Though his music sometimes exhibits the romantic sweep of chamber music and can be marked with skittering beats, Venezuela-born producer Alejandro Ghersi’s work as Arca is defined above all by its fluidity and flexibility.
You can hear conventional musicality inside of his tracks-melodies, chord changes-but rather than being fixed on paper, they are always in flux. Individual notes twitch and vibrate, refusing to stay with a single pitch; rapidly shifting clusters hint at proper chords without ever quite committing to them; tempos speed up and slow down according to whims rather than the grid of a timeline. Arca’s deeply organic machine music is defined by Ghersi’s ability to find grace in imperfection. Ghersi has come a long way in a short time, his…

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…career the sort of underground/mainstream hybrid that could only happen in the digital era, when producers rapidly move from sharing home-recorded beats online to working with stars. Though his music has varied greatly, you’ve always been able to hear his voice inside of it.

The first music heard from Ghersi was a series of three low-profile releases in 2012 that made small waves among electronic music heads but were little heard outside of that circle. But among that group was someone working on Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus, and Arca wound up contributing to four tracks, including “Blood on the Leaves” and “I’m in It”. That same year, he also produced for FKA twigs, helping to create a futuristic pop that was simultaneously dense and spare and defined by its elusiveness. Xen, Arca’s 2014 full-length debut, expanded Ghersi’s range further, sounding like a bent version of modern classical music crumpled into a ball with a post-dubstep beat tape. Music created for a fashion show in Italy earlier this year spoke further to Ghersi’s ability to move between genres, scenes, and high/low art boundaries, and his continued collaboration with artist Jesse Kanda on the visual aspects of his work make Arca a project with a rare thematic integrity. He’s developing quickly but building on a clear foundation.

If Aphex Twin took the playful communal energy of early-’90s rave and turned it to highly personal art, and producers of the early ’00s like Fennesz and Tim Hecker showed how emerging software could be used to create new worlds, Arca is making the abstract electronic music of our current moment, music for an idea of humanity that exists outside of binaries. “Xen is a genderless being,” he told The Guardian last year. “It’s about resisting labels and integrating different sides of ourselves.” Accordingly, Arca tracks are never one fixed thing: Conventional beauty is swirled together with ugliness, aggressiveness exists alongside serenity, chaos and form fail to cancel each other out. Mutant is an album of contrasts, and Ghersi has an uncanny ability to let extremes interact with each other to create something new.

The 20 tracks here stretch for over an hour, but lines between them are unclear, and when heard at once the record can seem like one long suite, treating us to an array of sounds and moods. You can imagine “Vanity” as a piano solo, so pretty and memorable are the central melodic motifs, but Ghersi’s production on the track is essentially a series of controlled explosions, the sound of a song breaking into a million pieces and re-assembling itself. “Alive”’s drones are positively cavernous, sounding like a memory of an ancient civilization bubbling up through a hole in the earth, and he breaks up the static drift with splattering breaks that jolt the song at irregular intervals. The repeated vocal loop on “Umbilical” is one of the few sounds on the record connected to life on planet Earth, but it’s mixed in with some of the album’s harshest and coldest electronics. As the tracks tick off and you lose track of how far into the album you actually are, the clarity of Ghersi’s vision comes into focus. The broken-ness of the music takes on an empowering energy, as oblong fragments bind together into gorgeously weird shapes and dynamic shifts that shouldn’t make sense feel perfectly logical.

Compared to Xen, Mutant feels less composed and less indebted to classical music. With many tracks on the former album you could squint a little bit and imagine them being performed by a daring new music ensemble, à la Aphex Twin with Alarm Will Sound. But Mutant leans toward soundscape, avoiding proper songs. There are moments in the back half, particularly on “Enveloped”, where beats crop up and you can imagine them being used to back a pop production of some kind, but even here the warped instrumental patch used for the melody is too strange and otherworldly for an artist that has ever been on the radio. It’s not an easy listen; this is glorious music that sounds like a living thing, and it can be hard to connect the album to anything outside of itself. Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí said that the straight line belongs to man and the curved to God; on Mutant, Ghersi turns a fixation on porousness and instability into a kind of spiritual pursuit.

