A Fragile Geography’s cover artwork sums it up entirely: a faded, scratched and blurry black & white photograph of a distant manor house shrouded by trees and obscured by what looks like rain or fog as it sits on a small rise, its windows staring out like sightless eyes. It’s a visual archetype that has become synonymous with the ambient/drone scene of recent years, the culmination of ambient moving away from Eno’s early minimalist ideas and the softening of drone’s harder edges.
Ambient drone’s ability to act as a vehicle for everyday alienation and painful emotions was evident 40 years ago and remains a constant well for artists like Rafael Anton Irisarri to draw upon.
If you’re a fan of wistful ambient drone, this album will be right up your street, even if it comes…

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…without any surprises. Plaintive guitar drones, billowing clusters of synths bathed in crackle and hiss, maybe a hint of piano here and there: these are familiar tropes, all useful tools for building up atmospheres that resound instantly with the heart rather than the head. Familiarity is not a bad thing: even for those of us who turn instinctively towards art that upsets norms and preconceptions will eventually drift back to talents like Rafael Anton Irisarri, not just because there’s comfort to be found in the immediately identifiable, but also acute pleasure. A Fragile Geography’s pleasure are manifold, best encapsulated on the ten-minute “Reprisal” as minor chord melodic shifts underpin a gradual increase of tension that builds to an aching climax as clouds of tone and texture swirl around the listener’s consciousness. Played at full volume, the emotional effect is alternately angry, melancholic and elegiac.

Irisarri has intimated that A Fragile Geography evolves between the personal and wider political and social concerns. The latter seem to be embodied by a very obvious gravitas, with deep, but quiet, underlying bass suggesting a turbulence that is in constant threat of bubbling to the surface. More immediate is the clear impact of having everything from his audio archives to his personal studio stolen whilst moving from Seattle to New York. Such a return to basics has clearly focused Irisarri’s mind, but instead of dwelling on frustrations he uses them to tend towards an incremental build-up on each track that, when it culminates, borders on the redemptive (such as on “Empire Systems”).

A Fragile Geography is an album that takes all the preconceptions you might have about a genre like ambient drone, underlines them and then makes you realize just how brilliant a form it is in its very essence. There’s no denying Irisarri uses techniques and instruments we’ve all heard a million times before, but with his taste for restraint and clever composition, he makes the familiar both relevant and beautiful.

1. Displacement 04:16
2. Reprisal 09:39
3. Empire Systems 08:44
4. Hiatus 02:38
5. Persistence 07:03
6. Secretly Wishing for Rain 08:11
7. The Outer Circle (Bonus Track) 5:53
8. A Fragile Geography (Full Album Integrated Track) 39:39

In May 2014, Chateau Flight released Terry Riley Covers, a two-track 12” that saw them deliver fresh interpretations of two works by the great American minimalist, with the assistance of new wave French electronic explorers Cabaret Contemporain.
As collaborations go, it was a rip-roaring success, with both tracks taking Riley’s works in fresh directions whilst retaining the original spirit and ethos of his compositional method.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Chateau Flight member Gilbert “Gilb’r” Cohen was keen to continue the collaboration beyond the strict remits of that particular project. To that end, he invited Cabaret Contemporain members Giani Caserotto (guitars) and Fabrizio Rat (piano/synthesizer) to join him in the studio for a series of free-and-easy jam…

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…sessions. Some 17 months on, the results of some of those sessions form the basis of the trio’s debut album as The Explosion.

Predictably, this eponymous album explores similar territory, drawing not only on the work of great classical minimalists such as Riley, Reich and Glass, but also the ’70s ambient and experimental electronic work of Robert Fripp, Brian Eno and, to a lesser extent, David Toop. Throw in nods to droning post-rock and early ‘90s ambient (particularly Fripp’s FFWD collaboration with The Orb, and some of System 7’s early ambient explorations), and you have an impressive and wholly complimentary palette of influences.

The Explosion, then, is an ambient album with arty roots and lofty ideals. Of course, these alone mean little if the resultant music is sub-par or forgettable. Happily, Cohen, Caserotto and Rat have produced something of rare beauty, which somehow retains the fluidity and energy generated by the project’s improvisational roots.

This is superbly demonstrated by the album’s undoubted high point, the 13-minute “Let’s Love”. The track initially unfurls slowly via soft electronics, subtle bass guitar notes and lilting, Fripp and Steve Hillage-style guitars. The piano motifs beneath are cyclical, but the hazy guitar textures and alien electronics that catch the ear seem to be slowly evolving. The later introduction of a sharp, spacey synthesizer arpeggio successfully shifts the track’s focus, lifting it into another dimension altogether.

This kind of subtle, complimentary progression – a feature of great American minimalist works – is what lifts The Explosion beyond the realms of bog standard ambience. It can be heard in the exotic, Indian-influenced drone textures, psychedelic guitars and gentle electronic hum of “Raga 4” – an inspired choice as an album closer – and in the album’s most surprising moment, the horror-influenced, post-rock-meets-blazed techno pulse of “Disco Blind”. While this sudden explosion of rhythm at first feels a little out of place, its’ pursuit of mind-bending hypnotism via contemporary psychedelia is in keeping with the album’s overriding approach.

Even the tracks that offer less obvious progression, such as Duke Ellington tribute “The Duke”, and the deep space ambience of “Three Worlds”, bristle with minimalist intent. The latter, all bubbling, overlapping electronics, head-in-the-clouds synths and sci-fi effects, is reminiscent of two overlooked ambient classics from the past two decades, I:Cube’s Live At The Planetarium, and Sun Electric’s 30.7.94 Live. Both of those sets were based on live recordings, so it’s no surprise that The Explosion’s take on the same sound – produced during extended jam sessions, remember – should be similarly inspired.

