#esmerine

Mattie Barbier — Threads (Sofa)

threads by Mattie Barbier

When isn’t a solo album a solo album? In the case of Threads, when the solitary musician consciously duets with their surroundings. The CD documents trombone and euphonium player Mattie Barbier’s encounter with the Tank Center for Sonic Arts, which is a repurposed water tank parked in the gravel near the high desert town of Rangely, CO. Its seven-story height and bowed floor contribute to an extraordinarily nuanced acoustic quality, whose combination of lengthy delay and ribcage-rumbling resonance amplify the grain and growl of the performer’s long tones. Barbier proves a worthy respondent to their environment, patiently placing their sounds and varying their volume to make each of the albums tracks a discreet, thought-zapping trip. You’re never alone with your own echo.

Bill Meyer

 Circuit Des Yeux & Claire Rousay — Sunset Poem (Matador)

Circuit Des Yeux’s album, -io, is such an elaborate production that more simply isn’t an option. So, it’s not the fact that Claire Rousay’s remixes cut things back that is startling, but just how far she goes. This digital-only EP lasts just ten minutes, and most of the three songs Rousay has chosen to reimagine aren’t there. Orchestral passages are reduced to blurs of sound, and epic, densely scripted songs to nearly wordless fragments of cirrhus melody. Each track feels like a memory, with structure and narrative stripped away, leaving only essential impressions.

Bill Meyer 

 Katelyn Clark & Isaiah Ceccarelli — Landmarks (Another Timbre)

Landmarks by Katelyn Clark & Isaiah Ceccarelli

Montreal-based organist Katelyn Clark and percussionist Isaiah Ceccarelli play early and contemporary classical music. But when they sit down to play together, they filter their professional disciplines through an experimental spirit that has little to do with what’s generally labeled as experimental music these days. The eight pieces on Landmarks, their second album, are either fairly long or very short, but they all center on investigations of a continuous, looming sound world that is rooted in the sounds of bygone centuries, but enacts processes that may be informed by contemporary compositional approaches, but aren’t governed by them. Clark’s melodies are patient and economical, drawing you into a stillness that is shielded from distraction by Ceccarelli’s ceremonially rung bells and subliminal synth drones. Like Kali Malone and Áine O’Dwyer, the duo links the music of past centuries to the present; given that we’ve spent the last few years in another time of plague, showing that we haven’t learned how to handle things any better, it’s comforting to feel like the better angels of antiquity and the present are also connected.

Bill Meyer  

 crys cole — Other Meetings (Black Truffle)

Other Meetings by crys cole

The pandemic and its ensuing lockdowns put many people’s lives on hold, but it was especially devastating to sound artists and experimental musicians, who were used to globetrotting between festivals and events around the world. Many people, labels and organizations responded with the intention of keeping the creative flame burning, using whatever means at their disposal. British label and distribution house Boomkat started the Documenting Sound series, encouraging artists to experiment with what they had on hand in the vicinity of their homes or nearby surroundings. Canadian sound artist crys cole’s input to the series was Other Meetings, a collision of field recordings, contact microphoned objects and unexpected mellifluousness. It’s a travelogue in miniature, an intimate look at cole’s recent sojourns folded into each other. Domesticity and adventure become one and the same as she weaves the sounds of her immediate surroundings with those of the outside world. Now, years removed from enforced isolation, Black Truffle presents cole’s compositions remastered, with new liner notes, allowing the music to tell a new story. Other Meetings initially reflected specific circumstances, but its reverberations emanate far beyond the original singularity. This might just be cole’s Big Bang.

Bryon Hayes

  Lawrence English — Approach (Room40)

Approach by Lawrence English

Yoshihisa Tagami’s manga Grey paints a bleak image of a dystopian future riddled with warring towns surrounded by wastelands and controlled by a distributed network of computers. It was one of the first manga to make its way into Western hands, and it reached an adolescent Lawrence English at a particularly challenging moment in his life. With Approach, English reflects on his early memories of youth and of how seemingly banal events in our lives have drastic ripple effects, creating who we are. It is an homage to that formative manga that set English on course for personal discovery. At first listen, the record is as desolate as its subject matter, a swarm of dark tones and monochromatic vistas. Upon deeper examination, faint splinters of light become distinguishable. What could be bursts of faint radio chatter or cleverly combined frequencies claw their way to the surface of English’s miasmic tone clouds. This faint ray of hope goes against the ultimately tragic tone of Grey but proves that courage breeds the potential for positive momentum.