01. Alive (3:56)
02. Mutant (7:27)
03. Vanity (4:16)
04. Sinner (3:35)
05. Anger (2:00)
06. Sever (2:13)
07. Beacon (0:48)
08. Snakes (4:50)
09. Else (2:30)
10. Umbilical (2:09)
11. Hymn (1:57)
12. Front Load (2:44)
13. Gratitud (3:44)
14. En (3:04)
15. Siren Interlude (0:43)
16. Extent (2:34)
17. Enveloped (2:22)
18. Faggot (3:10)
19. Soichiro (4:35)
20. Peonies (3:29)
21. Ashland (5:07)

Jaime Fennelly’s music as Mind Over Mirrors has always felt massive; the hypnotic loops he creates with Indian pedal harmonium feel endless. But The Voice Calling is more expansive than any previous Mind Over Mirrors record, primarily due to the project itself having gotten bigger with the the addition of Haley Fohr of Circuit Des Yeux.
Fohr’s vocal layers-mostly wordless-add a new dimension to Mind Over Mirrors, and every track on The Voice Calling shoots straight for the stratosphere.
Part of that effect comes from a slight retro feel-classic Terry Riley comes to mind-but Fennelly and Fohr still sound absolutely present, caught up in the real-time magic of their attention-demanding music.

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1. Motioning (7:31)
2. Regular Step on Snake River (8:40)
3. Whose Turn Is Next (4:51)
4. Strange(r) Work (5:29)
5. Senses Scattered (1:46)
6. Body Gains (3:40)
7. Calling Your Name (8:47)

Multi award-winning composer Trevor Wishart‘s electro-acoustic masterpiece, Red Bird: A Political Prisoner’s Dream reissued for the first time in nearly 40 years. Composed between 1973 and 1977, and first presented on the York Electronic Studios label in 1978, it is Wishart’s 2nd release and a prime example of his compositional interests in the interpolation by technological means between the human voice and natural sounds. Bearing in mind that was created long before samplers were readily available, it is the result of painstaking process, splicing fractured phonemes, extended vocal technique, bird calls, buzzing bees and tape FX to serve a mind-swilling wash of psychedelic abstraction that deals with sound at elemental, cerebral levels. The putative divide…

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…between real, acousmatic and manipulated sound, or the lines between language, philosophy, politics and music are systematically broken down across two 18-minute sides of constantly morphing composition and sound design.

This is Duane Pitre’s roots record. The New Orleans- based multi-instrumentalist and composer’s personal history has always been cause for comment, if only because the narrative of retiring from professional skateboarding to play rock and roll, then transitioning into minimalist composition after teaching himself the necessary scoring and math skills sure as hell stands out from the pack.
But even before he was a skater, he was a Pitre; a member of a family with deep roots in Cajun swamp country. It stands to reason that after moving from New York, where he was once the neighbor of Dusted writer Doug Mosurock, back to a home town in the process of figuring out what it’s going to be post-Hurricane Katrina, he’d start dealing with heritage at some level. But given the kind of artist…

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…that he is, it makes sense that he’d do it in a singular way.

Pitre has said that Bayou Electric finishes an “unplanned trilogy” with his albums Feel Free and Bridges. It shares with them a drifting quality and a prominent placement of curving, elongating tones, and that is most likely one reason that Pitre has thus grouped them. However it is as methodologically different from those records as they are from each other. Feel Free is founded upon variably controlled randomization of harmonics harvested from guitars tuned in just intonation, and while Bridges uses that tuning system, the six-part suite employs no chance elements. Bayou Electric is a single 48 minute-long piece founded upon field recordings that Pitre collected one August evening at a plot of wetlands in Four Mile Bayou, LA that has been in the Pitre family since 1922. To the sounds of wildlife and water, he has added strings, sine tones, and synthesizers.

The material that Pitre has chosen (and the reasons for choosing them) place Bayou Electric closer to Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land than to his previous records. Like that record, it mixes instruments played in the studio with sounds collected in the open air. And like On Land, Bayou Electric deals with personal history. It took Eno over three years to complete On Land, during which time he added and subtracted instrumental tracts, some intended specifically to go with the environmental sounds, but others taken from the sessions for his previous records. Certain of its tracks are named for places that have personal significance to Eno, either by triggering memories or by inducing associations about what he thought the places might be like. Like Eno, Pitre has made it a point not to relegate the field recordings to the background. But his intentions, while never completely spelled out, seem to be different. While this music can, at low volume, fulfill the passive listening role as well as Eno’s record did, when you turn it up Pitre’s swelling tones evoke frankly emotional grandeur. He may be expressing his responses to his family’s heritage in his own sonic language, but the feelings of love and pride, and the awareness of being part of something bigger than one self, that are stirred by those sounds are pretty universal.

So what comes next? Pitre has already announced that he plans no more solo records for the foreseeable future, and his steady recent collaborations with Jon Mueller, Eleh, and Cory Allen suggest one answer. If that is the case, the harmonious balance between instrumentation and pre-exisiting sound augurs well for partnerships to come.

