ROLL THE DICE - In Dust

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Also, while I think to mention it, if you're up for listening to a new synth + piano release that I just really got into and think you might also like, this Swedish duo Roll The Dice has a new album called In Dust on the Leaf label that takes that whole kosmische/Cluster/early Kraftwerk/electronic krautrock/John Carpenter set of influences that has been the zeitgeist for a little while now and does something really refined with it (think Vladislav Delay, Moritz von Oswald or that Mokira record I was raving about a couple years back)—the production's really rich and flattering on this, the sequencing is solid, and to me it sounds bummed but blissed out at the same time.
 
Check it out if you've got a free hour (or less, of course, if it doesn't end up being your bag!) at some point:
http://www.self-titledmag.com/home/2011/09/05/free-association-stream-roll-the-dices-in-dust-album-and-read-their-track-by-track-commentary/

JULIANNA BARWICK - The Magic Place

As far as album titles go, this is about as perfect and to the point as it gets. Following her debut Sanguine from a couple of years ago and last year’s Florine EP, Brooklyn’s Julianna Barwick has produced the most beguiling album of the year so far with The Magic Place.

With little more than her voice and a cathedral full of reverb, Barwick carefully builds up layer upon layer of mostly wordless vocals that reach high enough levels of intensity to rival the heights reached by that magnificent Pastor T.L. Barrett reissue from last year. Barwick’s transcendence, however, is much closer to European choral music traditions (think Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares without the brain-mulching dissonance) than it is to soul-cleansing American black gospel. She is the anti- (counter-? contra-?) Enya, vocal ambient music that can be as unnerving as it is overwhelming in its beauty. She is much closer aesthetically to Kevin Shields, who achieved a similar effect on My Bloody Valentine’s more repetitive pieces, such as "To Here Knows When" or on the feedback-driven "Glider". And way back in the '60s, David Crosby nailed down a blueprint for Barwick’s sound on "I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here" from his debut If Only I Could Remember My Name, perhaps his most moving piece, a spectral a capella fragment which, until now, has remained unrivalled.

Much of the magic of this album comes from the singer’s knowledge of when to let the reverberations ring out. She never gets Wagnerian with it, allowing the power of her music to come from timbre more than tumult. Compositionally speaking, her works are built around stacked melodies (her live performances are, no doubt, based on loops) rather than shifting harmonies. Most striking is "Keep Up the Good Work", both gorgeous and terrifying as it features her characteristic upper range with a highly vertigo-inducing vocal swoop. Its power is ineffable, something that does not feel created but, like a force of nature, like something that always was.

With only the barest occasional accompaniment on piano and other effects for colouration, Barwick continues to forge her original path, establishing herself as (literally) one of the most original voices on the scene right now.  

SUSUMU YOKOTA - Kaleidoscope

Susumu Yokota may not be a household name, but in certain circles he is certainly a recognized benchmark. For over a decade, Yokota has been quietly making quiet music whose quality speaks much louder volumes. True, his catalogue also includes some exceptional house albums, but his main output has been focused on the kind of ambient electronic albums that anyone outside of Eno, Budd and Aphex Twin would kill to make one of. Records like Sakura, The Grinning Cat, The Boy and The Tree, and Laputa all feature Yokota's signature touches—merging patterns of traditional and ethnic music from around the world with gorgeous synth pads, gently loping rhythms and ear-catching found sounds. What has always saved him from merely making background music is the way he can subtly anchor his pieces with a kind of sonic narration. It's hard to explain in any way other than to say that his records go places—all while remaining quite still.

Kaleidoscope, while representing no real quantum shift in his approach, is another solid addition to Yokota's body of work. Like the best albums of this genre, it takes on dramatically different forms depending on the volume used by and the attentiveness of the listener. The music works in layers, and what appears translucent and hazy from a distance is sketched with surprising detail up close. The tortoise-paced evolution of colours on "Lily Scent Jealousy" is pulse-calming, but underneath voices calling for "The mothership..." hint at great unrest. 

Yokota's years of being a house producer also make a few appearances, albeit in atypical ways. "Pebble On The Verge Of Breaking" plays its title out, as Yokota uses the classic dance floor trick of a reverse whoosh after a long keyboard build up to signal the throbbing bass-heavy beat...except, in this case, the beat never comes. It plays with our Pavlovian sense of anticipation skillfully, keeping our senses riveted to what is essentially quite static music.

In the end, just another day in the workshop by a master craftsman. Beautiful stuff.

