#fovea hex

Alessandro Cortini—Avanti (Point of Departure)

 Alessandro Cortini plays keyboards with Nine Inch Nails, but that fact will do very little to prepare you for this brooding memory palace of an ambient album, constructed of heaving, shifting, drones of EMS Synthi AKS and snippets from home movies shot in Cortini’s Italian childhood. A sense of loss pervades these slow-paced compositions, as vast cathedral tones surge than slowly fade to silence, a la William Baskinski’s Disintegration Loops, while conversations drift in from other times, other rooms. All seven tracks are named with verbs – “Iniziare” (to start), Perdonare” (to forgive), “Aspettare” (to wait), “Perdere” (to lose) — but the action, such as it is, seems to take place largely in Cortini’s head. The chatter of women, the clink of silverware, that opens “Aspettare” gives way to a pulsing, glowing abstraction, the church-organ-ish drones of “Perdere” open up mournful, pensive landscapes of internal reverie. Odd, personal and rather lovely.  

Jennifer Kelly

 Robert Ellis and Courtney Hartman — Dear John (Refuge Foundation for the Arts)

Guitarists Robert Ellis and Courtney Hartman discovered a mutual love for the music of John Hartford, and this connection led to the 10-track tribute album Dear John. Hartford was best known for his “Gentle on My Mind” (included here along with more obscure numbers), but he was also a bit of an oddity, performing at times like a one-man band and digging through traditional American folk and bluegrass even while turning in banjo-y versions of popular songs from other genres, an approach that put him at the front of the developing new grass sound. Ellis and Hartman take a more straightforward look at his music. The album mostly stays subdued; the duo seek to find the subtlety and the heart of this music. Often, as on the closing of “Gentle on My Mind,” they let their playing do the heavy work. Hartford's lyrics still have a resonance, but the treat of the tribute is as much in hearing these two artists weave their guitars (and their vocals) together as it is in revisiting Hartford's writing. The pair's love for the music comes through, and there's a pleasure in hearing them ease into the tunes. The joy comes out in the uptempo numbers like “Howard Hughes Blues” and “Up on the Hill Where They Do the Boogie,” which also show off Hartford's wit. Ellis and Hartman have paid classy and respectful tribute to an influence while keeping a commitment to their own artistry.  

Justin Cober-Lake

 Fovea Hex — The Salt Garden II (Headphone Dust)

Clodagh Simonds has been making music for a long time (look around and you can find her on the odd Thin Lizzy or Mike Oldfield record), but at this point most of her music has been released under the name of Fovea Hex, attracting plaudits from Brian Eno (who provides backing vocals here) and David Lynch, among others. Absent that context you might be hard pressed to tell when exactly Fovea Hex is coming from; Simonds’ voice is high and pure and clear, the music a blending of acoustic and electronic that attains a kind of smooth, vatic timelessness. Every element feels precisely placed and oddly haunting, no less here than on the first Salt Garden EP from 2016. Although the records aren’t actually that similar, at times The Salt Garden II feels like an emotional or psychological descendant of the immense stillness of Mark Hollis’ eponymous solo effort (even though this is, ultimately, much more “active” music). The effect is spellbinding, whether it’s the massed voices at the end of “All Those Signs” or patient cello drones opening “You Were There.” This is special stuff.  

Ian Mathers  

 Haptic—Ten Years Under the Earth (Unfathomless)

ten years under the earth by Haptic

Haptic is not in a hurry. Three years separate this CD from the last recording by Adam Sonderberg, Joseph Clayton Mills and Steven Hess. During that time the trio has played live fairly often, although that rate might decrease now that Mills has moved from Illinois to Arizona. This recording, which documents an encounter with Louisville-based percussionist and field recorder Tim Barnes, recalls the trio’s formational impetus, which was for its members to have an outlet for live performance and collaboration with other musicians. But it didn’t go down in front of an audience. Rather, the morning after a concert at Barnes’ venue Dreamland (RIP), they accompanied him to a cave in the nearby hills.  