The story of Kosmischer Läufer is one of the most wonderfully apocryphal tales in the current music world. According to Unknown Capability Recordings, the tracks compiled on this and the previous two volumes they’ve released so far were created by musician Martin Zeichnete as part of a training soundtrack for East Germany’s Olympic athletes. It’s a great story and one that you wish were true, but no one has ever been able to corroborate it. Much like Chuck Barris’ supposed work as an assassin with the CIA (as documented in his book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), you almost prefer that it doesn’t get confirmed or denied. The mystery is just too delicious.
The backstory is also a great device to draw people’s attention towards what might otherwise…

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…be dismissed as just another Krautrock homage using vintage modular synths, or synth patches built into a Eurorack system or computer hard drive. Even then, you have to give credit to the meticulous work that the creators of Kosmischer Läufer (or “Cosmic Runner”) did to evoke the musical era that they’re paying tribute to. The rolling melody lines and little synth trills in “Jenseits des Horizonts” sound like an abandoned offramp on Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.” And the opening track “Zeit sum Laufen 164” could easily get snuck into the recent vinyl box set of Harmonia’s collected works without anyone being the wiser.

On this volume, the story of Zeichnete goes even deeper, with the entirety of side two of the vinyl edition (tracks four through 10 on the digital version) given over to a supposed soundtrack to an animated film meant to “launch a bid to bring the 1984 Summer Games to East Berlin.” Again, a great concept made even better by the evocative track titles (“In the city and in the countryside,” “The Girl’s Dream,” “Arrival at the Stadium/The race”), even when the music sometimes feels like it’s straining to keep within the tone of the times.

There’s zero doubt at this point that the music here is being made by a modern band or single artist. The sound the recording is far too clean and some of the instrumentation doesn’t feel like it fits the supposed era when these tracks were laid down. But, again, a little suspension of disbelief never hurt anyone and certainly takes nothing away from the enjoyment of a throwback lark like this.

It’s telling that the instrument contributions by the sole guest on Temporal Enhancement are clearly identified, yet those by the artist responsible for the recording are only vaguely referenced.
More to the point, Jonathan Lees is credited with acoustic guitar and found sounds on four of the six tracks; David Newman (aka Autistici) is credited with having written and performed the album’s material. It’s not so much, that he isn’t amenable to listing the various instruments used to bring the album to its final form but more that the Sheffield-based composer wants the listener to broach the recording on purely sonic terms and not be distracted by production-related issues.
This so-called “sonic exploration of the perception of time” implicitly explores the ways by which…

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…listeners shape sequential sounds into organized, coherent wholes and use memory to retain the residue of previously heard sounds and combine it with the material subsequent to it. Augustine famously wrestled with such time-centric issues centuries ago in his Confessions, a theme that Newman now takes up in a different way. For him, the harmony or disharmony of one moment is determined in part by its relationship to the sounds that appear before and after it.

In the service of this exploration, Newman draws upon a number of different styles, among them modern classical, drone, and ambient, and blends samples, instrument sounds, field recordings, and found sounds into arresting compositions of unusual design. It is possible to extricate an identifiable instrument sound from the whole, but doing so risks missing the point: these settings are best experienced as mutating organisms, as sound experiments extending through time. For forty-six minutes, noises of varying kinds—creaks, clicks, whooshes, et al.—intermingle with synthetic washes and broken rhythms in constructions that exude more dimensionality than a term like multi-layered can convey.

“Opened Up Too Quickly” assumes a rather industrial character when molten shards emerge within the flickering mass; convulsions of a determinedly alien type dominate when the industrial episode recedes. Newman imposes shape on “Thinking Before Feeling” by grounding it with a regulated rhythm though not so much that the piece loses its abstract character in the process. At album’s end, he applies ear-catching echo effects to the otherwise pastoral-styled meditation “Slowing Down Before You Stop.” If there’s a go-to track here, it’s “Habituation of the Heart” for the way Newman shapes a sprawl of guitar treatments, hazy drones, crackles, and placid atmospheres into a slow-moving, seventeen-minute design unlike anything you’ve heard before. It would be tempting to label such material psychedelic yet doing so risks imposing on it associations that aren’t appropriate to the material at hand.