Lux Laze is Jam City’s soundtrack to Daniel Swan’s retro-dystopian sci-fi short of the same name, originally issued in a limited run in 2010. Classical Curves, which was at that point barely a glint in Jack Latham‘s eye, has since been described as the soundtrack to our dystopian present, reflecting the slick, unforgiving surfaces of hypercapitalist consumerism. By contrast, Lux Laze‘s dystopia feels closer to this year’s followup, Dream a Garden. It sounds old, raddled and kind of romantic, though its atmospheres remain icy cold throughout.
It’s often difficult not to think of Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire theme in the echoey bass pedal that opens Running Theme, or Blade Runner‘s east-meets- west dystopia in Latham’s spindly melodies. But Latham builds his own musical world out of these…

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…materials, and does it with the deftness you’d expect of such a talented producer. The five brief tracks are best enjoyed as a suite, with the same soupy percussion and piercing synths recurring throughout. We’re transported from the smoggy gloom of “Opener,” through the dazzling “Chimes,” to the gorgeous “Main Theme.” It may be slight (12 minutes), but Lux Laze is an interesting footnote in an impressive discography.

The genesis of Aberration of Light is a response to one of the grander sensory-cultural experiences accessible in the 20th and 21th centuries, but it has been released on two of the humbler audio formats without betraying its core originating concept.
Composer, multi-instrumentalist, recordist, and sound-massager Olivia Block originally developed it to be the audio element of a multi-media piece devised in collaboration with visual artists Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson. It was originally staged in movie theaters. Dimly projected, slowly changing images raised the question, is that on the screen, or just the viewer squinting? Slowly rising white noise challenged the listener to distinguish played sound from environmental sound, and what one hears from what one thinks one might be hearing.

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But Block has allowed the piece to be released in two formats — audiocassette and digital download — that invite the listener to consider other limits.

These audio formats upend the music’s social dimension. Instead of joining scores of people gather in darkness to share spectacular extremes of sound and light, they promote solitary listening. After all, downloads and cassettes share a common genesis in the pursuit of convenient portability. They’ve each been reviled for the sonic compromises that they require or enable. While it’s possible to make tapes sound pretty good, they usually ended up being shoddily made, played on cheap devices and in circumstances of divided attention. Their recent revival is founded partly on a fetishization of such flaws. Digital files can likewise deliver an enormous amount of accurate sonic information, but are more likely to be played through shitty ear buds and subjected to intentional limiting and shaping designed to make them persistently (i.e. un-dynamically) audible when played through crappy speakers.

But what better way to get you to deal with the limits of your medium than with work designed to test the limits of perception? In the theater, the use of darkness and quietly played, ambiguous sounds heightened awareness of the interplay between intentionally trying to pay attention to something and actually perceiving it. Likewise, the hiss of tape commingles with the hiss of intentionally deployed white noise, and invites you to consider what you’re hearing, where it comes from, and why you think all of that matters. Is it what you hear that you appreciate, or the act of hearing? Play it on your phone or mp3 player through typically ill-fitting ear buds on a nighttime walk; are you hearing the bugs in your neighborhood, or field recordings of bugs, or both? What do you like more or less, and why? Here we are at the polar opposite of the original listening situation, asking the same questions; if nothing else, you have to give Aberration of Light it’s due for being a flexible heuristic tool.

But you may already have noticed the qualitative evaluations salting the last paragraph, so let’s just stop right hear and acknowledge that the listener writing this review finds Aberration of Light to be pretty marvelous. The very quietness that invites you to listen closely also primes you to be seduced by the attractiveness of its components. The white noise is like a good tapioca pudding with has just enough texture to make it interesting; the layered organ drones and sine tones speckled with static are as attractive as the last fading light of a cloudy late fall day; the long clarinet tones that bloom into longer electronic ones wrap around you like the lightest of shrouds. The movements between passages are either linked by near silence of cross-faded so you can never quite tell when they occur, anymore than you can ever tell quite when you pass from consciousness to sleep. One could easily enjoy the sensual qualities of the sounds and their transitions without ever pondering the issues proposed by the preceding paragraphs. Now how’s that for flexibility?

No Wave is a funny thing: kinda nebulous, it can come in many guises, but it’s still instantly recognisable. It takes a lot of styles, all of which have to be dragged through the dust until they’re tattered and broken, then propped up together like a homeless choir with some unsurvivable concoction pumped into their veins, unleashing a last, unholy burst of energy, guided by an overweeningly arty sensibility to produce a sound that is equal parts utterly inspired and divinely untalented.
It’s easy to imagine feckless art-school dropouts mooching through the ghettos of late ‘70’s New York, croaking out these menacing noises. Giuliani might’ve scared the town too straight to reliably produce anything like this nowadays, but every…

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…now and then, from some grimy corner of the world, a genetic aberration -a freak throwback- will claw its way out of history and tortuously smear itself on to cassette.

Brisbane, it could be argued, is becoming disturbingly reliable at vomiting these atavistic noises. At least one hideous monster from the sweaty southern hell has crawled its way back to suck the ichor from the source. Some might not see Slug Guts as no wave and you could ask the band themselves, but they died there. The sludgy, furry horror of Sewers could be in the same, fallen, post-punk tradition, but perhaps it takes a more fulsome commitment to art in all its ridiculously elitist forms, chewed up and spat back at an uncomprehending public.