SAM PREKOP - Old Punch Card

Admitting that it took me a long time to remember to review this album isn't exactly the best way to begin its endorsement—especially when I also admit that Sam Prekop's self-titled debut solo album is one of my favourite records of all time. I mean, I should be all over this, right?

My relative tardiness does say a lot about the latest from the Sea and Cake frontman, but it's not as bad as it might seem. Old Punch Card is a very different album to his first two solo works, trading their cooing jazzy pop/soul for dawn-of-the-computer electronic instrumentals. But it happens to pick up a dropped thread from earlier in his career. Originally, his first solo album was going be such a record—you can hear his early stabs at this material with the two final cuts on The Sea and Cake's 1997 EP, Two Gentlemen. Evidently, Prekop wasn't fully happy with where those songs initially led, but he did keep at it. Ten years later, he had a book of photography published (2007's Photographs) and stuck with it via an eight-song CD of untitled electronic instrumentals. The pieces were brief Boards of Canada-style beatscapes punctuated by primitive melody. It was a nice little bonus, but there was not much reason to believe that it warranted a wider release.

Old Punch Card arrives with similarly homespun hedged bets—the first 1000 copies have hand-painted artwork by Prekop himself, and there was little fanfare to herald its release. Even by his soft-spoken standards, it's something of a minor album. But that's kind of the beauty of the whole thing. By skirting anything approaching a big show, this album is going to end up in the intended hands: i.e. people who are familiar enough with the man and his pedigree to give his first full-on foray into electronic music a chance.

Does it match his careful buildup? While spare and open, Old Punch Card is certainly confident of its territory. Though it boasts nothing approaching a song, Prekop tours the array of sounds before him like a connoisseur at a wine and cheese tasting—every sip and nibble of bubbly binary is presented just so. And just as one would at such a culinary event, you have to allow yourself to indulge a bit to get the most out of it. But if you do, you'll quickly find that glitch 'A' really does pair nicely with zap 'B'. It all adds up in ways that kind of circumvent rational explanation. It just sounds pretty cool. 

From a man whose solo and full-band discography speaks volumes of quality—not to mention an exceptional career as a painter and photographer—a minor release of cool-sounding recreational electronic music is more than allowed. If anything, that's a huge part of what makes it the special little find it is.

TIMOTHY ANDRES - Shy and Mighty

loudQUIETloud is the name of a Pixies documentary, referring to that band's signature dynamics that influenced everyone from Nirvana to Mogwai as a dramatic device. But it could just as easily be the title of pianist/composer Timothy Andres' debut (an album that instead opts for the more poetic Shy and Mighty). Sudden dynamic shifts have been an key to much Western classical music for centuries, whether it's the jarring penultimate choral blast that explodes from a gentle drift in the 5th movement of Beethoven's Ninth, or the heart-pulsing ebbs and flows of Chopin's Ballade No. 2 in F Major.

The 25-year old Andres—already a quite experienced composer—is keen to carry on the tradition, but his approach is hardly Romantic. Where Chopin allowed his musical phrases to harmoniously wind their way through the scales, Andres pulls from the more recent traditions established by composers such as Steve Reich. In other words, repetition, subtle shifts of accent and the occasional fits of dissonance. The result is an album of tightly interlocked piano duets (performed throughout with pianist David Kaplan) that is beautifully placed between two modes—the cool calculation of the modern masters with a dash of Romantic emotional, fiery temperament.

In this context, the title Shy and Mighty is almost a little too on the nose, too eager a description. But it is one that Andres sells fully, if for no other reason than that it is truly exciting to hear a young pianist/composer who so convincingly blends daring originality, a reverence for the past, and respect for the listener. Because even when Andres' competing desires threaten to swallow each other, he manages to keep an eye on the piece as a whole long enough to always see it through. The result is both an accessible and unpredictable debut, not to mention a total score for the label Nonesuch. With Mehldau's Highway Rider already a great success, these pianists are giving their employers a vibrant 2010. Expect many big things from this guy in the future.

VA - Deutsche Elektronische Musik: Experimental German Rock and Electronic Music 1972-83

Aside from a bunch of outrageously-named collections from a few years ago (Kraut! Demons! Kraut!, for example, or Obscured by Krauts, to name but two), there has been a surprisingly small industry dedicated to this highly-fetishized era of German progressive rock and electronic music. Leave it to Soul Jazz, then, to not only do it with authority, but to have the nerve to stretch the timeline into the early '80s, when the genre had been largely abandoned by its diehard fans. Heck, even today, the umbrella term “Krautrock” (conspicuously unmentioned in both the title and subtitle of this set) and its main proponents are largely unknown to most Germans.