Bryon Hayes

  Esmerine — Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (Constellation)

The title Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More might seem to fit our current moment neatly, but the first record in five years from the experimental, all-embracing post-classical quartet Esmerine is actually named after a book about the “last Soviet generation.” Fittingly to both that moment and our own, the music here (first started during a French residency in 2019) seems to deal with loss and maybe even grief in ways that are too nuanced and complicated for simple answers. Recording sessions at cellist Rebecca Foon’s converted barn featured the piano that all four members sprinkle throughout these tracks, weaving around the strings (from Foon and multi-instrumentalist Brian Sanderson), Bruce Cawdron’s marimba and other percussion, and most recent addition Phillippe Charbonneau’s bass. Whether it’s the changing moods of the multi-part “Entropy,” the way “Imaginary Pasts” evokes the electric mainline pulse of Spiritualized by very different means and with a very different feeling, or even the relatively straightforward plangency of “Hymn For Rob,” these songs’ structural and melodic restlessness and slowly blooming moments of beauty honour equally the “forever” and “no more” parts of the equation. 

Ian Mathers 

 Fucked Up — Oberon (Tankcrimes)

Oberon by Fucked Up

It’s at least a little ironic that, for a band as maximalist and massive as Fucked Up, an EP ends up being the record on which those instincts to GO BIG issue in too much hyperbole and unendurable pretension. Some of their recent records (Dose Your Dreams, Year of the Horse) worked precisely because of their audaciousness and scale. Oberon is a relatively scant 22 minutes long, but it’s hard to sit through. The title track, replete with brownies and other trappings of fairytale lore, is among the silliest things the band has ever recorded, and it doesn’t help that they hammer, crunch and howl away with apparent deadly seriousness. Perhaps there’s a wink that this reviewer just isn’t catching. Fucked Up seems to want to make boiling sludge on Oberon, but at best, this is a simmering cup of Campbell’s soup, warmed on a hotplate. The record closes with an arrangement of Saint-Saens’ “The Aquarium,” for hardcore instruments. It’s a fun idea, but unfortunately it ends up feeling as bloviated as the rest of the record, and the whole thing is just a bummer. It might be really nice if Fucked Up would write some punk songs again.

Jonathan Shaw

 Gift — Momentary Presence (Dedstrange)

Brooklyn based quintet Gift’s debut album is out on Oliver Ackerman’s label Dedstrange and you can hear the affinities been Gift and Ackerman’s A Place To Bury Strangers although Gift tend toward an airy euphoria rather the brutal noisemaking of the former. Not that T J Freda, Jessica Gurewitz, Kallan Campbell, Justin Hrabovsky and Cooper Naess are averse to a little propulsive thrash, but they are most effective when their combination of neo-psychedelica and shoegaze evokes a gravity-free feeling of timeless drift. The swirl and shimmer of sustained guitar chords, arpeggiated keyboards, vocals that bob around in the mix with an insinuating whisper, outbreaks of eastern influenced solos and the kind of maximalist comfort that the evokes The Moody Blues’ search for the lost chord in a garage in early 90s Manchester. With pristine production and a meticulous mix Gift magpie their influences into a warm nest of sound that demands and deserves to played loud and often.

