Yeezus Walk With Me

‘I went to a rock show, a departure from my usual noise-art fair, rock fans are a weird bunch— lots of band tee shirts, but I was the only one wearing a Dead C shirt, most of the other shirts I saw represented the dullest of the boring left of the dial shit from the 70’s till today.  

‘Opening for Shellac was Shannon Wright, who Albini lovingly referred to as a Shmoo, which is a magical being from the Li’l Abner comic that exists to be kind to humans and cute, they produce eggs and milk. I had never heard of Shannon Wright before, Sunday night, I was fairly certain that if she was opening for Shellac she was going to be pretty great. What this woman without the benefit of a guitar pick can do with a guitar is pretty astounding.  

‘All the stupid fangirling aside, Shellac might actually be the best live rock band I’ve seen yet.  They manage to have great live sound, playing ability and be funnier than 99.2% of all comedy podcasts. Shellac blends their song with a specific brand of fast-paced improv comedy, something I think is very hard to do well, they pulled in off wonderfully. The only thing more I could have asked for is more songs about JFK’s cock, please.

‘After all of this fawning over rock gods, I do feel as though I should complain, at a venue with tons of cheap good beers on tap, why is the gross soda gun diet coke $3 fucking dollars, next time I’m going to bring my own caffeinated beverage if I feel a pre-concert fatigue coming on.

‘Besides anything music related, I got to tell Steve that I love and miss his cooking blog, Mariobatalivoice and that his blog more than anything changed my life in a meaningful way.’

‘Opening act pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, a fitting quiet opener for such loud monstrous guitar heroes. The acoustics in the church made every tiny movement, every pew squeak sound so incredibly loud, distracting from Alcorn’s soft guitar sounds.  The crowd should have all been taped still into their seats.

‘The Dead C, with drummer Robbie Yeats as sampler due to visa issues, a sad occurrence but handled very well by the band. Michael Morley and Yeats spent a few days working out his drum parts for the sampler. Even without live drums these old dudes are still some of the most monstrous performers I’ve seen. The set ended with Bruce Russell taking apart his set up and playing with the still live guitar cable, including putting it down his shirt. The Dead C, maybe my very favorite band, seeing them was as wonderful and important as I thought it would be, go see them if these New Zealand oddballs play your town, it’s more than worth the price of admission.

‘After the show I was with my friends from White Out, and I found out GATE, Morley’s solo free noise project, down the street from my apartment.  As sad as this was to me, I did get to see my dear friend Michael Arcos, on his last night in New York City.  

‘And I am left to think about the changing face of New York, hanging with my friend at this cool beer bar the night before, late night fun times in Alphabet City, maybe some of the last there as the world has seemingly moved on and now most things that are cool seem to happen elsewhere.  The old world of the Lower East Side is pretty much dead now, but not New York City.  Stuff has been pushed out to the far reaches of Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, Queens.’

Northern Spy Tape Batch

Horselover Fats - Liberty Ashes [Northern Spy]

‘Liberty Ashes is an exercise in not only deliberation but also impulse. Side A and Side B act as inverse of each other, sharing similar three-movement structure. A is the more deliberate, ecstatic piece, its hulking movement arranged for the appearance of the State Street Singers men's choir, led by Matt Morello. Ferocious wormhole guitars and irascible walls of drums weave in and out of the Latin incantations of the choir, producing a bliss both pineal and cerebral. Side B focuses more on chance--the composition builds around blooming synth pads and wanderlust guitars before dropping into synthetic percussion, processed into oblivion. By the end of the piece, vocals lace the ambient washes of the keys and guitars, again achieving a bliss--this one subliminal. The contrast between the two sides of Liberty Ashes is stark, but the spirit is similar. The music comes fast and easy, both seamless and sawtooth, sacred and profane. It's a record built toward the end of post-modernity, exploring dichotomies of loud/quiet, space/occupation, light/dark, and free/unfree. Liberty Ashes refers to the remnants of an ideology, that deliberation and impulse together lead to something more sustainable than either on their own.’

--from press release

Padang Food Tigers / Sigbjørn Apeland - Bumblin’ Creed [Northern Spy]

‘Between them, British folk phantasms Padang Food Tigers (Stephen Lewis and Spencer Grady) and Norwegian harmonium player Sigbjørn Apeland have recorded for illustrious imprints such as ECM, Hubro, Bathetic, Scissor Tail and Blackest Rainbow. These past offerings are engrained with a rich devotion to various branches of traditional composition – church music, country and folk – yet seek to dissemble those well-worn forms under the aegis of extemporisation. Both parties are collating a formidable canon of après organic ambient, venturing beyond the all-prevailing placebos tailored by so many sleep-starved somnambulists. These guys offer up genuine alternate atmospheres with an emotional pastoralism that speaks with a deep heartfelt feeling, undeniably immediate and open. Theirs is a music inviting, or rather insisting, upon a listener’s self-projections – aimed inward towards the soul, outward in boundless leaps of imagination.     ‘Bumblin’ Creed, this collaborative venture for Northern Spy, finds these kindred spirits revelling in their new-found alliances. A shared vision now bears its artistic fruit, borne of an unshakeable belief in the beauty of the passing moment and the intrinsic need to harness precious seconds in the slow-motion passing of a reductionist blues, a child’s plaintive plea or the creak of an old wooden chair (listen, you’ll hear it). In theory it can get pretty Cageian, in reality the academy never gets a look in. The nine pieces on this highly-emotive suite – each built up from an embryonic kernel ceded by Apeland or the Tigers and developed in cherished association – seduces the space between every well-judged note, while hanging on their ebbing word. Tones react to the muttering of memory and recollection (before vanishing, lost forever), or to the artist’s respective environments (a picturesque Norwegian village, a lost river found buried at the end of a suburban garden, a stone sphinx blanketed in snow watching over the relics of a crystal citadel). ‘As influenced by Messiaen’s ecclesiastical organ works as Uncle Tupelo’s last round of alt.country cuts, as energised by the non-idiomatic innovations of Derek Bailey as the Delta deviations of Loren Connors, Bumblin’ Creed is an extraordinary piece of enchantment that ranks right up there alongside the best material these guys ever produced, a slow-motion country crawl, the soundtrack to your spiritual baptism: listen close, and be born all over again.’