For that you could go to the likes of the increasingly postmodern hellions Bitchratch or the freakishly dancing Cured Pink. Traditionally that has been Enderie Nuatal: just one maniac, with a million ideas running through his head, throwing himself about on stage. Everything comes spraying out over his collection of noise producing implements and anyone who happens to be caught in the blast. On his latest release, As A Four Piece Band, he introduces you to some co-conspirators from the likes of Sky Needle, Per Purpose & the Deadnotes via his trademark, deadpan humour.

Nuatal has heard and absorbed so much music it’s often a bit difficult to know which angle he’s going to come at you from: grim post-punk, sweaty afrobeat, hypnotic dub, clinical techno, industrial of the more experimental kind or mind-expanding found sound. Appropriately, given the title, all four members contribute to this record and that appears to have helped solidify the stylistic approach. A murky, lo-fi jam rock predominates, the undulating base for shrieking horns, found percussion and dubby echoes. It seems to secure its best expression on advance release, Essential. It’d sound like Tom Waits at his most cock-eyed, leading some hellish gamelan, but Enderie Nuatal’s voice sounds like Birthday Party era Nick Cave, entombed in a Dalek.

Many of the same things could be said about a track like Swimming, but the rhythm section shifts gear into a complex and fast-paced funk, as other elements weave on heedlessly and -somewhere in the background- Nuatal wails and burbles like a madman. The back half of the record heads, loosely, in a few directions. Live In Sydney self-indulgently bangs on cans as Nuatal focuses on mutating his voice. Champagne floats, womb-like between spacerock and ghastly ambient as the backdrop for performance poetry. Two Stroke recapitulates in the original, slowly vamping beat, as unnameable noises slither across the top. At some point Nuatal enthusiastically slurs “It’s very impressive!” Quite.

It’s just another hazy chapter in the already voluminous history of Cured Pink, one that will probably last at least as long as their upcoming European tour. After that, who can say? Nuatal, like no wave itself will continue to creep in and spirit away the cadavers of old sounds, reanimating their rotting remains and sending them stumbling back in our direction. Always different, strangely nebulous, but with mad purpose and instantly recognisable.

1.Rosetta
2.Essential
3.Treated Unwell
4.Offcut
5.(I’m) Swimming
6.Grande (Dub)
7.Live In Sydney
8.Champagne
9.Two Stroke

Since accepting responsibility for the technical end of Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation in 2005, Byron Westbrook has been creating interactive performances and sound installations that don’t shrink readily down to album dimensions. In 2010 he released a self-titled album under the name Corridors, which, while undeniably beautiful, lacked a certain experiential dimension. In Corridors performances, he processed instrumental sounds until they were unrecognizable and played back his arrangements of them through multi-speaker set-ups that he mixed live. Sometimes audience members helped shape the music by moving iPods and mini-discs loaded with files of the music he was playing around the playback space, continuously transforming what they heard…

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…according to the placement of both the speakers and their ears.

In the next five years, Westbrook has created 16 installations and played 90-odd concerts, but until now, issued just one short Corridors cassette. Precipice is his first recording under his own name, and if one considers how he’s spent his time, its existence raises questions. Why the change of name? Why make an album at all? Shedding the Corridors moniker may be a matter of practicality — get rid of it now, before you have to live with it all your life. Perhaps it also declares the end of a phase, since the music on _Precipice _sounds pretty different from Corridors’. The sleeve doesn’t say so, but it sounds like Westbrook’s opted this time out of synthesized sounds. Instead of gorgeous blurs, these pieces are composed of discrete events. The side-long “Spectral Ascension” opens with intermittent bursts, windy whooshes, and a low bass trill; on “Fractal Shift,” bright sound-bubbles harden and then shatter into tiny pieces that seem to fall and clatter as they land.

But Westbrook hasn’t abandoned continuous sound. “Infinite Sustain” lives up to half of its name with elongated tones that seem to stretch and shimmer, although no forever. And once “Spectral Ascension” gets going, a looped organ-like tone becomes the ladder upon which the rest of the piece rises. But where the pieces on Corridors invited the listener to wander and drift, this music seems to press upon the listener, imposing a more visceral response. And there you have your other answer. By making a select sequence of music and having it cut into discs of plastic, Westbrook has asserted a fixed element into his changing soundscape. It isn’t about processing, or space, or movement — it simply is.

Tim Keiling’s productions under the name Erdbeerschnitzel have always taken an offbeat approach to house music, slicing up samples in a rapid-fire manner similar to Akufen, but also emphasizing heavy bass grooves and thick, soulful melodies. Following his eclectic, glitchy 2009 digital full-length Pathetik Party, his numerous vinyl releases (including 2012 double LP Tender Leaf and EPs on Delsin and 3rd Strike Records) have emphasized the more dancefloor-friendly qualities of his music, often drawing influence from ’80s R&B and disco. His 2015 full-length The Attendants is easily his most experimental work to date, moving away from the dancefloor and creating more cerebral sound constructions incorporating electro-acoustic and minimalist influences.

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“Hessian Arc” opens with marimba-like percussion and stark snare drum hits, eventually bringing in digital choir sounds and ticking drum-machine beats. Many of the tracks recall the crunchy, skittery beats of late-’90s Warp Records, but with shadowy melodies and a few R&B vocal samples still tucked in. “Tennental” more closely resembles the Warp output of Oneohtrix Point Never, eschewing beats for complex melodies and intense sound design. The album’s closing track, “Seyden,” finds Erdbeerschnitzel returning to his hazy tech-house sound, but it seems a tiny bit more melancholic here than on previous recordings.

The Attendants is a stunning album from a highly creative, under-recognized artist.

