical sounds sizzle and pulse, and radio captures mutter, flickering deep in the murk. Chase them with your ears, and you’ll happen upon another layer of sound, mostly collected on Russian streets and train platforms. Turn it up loud enough for everything to register and you’ll find yourself feeling very small indeed.

Bill Meyer

 Beshken — Pantomime (MATH Interactive)

Beshken layers frantic cybernetic grooves atop mysterious surges of tone, creating a brightly colored, precisely drawn alternate universe of musical sensation. The disc’s animating personality is the cover’s cartoon cat, a mime who scrambles, jitters and scampers headlong through the album’s many part sonic structures. To support his adventures, Pantomime combines live and programmed musical textures in an antic, continually shifting way. That’s why “Social Suicide” is alternately so fractious and lyrical, with scratchy, bumpy, syncopated drum cadences (that’s Matt Bent on kit) running into velvety lush swells of synth and vocal choruses.  It’s not quite clear why you’d center such intricate, engaging soundscapes on a non-speaking character, but Pantomime is like a dream that brushes past linear logic on its way towards its own internal way of making sense. Musically, it reminds me a lot of Mattias Aguayo’s giddy rhythmic electro-pop, though set in an anime movie, not the world around us.

Jennifer Kelly

 The Body & OAA — Enemy of Love (Thrill Jockey)

Enemy of Love by The Body & OAA

By this point it’s a certainty that the Body loves a collaboration. Since 2015, the band has released nine full-length collaborative records (including multiple outings with Thou, Full of Hell and Uniform), more than twice the number of LPs the Body has released under its own name. Whichever way you want to total things, it’s an impressive amount of music, much of it as excoriating as it is great. This new collaborative record with producer and digital musician OAA (artistic sobriquet of AJ Wilson) sharpens the Body’s ongoing exploration of electronic music, and issues in some ear-splitting sounds. For all its outsized clamor and crunch, Enemy of Love is a bit soulless — which may be the point. You don’t make songs like “Barren of Joy” or “Miserable Freedom” in order to sustain anyone’s tremulous grip on the meaning of existence. But what has always made the Body’s music so hair-raisingly effective has been their engagement with the embodied (hello) nature of pain and dread, its human dimensions. OAA, on the other hand, is a creature of Clubland, which has little interest in mortification or fear. Enemy of Love has some tracks that generate excitement (“Fortified Tower”) and interesting engagements with digitized noise (“Obsessed Luxury”), but it all feels a little too produced, too studied and removed from the rigors of the flesh. Except for the ears. They’ll still hurt, plenty.

Jonathan Shaw 

 Cryptum — Vile Emergence (Caligari Records)

Vile Emergence by CRYPTUM

Caligari Records has a sharp ear for emerging underground metal bands, and Cryptum’s 17-minute blast of thrashy death metal deserves your attention, if you’re into this sort of thing. The Joliet-based band plays fast and filthy, with particular emphasis on the speed of the proceedings. It makes sense. Band members Kyle Pooley (skin thumpin’) and Carlos Santini (git grindin’) also play in gross-out, deathy thrash act Molder. Like that band, Cryptum does not produce elevated experiences; you get four three-to-five minute portions of toothsome, riff-rich death metal, celebrating the gruesome aesthetics of vaguely SF-oriented horror: think the famous sequence in Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) during which Norris’s head removes itself and slowly dangles its way to the floor, hanging by gloopy and multicolored connective tissue, and you’ve got the general idea. But while it’s not pretty, Vile Emergence sure manages to be fun. Santini’s leads are engagingly gonzo, and Matthew Aguilar’s bass fills out an athletic bottom end that pummels even as it shifts from canter to gallop. Give the tape a spin or two — or maybe meet it on its own terms: coat it in something wet and malodorous and munch on it.

Jonathan Shaw

 Hunter Diamond + Charles Rumback — We Stand (Curio)

We Stand by Hunter Diamond + Charles Rumback

We Stand inaugurates the Metal and Wood series, which is a project undertaken by Chicago-based reeds player Hunter Diamond. Diamond has been on the city’s scene for a number of years, performing in a variety of leadership and side-person capacities, but Metal and Wood seems to be both a self-assessment and a statement of identity. It will comprise a series of duos with drummers, each offered as a download or a short-run, blue-faced compact disc. This is an exposed, no-net setting for any improviser, and the first thing that We Stand shows is that Diamond knows how to pick ‘em. Rumback is a highly sympathetic accompanist, ready with the right or pitch to enhance atmosphere and maintain momentum. He is attentive to qualities of sound, leaving room for Diamond to express shapes, develop lines and vary attacks unimpeded. On tenor sax, Diamond adopts a gruff, frayed tone; on clarinet, his low notes are warm and imploring. There will ultimately be five more releases in this series; other participants include Mike Reed, Dana Hall, Lucas Gillan, Justin Peake and Quin Kirchner.

