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September 2021

Low HEY WHAT

Whoa — that was unexpected.
I didn't even like Low before! Seriously, I had never even finished a Low album before. And here they hit me with this incredible meteor of a record.

So this is
like
indie rock songs that sound like they would be acoustic on paper, only they come alive with a sound that's abrasive, loud, intense. (The Bandcamp tags say alternative, folk, indie rock. RYM says post-industrial and other experimental genres. I feel like the former is only right about the songs, the latter only right about the production. This is a two-headed beast.) Take “More” for example — barely over two minutes long and it packs more intensity than most full albums, pain, beauty, regret, inner strength, a beautiful melody and ear-scorching loudness. It's like a duet between the singer and the sounds, and you need both to truly understand what it means. It ends as abruptly as it started and that's how it should be, too.

I'm giving their back catalogue another chance to see if there's anything else I might like — no luck with The Curtain Hits the Cast nor with The Great Destroyer so far, perhaps Double Negative? — meanwhile I'm really impressed by this.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Teto Preto Pedra preta

Angry, colourful, hard and glamorous Brasilian pop music. With elements from nu-disco to post-industrial, acid beats and female vocals, live performances in which they're almost naked in provocative outfits.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Node Node

I listened to a lot of Berlin school for a couple of days, catching up on classics I hadn't listened to, giving others a new chance (Tangerine Dream Zeit sounds a lot better to me now), revisiting favourites — and this one really stands out as special. More interesting rhythms, goes further with timbres, sometimes veers towards dark ambient or a FAX +49-69/450464 sound. Node 2 is also great and ventures even further away from the genre.

▷ RYM

Christine Groult Étincelles

I really like this — maybe because it's close to drone or ambient music? Especially in the first tracks, there's a perfect balance between atmospheric drones and concrète sounds. It's the kind of music that I find very sensorial without being evocative, which makes it difficult to talk about, but “Canal instantané” is an exception: it's inspired by a walk along a river, following its rhythm, from place to place, each one with a specific atmosphere. Also “L'heure alors s'incline…” is a homage to Luigi Nono. More accessible than the little Nono I've heard though.

▷ RYM

JASSS Whities 027

Oh yes. Contemporary tech trance, bringing the hedonism of past raves to our dark times. Very different from her album Weightless but also great!

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Denzel Curry Imperial

Shouldn't be my cup of tea, but I can't argue with how good this is. Assertive, aggressive, angry, yes — but the production and crepuscular, emotional melodies take this to another level. Would almost sound “haunting” if it weren't for the urgency of it. “ULT” is the perfect opener and single; “Tomorrow's Not Here” is the perfect closer.

▷ RYM

Tongues of Light The Myth of Separation and Selfhood

An art of illusion. Tongues of Light's albums have a truly mysterious, even mystical atmosphere — and it's funny to learn that the voice samples, which I pictured might come from obscure lost tapes recorded a long time ago in an attic or a remote country, are just sourced from Youtube videos. Hey, recontextualized like that, it works. And perhaps I'm the fool for imagining that a spirit channeling ritual in an isolated forest village in 1867 or whatever would be more mysterious than what I can find in two seconds. But the illusion is what I'm looking for anyway, right?

Channelled Messages at the End of History (the previous album) was a bit eerier; this one is very close and still has dark passages but also more soothing and hypnotic ones.

▷ RYM

Dalhous Will to Be Well

What happens when a Blackest Ever Black project (dark ambient / industrial / techno / dub) casts some light and colours in their dark world and take some inspiration from Boards of Canada.

Their previous album already aimed at something similar but I feel that this one is a lot more successful at it — more consistent, with a more cohesive style, more memorable tracks too. Thanks to Traz for the discovery!

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Will Guthrie People Pleaser

Fun! A short album of wild drumming that changes styles and genres on each track, “building pieces from drum and percussion tracks left over from other projects, audio ripped from skate videos, noise electronics, fragments of a police interrogation, and anything else ready to hand”. I don't know if I'd call it accessible since there are very few melodies here, but it's intense and exciting throughout.