It can be a gamble when a dance music producer makes an ambient record: sometimes they take to it naturally, and other times the results are aimless and drifting. Magic Touch, real name Damon Eliza Palermo, is another dance producer letting his beats dissipate into fluffy clouds, and this tape comes at a time when interest in new age-inspired ambient music is at a peak. (1080p itself is no stranger to misty pads and spiritual meditations by now.) As pleasant as it is, however, Clouds of David represents the limitations that can come with an artist’s first dip into ambient.
Clouds of David was made almost entirely on a Yamaha SU700, written and recorded in just two weeks. Each track hews to a similar formula, where a bed of babbling electronics spreads across six…

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…or seven minutes and gentle melodies coast overhead like contrails. Palermo often loses his way without a kick drum—some tunes feel like a string of ambient clichés, or are little more than surface-level prettiness. Opener “Yogi AM” beckons you in with glassy pads and a warm heartbeat, and by minute three it’s locked into a rut that doesn’t change for six more.

When Palermo goes beyond mere exercise, the results are far better. “River Drum” feels like bleep techno slowed down to a morphine drip. The elements float by in illusory vapour trails, a more meditative version of the effusive melodies he writes as Magic Touch. Even better is “Your Way,” which makes tropes like birdsong and glacial chord progressions sound truly affecting again. That’s partly from the glitchy static that tugs at the track’s bottom, a fuzzy tension that also surfaces on highlight “Meera & Geetesh.” On that one, Palermo teases otherworldly sounds out of his keyboard that’ll make you swear there’s a guitar in the mix (there isn’t), and the texture offers something concrete to latch onto.

Those highlights are all clustered in the early section of the album. By the time we get to nine-minute standstill “Lost In Asia,” the music starts to feel empty. Good ambient pieces can retain a shape even if you can’t quite figure out what that shape is; too many songs here feel formless. Clouds Of David is a pleasant diversion, with a few clever surprises. It’s something to put on the background, something that shades the room rather than shapes it.

Bastards might be the full-length debut by Istanbul-based producer and instrumentalist Basak Günak under the Ah! Kosmos name, but she’s no inexperienced neophyte. Two years ago she issued the Flesh EP, and Günak has also created sound design for a number of contemporary dance and performance-related productions throughout Europe (Rotterdam, Prague, Venice, etc.).
One of the more appealing things about the recording is its muscular rhythmic dimension; while Bastards is not a dance music album per se, some of its tracks wouldn’t sound out of place in a club and are all the better for being so; one imagines any festival-styled appearance by Ah! Kosmos will go over strongly when driving dreampop such as “And Finally We’re Glacier” and “Always in…

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…Parentheses” is presented live. Günak also enhances the music’s full-band effect by adding vocals (speaking voices and singing), guitars, and drums by a small number of guests.

The short intro “Out/Ro/In/Growth” immediately establishes Ah! Kosmos’s connections to electronica in its arrangement of voice, abstract electronic, and percussion effects, after which the album proper gets underway with “Stay,” a somewhat shoegaze-styled setting elevated by ethereal guitar textures, intricate beat clatter, and a powerfully supplicating vocal performance by Seha Can. Traces of Günak’s land of origin echo through “Home” in the dulcimer-like strums she drapes across the track’s driving pulse and haunting melodic elements. The song stands out as much as “Stay,” and when its chiming guitars surface, the listener could be forgiven for hearing a hint of Radiohead and Coldplay in Günak’s Ah! Kosmos sound (something similar could be said of the comparatively more atmospheric instrumental closer “Never Again”).

Whether the piece in question is long or short, Günak repeatedly serves notice during the album’s thirty-seven-minute run that she’s a sound designer and arranger of significant ability. Bastards impresses in another way, too, as that rare thing: an album of songs that pushes beyond conventional song design into the kind of sophisticated realm characteristic of electronica and ambient soundscaping.

When the American composer James Tenney wrote the score for Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, he did so on the back of a postcard.
The directions are almost too simple: an extended roll is played on an undefined percussion instrument for a “very long” time. It must rise from silence to a quadruple-forte peak, then return again to silence.
That’s it.
On this LP, Rrose performs the piece twice. Both recordings are around half an hour long, and played on a 32-inch gong — two conditions that must have made these performances physically demanding. First up is a studio recording, dry and relatively soft.
The focus is on the shimmering sound of the instrument: initially just a low thrum of bass frequencies, then the rising complexity of…

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…the overtones. The piece doesn’t reach its crescendo in a straight line, but in fluctuating waves that almost imperceptibly gain intensity. It’s a great recording—powerful, textured, rich.

The second version was recorded live in Washington D.C.’s Dupont Underground, an abandoned subway station. Here the focus is shifted to the sound of the space, which the instrument cannot fill. The microphones are further away, and the reflections from the vast concrete walls dominate. The smooth, rippling rise of the studio recording has vanished. In its place is a darker, altogether more threatening sound. The rustle of footsteps, the traffic echoing in the stairwells and the abrupt clattering of doors are just as much a part of the piece as the gong. Though far less immediate than the studio recording, it’s no less compelling.

Though it’s not used here, the title of Tenney’s piece is often written as “Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion.” Simplifying greatly, in Zen Buddhist teaching a koan is an enigmatic statement, question or story, given by teachers to students in order to test them. Traditionally, they lack any clear resolution. They inspire reflection, doubt and, ideally, a moment of insight.

Tenney chose his words wisely. There is no set way of playing this piece, no fixed idea of perfection to which one can aspire. Instead, his simple instructions open up a space for reflection on the mesmeric nature of hammered metal and the endless variety of tonal shades that emerge both from the instrument and the room it inhabits. A thousand strokes blur into a single sound. The player, the instrument and the room become one.