The cave has been put to various uses over the past century and a half, and it is fitted with lamps and electricity. Still, what you hear over the CD’s single 45 minute-long track is not so much a performance as the sounding of an environment. Using microphones, a shortwave radio, a few percussion instruments and the rocks on the floor, the four men tested the space’s properties. Objects boom and echo, droplets smack and splatter and a fuzzy whoosh makes you wonder where water ends and untunable static begins. The vibrations of a bowed cymbal spread and morph, turning quasi-electronic and then fading away. Bell-strikes fade like sonar pings. Nothing is rushed, and the piece’s patient unfolding allows the listener to forget the origin of what they are hearing and sink into the sound itself.  

Bill Meyer

 Cat Hope — Ephemeral Rivers: Chamber Works (hat[now]ART)

Australian composer/flautist Cat Hope’s Ephemeral Rivers contains a survey of five chamber works recorded between 2011 and 2015. Familiar acoustic instruments converge with electronic elements in singular combinations both complementary and oppositional. On the 21-minute “Dynamic Architecture” bassist Mark Cauvin approaches his instrument flat with three bows, one strung with guitar string instead of customary horsehair, alongside an audio track funneled into the body of the bull fiddle by transducer affixed under the fingerboard. The results are a series of striated drones that are at once mesmerizing, fine-grained and self-sustaining. “Miss Fortune” mixes the unlikely assemblage of viola, cello, piano and cymbals with AM radio static for an exercise in measured glissandi and ambient textures. Each of the pieces draws on very specific catalysts that are mostly extra-musical in origin, most strikingly “Cruel and Usual”, which comments on the exponential increase in the usage of solitary confinement as a means of prisoner pacification. Standard string quartet joins a perimeter of four bass amplifiers in the sculpture of a soundscape both disconcerting and trenchant. Hope succeeds in each meticulously-realized exponent through a plenary unification of score and musician(s).  

Derek Taylor

 Leeann Ledgerwood — Renewal (Steeplechase)

Confirmation of Leeann Ledgerwood’s latitude of musical intelligence is as immediate as a glance at the tray-card of Renewal, which lists a program of material encompassing Miles Davis, Jimmy Rowles and Paul Hindemith alongside a pair of her own compositions. The pianist has been in the professional game for nearly four decades after getting an auspicious start in partnership with bassist Red Mitchell. All these years later she’s still keeping quick company.  Bassist Ron McClure and drummer Billy Hart bring their best in the service of their unstinting employer. Hart’s vital solo on the foray through the Harry Warren ode to optimism “Summernite” is the first of several and McClure favors palpable feel over distracting displays of digital dexterity. “All Blues” is all fun with the leader launching from the seesawing vamp only to switch gears and open space for McClure’s striding pizzicato line. Hart keeps a percolating beat around the edges and three players manage to make a tune that’s been covered to the point of ubiquity seem zestfully fresh. Adding an earnest outside seal of approval, pianist peer Richie Beirach submits his share of encomiums by way of warmly-written liner essay.  

Derek Taylor  

 Maneka—Is You Is (Exploding in Sound)

Is You Is by MANEKA

Devin McKnight’s main gig is playing mathy, complicated guitars in Speedy Ortiz. For Maneka, he plays guitar, everything else and sings, with occasional help from Fern Mayo’s Katie Capri, Butter the Children’s Jordyn Blakley, Dirty Dishes’ Alex Molini, Two Inch Astronaut’s Sam Rosenberg and, on the final track, his parents. Where Speedy Ortiz navigates tricky corners and tight, unexpected maneuvers, Maneka is blown-out guitar-fuzzed bliss, the dandelion fluff indeterminate roar of MBV cut with Dinosaur’s disconsolate tumult. “Tiger Baby (with Jordyn Blakley)” stretches out like taffy, vocals half buried under slanting, sloughing piles of guitar feedback, like Sonic Youth if they’d just woken up from a particularly nice dream. “Dracula,” one of the Katie Capri cuts, is meatier, big crashes of guitar wrapped in blurry blankets. In “Parents Outro,” the senior McNights chat about past brushes with racial discrimination, then mom calls out journalists who say there are no more guitar heroes. “I know one,” she says. Me, too.