Thanks to tiny_vampire for the discovery!

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Calsutmoran Bend of the World

I don’t know how to describe it, but BrothermanTrill features it on his list For the Void Is Black: Trve Experimental Hip Hop & Black Tongues as such: “sort of inbetween Cal’s early Memphis inspired stuff and his more recent sound collage nightmares. Still beat-driven but with the kind of experimentation that makes it near-impossible to digest on just one listen. Essential listening for this style.”

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

The Boats Do The Boats Dream of Electric Fritz Pfleumer?

Wikipedia: “Fritz Pfleumer (1881 – 1945) was a German engineer who invented magnetic tape for recording sound.”

A long hypnotic/soporific ambient track, somewhere between the near-nothings of, say, Haptic (including the ambient noise) and very warm drones to lull you to sleep, with soft glitches that remind me of another kind of surface noise and a few sparse neoclassical touches. Very, very nice.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

J Dilla Donuts

Sweet, sweet loops.
I didn’t fully appreciate how good this was when I first listened to it years ago.

Each little loop-world you just visit, partly recognize (so many samples you’ve heard elsewhere, memories) and partly discover, and it all goes by so quickly but always leaving such vivid impressions. And you can only leave abruptly, but it feels like it will keep spinning without you, life will go on even after you’re gone.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM



October 2021

The Three Degrees The Three Degrees

Top class soul — lush production, nice grooves, I love their voices too! (Some of the lyrics about womanhood are outdated now but eh, that was 1973.)

Thanks to danilo for the recommendation!

▷ RYM

Café Tacvba Re

Super eclectic. They change styles on each track, and I like all of it — or almost — even though I’ve never been drawn to these genres. (Nasal singing over oompa oompa rhythms and I like it?!) So many earworms in there too. Honestly this is brilliant.

♪ “El ciclón”
▷ RYM

Lim Kim Generasian

Rebellious and aggressive, strange and dreamy, pop and avant-garde, it sounds like she’s several artists in one. Apparently this was her first release as an independent artist and sounds very different from her previous K-pop releases? I haven‘t checked but I’m looking forward to her next one!

(Does she have huge shoulders or a tiny head or ???)

♪ “Mong” (video — dreamy)
♪ “Yellow” (video — aggressive)
▷ RYM

Jenny Fried The Chicken House

Loved this short story. You know of Baba Yaga, right? This is an allegory, maybe an obvious one, but the otherworldly mood and images are great to get lost in. And the writing is on point.

Strange Horizons publish new fiction each week — short stories, poems, articles, etc. Other really good stories I’ve found there include Janelle C. Shane68:Hazard:Cold (found it via a linguistics Tumblr blog, the story of a droid stranded on a hostile planet) and Noel CherutoWe Broke Nairobi (a terrifying story set in a post-climate apocalypse Nairobi, with surreal elements).

Strange Horizons

Injury Reserve By the Time I Get to Phoenix

This seems to get eerier with each listen. In a good way.

♪ “Knees”
▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Solar Quest Into the Machine

“Into the Machine” is the trance track Burial’s “Temple Sleeper” is based on, basically a 1990s brutal space combat video game boss fight vibe — I expected it to be the highlight, but “Acid Eye Full” is actually even better, a pretty damn beautiful 15-minute acid number. All good!

▷ Bandcamp
▷ Discogs
▷ RYM

Foetus Flow

J.G. Thirlwell at his most badass, psychotic, jazz-loving villainous best. Goes from absolute mayhem that begs to be listened to at a deafening volume to the coolest jazzy numbers to brooding pathos. Might actually be better than Nail?

