#luis lopes

CMD — Obscure Worlds (Several Reasons)

Obscure Worlds by CMD

On the face of it, CMD’s Obscure Worlds is a sci fi-themed techno album, which doesn’t do much to separate it from the broader genre. Scratch the surface, and you find an album of detailed techno vignettes that refuse to stand still. In less than three minutes, “Uneven Landing” layers crushed static onto knocking digital debris, with a rapid-fire kick added to the mix two minutes in. On “Obscure Manifestation” a foundation of pulsing static sets the stage for otherworldly peals of feedback. “Death of a Galaxy” reaches toward the undulating bass engineering of an Yves de Mey track. “Through the Wormhole” hints at industrial fuzz a la AnD while maintaining a bit more restraint, with a switch-up in the kick pattern four minutes in that isn’t exactly characteristic for techno. Given the density of musical ideas, many of the tracks could have been extended, but they last long enough to satisfy. If the album’s concept was intended to prompt a creative, concise set of techno variations, it did the trick. Obscure Worlds feels like getting a glimpse into a techno sound-design obsessive’s sketchbook, in the best possible way.

Peter Taber

 Julien Desprez / Luís Lopes—Boa Tarde (Shhpuma)

The title translates from Portuguese as Good Afternoon, and from the sound of this record it was. Both Julien Desprez and Luís Lopes are known for bringing the electricity to jazz ensembles, but when you put a couple of guitarists together it’s possible that they will connect around the instrument, not any particular genre. So it is here, but just what instrument are we talking about? The electric guitar? The amplifier? The pedals? Or all of the above? Let’s go with the latter, because this music is more about the interplay of timbres, textures, contours and sound waves than melodies, harmonies or beats. Imagine the jousting of train sounds issuing from converging valleys, the shudder of twin flexing suspension bridges or maybe just the shared sweet spots of a couple guys who probably wore out more than one CD player spinning Thurston Moore and Nels Cline’s Pillow Wand. Or don’t imagine at all, just listen to this artifact of one good afternoon in Lisbon.

Bill Meyer

  Carol Genetti / Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson — Chyme (Suppedeneum)

Carol Genetti’s vocals operate beyond the boundaries of language. On Chyme, which is named after that gurgling stuff that sloshes around in your stomach after you eat, she electronically manipulates and juxtaposes sounds that humans have been making since before they thought up the first words. You might get disoriented trying to make sense of her pre-lingual exhalations and utterances, so visual artist Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson has prepared a listening score for each of the CD’s four tracks. Each score is a vibrantly colored, circuitously shaped paper cutout, the handling of which will put you (back?) in touch with the experience of pre-GPS, map-based navigation. Anderson’s combination of vibrant colors and text cues prod you out of passive listening and into a vocal / visual interaction with the sounds, which are by turns eerily beautiful and absolutely hackle raising. You will not encounter another record like Chyme.

Bill Meyer  

 Golden Daze—Simpatico (Autumn Tone)

Simpatico by Golden Daze

Hold up, you don’t need musical difficulty all of the time. No, there are hours and days and (occasionally) weeks when you don’t want propulsion or tension or contradictory impulses in your tunes. Life itself is full of that shit. You want something easy. You want something like Golden Daze’s Simpatico, an edgeless, frictionless, limpid pool of baroque pop, with soft whispery vocals and sumptuous clouds of guitar flurries and bright bars of electronic keyboards, unending prettiness, unconflicted lemon-y wistfulness.  “Blue Bell,” the single, is like the Clientele with the bones picked out, an enveloping haze of pastel colored sound. There’s a bit of drumming in a song called “Drift,” but it only seems to heightened the disembodied floating-ness of the song’s breathy sway. “Simpatico,” at the end, emerges out of haze and fog, with warm, brushes of guitar and soft, dreaming verses, then slips out of sight. Golden Daze indeed.

Jennifer Kelly

 Golia, Kaiser, Moses, Smith, Walter — Astral Plane Crash (Balance Point Acoustics)

BPA 18 Astral Plane Crash by Golia / Kaiser / Moses / Smith / Walter

p>Henry Kaiser, Damon Smith and Weasel Walter are Plane Crash, a guitar-bass-drums trio tough enough that it doesn’t have to act tough. The musicians’ common bonds are an appreciation for the atomized activity of vintage English free improvisation and a shared determination to communicate intensity through intent and focus, not bluster. Things get cosmic when you bring in West coast woodwind veteran Vinny Golia and drummer Ra Kalam Bob Moses, who played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk at an age when most kids are first trying to cadge their parents’ car keys. Moses and Golia had never played together, but they roomed in the 1960s, and their presence complicates Astral Plane Crash’s prevailing MO of quick micro-interaction in interesting ways. The flutes and saxophones run thick and slow under APC’s dust devil swirl. And Moses and Walter sound like their having a blast making like converging storm clouds, each pelting hail stones from a different direction so there’s no way you won’t get a chill down your neck. At two tracks and a hair under 80 minutes, this is all-in stuff, but when the changes come as quick and compelling as they do here that’s a feature, not a bug.