Jennifer Kelly

 Sleigh Bells — Kid Kruschev (Torn Clean)

After releasing a record three days after the election that, accidentally or presciently, channeled a lot of the chaos and fury to come in 2017, you could forgive Sleigh Bells for taking the actual year off. But no, a year later here they are with just under 22 minutes of new music, which for some bands would qualify as a single or EP but for this band (with their most sprawling release clocking in at a whopping 46 minutes) it does feel appropriate to call a mini-LP. It covers a lot of ground, from the despairing guitar thrash of the opening “Blue Trash Mattress Fire” to the dense boom bap of “Panic Drills” or the full on acoustic balladry of “Florida Thunderstorm.” Derek Miller is still wrestling with sobriety, the death of his father and politics, and he and Alexis Krauss still make it the most natural thing in the world that she’s the one who sings from his perspective. Especially on devastating closer “And Saints,” a synthetically nocturnal, darkly sweeping song about the state of depression where even the delivery guy starts asking if you’re ok. It never erupts, just sounds like an unresolved problem sung through by Krauss with an ache in her voice like a bruise, and it’s one of the more powerful things they’ve done.    

Ian Mathers  

 Strange Ranger—Daymoon (Tiny Engines)

Daymoon by Strange Ranger

Strange Ranger, now out of Portland, OR, but with roots in Montana, makes a sleepy kind of indie racket, vocals stretched out high and thin over a hard strummed guitars and bashing drum fills. Nothing is polished. Nothing runs straight when it could meander through fog banks of indeterminant sound. Melodies shade in and out of tune. Yet, even so, there’s a dreamy emotional heft, a beautiful narcotized ache to these songs that might remind you of fellow NW-slow-corers Carissa is Weird. “Hydration is Key” winds the wheeze of melancholic organ through thickets of jangle, its vocal line a cirrus cloud tracing of tunefulness, far, far away. “The Most Perfect Gold of the Century” channels some slack Neil Young guitar blues a la the more recent MV + EE material, but slowed way down, so that every line seems lost in its own daydream. This is the kind of record that sounds slight the first time, but gains on you, listen by listen.

Jennifer Kelly

 Suns of Arqa — Revenge of the Mozabites (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

Revenge of the Mozabites by SUNS OF ARQA

The Mozabites are a Berber ethnic group who inhabit an expanse of Saharan desert in Algeria. Just what Revenge of the Mozabites has to do with them is a matter for conjecture, but you can be sure that it’s part of a bigger picture. Suns Of Arqa has been combining musical styles from around the globe since 1979, with sitarist Michael Wadada the sole constant in a membership that counts about 200 past, current and recurrent people. Early on the Suns were aligned with Adrian Sherwood of On-U Sound, and his fingerprints are all over their first long player, which has just been reissued on CD by long-time fan John Corbett’s Corbett Vs. Dempsey label. Celtic fiddles, Indian drones, flamenco guitar and reggae rhythms meet in a zone bounded by the throbbing walls of a dub-happy sound system, and while the stylistic combinations seem audacious even from a remove of nearly four decades, it’s Sherwood’s ability to make the air pulse like a living organism that makes this album so strong.

Bill Meyer            

 Thollem / Mazurek — Blind Curves and Box Canyons (Relative Pitch)

In the minds of many, Rob Mazurek is a Chicagoan. While he came to musical maturity in the city, he’s spent more time away than around in the past 20 years, and he’s currently based in Marfa, Texas. The desert artist’s community is no doubt good for many things, but you have to look a bit harder to find improvising peers, which may explain why he has forged a relationship with Thollem McDonas. The keyboardist, who dropped his last name for professional purposes not so long ago, lives in New Mexico and headed down to Marfa for this first time encounter, which took place at the closing of a showing of Mazurek’s visual art. Plugged in and spontaneous the two men engage in a dimension more commonly associated with Sun Ra’s small group encounters from the 1970s. Mazurek chants, plays synthesizer and cornet and samples his horn, and Thollem runs his electric piano through a bank of analog effects. They often sound like they are calling to each other across a space far vaster than the confines of the Marfa Book Co., but they bridge that space quite successfully, whipping up great whorls of voltage-charged sound.