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Steroid Maximus Ectopia

And that’s Thirlwell again, exploring another angle of his explosive industrial + jazz/swing combo — instrumental this time, and big band first and foremost with electronic beats and spy film cinematics.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Ensemble Économique No GPS

The soundtrack to getting lost in a hostile jungle? Or something else — but dense, disorienting, possibly hostile. Unidentified chants and rhythms over field recordings and noisy concrète elements. How much of this is field recordings? I’m not sure.

▷ RYM

Terre Thaemlitz Fagjazz

A compilation* of Terre’s pre-2000 works, from ambient to deep house (and a few influences from other genres — Chugga is a downtempo band, G.R.R.L. was Terre going techno / drum and bass / etc) — and a bonus hour-long track that sounds 100% like a Necks album. All pretty great!

* “Superbonus” (the Necks track) is only available here in full. “Pretty Mouth” was salvaged from a now redundant EP. The Terre’s Neu Wuss Fusion tracks — some of my favourites — can also be found as singles or on Recalls. The Social Material EP would have been worth including in its entirety (it was only two tracks, both good), and although the G.R.R.L. album is hit and miss I’m not sure how I feel about including just one track. Terre also has a bunch of other compilations which may or may not re-include these tracks. Yeah, that kind of mess is why I usually don‘t like compilations.

▷ Comatonse Recordings
▷ RYM

Burial Temple Sleeper

See “Into the Machine” above — that hook is turned into speed garage and goes through several phases, ending with a pitched vocal sample that reminds me of The Prodigy’s “Out of Space”. It’s still dark because it’s Burial, but really fun too, probably his most danceable.

Thanks to hoenir for the recommendation!

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Genesis Owusu Smiling with No Teeth

Yeah, this man knows how to make a bop.

♪ “The Other Black Dog”
♪ “Gold Chains”
▷ RYM

Alain Bashung L’imprudence

I don‘t know Bashung well yet and I’m not sure I ever will. I liked “Samuel Hall” on Fantaisie militaire (a moody drum and bass + spoken word track about a brooding writer with bad eating habits who hates everyone), but many of his other songs aren‘t my thing.

This one though is all dark elegance. Nocturnal, soft, deep, with lush arrangements, and Bashung’s voice which sounds so charismatic when he speaks — sometimes weaker when he sings, but he knows how to play with that. He’s not afraid to take his time either, like on the title track which bookends the album (fifteen minutes long in all, slow, barely moving, yet enticing).

♪ “Faites monter”
▷ RYM

Michael Pisaro Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation

One of my favourite Pisaro records, though he’s got a lot of good ones. “Thirteen rings or loops of sound, wound around each other”, for three musicians — piano, crotales, sine waves and other sounds. Reminds me a little bit of Jem Finer’s Longplayer at times in its hypnotic circularity, but more focussed, mysterious, and with actual progression too.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Takanobu Hoshino Ancient Star Story of Asia

Field recordings and a few instruments (a Vietnamese jew’s harp is the most recognizable, but various percussions can be heard too), said to evoke ancient legends, mythologies and celebrations about the stars from several Asian countries. How these connect at all though, I have no idea — but I’m unfamiliar with these stories, so I wouldn‘t know. Perhaps the last track, in which swans can be heard and which evokes Cygnus (both the name of a constellation and the scientific genus of swans), is a key that tells you each sound stands for another? That would be pretty neat, but I have no idea. Anyway I like this.

Cold. Cryptic and mysterious. Water (on many tracks), birds and the wind sometimes, but nothing here is peaceful — it even gets noisy at times. Sometimes everything is processed, distorted.

▷ RYM

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet Landfall

Very melancholic and strangely poetic. A concept album about loss, inspired by hurricane Sandy but also evoking extinct species, vanishing dreams and other images.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM
▷ Nonesuch
♪ “CNN Predicts a Monster Storm”
♪ “We Learn to Speak Yet Another Language”



November 2021

Gravediggaz Niggamortis a.k.a. 6 Feet Deep

Kinda obsessed with “1-800 Suicide” (which I had first heard sampled in DJ Krush Code4109, a great mix), but the whole album is great — quality classic 90s hip hop with morbid and quirky twists. One of the best albums to play on Halloween.