Just as the student of Zen must give their whole body over to contemplation of the koan, Rrose approaches the physical and mental challenge of this piece with remarkable patience and dedication. The results, rising and falling in asymmetric harmony, are just as beautiful and as complex as you could hope for.

Vito Ricci has composed some 80-odd pieces over the last 36 years: among them are string partitas written for Kronos Quartet; harmolodic studies inspired by his former teacher Ornette Coleman; a work sampling the sound of Japanese cicadas; and a microtonal composition for bassoon, two Theremins, and something called wrench guitar.
You can get a sense of the circles Ricci has inhabited from a 1982 compilation on which he features alongside John Lurie, Peter Blegvad, Arto Lindsay, Christian Marclay, Martin Bisi, and Spalding Gray, among other Downtown N.Y. fixtures. If you don’t pay close attention to New York’s independent theater and new-music scenes, you may never have heard of Ricci, but he is a cult figure to some. An Amsterdam label that specializes in reissues…

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…of overlooked electronic musicians, like the Italian ambient outsider Gigi Masin and the Balearic oddball Joan Bibiloni, named itself after Ricci’s 1985 album Music from Memory. (The LP’s fans are a dedicated bunch: a batch of deadstock copies recently sold out at $85 a pop.) Now, Music From Memory is paying back the debt with a collection of Ricci’s work.

Most of it is drawn from the 1980s, rescued from tapes made for theater works by playwrights like Matthew Maguire, Jeffrey M. Jones, and Susan Mosakowski. There are plangent synthesizers and gently pealing guitars; there are chiming echoes of classical minimalism and even synthetic strings descended from the vernacular heritage of Charles Ives. “Hollywood” sounds every bit like the incidental music its title would suggest, with its limpid synth pads and ersatz jazz keyboards; the slap-bass-infused “Dub It” doesn’t have much to do with reggae, though it’s certainly indicative of how what we might call “rainforest noir” ruled cinematic imaginations in the ’80s.

As electronic music goes, it’s a hard-to-place sound, lacking in the usual stylistic signifiers and now-canonical instruments. (The album notes detail a gear list of mostly forgotten devices like the Octave Plateau Voyetra 8 synthesizer, E-mu Proteus sound module, and Yamaha RX11 drum machine.) The music here sometimes brings to mind Craig Leon’s Nommos and the early ’80s recordings of the Seattle ambient musician K. Leimer. It shares, at least in part, their technology—long-since outmoded synthesizers, unvarnished drum machines, springy delay that wreathes the music with a hint of fizz—and their aesthetics, a mixture of proto-ambient, late-night television soundtracks, and homebrewed avant-gardism. Both of those artists released electronic music that sounded completely otherworldly in the ’80s, and both, like Ricci, have recently been rediscovered, via reissues like this one.

In that sense, the compilation says as much about what listeners find value in now as it does the lasting value of the music itself. Today, sounds that even five years ago might have seemed unfashionable suddenly sound fresh. That’s not to take away from Ricci’s accomplishments: much of I Was Crossing a Bridge is wonderful stuff, even the incidental bits. One of the highlights is “Commie Stories (Part 9)”, one of a pair of sketches written for Susan Mosakowski’s play of the same name. Less than two minutes long, it consists of a single arpeggio played—by hand, from the sound of it—through a delay unit, evoking a burbling water fountain; it’s easy to imagine it as the foundation for a transporting techno jam on a label like L.I.E.S. or The Trilogy Tapes. And if “Inferno (Part 1)”, an eight-and-a-half-minute fugue for shuddering percussion and chirping analog delay, were released on either of those labels today, passed off as a new production from a bedroom studio in Los Angeles or Berlin, nobody would bat an eye. That the opening track, “The Ship Was Sailing”, sounds like a companion piece to Maxmillion Dunbar’s “Woo”, from the Future Times co-founder’s 2013 album House of Woo, speaks to the uncanny timeliness of Ricci’s work. It’s as though gardens planted in vacant lots in the ’80s, long left untended, were finally being harvested, and their heirloom seeds put back into circulation.

Two songs on the anthology date from the past few years, and they are, perhaps appropriately, among the album’s most musically and conceptually developed selections. “Deep Felt Music”, nearly 13 minutes long, evokes both Durutti Column and Tony Conrad in its flickering hints of plucked guitar and its shimmering drones, while “Dox E Koo”, for solo voice and delay, stakes out a position somewhere between Meredith Monk and the haunting tones of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. The very finest piece is “Riverflow (Electronic)”. Plucked acoustic guitar cuts against coolly bowed lines and dissolves into a galaxy of delay and faint percussion; dissonant and arrhythmic, it could almost be mistaken for a Gastr Del Sol outtake. No date is given in the album notes, so I don’t know when it was recorded. There’s a different version on YouTube, dated 1970, but the album version, sparklier and in much higher fidelity, is almost certainly a more recent recording. But perhaps it doesn’t really matter when it was made. The best material on this compilation sounds like it stands outside of time entirely. Unlike linear time, this river flows both ways.

On Cryo Chamber’s artist page for Council of Nine, we’re told Redwood Valley, California resident Maximillian Olivier creates material that “conjure[s] visions of a Lovecraftian deep space and its unspeakable horrors.” In truth, while a powerful sense of foreboding does sometimes permeate his second full-length collection under the Council of Nine name (his debut album Dakhma appeared earlier this year), Olivier offers considerably more than variations on a one-dimensional theme on the seven-track Diagnosis.
Though a title such as “I Can See the Fear in Your Eyes” clearly suggests disturbances of thoroughly unsettling kinds, for instance, the physical material itself, an ethereal, deep space ambient-drone, is as likely to induce wonder as much as trepidation.