Andrew Forell

 Homeskin — Itch Ecstasy (Self-released)

Itch Ecstasy by Homeskin

Homeskin is the weirdo, creepy-crawly solo project of Garry Brents, who puts out tons of music. He records much of it with Chris Francis in the always-interesting blackened skramz outfit Cara Neir, and even more as Gonemage, a black metal-chiptune project that’s as bonkers as that combination sounds. Homeskin is bonkers, too, but in a deeply paranoid, twitchy mode. Songs are called “Tiny Bodies Burrowed in the Ear,” “Raw to the Touch” and “Back of the Closet You Thrive Painfully.” Yikes. Guitars warble and tangle, voices groan and babble, rhythms quicken and skew. If scabies or roundworm had a musical complement, this would be it. Too much doom-scrolling, too much crack, maybe too much time to make music — it’s hard to say what moves a human to compose songs like these. It's also pretty great that Brents has done so. Against the odds, Itch Ecstasy ends up being a lot more pleasurable than not. For sure, there are extended periods during which the record sounds like the inside of someone else’s nightmare, but because it’s not your nightmare, it’s sort of fun to walk around in there. Just don’t forget the anti-fungal cream.

Jonathan Shaw

 loscil — The Sails p.1 and p.2 (Frond)

The Sails p.1 by loscil

loscil has been relatively quiet since last year’s stellar Clara LP, putting out a genuinely deluxe edition involving a photo book and some new extended songs from the same source material but otherwise lying low. Even this two-part project isn’t so much what loscil does next as a summing up of some of what Scott Morgan has been doing this whole time. These 18 tracks were all composed to accompany various dance projects over the last eight years. Listening to them with human movement in mind does make all of the varied efforts here even more evocative, particularly when they showcase something less typical of loscil’s established palette. “Container,” on The Sails p.1, is maybe the closest Morgan has come to the dancefloor in some time, at least initially, and the way the track settles into a kind of pulsing, ambivalent menace is spellbinding. Even the more typical songs here for loscil (the hypnotically submarine, the beautifully becalmed drone, the austere soundscapes) stand up to anything he’s put out more formally. Even without the intended context (one of them never performed, several others unlikely to be repeated), the result is almost an alternate universe greatest hits of Morgan’s gorgeously calibrated ambient/drone works.

Ian Mathers  

  Who Remembers Light by More Klementines

More Klementines — Who Remembers Light (Twin Lakes/Feeding Tube)

Notice the absence of a question mark at the end of this album’s name. This isn’t some Led Zeppelin-like, “do you remember laughter?”-style question; this is a decisive statement, whose specificity is in keeping with the fact that there are twice as many tracks on this LP as there were on its eponymous predecessor. The members of this New England-based trio declare themselves to be keepers of the light, the ones who remember what those of us lost in the current murk have forgotten or cannot perceive. The torch they hold aloft is one of psychedelic enlightenment, accessed by fearless, forward-motion jamming, and since this is a four-track album, there’s still plenty of room for sprawl. But each cut points at a different point on the lysergic compass, and only the shortest, the solitary vocal track, goes off course. By turns turbulent and patient, these jams stand ready to take you where you need to go.

Bill Meyer

 Fredrik Rasten & Léo Dupleix — Delve II (Insub)

Delve II by FREDRIK RASTEN & LÉO DUPLEIX

If you asked Fredrik Rasten to sit down and play you a tune, he surely could; he picks some sturdy ones on Alasdair Roberts’ latest LP. But if you asked him to play what’s on his mind, he’d strum a chord. Then he’d do it again. After a spell, you might notice an accumulation of varied tones rising from the chord, instigated either by subtle variations in attack, or simply by the overtones stirred by twelve strings vibrating in close proximity. That’s pretty much what happens on Delve II, with one added variable — the spinet (a sort of parlor harpsichord) of Léo Dupleix. Dupleix’s brittle, quicker-decaying sounds are the barely submerged rocks that make Rasten’s oceanic strums by turns shallower and more turbulent. This is minimalism boiled down to its essence — one idea, tested from every angle, with every weaker aspect steamed away.