▷ RYM

輕描淡寫 小圈子

Just really nice dreampunk for gazing at the stars for a short while.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

(I always forget it’s called dreampunk, I know that’s because it’s inspired by cyberpunk but soundwise it could have been pretty much anything else. Dreamwave. Dreamcore. Dreamstream.



)

Refreshers Way U Smile

Classic jungle (track 1), with strange exotic twists (track 2) and a blissful, sunny atmosphere (tracks 3 & 4). Thanks to plexure for the discovery!

▷ Bandcamp
▷ Discogs
▷ RYM

Kœnig Messing

Very original and refreshing — experimental percussion focussed on a single brass cymbal* (which I honestly couldn’t tell just by listening to it), with vocals/rapping on three tracks. It might have ties to industrial music but honestly feels like it’s in a class of its own. A little short perhaps but I’d be interested in hearing more!

* Hence the double meaning of the title — it’s both the German word for “brass” and the English verb you know.

Thanks to Roganjoshua for the discovery!

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Overlook Smoke Signals

Just the right record for when you still want the wild drum and bass rhythms from last summer, but with the darker atmosphere of a foggy November forest. And also want to daydream there for a bit.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ Discogs
▷ RYM

David Simmons The Bunny Man

It’s a poem! And it does a few unusual things that I’m afraid many readers will find terrible ideas, but I honestly kinda love it.

▷ Strange Horizons

👁 👁

Nine short dark ambient tracks, some based on distorted recordings of other music, other harder to identify (field recordings?) — eerie, interesting, very varied.

Thanks to birds for the discovery!

👁 Bandcamp
👁 RYM

Jim O’Rourke To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye

Another one I really like by Jim O’Rourke — four long, beautiful, penumbral drone works.

Thanks to snow_over_mongolia for recommending this! (Based on me liking Shutting Down Here, so if you like that one, check this one too)

▷ Sonoris
▷ RYM

Kill the Vultures Carnelian

Dark, austere jazz rap. Not much variety nor dynamics but it's good; their particular sound and some memorable lines keep drawing me back to it.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Orthrelm Ov

Madness. Relentless pummelling that seems ultra repetitive yet is also complex and changes all the time, it’s like an endless cyclone of drums and guitars. How is this somehow not tiring I have no idea.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Metaroom & Telemist Dog Bus

Wooo! Dog bus!! Dᴰₒᵒgᵍ Bᴮᵤᵘₛ ˢ DOG BUS ☆ ♪☆゚.*・。゚҉̛༽̨҉҉ノ  ! ! !

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Kali Yuga Pro. This One

Oh yes. Instrumental hip hop that heals.

▷ RYM

Team Cherry Hollow Knight

This was amazing.
Could be my favourite game ever.

The hand drawn visuals, the music and atmosphere (dark and tragic but with enough mystery and sensibility that it doesn’t feel too bleak), the gameplay (which gets even better as you collect more charms to pick from), the difficulty (I’ve only completed the standard ending so far but it was the perfect “tough but fair” dosage, with challenging but clear patterns; in fact it’s the only game where, whenever I had difficulty, I noticed that I was getting better and better on each try!). How wonderful Greenpath looked, and how genuinely scary the descent towards the Ancient Basin was.

(I got to 94% completion and the basic ending in about fifty hours or so, mostly with Wayward Compass + Dream Wielder + Grubsong + Quick Focus + Sharp Shadow + Weaversong + Dashmaster, which probably isn’t the best nor smartest combination but it worked for me.)