As a Professor of Jazz (Drums/Percussion) at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and as contributor to recordings and performances by Lee Konitz, Dave Holland, Bill Bruford’s Earthworks and other progressive jazz thinkers, drummer, composer and bandleader Martin France is accustomed to deep and heady jazz waters. In Spin Marvel, France teams up with two of Norway’s most exploratory progressive jazz musicians, electronic sound sculptor Terje Evensen and electronic/ electric trumpet pioneer Nils Petter Molvaer.
Infolding captures Spin Marvel’s debut. “It was recorded live in a four hour session for the BBC,” France reveals. “We were all very happy with the session and how the music was sounding so I forwarded the master files to producer…

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…Emre Ramazanoglu, who then worked with the music and produced it for us.”

To borrow illustrations from another culture, Infolding is as complex and detailed as the art of origami yet as massive and uncompromising as Mount Fuji. Evensen and Molvaer open “Canonical” with electronics and trumpet that sound like an extraterrestrial communication from a civilization in distant space, floating in free time, until Tim Harries’ rampaging bass and France’s drums storm in.

In “Tuesday’s Blues” and “Two Hill Town,” France’s explosive playing on his snare and cymbals honor the sound and spirit of drummer Elvin Jones, linchpin of some of John Coltrane‘s most ferocious rhythm sections. Moelvar’s trumpet sings “Tuesday’s Blues” in blue sound and feeling but frozen and fractured, with ice where its soul might once have been. “Two Hill Town” ping-pongs across its rhythmic pulse but then grows across a broader landscape, as the bass, trumpet and other electronics menacingly surround France’s thunderous drums like the feeling in the wind right before a bad storm.

“I tend to mold my mixing style to the project at hand and on this one I just was led to that kind of dramatic, spacy sound by immersing myself in the mix and creating as much of a performance there as I could,” Ramazanoglu explains. “I intensively used convolution processing to get different instruments modulating each other and a lot of interactive compression and effect processing to shape the individual voices into larger, dense blocks of sound in which the boundaries between the instruments are blurred perhaps.”

All these different techniques and textures come together in “Leap Second”: In its ambient beginning, Moelvar muses on the blues, his trumpet the fulcrum between the electronics and bass but trapped in the amber of suspended time, until France breaks his shackles and leaps into hard swinging jazz with a tribal and powerful sound. “Leap Second” somehow manages to stay together and to fall apart, and serves as a milepost on the modern music continuum to which poet W.B. Yates seemed to point in his historic “The Second Coming”: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”

“The use of openness and space is a very important part of what we do,” France concludes. “And creating something from this place allows the musician to feel free and uninhibited and move it in a direction they want to express.”

Personnel: Nils Petter Molvaer: trumpet; Martin France: drums; Terje Evensen: live electronics; Tim Harries: bass; Emre Ramazanoglu: drums (6).

After the much praised collaboration with Raison d’Etre released summer 2015 (“De Aeris In Sublunaria Influxu”) and the final volume of the ‘Power Romantic’ trilogy with “Mare Morphosis” in late 2013, “Acouasme” is the first full length album from Troum in over 2 years.
With this album, Troum wanted to go in a completely different direction, creating a ‘harsher’ and more ‘Industrial’ sounding album as a contrast to previous releases. But through the trademark troumatic machining, the final result doesn’t sound at all like standard harsh noise – it’s rather industrial noise as if filtered through a feverish dream, through a deranged perception. The six long tracks of pestering transrational drones on “Acouasme” sound like an aural…

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…psychiatric symptom, a humming hallucination leaving the stable reality.

1. Aliens Laughing About Us (7:48)
2. Acouasme (10:59)
3. Omega Melancholicum (10:06)
4. Outer Brain Outsourcing (12:59)
5. Somnolenz (7:00)
6. Signe Du Miroir (17:56)

While travelling through Berlin in 2012, Lucinda King ripped a sketch of a skeleton and a woman from a book, and stored it in her wallet. The piece was Death and the Maiden, a 19th Century engraving by Edvard Munch. It is an artwork steeped in mythology, one which explores the dark bounds between love and death, frailty of beauty, and beauty of decay.
On her return to New Zealand, Lucinda began to make music with Danny Brady. Inspired by the Chromatics, they initially sought to make their own style of hazy Italo-pop. However, as Lucinda’s vocals and basslines melded with Danny’s synth and drum programming, it became evident they were creating something much darker. Soon, the duo welcomed guitarist and drummer…

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…Hope Robertson to the fold, and Death and the Maiden was born. On their debut album, the group craft a shadowy sound world, filled with drowsy mechanical drums, melancholic synth arpeggios, reverb-drenched guitars, and sighing vocal melodies. The combination is both hypnotic and devastating, as Lucinda explores themes of love, loss, and decay, wrapped in tactile electro-acoustic languor that sets teeth on edge. It is fitting that the group recorded the album in the cavernous rooms of Dunedin’s None Gallery, a spiritual home to many of New Zealand’s experimental and electronic upstarts.