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Crafting his concoctions using synthesizers, guitar, electronic instruments, and field recordings, he generates engulfing dronescapes that extend from ominous (“Rite of Passage”) to awesome (“Sedation”). In the latter, voices, faintly audible beneath epic swathes of synthesizer textures, cryptically murmur as if portending the universe’s imminent collapse, whereas choirs intone amidst swollen synth rumblings in “Void of Regret” in a chilly manner that likens Olivier’s throbbing set-pieces to isolationism. Adding to the general sense of unease, high-pitched, slightly dissonant winds howl throughout “Riddled with Guilt,” their intensity leavened somewhat by the soft tinkle of a keyboard melody. Diagnosis doesn’t appear to possess a formal narrative or story-line, but its deeply atmospheric content is certainly powerful and evocative enough on its own terms. Whatever the story is that it’s telling, it’s an epic one and very much compatible with Cryo Chamber’s vision.

Certainly the first thing one notices about this first release in Glacial Movements’ so-called ‘Iceberg Series’ is the packaging design by Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek): no expense has been spared in housing its CD within a firm, extra-wide digipack that includes on its outer covers an embossed iceberg and glossy spot varnishing. And that such a deluxe presentation has been given to a Netherworld release can’t be attributed solely to the fact that Alessandro Tedeschi (aka Netherworld) owns and operates the Italy-based Glacial Movements imprint when the other projected releases in the series are scheduled to be presented in similar manner.
On musical grounds, it’s a rather curious release in that it’s pitched as “the first techno glacial album…

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…by Netherworld.” Techno here needs to be interpreted loosely, as Zastrugi is most definitely not a techno album, though techno-like 4/4 pulses do surface throughout the album. No one, in other words, should expect to hear any one of its five tracks booming forth from a festival stage during the peak moments of a DJ’s set; some of its material could, on the other hand, very reasonably be heard before the set begins and in the chillout room outside the primary club space.

An iceberg is, of course, a huge ice mass, the greater portion of which is hidden beneath the water surface; consistent with that, the goal of the series is to evoke in musical form this immense ice mass. Text on the release’s inner sleeve clarifies that the title term refers to “a wind-eroded, hard-packed snow surface with irregular grooves and sharp ridges that is mostly found in the earth’s polar regions as well as on high mountains subject to high winds.” The track titles similarly allude to iceberg-related phenomena: “Mapsuk” refers to an overhanging shape caused by wind erosion, “Bergie Seltzer” is the term used to describe the sound produced when an iceberg melts, and “Uikka” is the name given to an evil spirit in Inuit mythology who grounds boats between ice blocks.

Granular noise, sonar blips, industrial clanks, speaking voices, convulsions, rumblings, and frozen strings surface in Tedeschi’s five settings, which extend from ten to thirteen minutes. When its kick drums keep up a constant pulse amidst layers of cloudy detail, “Mapsuk” begins to sound very much like one of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas productions. Seething, bone-chilling winds blow across the barren surfaces of “Bergie Seltzer” though not so powerfully that the muffled boom-boom pounding at its center is obliterated. Animated by a lumbering, indomitable pulse, “Sérac” meets the series goal in conjuring the image of a massive entity, while “Uikka” is light years removed from peaceful ambient territory when it includes thunderous tribal drumming. Though Zastrugi does add a new dimension to the Netherworld soundworld, the recording with its techno element stripped out wouldn’t sound all that much different from the kind typically heard on Glacial Movements: deeply textured electronic soundsculptings of a powerfully evocative character.

While the title of How to Cure Our Soul’s second official release calls to mind images, many horrific, of the Vietnam war, it’s unclear whether that’s what audio-visual duo Marco Marzuoli and Alessandro Sergente intended by their choice. And if Saigon is an evocative title, as suggestive are the ones chosen for the recording’s two long-from pieces “Aurea” and “Opium.” Such is the nature of abstract instrumental music that questions of meaning will predictably arise and just as predictably be difficult to resolve.
Marzuoli founded the Abruzzo, Italy-based How to Cure Our Soul project in 2010 and was later joined by Sergente. Having both graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, the duo, armed with digital and analogue gear, set out to explore concepts…

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…like identity, time, and space in sound form and encourage reflection upon such matters in the listener as he/she absorbs the outfit’s ambient-drone meditations.

On the fifty-four-minute Saigon, Marzuoli’s credited with tape, mixing board, and laptop, and Sergente guitar, bass, and electronics. Those familiar with the ambient-drone genre will already have a pretty good idea of what to expect: deep, immersive soundscapes whose lulling, lo-fi drift is best experienced on headphones or on a high-end system at loud volume. The two settings aren’t fundamentally different with respect to structural design and duration, though the pitches in “Opium,” suggestive of the muted hum of a low-flying plane, are lower. With droning layers accruing almost imperceptibly, time slows if not suspends altogether as the gently pulsating settings unfold. States of peacefulness and calm set in as the minutes advance, and any feelings of turmoil temporarily recede from view. How to Cure Our Soul didn’t invent the ambient-drone style, obviously, but Marzuoli and Sergente do it as well as anybody.

Pedro Pimentel’s second Wordclock album aligns with Cryo Chamber’s dark ambient aesthetic but in rather circuitous and unconventional manner: in place of horrific nightscapes, the settings on Self Destruction Themes evoke the aftermath of an attack, those moments when violent acts have ended and survivors reflect with grief and sadness as they gaze upon the devastation.
As a result, the music on the release eschews aggression, intensity, and extreme volume for atmospheric material rich in texture and plaintive in tone. In the album’s 10 pieces, pianos, disembodied voices, ethereal choirs, field recordings, and other sounds regularly bob to the surface of Wordclock’s multi-dimensional soundscapes.
Robert C. Kozletsky (Apocryphos) and label-runner..