Bill Meyer

Marcelo Dos Reis — Glaciar (Miria)

Glaciar by Marcelo dos Reis

No matter your view, the time will come when you want to see something different. For Lisbon resident Marcelo Dos Reis, the grass is greener elsewhere phenomenon may have impelled him to say, “enough of the beach, give me some ice and snow!” The guitarist’s solo album Glaciar evolved from a residency in the Alps, and the mountainous echo seems to influenced its sound, since his bold, single-note leads are often chased by fading echoes of themselves. His amplified nylon-stringed guitar even takes on an almost Santana-like sustain on “II.IIII” (even though it is available on CD and digital formats, the album is sequenced like an LP), with bold, single-note leads sailing over chunky loops.  The outcome is a far cry from the discrete abstractions he plays with Chamber 4 or the acidic textures he contributes to Fail Better! But hey, sometimes you want to go somewhere different, and he hasn’t abandoned poised stance that makes him a valued contributor in those ensembles.

Bill Meyer

 The Howard Hughes Suite — High & Lonesome (self-released)

High & Lonesome by The Howard Hughes Suite

Cowboys don't typically live in London. Then again, they don't typically make ambient Western music that stretches the tones of a pedal steel guitar. The Howard Hughes Suite specializes in just that sort of thing, varying his levels of weirdness and melodicism. New album High & Lonesome focuses on the ambient side of his work, but where Steel Hymns followed more in the footsteps of composers like Brian Eno, this collection springs from the American Southwest. The pleasure in the disc lies not just in the way that the artist turns that topography into textured music (a nice addition to a burgeoning genre), but also in his ability to expand the tone of his guitar. The Howard Hughes Suite explains that everything on the album came from a pedal steel, and at times it's almost difficult to believe. He wrings a synthesizer or organ sound out of it for his foundational tones, but then alternates from country strings to something almost brassy to develop his pieces. The album was born from anxiety and sleeplessness and, in response, it effectively soothes and warms. Closer “Hinterland” is too broad in scope to serve as a lullaby, but the Howard Hughes Suite does find a little optimism in his dark nights. However he twists his guitar sounds, he finds a proper way to deliver that peace.  

Justin Cober-Lake

  Kariu Kenji — Sekai (Bruit Disques Direct)

Kariu Kenji - Sekai by bruit direct disques

Sekai, or “world,” is a lockdown album, recorded unaided by its author Kenji Kariu (also of the unclassifiable punk/experimental/prog band OWKMJ, which OMG, lookie here!). Largely quiet and shaded with melancholy, it twists the contours of gentle bedroom pop into oddball, evocative shapes. The main ingredients in play on the title track are wistful vocals, a droning, wheedling organ and some outsized crashes of percussion. Slumberous textures, indeed. They wouldn’t be out of place on one of the softer Yo La Tengo albums. And yet these quiet components are canted sideways into edgy, disturbing patterns. It’s sweet pop with the bottom dropping out. Likewise, “Atelier” has a gentle, bossa nova sway, lit by the twinkle of electric keyboards, punctuated by finger snaps. But while it drifts towards easy listening, the cut also has its own strange laws of gravity. You’re in a pleasant, well-lighted space where none of the usual rules apply.

Jennifer Kelly

Kill Alters — Armed To The Teeth L.M.O.M.M. (Hausu Mountain)

Armed To The Teeth L.M.O.M.M. by Kill Alters

Beset by severe OCD and Tourette’s syndrome the mother of composer/vocalist Bonnie Baxter obsessively recorded her daily conversations and arguments. On Armed To The Teeth L.M.O.M.M. Baxter and her cohorts, producer Nicos Kennedy and drummer Hisham Bharoocha, use samples from these recordings to create an unnervingly intense maelstrom at the juncture of industrial techno, noise rock and hyperpop. It mirrors the mother’s quest to control the chaos in her mind and the child’s daily attempt to negotiate that chaos. The result is a disturbing but nuanced portrait of their relationship in which distress mixes with dark humor, tenderness and the realization that both were victims of the misogyny that punishes unruly women. It closes with the mother— “Let me find a song, a real good one, for you to cherish and remember me by.” This is not easy listen but it will stay in your mind.

Andrew Forell

 Leider — A Fog Like Liars Loving (Beacon Sound)

A Fog Like Liars Loving by Leider

It is hard to convey how sad and ghostly these songs are. They drape funereal grey colors of cello and viola and flute over slow thumps of rhythm. They conjure boggy shadows through which singer (and violist) Annie Gårlid floats spectral tones and puzzling phrases “Nose…bleed,” “Do you find it funny?” and “Love her, love her.” Composer Rishin Singh made these haunting pieces out of the barest thrum of mournful vibration, a dirge, a lament, a banshee wail tamped down to low volume and disembodied. The longest cut, “Great Expectations,” hazards a long, glistening treble tone undergirded by the grumbling consonance of cello. It proceeds so slowly as to hardly move at all, floating between rooms like a mourner after a funeral. Sorrow accumulates in soft suffocating piles, but then, after enough of that, the viola turns frantic and dissonance. A scree of tortured strings rears up suddenly in shock and disbelief. So much to grieve over, so much to rage against. So much fog and death.  