Bill Meyer

  Laika Sakini – Paloma (Modern Love)

Laila Sakini seems always at the edge of disappearing, of losing the threads that hold us to the earth, to each other and that compel us to make stories. The music on Paloma is like snatches barely heard through walls. Wisps of melody, a voice barely singing what are barely words, tentative piano notes, scrapes of violin, breathe through a recorder. Fragments of a mystery you need to define before it can be explained. Her titles like “The Light that Flickers in the Mirror” and “The Missing Page” tell part of the story but even when the music becomes more direct, more assertive, the enigma remains. On “That Wave, That Line” a voice exhausted from explaining, a simple drumbeat, swelling strings, droning synths and a recorder build to an enervated crescendo, a tone poem on the battle against erasure, the strings you cannot grasp, fine webs you cannot discern that nonetheless entrap you. It is otherworldly but there is a tensile strength at the core of Sakini’s music that makes it compelling.

Andrew Forell 

 Vazio e o Octaedro —Vazio e o Octaedro (Porta Jazz)

Vazio e o Octaedro by Vazio e o Octaedro

Following up a fine debut on Porta Jazz earlier this year (Dharma Bums), Italian but Basel-based double bassist and composer Gianni Narduzzi joins forces with tenor player and composer Josué Santos, who, like the rest of the musicians, is Portuguese, for a not-quite-big-band set under the name Vazio e o Octaedro that includes a string quartet. The front line of two more saxophones in addition to Santos’ is supported by a rhythm section consisting of Narduzzi and a drummer. The strings to some extent take the place of a chordal instrument, so the sound is full but not cluttered with plenty of room for solos.

The six tracks include four apparently new compositions, a reworking of “Big Sur” from Narduzzi’s earlier recording, and a beautiful rendering of Portuguese songwriter José Afonso’s “Balada de Otono” (with the presumably significant line “Meu sono vazio” = “my empty sleep”) sung by Santos that is the only vocal here. Indeed, a kind of autumnal feeling pervades the recording, from the Halloween colors of the cover art to the strings suggestive of rustling leaves on tracks such as “Lieu Commun.” Gentle but not sleepy, this album is the perfect soundtrack for a trip to the pumpkin patch or a romp through the fall leaves.

Jim Marks

Will Veeder — Exit Interview (Carbon)

Exit Interview by Will Veeder

If you happen to be a scholar of the Rochester, NY music scene, you should be able to frame Exit Interview within the context of Will Veeder’s nearly 30 years of recording with Muler, Hinkley, the Fox Sisters and Entente Cordiale. But if you share this correspondent’s ignorance of happenings in that segment of upstate New York, you might find it helpful that this sounds like some great, lost Six Organs Of Admittance from the late 1990s, or more maybe some private press LP made much earlier that exchanges hands for mortgage-sized prices, rather than the newly recorded, eminently affordable CDR at hand. Veeder’s acoustic picking has an indefinably “eastern” quality that’s got more to do with psychedelic rock music than any music made by people who live beyond the farthest edge of the Mediterranean, and his reverb-wrapped electric leads shine a focused light on a hitherto unknown corner of the Anatolian surf music cosmos. But Veeder’s a man with something to say, so his thin but sure-pitched voice threads through these pithy tunes, uttering sentiments that occasionally vanish into the fx-ed fog that settles around them, only to materialize harmonizing with itself on the porch outside. Good stuff.

Bill Meyer 

 Wesli — Tradisyon (Disques Nuits d'Afrique)

Tradisyon by Wesli

If you didn’t know better, you might assume that “Fè Yo Wè Kongo Banda” hails from West Africa. Its long, rough-edged declamation fades out amid an antic dance of cowbells and hand drums, a surge of glorious choral vocals, its relentless push a joy and a trance and a celebration. For this album, Wesli Louissaint plumbed the depths of traditional Haitian music, which meant, in some ways, plunging all the way through to the music’s African foundations. Louissaint is a Montrealean, but for this album he learned to play all manner of traditional Haitian instruments—and for those he couldn’t immediately master, he brought in local players versed in the kata, the segon, the boula, the manman and a modified banjo (you can hear that best on the swoony, syncopated “Kay Koulé Trouba). The result is a rich, multilayered tapestry of Afro-Latin sounds, from the polyrhythmic, gym-whistle pierced rumble of “Samba (Hommage à Azor Rasin Mapou)” to the swaying accordion romance of “Ay Lina.” Lovely stuff.