Bill Meyer

Matt Hannafin / John Cage—Four Realizations For Solo Percussion (Notice Recordings)

Four Realizations for Solo Percussion by John Cage & Matt Hannafin

In a life of ideas that spans 79 years, a guy might change his mind. John Cage famously expressed disregard for jazz, the most notable American manifestation of musical improvisation in the 20th century. But his problem was more with corrosive expressions of the self and human prejudice than it was with improvisation per se, thus his preference for chance operations. You can’t impose your personal bullshit when you submit to the random. Near the end of his life he dropped his opposition enough to write compositions that invited improvisation, which was distinct from chance operations. If that sounds like a convoluted process, consider the name of this tape’s first piece. “c Ȼomposed Improvisation for One-Sided Drums with or without Jangles” reads like a koan, which makes some sense given Cage’s engagement with Buddhist teachings. That’s just one of the four pieces that Oregonian percussionist Matt Hannafin recorded for this tape (or download, which is probably a more Buddhist format than a tape). In his hands, Cage’s music becomes a vehicle for feeling both the presence of a healthy blow and the unoccupied presence of the variably proportioned spaces where Hannafin isn’t hitting anything.

Bill Meyer

 Gerrit Hatcher — Parables for the Tenor (Astral Spirits)

Parables For The Tenor by Gerrit Hatcher

One listener’s marvelously wigged-out sound is another’s torture. An audience member’s transformative listening experience might be in response to a sound producer’s moment of hollow display. You might hate a person’s most sincere expression or be deeply moved by something they do with their fingers and lungs while they try to remember where they left their bottle opener. Chicago-based tenor saxophonist Gerrit Hatcher had these existential quandaries in mind as he recorded the six solo tracks on this tape, and who’s to say if that’s why this music has such bite? Maybe it’s better to note that he makes sounds that feel linked to the work of certain Sun Ra associates and Archie Shepp into statements that don’t sound irrelevant at the tail end of the second decade of the 21st century. Hang with him while he blows and you might be changed, either because he’s ripping transformative shapes in the air or because that’s already where you’re taking yourself. Either way, what do you have to lose?

Bill Meyer

  Hübsch Martel Zoubek — Otherwise (Insub)

Otherwise by Hübsch, Martel, Zoubek

There’s a world of improvised music that never crosses that precious Yankee border, and this is group is part of that world. Take one German tuba player, one Canadian viola da gamba player and another German on piano, throw in some pitch pipes and a synthesizer and what do you have? You have the raw material for a session of highly refined interaction. On the spectrum from process-oriented to outcome-oriented improvisation, these musicians tend more to the latter pole. The piano has been prepared to render gamelan-in-a-box sonorities, the tuba’s tones consistently gravitate towards ground-liquifying depths and the strings buzz in splintered contrast. The music unfolds patiently, never lapsing into clutter or confusion, and yet it never telegraphs the next move.   

Bill Meyer

  Jäh Division—Dub Will Tear Us Apart…Again (Ernest Jenning)

Dub Will Tear Us Apart...Again by Jäh Division

A jokey side hustle with an aughts all-star psychedelic pedigree, Jäh Division grooved hard, if obscurely, joining a love of dub, a reverence for Joy Division and a clutch of old keyboard gear. The line-up well exceeded solid with Brad Truax on booming, reverb drenched dub bass, Barry London manning a garage sales’ worth of vintage electronics (Roland RS-09, Realistic Concertmate MG-1, a Moog) and Kid Millions busting up organic and synthetic drums. This disc collects songs from a 2004 12-inch, plus bonus material including covers of Desmond Dekker’s “Fu Manchu” and Jackie Mittoo’s “Champion of the Arena.” These two are trippily wonderful, but the heart of this goofy fever dream is a nodding, pulsing, synth wreathed version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” It’s a jam that could go on for days or last only a second (technically it goes ong a bit over four minutes), as it distills post-punk and reggae and experimental art rock into an unending now.

Jennifer Kelly

 Miscarriage — Imminent Horror (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Imminent Horror by Miscarriage

Much alike Stormy Daniels’ description of the Chief Executive’s fungoid phallic member, the world didn’t really need this tape from international doom metal crew Miscarriage (who hail from Sweden and the United States) — but now that Imminent Horror is here, it’s sort of hard to ignore. And once you’ve heard it, you’ll have a hard time removing it from your memory, much as you might like to. Lots of metal bands like to talk about how “disgusting” and “putrid” their music is. Miscarriage do more than talk. The noises they make sound and feel like a huge bubble of noxious gas painfully working its way through a diseased intestinal track. It’s slow. It’s gross. It doesn’t create any sort of pleasure. It’s only minimally more coherent than listening to the aforementioned Chief Executive attempt to speak in complete sentences. In all those ways, Miscarriage have made music for our times. Good luck to us all.  

Jonathan Shaw  

 Shady Bug—Lemon Lime (Exploding in Sound)

Lemon Lime by Shady Bug

Shady Bug, out of St. Louis, makes a mathy pop so stretchy and bendable that you expect a bo-oi-oi-ing when its wandering melodies snap back into place. Under the guidance of classically trained Hannah Rainey, the band sets up intricate, jerry-rigged machinations that work by their own logic. Yet though complicated, these tunes have a vulnerable sweetness to them, mainly due to Raines’ hiccupy sincere delivery, which tips and lists as the wind blows. “Make It Up,” the single floods the sonic plane with power-washing blasts of amplified guitar, then cuts to a jittery next-to-nothing of angling, cross-cutting guitar lines. It’ll remind you of Pavement and, more recently, Speedy Ortiz, except in a fetching, kid-sibling-ish way that tugs at your sleeve and your heart.