Jennifer Kelly

 A Place To Bury Strangers — See Through You (Dedstrange)

See Through You is an oddly sequenced, strangely listless entry on the APTBS catalog. Leader Oliver Ackerman with Sarah and John Fedowitz on drums and bass don’t really hit their straps until the last third of the album with the rollicking bass driven “Broken” and the garage girl group smear of “I Don’t Know How You Do It’ with Sarah Fedowitz sharing vocals. The final track “Love Reaches Out” cops Peter Hook’s bass line from “Ceremony” albeit with Bernard Summer’s diffident vocal styling along for the ride. Elsewhere, various approximations of The Scientists’ swampy noise and Ministry level brutalism never quite overcome the flat production that undermines some impressively heavy playing and Ackerman’s ear for melody.   

Andrew Forell

David Ramirez — Rules and Regulations

After taking some stylistic adventures over his last two albums, singer-songwriter David Ramirez strips it back for his new EP Rules and Regulations, returning somewhat toward the folkier sound of his earlier work. It might be related to the process, as he and his band recorded these six tracks live in the studio. When “Can You Hear the Silence?” stares deep into a lonely desert night, the immediacy of the recording gives it a boost. Ramirez wrote these songs over the past few years but discovered they didn't quite fit on any of his albums. That fact might suggest that only hardcore fans will need Rules, but the cuts hold up well, pointing more to the focus of his full-length releases than to the quality of these pieces. The top two performances come at the end of the disc. Ramirez has been performing “Put in the Work” on tour for a while (such as touring has existed in the past while), and getting it on record gives us an excellent treat. This rendition leans heavily on country influences and a certain weariness rather than the big-voice stage performance, giving new insight to the lyrics. Closer “I Believe You” came as a response to the Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford hearings. Ramirez turns his support for a survivor into a broader work of compassion through a classic melody, giving a beautiful finish to yet another valuable EP from the songwriter.

Justin Cober-Lake 

 Jana Rush — “Lonely (Feat. DJ Paypal)” (Planet Mu)

Wanna see the most Chicago thing February had to offer this side of a snowstorm? Then take a look at the latest video from Windy City footwork producer Jana Rush and Berlin-based Teklife affiliate DJ Paypal, which features dancers under Lower Wacker Drive’s sodium glow putting in the moves to a track that snags a line from Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” and trips it up almost beyond recognition. To me, Rush is at her best footworking jazz samples (as it was with “Moanin’” on last year’s excellent Painful Enlightenment), though perhaps that’s too purist a way of looking at the style given what else she’s proven she can do. The forthcoming Dark Humor EP, out in March, wedges this one right in the middle of the track list; what lies on either side is a tantalizing prospect, sure to be one of the year’s most notable releases — but it’s also possible she’s led with her strongest foot forward here. The shape of jazz to come is right.

Patrick Masterson

 Uwalmassa — Malar (Divisi62)

Malar by Uwalmassa

Uwalmassa is the home group of Divisi62, a Jakarta-based “sound and visual arts label” that’s existed since 2016 and is led primarily by producers RMP and Wahono. What’s going on here is very much a blend of haunted atmospherics (even featuring vocals on “Putung”), rhythmic workouts and local flavor of the finest freshness — or, in more formal artist statement-type jargon, “marrying acoustic sonics with a contemporary outlook that reflects their Indonesian identity.” Their backgrounds are undeniable in tracks like “Majuh” or “Caruk,” which sound like a Sumatran SND or Dakono Demdike Stare. The level of intricacy and cohesion to these songs, which never outstay their welcome, is stunning for someone interested in sound design — but even if you’re not, there’s enough going on here to do more than merely stroke your beard at.

Patrick Masterson

 Ben Wheeler — Lurji T’algha (Crash Symbols)

Lurji T'algha by Ben Wheeler

American ethnomusicologist Ben Wheeler has been living in Tbilisi, Georgia for almost a decade. In addition to researching the music of the Caucasus region, he both practices and teaches modular synthesis. He also runs Mountains of Tongues, a project that seeks to promote the musical traditions of the locale he now calls home. In Lurgi T’algha Wheeler expresses another passion of his: Soviet-era electronics. He conjured up the six soundscapes presented here using an East German synth and a Soviet effects unit, aided by a drum machine and a loop pedal. The title of this cassette is Georgian for “blue wave” and upon listening, one immediately gets the impression of being unmoored and drifting in a vast ocean, or perhaps floating in space and inhaling the luminous gases of a far away nebula. These soothing yet surrealist images begin to crystallize and eventually erupt when Wheeler deploys snappy static pulses, evoking the electronic experiments of early industrial music. This all comes to a head when “Spider Crab” appears, shedding any semblance of cacophony and leaving only a pointillist landscape of synthetic bliss in its wake. Crash Symbols provides a stunning visual accompaniment in the form of an eight-panel j-card, the imagery on which is striking and could pass as the graphical score to this dreamlike journey in electronic sound.