Despite the sense of loss and darkness on this record, there is a bittersweet hopefulness at the core. On Dear ____, Lucinda sings of the irreducible distance between the self and desire, with a lyric penned on her flight back from Berlin. Yet Danny and Hope counterpoint this sombre subject matter with soaring sonic beauty, crafting a party record for heartbroken romantics. These striking juxtapositions are evidence that Death and the Maiden are seeking to create a feeling, something that lasts. The result of this effort is a stunning record, one which haunts the listener and demands repeated listens.

1. Victory (4:46)
2. Flowers For The Blind (3:46)
3. Skulls (5:38)
4. Civilization (4:59)
5. Dear ____ (7:36)
6. War Dance (4:27)
7. Bioluminescence (6:40)

Secret Science, the ‘difficult second album’ from Mechanimal sounded like a breeze in the park for the act led by programmer and writer Giannis Papaioannou. It’s dark, industrial soundscapes provided one of the finest albums of 2014.
The new album, Delta Pi Delta (represented by the acronym ΔΠΔ) sees the band opt for a new line-up including female vocalist Eleni Tzavara and a slightly more commercial approach. The results are successful, and their blend of industrial, dance and electronica is becoming more and more addictive.
Ten new tracks, including two instrumentals see the band re-group after some recent tension and the addition of Tzavara adds a whole new dimension to their sound. Delta Pi Delta starts with slow beginnings. Sunlight and Repetition kick off…

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…the album, both tracks being slow burners to an album which builds and builds to some mighty sounds. There are hints of eras gone by, most noticeably on Thistlemilk which has more than an inkling of A Flock of Seagulls’ I Ran in the intro, and comparisons to Faithless continue particularly on Sawdust and Winter Mute.

The bassline to Winter Mute throbs and bubbles much like Faithless’ massively underrated Not Going Home and the shoegaze guitars blend perfectly with spiralling synth sounds. An anthemic vocal propels the track into magnificent dance attempt.

After starting subtlety and then moving more upbeat, the album then starts to take on a fascinating dark direction with Sextant which spreads an almost drone-like feel, and Ferrum incorporates an electronic Bhangra beat to a brooding instrumental with dark guitars and sprawling electronic bursts.

Illuminations goes all ’90s Indie and album closer Search the Woods groups varying loops together to create a confusing yet compelling backdrop to an otherwise haunting theme over a dramatic soundscape.

Dedicated to the Greek artist, painter and long-term friend of the band Nicholas Liber who sadly passed away in 2013, Delta Pi Delta is an album with a journey that sees Mechanimal develop their sound even further. There is the potential for widespread acclaim outside their homeland and hopefully this will be the album that finally gives them what they richly deserve.

Though Human Suits‘ Planetary holds up superbly as a stand-alone musical work, a bit of context is needed to clarify what the project’s about. The material is formally speaking the original soundtrack Human Suits — Jerome Alexander (aka Message to Bears), Justin Radford, and Maximilian Fyfe — created to coincide with the global theatrical release (on Vimeo On Demand) of the debut feature-length film by Planetary Collective. Conceived as a follow-up to the award-winning short film Overview (whose soundtrack was also composed by Human Suits), Planetary aims in poetic fashion to remind viewers of the need for a more global perspective on the world and to promote the belief in the connectedness of all things. In doing so, the film features, among…

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…other things, footage of the Milky Way, Buddhist monasteries, and big-city life in Tokyo and Manhattan.

As one might expect from a soundtrack featuring track titles such as “Space,” “Gaia,” and “Meditation,” the music Human Suits created for the release is immersive and panoramic in scope. Alexander, Radford, and Fyfe apparently generated the seventy-five-minute recording without the benefit of high-end equipment or an expensive recording studio and used classical strings, Indian instruments, voices, piano, guitars, and analogue synthesizers to produce the soundtrack’s emotionally affecting material.

Rich in luscious strings, hushed vocal textures, and ambient shimmer, the hymn-like “Space” and “Epilogue” bookend the recording with uplifting meditations. Though the title “Mass Extinction” suggests apocalypse, the tone of the music isn’t violent but plaintive, as if intended to to mourn the tragic squandering of human potential. The film’s global perspective is embodied by “Seeing” in its merging of an Eastern-styled vocal-and-strings drone with piano playing that hints at a classical minimalism influence. Not surprisingly given its track title, the eleven-minute “Meditation” revisits the drone form, though this time with a melismatic string instrument in the lead role. At times a string instrument rises to the forefront during the dozen tracks (e.g., “Indigenous”) and in doing so intensifies the poignant quality of the music.