Key events of the last couple of years have precipitated this release, namely the recent tours of Cluster and Faust; the remastering of Kraftwerk’s definitive catalogue and release of an unauthorized but leagues-deep DVD, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution (check our shelves!), which documented both the band and the development of the scene as a whole; and Black Dog Publishing's Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy book from last winter (we’ve got that one, too!).

Soul Jazz serves up a double-disc survey that kindly summarizes the key players (minus the preciously protective Kraftwerk) that would satisfy neu-comers and vets alike. Sequencer-meisters Cluster and solo members Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, along with Kluster's enigmatic Conrad Schnitzler (who shows up on the cold wave “Auf Dem Schwarzen Canal”) are here; so is the more hippy flute-crazy wing (Kollectiv, Ibliss). Of course, there’s also Can (post-Mooney/Sukuki), Faust, Harmonia, Neu!, Ash Ra Tempel, and Amon Düül II. And then there are late entries La Düsseldorf and E.M.A.K., who both underline how key the Teutonic influence really was on rock's New Wave.

A highly immersive experience, replete with fine liners and wonderfully garish packaging, Deutsche Elektronische Musik is wholly mind-expanding, and a mere scratching of the surface of an oft-referred-to but underheard world of music.

BROADCAST & THE FOCUS GROUP - Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age

Broadcast keep getting stranger and stranger, ditching all remnants of their '60s British pop leanings and embracing the naïve and chaotic while retaining their soundtrack inclinations, although they tend more toward the avant end of sound library recordings these days (along with harsh electronics, as evidenced during their recent performance here in Toronto). The amorphous processing on display at the show was just a hint of what Trish Keenan and James Cargill have been up to since 2005’s Tender Buttons, although we won’t fully know until they drop their next proper album next year. In the meantime, we have this nearly 50-minute “mini”-album to contend with, the first musical collaboration between Broadcast and The Focus Group (Julian House, co-owner of the Ghost Box label who has also designed most of the sleeve art for Broadcast). Witch Cults flows like a disturbingly surreal dream, with Trish’s increasingly lullabye/nightmare vocals spread out over a handful of the 23 tracks here. The asymmetrical loops and nonsensical treatment of harmony and melody further add to the notion that Broadcast’s creative vision is far from spent. 

MUSKOX - 5 Pieces

Mike Smith's Muskox finally make the leap to full-length (and -sized, as all-out triangle-tesselated packaging deservedly flaunts the fact) status with 5 Pieces, their first for Alex Durlak's Standard Form imprint (also home to Canaille and Feuermusik, among many other interrelated acts) after three consistently impressive 3" CD-Rs self-released over as many years. The ensemble's since likewise grown, now counting cellist Erika Nielsen among its ranks.

Disciplined but lyrical and delicately driving, Smith and company continue to temper tricky rhythms and time changes with lithe melodic lines that brainily intertwine, often returning to state the head motif after an adventurous, involved digression. A truly progressive crossbreed, Muskox straddle genres with the grace of a much less brawny beast.

(Muskox perform at the Music Gallery Thu. Oct 29 with Canaille and Damian Valles. Tickets are $10 at the door, and the show starts at 8:30pm.)

VLADISLAV DELAY - Tummaa

On Tummaa, Sasu Ripatti's newest album under his Vladislav Delay guise, there's if not a frenetic, then at least a restless aspect to its performances, a gnarled element in its flattened, alien tweaks that makes it, to these ears, a cut above the comparative placidity of Moritz von Oswald's Vertical Ascent trio backed by Ripatti's processed percussion with Max Loderbauer on synth, whose debut was likewise recently released. With key contributions here from Craig Armstrong's Rhodes and piano and Lucio Capece's woodwinds, this is one fine, lively recording, in league with Mokira's Persona as this writer's personal favourite ambient/abstract electronic discs of 2009 so far.

ARVE HENRIKSEN - Cartography / JON HASSELL - Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street

Sometimes you can just look at the back of a jazz album, check out the list of players and their instruments, and conclude that it will be great. And when the label in question is ECM, anyone who needed an extra push just got one. So is the story with the latest of the label's discs to win this writer's heart from a pair of exceptional trumpet players—Arve Henriksen's Cartography and Jon Hassell's Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street. In truth, this may be the most revelatory pair of releases on ECM since Anouar Brahem's transportive Le Pas Du Chat Noir. Henriksen and Hassell both possess a uniqueness of phrasing that transforms the typically bright clarion call of the trumpet into a mournful timbre more akin to that of an oboe. Match that voice with layers of drifting electronics and spare, exotic percussion and you end up with the kind of East-meets-West albums in which ECM specialize—records that manage to deftly navigate the fine line separating truly gorgeous, multi-ethnic ambiance from, well, Enya. It's far harder than it sounds, and they owe their success mainly to a touch that never forces any one flavour upon a track.

