#brian weitz

Brahmashiras — Trinitite (Caligari)

This new LP from Russian miscreants Brahmashiras puts real pressure on the adequacy of several subgenre tags the underground uses to label (and, thereby, at least implicitly to value) disparate musics. Metalpunk? Black metal? Blackened punk? Even — ugh — blackened crust? None feels accurate or sufficient to the intensity, nastiness and tangible rage radiating through the songs on Trinitite. Likely it’s better to play the record and let the tunes speak for themselves. One assumes the shrieked and shouted lyrics are in Russian, so some of us will have a hard time understanding what’s spoken, or howled, or moaned. But there’s nothing mysterious about the furious furrow the riffs in “Exodus” will carve through your brain, or the crusty high drama that blazes through “Forty Minutes.”

Jonathan Shaw

Citrinitas — Unending Descent (Caligari)

“Outsider black metal”? That’s what some folks are terming the music of Citrinitas, a mysterious Oulu-based project. Seems to this reviewer that all underground black metal seeks an outside — outside conventional culture; outside traditional concepts of pleasure and moral right; outside mainstream commercial activity (well, this last one is sort of tough to argue if you have a Bandcamp page, but fair enough, Unending Descent isn’t being handled by Sony Music-owned Century Media…). Even given those assumptions and attitudes, it’s possible to note the profound weirdness of Citrinitas’ music, which is inbent, blurred and full of disturbing eddies and semi-human emanations of noise. One imagines that the consciousness responsible for the music must also be inbent, blurry and disturbed. Outsider? Unending Descent is certainly only semi-listenable, in all the best senses of that term. More, please.

Jonathan Shaw

Werner Durand & John Krausbauer — Black Seraphim (Moving Furniture)

Werner Durand and John Krausbauer are both explorers of just intonation, probing the spaces between the semitones found in the Western musical tradition. Durand builds his own wind instruments to explore alternative scales, while Krausbauer deploys his violin. Black Seraphim is their debut collaboration, a nearly 30-minute-long drone workout that winds the upper and lower registers together with searing passion. Krausbauer’s bowing is slow but aggressive, his violin howling as if spirits are trapped inside and seeking to escape. Durand unleashes a highly textured bass drawl with hurricane force. As the two energies meet, a third voice reveals itself: a fiery demon that dances with a sinister cadence. Its whirling flame blazes with a forceful roar, joyful in its uncanny gallop. This relentless intensity is captivating, a delightful resonance for us to behold.

Bryon Hayes

Figure Eight — “until the sun swallows the earth” b/w “hummingbird” (self-release)

Figure Eight drifts at the softer, more diffuse end of the dream-pop-into-shoegaze spectrum, layering massive, shimmering auras of guitar onto tetchier, growling bass. The singer, Abby Goeser, sings with piercing clarity but blunted edges, floating down the descants like a feather wafting downward. Her partner, Nash Rood, injects this seraphic sound with strife and friction, a muted tsunami of noise always looming but never obliterating. The pair of them mostly encompass this Oakland band, but they’ve brought on a drummer, too, another engine and throughline for this diaphanous music. Put it on and fall backwards into something very, very soft.

Jennifer Kelly

Geologist — Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? (Drag City)

For his debut solo record, Animal Collective member Brian Weitz wields hurdy gurdy drones that grow into fractalized melodies. His frequent muse, the arid plain of the Sonoran Desert, continues to inspire him, encouraging a warm yet muted color palette for these songs, which range from psych rock bangers to motorik soundscapes to near-ambient drone feasts. Weitz doesn’t go it alone: he’s enlisted a number of compatriots to assist. Three drummers (Emma Garau, Ryan Oslance, and Alianna Kalaba provide the propulsion, while Shane McCord, Mikey Powers, and Adam Lion bring clarinet, cello, and vibraphone ornamentation to his kaleidoscopic tunes. Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? is quite the serpentine journey, taking us to a variety of locales, yet it’s sinuous and supple, a testament to Weitz’ songcraft. He sparkles and shimmers with his Animal Collective pals, but he’s equally inventive on his own.

Bryon Hayes

Danny Kamins — Pracownia Wschodnia/The Creamery (Musical Eschatology)

Houston-based sopranino and baritone saxophonist Danny Kamins ponders the improvisational continuum and its spatial circumstances on this solo recording. Half of the music comes from a concert in Arkansas, on which Kamins limited himself to the smaller horn and the rest from an earlier concert in Poland. Both feature the echoing acoustics of the spaces in which they were played as transformative influences, hitting that perfect spot where an instrument no longer sounds quite like itself, but where the tones are still perceivable and unobstructed. Likewise, each works a fundamental tune of yore (“Body And Soul” in Arkansas, Coltrane’s “Living Space” in Poland) into a journey through each horn’s personal potentialities. When Kamins starts circular breathing, his output takes a slow corkscrew trip into an altered state that feels quite rewarding to access.

Bill Meyer

Wednesday Knudsen — Atrium (Spinster/Feeding Tube)

In parallel to her work with Stella Kola, Pigeons, and the Weeping Bong Band, this multi-instrumentalist maintains a solitary pursuit of contoured sound. Atrium is a double LP (or CD, if you’re a more frugal materialist) of manageably dimensioned reclines into soft texture and evocative shape. On the majority of the album’s eleven tracks, long, curving tones from reverb-plumped woodwinds unfurl in slow motion, often layered atop each other in a more-is-more equation; the soprano sax-forward pieces are a little too soft focus, but the denser pieces are imbued with grave stateliness. Spare bass guitar notes pulse and decay like beneficent radiation on “Skyline I,” and when Knudsen switches to piano on “Many A Happy Hour,” the music empties out so that only the outlines remain, like the framework of a wooden house to be.

Bill Meyer

Raymond MacDonald — Desire Lines No 2: The Gathering Of The MacDonalds (HYG)

Pibroch is a traditional form of Scottish bagpipe music that floats complex melodic variations of a theme over a long drone. Raymond MacDonald isn’t the first to point out the similarity between pibroch and the output of saxophonists who use circular breathing to support long flows of intricate fingering, but he might be the first to take the tradition head-on. This album comprises three tilts at the titular tune, which apparently contains enough melodic information to set the alto saxophonist on three fairly distinct courses of unbroken line-twirling. It’s absorbing stuff, but the album art contains explicit acknowledgment that not all MacDonalds are drawn to it; the sleeve’s gatefold reproduces an increasingly inchoate text of protest by his daughter, who objected IN ALL CAPS to him practicing this material at breakfast time.

Bill Meyer

Christian Marien Quartett — Beyond The Fingertips (MarMade)

This record is all about band interaction over the duration of a set, so let’s acknowledge the participants up front. Drummer Christian Marien, the quartet’s leader and composer, is joined by electric guitarist Jasper Stadhouders, double bassist Antonion Borghini, and Tobias Delius on tenor saxophone and clarinet. Astute readers may already be disconnecting from this review in order to hear some new Delius, and if you are one of them, I can’t fault your attention management strategy; he’s in great form here, as are his fellows. Marien’s tunes tap into the participants’ fluent negotiations of the zones where jazz and related musical methods converge; you’ll hear elements of South African folk and Caribbean dances alongside harmolodic rhythmic turbulence and blues-steeped melodies. But his decision to present each side (there’s a vinyl edition, and its divisions are reproduced in digital formats) as a continuous performance places said sturdy compositions within a larger dynamic process in which the transitions between tunes and emotional tones is as important as the tunes themselves. Don’t hang on, just enjoy the ride.