There are moments on the album that could be classified as New Age, though I hesitate to label it as such given the sometimes negative associations attached to the term. But genre labels cease to apply when music of such soul-stirring beauty is present, and Human Suits’ Planetary offers more than its share of such moments. Experienced separately from the film, the soundtrack holds up as an exquisite piece of work whose emotional impact is powerful.

Formed in Berlin in September 1967 by Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream are simply one of the most important groups to have emerged on the German music scene of the late 1960s / early 1970s. Always guided by the genius of Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream developed a sound based on the use of synthesisers and keyboards, first revealed on their marvellous Alpha Centuari album in 1971.
In Britain, John Peel soon began to promote the band on his influential radio show which ultimately led to Tangerine Dream becoming one of the first acts to sign to Richard Branson s newly established Virgin label in 1973. Tangerine Dreams music would influence a whole host of musicians who followed in their wake, such as Julian Cope.

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Featuring recordings made at Reims Cathedral, France in December 1974 and at the Mozarthalle, Mannheim, West Germany in October 1976, this 4 CD set (with over four hours of music) has been compiled with the official approval of Tangerine Dream and features two concerts that were voted as some of the finest bootlegs in existence in a recent poll of fans. The concert at Reims Cathedral has gone down in Tangerine Dream history as a legendary event. The music performed by Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann was exemplary, although the circumstances surrounding the staging of the concert led to a ban on further performances in Cathedrals by The Vatican.

Disc: 1

1. Reims Set One

Disc: 2

1. Reims Set Two

Disc: 3

1. Mannheim Set – Part One
2. Mannheim Set – Part Two

Disc: 4

1. Mannheim Encore – Part One
2. Mannheim Encore – Part Two

North Carolina-based producer Hanz‘s (Brandon Juhans) debut album, Reducer, is a bit of an anomaly in that it sounds entirely familiar while remaining completely foreign all at once. Each track features a repetitive, twisted amalgamation of dizzying samples woven into tracks that are seemingly static yet unfixed.
Imagine a drone strike simultaneously infiltrating DJ Shadow’s Entroducing… and UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction, or Flying Lotus and Run the Jewels collaborating, amping up the abstract and dousing the entirety in cinematic verve, and it might sound something like “Dues.” And whether intentional or not, “Capsule” plays like an abstract, breakbeat version of Massive Attack’s “Man Next Door,” with a striking elastic bounce in the bass line.

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Hanz’s Reducer is an industrial playground, a completely unpredictable and ambitious debut.

In the 21st century, electronic music and hip-hop have formed a co-dependent relationship; on his self-titled debut, Exeter exemplifies this in wonderful technicolour. Flouting any singular sound, the Toronto musician freely incorporates Italo disco, IDM, Golden Age hip-hop, video game soundtracks and post-Hudson Mohawke styles into this EP’s six tracks. While many producers focus exclusively on beats, rhythms or melody, Exeter tries to highlight each element independently, expertly letting songs germinate in spots where most DJs would aim for the money shot.
Many of the tracks on this EP reference a number of artists and genres, as “Aegis Theme/Based World Interlude” plays off of Lil B’s languid rhythms, “Complex – Power Weapons” highlight Exeter’s…

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…trap background and “XTRA” bravely interprets elements from a Prince demo. On his debut, Exeter decides to show off very little of himself, but that doesn’t make the execution any less killer.

When it comes to modern field recordings and processed, situational drone music, you’d be hard pressed to find a more apt or agile producer than Jacob Kirkegaard. The Danish sound artist, currently based in Berlin, has issued work after work of dark and weighted meditation on a number of grimly beautiful concepts. For example, Four Rooms, issued in 2006 by Touch, is Kirkegaard’s “breakout” record in many respects, perfectly capturing the producer’s talent for focusing a minimal but expansive rumination on massive themes.
In the case of Four Rooms, Kirkegaard set up a series of recorders and playback systems to capture the hollowed-out desolation of “four abandoned spaces inside the Zone of Exclusion in Chernobyl,” thus highlighting the “sonic experience…

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…of time, absence, and change – in an area haunted by an invisible and inaudible danger, amidst the slowly decaying remains of human civilization” according to the label. Since his earliest works, Kirkegaard has ventured outside of so called “non music” and into modern classical (Conversion, 2013) and physical, bodily experiments (Labyrinthitis, 2008).