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…Simon Heath (Atrium Carceri, Sabled Sun) guest on separate tracks, but it’s classically trained cellist Amund Ulvestad who makes the most substantial contribution. His playing forms a prominent part of the ultra-dense landscapes Pimentel generates such that, even when a piece is its most texturally rich, the cello remains clearly audible, whether it’s heard sawing intently in “The Fever of Our Waiting” or supplicating gently over a shimmering, piano-inflected base during “It May Come.”

Representative of the release are “More Often Than Not,” wherein Ulvestad’s cello drifts through a thick mass of blurry piano notes and rainswept outdoor sounds, and “Every Shade,” a comparatively sadder meditation that pairs the cello’s quietly mournful ululations with an ambient backdrop one could describe as symphonic were it not so hazy. The track on which Ulvestad emotes most powerfully is “Something Else,” a five-minute outpouring of anguish so strong it’s impossible to ignore. As mentioned, Self Destruction Themes largely shies away from harrowing extremes of volume and dynamics, but there are exceptions, such as when “The Fever of Our Waiting” and “Lack of Language” build to crescendos in their final moments.

Self Destruction Themes represents a return to dark ambient work for Pimentel, who’s recently committed time and energy to working with Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robert Finck on the soundtrack to the survival horror game NOCT. Interestingly, Pimentel only started the Wordclock project in 2014, but this sophomore effort under the name indicates that it’s reached an impressive level of sophistication in a very short time.

With The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971, Fossil Aerosol returns to the damaged media and decomposing mediums of the late 20th century. The basic tracks were recorded in 2010, and were remixed and remastered in 2014. The source material for the work consists of dissociated fragments from nearly-lost genre films of the 1970s, filtered by scratched celluloid, bad splices, dropouts, and damaged control tracks.
That is not entirely new territory for the band, as they have previously devoted a handful of releases to the celebration of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead films, but Contaminated is more of an exploration of film’s decay than of its content.
Notably, the genius and fundamental shortcoming of this album are exactly the same, as FAMP seem…

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…to make use of their base material in willfully primitive and unapologetically purist fashion.  Occasionally, a deep, throbbing pulse or drone is used as a backdrop, but these nine pieces otherwise sound a lot like they could be a real-time tape loop performance or possibly even just the work of a single malfunctioning film projector.  FAMP are completely unlike most of the tape-based artists that I have heard, perversely eschewing the “gradual pile-up” and “hypnotic locked-groove” techniques that the technique lends itself to so wonderfully.  Instead, Fossil chooses to “magnify the grit, the errors, the bad splices, and the dropouts.”  The end result is a distinctively unreal, amorphous, and disorienting auditory miasma that does not sound much at all like it was deliberately created by humans.

In theory, that is wonderful and subversively contrarian, but it is very hard to sustain an entire album on clicks and pops alone (especially if the album is completely beatless).  In lieu of anything resembling rhythm, melody, harmony, or power, FAMP instead offer appealingly warbling, fluttering, warped, and echoing snatches of dialogue.  I am probably the target demographic for such an aesthetic, given my great love for Cabaret Voltaire’s “Project 80,” but FAMP frustratingly see it as a complete idea rather than merely a textural starting point for something deeper and more significant.

The only real exception is “Floridian Mnemonics III,” which beautifully enhances its stuttering and strangled snatches of speech with some warm, gently pulsing chords.  Regrettably, it lasts less than three minutes, but it illustrates how much more compelling this material could be if it was just framed by some additional coloration or used in service of actual compositions.  That said, The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971 is not necessarily a failure; it just does not work particularly well as music: it is nearly all atmosphere and minimal content.  As an art project, however, it definitely has its merits and I absolutely love the idea of a cabal of enigmatic Midwestern weirdos raiding abandoned drive-in theaters in search of ravaged film to repurpose.  Also, it casts a rather unique spell, evoking a drifting and formless fever dream that someone might have while a late-night vintage horror marathon drones away on a nearby television.  Unfortunately, that is essentially all it offers, which is deeply exasperating.

What’s in a name? In the case of this brilliantly weird concept record upholding the increasingly rare tradition in British pop of surrealism and provocation, nearly everything but the kitchen sink.
The Eccentronic Research Council are a pan-Pennine analogue synth trio, with actress Maxine Peake on the mostly spoken-word vocals provided by bandmate Adrian Flanagan. Their debut, 1612 Underture, billed itself as a 12-part sound poem drawing on the Pendle witch trials, while the follow-up explored the interplay of two male apes sharing a house.
For their third album they have teamed up with Lias Saoudi and Saul Adamczewski of new label mates, Fat White Family. In the northerners’ latest musical fable, the South London psychedelic punks…

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…play the part of a fictional band, The Moonlandingz, with Peake narrating the main role of an obsessed fan stalking the band’s lead singer, Johnny Rocket.

If this sounds like your idea of art school hell – hang in there. The Eccentronic Research Council counterpoint the conceptual excess by drawing on a lean, mean electronic palette, shared with Sheffield’s long line of experimental synth bands like Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League. They also mix in the retro knob-twiddling, narrative sonic oddities of the Radiophonic Workshop and Joe Meek, while the Fat White Family duo bring their trademark lurching fairground guitar rhythms and sleazy drama.

But it’s Peake who holds the show together, devouring the dense, dark humour of Flanagan’s observational poetry in the same way that Billie Whitelaw used to wrap her mouth around Samuel Beckett’s lines in the Sixties.