Henriksen's album is even more remarkable for the success of spoken word appearances by David Sylvian. Often the straw that breaks many a pretentious album's back, Sylvian's spare readings intersect beautifully, much in the way that similar (albeit much heavier) pieces on Sunn 0)))'s recent albums blend ambience and narration. Although both discs stand easily on their own, it's telling how well they complement one another—each an exceptional exercise in active musical meditation.

(For another take on Jon Hassell's Last Night The Moon..., also check out a review of that disc that ran back in February 2009.)

SUNN 0))) - Monoliths & Dimensions

Bringing the black into the white, the heavy into the light, the masculine into the feminine and their sludgy doom-drone into the airy environs of brass, choral and string arrangements, Monoliths' four sidelong pieces (the perfect length for a forthcoming 2LP edition, release date TBA) offer the most balanced perspectives yet on Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley's ever-expanding soundworld. Also, since it's an increasingly important factor these days when deciding what to physically own and what to simply download, it must be noted that Sunn 0))) have really outdone themselves with this disc's vellum-veiled packaging and cyanotype-and-Serra art direction; besides, without the lyric sheet, how can you expect to follow along with the front-and-center guttural philosophizing of frequent guest vocalist Attila Csihar?

MOKIRA - Persona

It goes without saying that we're always on the lookout for new music, so thanks to the mighty Boomkat (as well as the recommendation of one of our regular customers) for the tip on this one. Although Sweden's Andreas Tilliander has been crafting electronic music for the better part of the last decade, releasing self-described 'clip-hop' on Raster-Noton and Mille Plateaux in the early '00s, his music as Mokira for the Type label (this disc follows 2004's Album) strips the beats away and finds him fashioning finely-honed ambient floaters. Most of Persona is a seamless suite, making it all the easier to get carried off into its drift, as its elements crossfade from crackle-and-hiss-laden treatments to weighty feedback murk, with percussive shards spiking out and eventually clanking together some semblance of melody. Tilliander's recent straight-up TB-303 techno (released under his own name, and heard on his MySpace page) creeps in obtusely on "Valla Torg Kraut", while the home stretch turns to Spiritualized and Spacemen 3 for inspiration, only to then take a deep breath and plunge back into the depths for a misty tape-fuzz finale.

THE WEATHER STATION - The Line

With spring finally blasting sunshine in full force, it seems like an odd time to get into the deep blissful sulk that an album like The Line can inspire, but Tamara Lindeman's performances connect with such an immediate sense of intimacy that you cannot help but be surrounded in her songs. Although The Weather Station's first full-length release is comprised of the five songs from 2007's East EP (albeit in more finely-tuned form) plus six newer tunes, it is by no means a padded revamp, but rather a continuation of the same themes. Dark banjos, bowed strings and and the ambient rustling of wooden objects dominate the rural soundscape, and immediately betray the music's origins in Lindeman's self-recordings. Although augmented by friends and bandmates, these recordings remain personal, with Lindeman's voice sinking into the arrangements as if her words alone cannot express the whole of each song.

TIM HECKER-An Imaginary Country

The one and only time this writer has seen Tim Hecker perform live (giving what now reveals itself to have been a full preview of this new disc), he made a point of setting up perpendicular to the audience, offstage and to one side, so that when the opening 'live' band finished and his performance began, it took a few seconds for us spectators to find our bearings and figure out where this disembodied barrage was emanating from. Combined with an equally discombobulating ceiling-projected slide show, it was the perfect visual analogue to Hecker's work, deep immersion to the point of self-removal, and An Imaginary Country could be his heftiest exercise in dark, granular ambience.

JON HASSELL - Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street

Always one to leave breadcrumbs of esoteric info around for the interested (as on his website's Atmospherics sidebar), Jon Hassell makes a point of musing on the term "montage" in Last Night...'s liner notes, and enough time has elapsed since his Maarifa Street group first assembled in 2005 for a second recording by the band to now arrive, composites of live and studio work that follow last year's long-awaited reissue of Hassell's first session for ECM back in 1986, Power Spot. With Hassell's harmonizer often tracking his trumpet as on past efforts, Jan Bang and Dino J. A. Deane's live sampling particularly helps congeal these tracks into a miasma both tense and placid, nearly New Age but with an unmistakable edge that's been remarkably maintained throughout thirty years of Fourth World formulations.