The latest chapter in Kirkegaard’s narrative comes with 5 Pieces, a stunning, three-tape boxed-set issued by the austere noiseniks of Posh Isolation. Gathering five previously unreleased works ranging from 2006 to 2014, the set provides several hours of captivating experimentation presented in a minimal, white-on-black package, complete with extensive liner notes explaining some back story, recording information, and other tidbits of information associated with the work. Each recording finds Kirkegaard mining peculiar aural settings for his studies, from the depths of the Hudson River’s murky waters in the New York Harbor Estuary to iron fences along the Rhine around Cologne, Germany.

The first of the five pieces brings “Æsturarium,” in which Kirkegaard sources the Hudson River for dingy, aquatic diagetics. Specifically recorded at the New York Harbor Estuary, a “transition area where the tides, waves and salty water of the ocean mix with the flow of fresh water and sediment from the river,” the piece effectively sets you in a sturdy, microscopic vessel to get a zoomed-in view of the various physical elements of the sub-aquatic surroundings. Each grain of sand and anonymous granule of floating flotsam and jetsam adds the subtlest amount of character. Movement is both violently kinetic and powerlessly slow, adding the the muted sense of chaos underneath the choppy waves. At times almost entirely silent while at other times buried in a layer of foggy noise, the piece is the perfect primer to Kirkegaard’s M.O. and a fitting beginning to the whole boxed-set.

Next up is “Iron Wind,” a thirty-minute drift of eerie sound riddled with rust and decayed metal, culled from the previously mentioned fences in Cologne. More specifically, “the flowing river, the wind in the air and the large passing tugboats [that] vibrate the fences and case them to produce tones.” Originally composed for WDR – Studio Acoustic Art” in 2006, “Iron Wind” plays out like a doomed, protracted exploration of an aeolian harp. Where the stringed instrument played by wind blowing across its strings performed affirmative, inspiring sounds, the faded metal and slow, drifting machinery in the water create ominous, tragic tones for the sullen. Ghosts of sound and distant motion divine their way through the guardrails as conductors. Over time, physical clatter meanders its way into the picture, occupying the haunted tones with light but destructive clangs and ricocheted sound. Distant, siren-like tones chime in with an immense sense of weight and size, overburdening the senses with surprising ease.

“Déjà Vu” leads the second cassette in a similar vein as Four Rooms, setting up microphones and speakers in eight empty broadcasting studios of Deutschlandradio and orchestrating a “circular chain reaction” wherein the ambient sound in Studio 1 to play through the speakers of Studio 2, which is then played and recorded in Studio 3, which is then played and recorded in Studio 4, continuing the line through Studio 8, only to be replayed back into Studio 1. Micro-tones morph into massive, earth-shaking waves of pure, tonal study as each room reveals its own personality. Drifting from elegiac highs to wrought, pitiless lows, Kirkegaard shows his talent for creating something great out of something incredibly, unassumingly simple.

Jumping over to the flip brings “Fool’s Fire” and a half-hour traipse through more geological, elemental sounds. Created by “attaching an electrified needle to the crystals of a negative/positive charge,” thus creating “isolated charged spots” wherein “atoms jumped across the barriers and made the crystals receptive to radio waves,” then picked up by the needle, the piece is slow and quiet drift textured with gritty static. But rather than resembling a harsh noise record turned with the volume turned almost completely down, “Fool’s Fire” ebbs and flows in gradual movements that expose a disarmingly multi-faceted recording. Quiet storms of noise remain afar, distant just enough to raise alarm without destroying or maiming the scenery.

The final tape in the set brings the hour-long reverie of “Under Bjerget,” broken out into equal parts on the A- and B-sides. Sourcing Carlberg’s main factory in the center of Copenhagen shortly before being shut down, Kirkegaard mic’ed the basement of the 150-year-old building to record “the vibrations of its many tubes and kettles.” The vaporous transmissions lose sense of direction, origin, and pace, blurring into an amorphous blur of metallic drones that are both warm and frozen. Steam and other aqueous ephemera form an aural smog that permeates the dingy room, flowing around pipes and filling vacant vents alike. Phasing sets of chugging, lightly shuffling feedback saunters from channel to channel as dim and dulled serrations of feedback bounce from wall to ceiling to wall to floor and back again, trailing down errant corridors until returning with new, eroded facets. While the tape document of the piece is beautifully addicting in its own right, one can’t help but feel empty after learning the piece was used in a 16-channel sound installation inside four pitch-black rooms in the same basement where the piece was recorded.