This kind of record was par for the course in those more experimental times, but there is nothing remotely difficult about this record. It manages to pull off the trick of making you laugh and making you dance at the same time.

In certain respects, Kengo Yonemura’s second physical sleepland release is retiring in nature and restrained in approach. There’s the lower-case moniker for one, plus the fact that for Silentseeing features ten rather minimalistic pieces of modest duration in contrast to the long-form compositions we often come across on ambient-styled releases.
But the forty-five-minute collection includes powerful moments, too, in keeping with a project that, as described, draws for inspiration from the “sound of insects, the sound of falling rain, the bustle of big cities, [and] noise in construction work.” Operating out of Hyougo, Yonemura began producing his ambient sleepland sounds in 2011 using layers of electric guitar to generate his overtone-rich ambient-drone constructions.

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There are some undeniably lovely moments on the recording. Often blurry and crystalline, densely layered dronescapes such as “Merits of Sequence,” “Eosphorite,” and “Ripples Over the Frosted Glass” drift peacefully, pulling the listener along with them as they do so. The more aggressive side of the project comes to the fore when “Scaffold” undergirds field recordings of construction clatter with a low-pitched rumbling drone; even more intense is the two-part “Degree of Partial Melting,” whose clangorous metallic textures add a harrowing dimension to the recording.

All such pieces are memorable, but the recording reaches its peak halfway through when “hilllight” ascends to celestial heights and, better still, “b.o.n.c.” paints a plaintive picture whose slow-motion arc is as beautiful as it is sad. It’s so lovely, it alone makes for Silentseeing worth checking out. Needless to say, Yonemura’s album is a natural fit for Chihei Hatakeyama’s White Paddy Mountain (the label head also did the mastering on the project).

Where IX Tab’s earlier Spindle and the Bregnut Tree was lusciously and admirably in thrall to the heroically named Saxon Roach’s observance of all things Coilish and tentacular, on R.O.C. he takes what no-one is calling the Englyshe Wyrd Electronicks template and proceeds to make it his own. R.O.C. sounds so disorienting at times that it seems as if inebriation has been brought upon the very atmosphere, like when the corners of the room in an HP Lovecraft story become smogged and dankly unfamiliar, assuming an unnatural geometry that signifies the presence of an unwholesome other, just as the shrill, keening tones that IX Tab summon pierce deep and lastingly into the brain. This album isn’t so much haunted as pushing at the boundaries of the so-called hauntological…

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…movement, as encountered among the ticking, almost childlike splendour of the bass-heavy ‘A Drunken Bone (Of Chrome)’, where a timestretched voice quoting Beaudelaire advises the listener to “be drunken… all of the time… continually… it is the hour to be drunken”.

IX Tab’s derangements of the senses are more subtle in their approach than the sometimes scattergun plunderphonic approach others have deployed over the years, though he shares with that method the extended use of sampled spoken words and sung tones from time to time. Roach deploys his psychogeographical and hypnosis tape samples liberally but with a thoughtful, heavily psychedelic ear for the joys of audio befuddlement. R.O.C. cries out for listening to in a darkened room on headphones, or better still in a suitably spooky, psychically charged environment, such as an abandoned tower on the moors or deep in a mysterious lichen-covered deconsecrated chapel on the borderlands between the mundane and magical worlds.

This literary channelling of the likes of Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgeson and the psychedelic derangements of David Lindsay’s bizarre interstellar mindbender A Voyage To Arcturus is never especially gothic; what Roach makes eldritch is not the lifestyle accessories but almost the actual air between the speakers and the ears receiving the soundwaves. At least, that’s how it seems if disbelief is properly suspended, preferably over a yawning chasm of existential abandon; and that’s what the glacial dubs and heightened audiobook dementia of R.O.C. often sounds like the music is suspended so precariously, deliriously above.

Another installment in Sub Rosa’s Early Electronic series: the complete works, for the most part previously unreleased, by a key composer of Belgian electronic music. André Stordeur‘s musical career started in 1973 with a tape composition for the soundtrack to Gordon Matta-Clark’s film Office Baroque. Later in the ’70s, he participated in avant- garde music ensemble Studio voor Experimentele Muziek, founded in Antwerp, Flanders, by Joris de Laet. Since 1980, Stordeur has composed exclusively on Serge synthesizers — either a Serge series 79 or a Serge prototype 1980, which Serge Tcherepnin built for Stordeur. In 1981, Stordeur composed the soundtrack to Belgian director Christian Mesnil’s documentary Du Zaïre au Congo.

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He studied at IRCAM in 1981 with David Wessel and then flew to the US to study with Morton Subotnick. Stordeur became an influential sound synthesis teacher and, in 1997, completed his Art of Analog Modular Synthesis by Voltage Control, a guide to everything modular.

Complete Analog and Digital Electronic Music 1978-2000 includes Stordeur’s only album, 18 Days, originally released in 1979 by Igloo, and two discs of previously unreleased material: Analog and Digital Works 1980-2000 and 6 Synthesis Studies Circa 2000.

Disc 1
01. To You (2:43)
02. Memories (8:48)
03. My World (7:26)
04. C.C. 101.296 (12:18)
05. Aphrodisiac (6:59)
06. Nang Na Nang (4:57)

Disc 2
01. Oh Well (35:50)
02. Chant 10A (16:59)
03. Nervous (7:48)

Disc 3
01. Drone (13:47)
02. Raga (7:56)
03. Karma (7:54)
04. Tablas (7:27)
05. Clarinet Solo (2:00)
06. Like Phil (5:21)