▷ Official website
▷ GameFAQs
▷ Glitchwave

Shabaka and the Ancestors Wisdom of Elders

I liked Sons of Kemet Your Queen Is a Reptile and its rhythmic jazz protests, but I like this beautiful “psalm in nine parts” about South Africa more. There are still strong rhythms but it’s calmer, with more breathing space, beautiful details, I don’t even know what language the vocals are sung in but they’re definitely moving.

(Next on my list of Shabaka Hutchings’s projects to explore: Melt Yourself Down’s self-titled)

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Aphex Twin drukqs

This really has a sound of its own — a cohesive, harmonious combination of beautiful impressionistic piano and extreme drill’n’bass (with a few short weird ambient tidbits). Shows how good of a composer Richard is, and how much he loves his machines; it’s all about the compositions, instruments and sounds themselves rather than anything else. But I associate it with winter, its biting cold and beautiful lights; maybe also because of the warm colours on the cover and the memory of when I first listened to it (in my bed in my grandparents’ house, while reading the first tome of the Evangelion manga my brother had got — that was a while ago now).

Good as this album is, the whole thing is probably too much — CD 1 alone (= the first 15 tracks) is just right, I often stop there. CD 2 feels like a bonus disc or companion album that mostly covers the same ground and is almost as good. Except for “Meltphace 6”, which is easily the best drill’n’bass track here and my second favourite. But my favourite track is “Jynweythek”, perhaps the first prepared piano composition I’ve heard and still my favourite, I just love everything about it. “Hy a scullyas lyf adhagrow” is another beautiful one and makes me wish Richard would release a whole record of piano compositions.

▷ Warp.net
▷ RYM
▷ Discogs



December 2021

Sparkle Division To Feel Embraced

Retro ambient lounge / jazz vibes taken to another dimension with deep bass, an impressive spatial design and glitch hop accents. Psychedelic too, as if you danced and chilled out in a smoking room in… what a David Lynch movie would be like if it felt good and trippy instead of eerie and disturbing? Grandma came back to life and the jazz band playing in the room are time travellers. Kind of mesmerizing.

I would never have guessed William Basinski is part of this project, it sounds nothing like the other releases I’ve heard by him. (And I personally like it a lot more.)

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

death’s dynamic shroud.wmv Faith in Persona

I didn’t like I’ll Try Living Like This but this one is different! Very catchy tracks based on looped vocal samples, as if spinning in circles, caught in time or repeating the same thoughts. The grooves and hooks are solid (and these alone would make the album), but there’s also a sense of unease or even panic; sometimes the music seems to contradict itself, like on “See Me” where the interruptions (and realization that part of the melody is an old Windows startup jingle) become uncanny. But most of the time they come together in a relatable way. Like when you’re stressed out with a cool song playing on repeat inside your head.

▷ Bandcamp but it’s for subscribers only
▷ RYM

Darius Čiuta _ju-i-ra

Čiuta’s been releasing a lot of works on Archive.org for free, mostly field recordings/experimental. No descriptions, no explanations. This is the one I’ve come back to the most so far, a single hour-long track with some gently dissonant electronic tones over field recordings I can’t really identify. Mysterious, not overly austere, my kind of thing.

▷ Archive
▷ RYM

Darius Čiuta fi-zm

Two hour-long field recording tracks, one with plenty of natural sounds (but probably more of a park than of nature), one in a more urban setting. Some sounds are repeated — it might not be always obvious, but there’s a sense of rhythm here. And it took me a long time to notice that peculiar absence: for the first hour and a half, nobody talks. There are sounds of human activity, yes, but no voices.

▷ Archive
▷ RYM

Material Girl Tangram

Seven tracks as seven different pieces, coming together in non-obvious ways. Elements of instrumental hip hop, experimental jazz, other electronic genres, consistently interesting yet elusive, and — this is what sets this album really apart from other experimental instrumental hip hop projects I’ve heard, I think — always unexpectedly nice and soothing, almost ambient. It’s not easy to see where Tangram is going, and it doesn’t have obvious highlights, but it works.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

อภิชาติพงศ์ วีระเศรษฐกุล [Apichatpong Weerasethakul] ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ [Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives]

I like to watch films to change my mood and feel like I’m somewhere else, and this took me to another place from the very start*, with the beautiful landscapes, peaceful yet mysterious slow pace and supernatural occurences. Very few things happen but the mood, photography and sound design were really good.