--from press release

Joe Westerlund - Mojave Interlude [Northern Spy]

‘Mojave Interlude was realized, recorded and edited from August 2006 - November 2015, in various locations between North Carolina and California. The majority of the music was created with a wide array of percussion instruments, utilizing a variety of techniques, and processed with analog and digital electronics. Additional instruments and found sounds were added under my own direction and/or editing. In 2013, a live-mix version of this music was assembled to accompany the dance piece I am Come For You, choreographed by Carson Efird, at UCLA in Los Angeles, CA and at White Wave in Brooklyn, NY.’

G.S. Sultan - Redundancy Suite [Phinery]

‘Music is communication—a jumbled, ecstatic and often tangible conversation between our own experiences and the amalgamate influences of any given musician. These connections are often aided by associative lyrics or intimate experiential narratives, although sometimes those are cast aside in favor of something more instrumental and more deeply affecting than any lyric could convey. The latest release from Brooklyn-based electronic alchemist Roy Werner (aka G.S. Sultan) develops this idea of abstract noise as a communicative medium. Taking the cacophony and formlessness of his past work and fashioning a new and utterly compelling series of discordant electronic rhythms, Werner displays an uncanny ability to evoke emotion and sensation from what is ostensibly a completely artificial aesthetic. ‘Reduncancy Suite positions his blips, bloops and energetic bouts of static-filled impressionism as the next logical step in our collective musical evolution. He’s gone past any expectations about how inclusive and disturbing these kind of circuital compositions really are. Without a sure and concise guiding hand, this sort of fragmented electronic conflagration of atonal disciplines would feel empty and aimless—thankfully, however, Werner has the implausible ability of making even the most inhuman noise sound almost human. Buried beneath all the squiggling feedback and arrhythmic melodies, there lies a heart, a mechanical and bloodless heart to be sure, but one that still evinces an unexpected warmth and humanity. ‘He quickly drops us into the deep end with “Wagner Canvas,” a bustling concoction of bobbing cables, wires and analog/digital frustration. By imbuing the track with a sort of organic deconstruction, we’re able to see both the origins and future of his futurist electronic sound. But rather than pull back on subsequent tracks, he draws us in further, adding layers of half-formed rhythms and tonal dispersions as each minute ticks by. What starts off as a fascinating journey into one man’s electronically-inclined headspace soon becomes a collection of daunting and curiously personal revelations told through a particularly expressive sequence of explorative bylines drawn from Werner’s personal history with these sounds. ‘From the scorched earth tonality of “Prepared Syntac” to the euphoric transmissions of album closer, “Crepuscule M,” Werner carefully and methodically pulls apart his own influences, vigilantly rearranging them in ordered lines before pouring gasoline over everything and lighting it on fire. Reduncancy Suite is more than just a succession of sounds that owe their livelihood to the technological advances made over the past five decades. It’s a shapeless creature, born from a formless creativity that stalks the shadows of a neon cityscape, keeping to the periphery and biding its time before lashing out in weaves of disjointed patterns and oddly emotional bursts of consequence and human sentiment.’ 

Danny Clay - Stills [IIKKI]

‘Stills is the result of a dialog between the artist Katrien De Blauwer and the music artist Danny Clay initiated by IIKKI, between February 2016 and June 2016. ‘The complete project works in two physical imprints : the book and the vinyl. it should be appreciated in different manners : the book watched alone the vinyl listened to alone the book and the vinyl watched and listened to together.’

Miguel Isaza - Soliloquio [White Paddy Mountain]

‘Soliloquio (soliloquy) is an silent dialogue that gets renewed on each listening. Some parts were recorded from an old Yamaha keyboard. The rest of the sounds were captured in the field, including soundscapes as well as some found objects, all from different places at Medellin, Colombia where the album also composed and mixed, during 2015 and 2016.’

Rhuncle / Silentwave - Night Life [White Paddy Mountain]

‘this sprit album is expectations of young ambient creator in japan Rhucle and Silentwave. Night Life is inspired from such beauty of landscape of night see. there is lovely ambient atmosphere and field recoding. this work was created with the image of such sound nestling in pleasant nightlife in the everyday.’ 

Gnawed - Pestilence Beholden [Malignant]

‘Since its inception in 2009, Grant Richardson’s Gnawed has propelled itself into the top tier of heavy electronics and death industrial with a stream of high quality releases over a variety of formats. ‘For his 3rd full length disc, Pestilence Beholden, the template set forth by prior works remains intact, but is dragged down into an even darker space, this time enriched by added layers of foreboding atmospherics and foggy ambience. ‘Make no mistake, this is Gnawed through and through, but Pestilence Beholden is even more sculpted and refined than before, finding an intersection between tensile dread and controlled aggression, as ominous synth beds and throbbing drones are augmented with the cataclysmic reverberations, resonating scrapyard acoustics, and mechanized dirge you’ve come to expect. ‘Recorded in industrial complexes in and around Minneapolis, the sound here is deep and immense, once again solidifying Gnawed in a category all their own.’