FM3 - Buddha Machine II

Yes, Beijing's Christian Virant and Zhang Jian (visitors to Soundscapes in October '06 for one pensive instore) have upgraded their loop boxes just in time for the holiday rush, but the Buddha Machine stays as lo-fi as ever, with the one big change to the device (aside from getting nine completely brand-new loops to lull yourself with) being the addition of a pitch-shift wheel, letting one speed up or slow down the repetitions, especially handy for those out there who improvise with these as an instrument, using the headphone jack as a line out to amplify and effect the signal. Three new colours (and a much more austere kraft-cardboard box) distinguish version 2.0--grey, burgundy, and brown. A unique gift idea, no matter the season!

ARTHUR RUSSELL - Love Is Overtaking Me

The furthest-spanning collection thus far from Russell's archives, Love Is Overtaking Me is a loosely chronological (1974-1990) look at Arthur's most accessible (but no less odd) pop, country and folk songs, often in the vein of James Taylor or Jackson Browne and variously betraying his loves of Randy Travis, Jonathan Richman, and Talking Heads. Whether backed by tamboura and tablas, Van Morrison-like horn charts, pedal steel, DX7 and drum machine, or simply solo cello or acoustic guitar, Russell epitomizes the boundless new-wave/new-music hybrid that fermented in 1980s New York.

BIRD SHOW - Untitled / RAGLANI - Of Sirens Born

    

From where we're sitting (lotus-legged, naturally), Kranky has been on a roll these past few years, signing many notable new (or newish) acts that are often solo projects or duos, yet feel fully-formed: Valet, White Rainbow, Atlas Sound, Lichens, Benoit Pioulard, Andrew Pekler, Cloudland Canyon...Although there are many elder bands on the Chicago-based label's roster of this general, ineffable ilk (Charalambides, Windy & Carl, Stars Of The Lid, Keith Fullerton Whitman, etc.), the A&R pace certainly seemed to pick up right around the time they took on Bird Show's first record, Green Inferno, back in 2005.

Then working with fellow Town And Country player Liz Payne only to go it alone for '06's Lightning Ghost, multi-instrumentalist Ben Vida is joined on this untitled effort by four other players: Rob "Lichens" Lowe and Ben's brother Adam, the three of whom are also 3/4 of US Maple successor of sorts Singer; improv percussionist Michael Zerang; and Greg Davis, who has toured as part of a collaborative trio with Vida and Whitman. Pan-African, Middle Eastern, South Asian and South American soundways intermingle in a rhythmic haze that's maybe more confident in how it'll cohere and congeal than the last two albums, as this more social setup allows for simultaneous recording and fewer overdubs. The fourth-world spirits of Riley, Hassell, and Codona run through this music, and a true fusion connection is here for the making.

Joseph Raglani, for his part, presents a mighty fine floater with Of Sirens Born, mainly synthesized and seemingly rooted in old-school analogue academic experimental electronics, but with enough warmth and gumption to want to lump it in with the punkier noiseniks and ambient outcasts. Makes for terrific namesake theme music whenever it graces the store's PA!

NICO MUHLY - Mothertongue

Nico Muhly's day job as assistant to Philip Glass is a particularly pertinent backstory when confronted with the Einstein-ian barrage of rich low-end and flutttering operatic chatter (with mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer instructed to incorporate as many past street addresses lived at into said overdubs) on Mothertongue's first, eponymous piece. Harpischord, celeste and trombones back Helgi Hrafn Jonsson's recitations riffing on various early-1600s texts for the duration of "Wonders", but nu-folk wunderkind Sam Amidon threatens to steal the show with "The Only Tune"'s cheery telling of a murder ballad involving two sisters, slowly drawn out additively.

ELODIE LAUTEN - The Death Of Don Juan

An artifact of early digital recording and composition (the year: 1985; the main tool: the Fairlight CMI polyphonic sampling synthesizer), Don Juan transcends both the era of its making and the many styles it encompasses, from speedy-grid minimalism to pensive lyre passages (played on an electro-acoustic model of Lauten's own invention, the Trine) and drawn-out, haunting choral singing (as on the mid-opera "Death Of A Woman", where Don Juan himself is voiced by Arthur Russell--his chief accomplice Peter Zummo also features prominently throughout). This reissue continues Unseen Worlds' mandate, giving deserving cult avant-garde classical works a new audience.