(Also this has nothing to do with the actual film but I really like how Thai script looks. Does anyone know of good examples of Thai calligraphy?)

(* I wanted to use the word “dépaysant” here. Probably the best French word English doesn’t have an equivalent for.)

Wacław Zimpel Massive Oscillations

Long, slow progressions. Minimal pulses and beats. Grooves. Progressive electronic. Something like a jazzy feel too?

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Lionel Marchetti & Vanessa Rossetto The Tower (l’escalier en spirale)

A very interesting collaboration between two musique concrète stars. I don’t know what it actually is about, but it feels less impenetrable than Rossetto’s other works; perhaps like exploring a cosmopolitan city from a better world, brighter and more peaceful, close to what ours could have been.

And a cool thing about The Tower is that it exists in two versions, built from the same material — this is Marchetti’s, nocturnal and unfolding in a more analytic, linear / narrative way, each track focussed on a particular sound or idea;

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Vanessa Rossetto & Lionel Marchetti The Tower (The City)

whereas Rossetto’s version is more synthetic, very polished, much shorter but with more going on at each given moment. Also more comforting, diurnal, a little ambient-like.

Don’t ask which one is better — I think both are equally good and it’s particularly interesting to compare them. Two ways of describing the same imaginary place, with the same vocabulary but a different rhythm, a different grammar, a different tone, different lighting.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Nagabe The Girl from the Other Side

Original title:『とつくにの少女』
French title: L’enfant et le maudit

A minimal story with a melancholic atmosphere and gorgeous drawings. It’s about two misfit characters living in a cursed divided world (humans in medieval cities / outside creatures in the forest): the unlikely relationship between an abandoned little girl and a tall outside creature who acts like a parent figure to her. The world is cold, mostly ruthless, mysterious. Only the little girl seems completely oblivious to all this.

Traumprinz B2B DJ Metatron Live at Planet Uterus

As dreamy, deep and emotional as I hoped it would be — it’s the best thing I’ve heard from him yet. And the unexpected breakbeat takes it to another level.

▷ Soundcloud
▷ RYM

HANSA He Is Risen!

Everything derelict, distant and distorted, a mess of ruined buildings falling apart with some lights, TVs or radios still flickering before they die. Maybe they’ll stay messed up like that for a little more. Who knows. There can be something weirdly comforting about the apocalypse sometimes.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM

Graham Dunning Panopticon

This album was played using a video game as an instrument! Dunning replaced all the original sounds from Half-Life by “90s rave tracks and sample CDs” and recorded himself experimenting as a player in the modified game to make interesting results (you can see videos below). It’s disorienting, the sounds sound as if they were affected by an unfamiliar force, prevented from forming the rhythmic patterns they’re meant to but without becoming a senseless mess either. An absurd deconstruction that also sounds like a strange new world.

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM
Motian Capture” (video)
Yellow Henge (Radio Occult)” (video)

Dis Fig FACT Mix 654

This mix has teeth. A rhythmic trip to the most exciting regions of industrial and experimental music, featuring Pauline Oliveros, clipping., Diamanda Galás, 9T Antiope and many others I like — edited, reshaped, recontextualized.

▷ FACT (free streaming + download)
▷ RYM

天気予報 Final Transmission

It’s ridiculous just how comforting “PLAYBACK_REWIND” is — crackle and a warm slow, droney melody on repeat. Just that, for than half an hour. And it hits the spot perfectly. (“PLAYBACK_CORRUPTED” is also good in a similar vein but hits it just a little less.)

▷ Bandcamp
▷ RYM





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