Whether choosing to sit through its entirety as a set one extended morning, afternoon, or night or breaking it out piecemeal, 5 Pieces is an overwhelming experience in all the right ways.

A Æsturarium
B Iron Wind
C Déjà Vu
D Fool’s Fire
E Under Bjerget Pt. 1
F Under Bjerget Pt. 2

Chicago-based musician Whitney Johnson’s solo project Matchess combines layers of organ and viola drone with primitive, pulsating drum machines and otherwordly vocals beamed in from another galaxy, coming close to a more cosmic, spacy version of a BBC Radiophonic Workshop creation.
Matchess’ 2013 album Seraphastra was originally released in an edition of 50 cassettes on Brad Rose’s astounding Digitalis label, and the album was issued on vinyl the following year by Chicago- based garage/psych-rock label Trouble in Mind.
Somnaphoria, also released by Trouble in Mind, is the follow-up, and while it’s constructed from a similar palette as Seraphastra, it has a wider scope, and is more expansive and ambitious. The 11 songs on this album all flow in and out of each other,…

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…only breaking in the middle for a chance to flip the record over. The hissy fidelity and distorted textures of the debut remain, but there’s a wider array of sonic combinations on this album, with clearer passages and more melodic vocals, as well as some more discordant moments. Several of the songs have trudging, dirgelike rhythms, although sometimes the tempos pick up a bit. Johnson’s vocals remain eerie and alien, but several of the songs feature catchy vocal melodies, even if it’s difficult to discern any of her lyrics. “Mortification of the Flesh” clears out a bit toward the end for a spoken word section, revealing a more straightforward beat, bringing her sound a bit closer to earth while still sounding extraterrestrial. Most impressive is instrumental centerpiece “Sinister Prophecies of Coming Catastrophe,” which begins with dramatic strings, while hissing wind slowly rises, shifting into screeching viola feedback, culminating in something truly mind-warping. Later in the album, “But Their Chains” touches on a similar melody, but with a thumping beat and hypnotic vocals, and ending with cascading layers of rumbling noise. “Melts into Air” is the album’s serene closing track, with a puttering drum machine beat framing Arthur Russell-like string and vocal melodies. Haunting and ethereal, Somnaphoria inhabits a number of unearthly spaces, and is thoroughly stunning.

Delicate, sparse, occasionally transmogrifying; the debut album from Manchester-based musician John Howes is both back-lit and fugue-like, riffing upon solitary, nocturnal notions in 8-bit configuration, rather like that Commodore 64 you left running for so long it attained sentience.
Fans of the Third Eye Foundation and Aphex Twin’s more intimate moments will recognise the sense of loose, bleached-out disquiet that comes with such articulate electronica; on tracks including OYC and the almost kinky Zeroset, it’s as if you can visualise the trails of modular synth experimentation, Howes trying out different ideas to see which best fits. Overt beats don’t appear until the sixth stanza, bass conspicuous by its absence pretty much throughout, yet whilst the themes can occasionally run away…

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…with themselves through lack of definite direction or concrete dénouement, 3.5 Degrees remains an accomplished debut – still only 22, it will be fascinating to see which direction he’s headed next.

Tetuzi Akiyama (guitar) and Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board) of Japan and Switzerland-based American drummer Jason Kahn are all leading musicians on the contemporary improvised music scene who perform internationally and have many album releases.
The four pieces on this CD were performed live by Akiyama, Nakamura and Kahn at Ftarri in Suidobashi, Tokyo, during Kahn’s stay in Japan in May 2014. Akiyama’s softly resonating guitar makes subtle inroads into the pulsating electronic sounds created by Nakamura and the myriad percussive sounds sent out by Kahn. Permeated with stillness at times, raging stormily at others, their interweaving sounds turn into a living organism that becomes a steadily…

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…more detailed and kaleidoscopic as the performances progress.

I’ve been recording with Toshimaru and Akiyama since 1997 in various collaborations. “between two” is our second CD together as a trio, albeit in somewhat different form with myself on drum set and Akiyama playing acoustic guitar without any electronics. Which isn’t to say this is some departure down the road of purism – rather, this was just what we felt like playing this time around. Maybe the next CD – if there is one – will be with completely different instrumentation. The point being, it comes down to the people and not the instruments they play. This constellation of personalities and their histories, running intertwined, parallel, meeting up and departing again. In a sense, much like the sounds we made, placing them in the room, letting them hang in the air for a while, watching them ricochet, collide and fall. Ftarri filled with these sounds and then nothing. A quiet room again. This CD documents two nights of these proceedings, each night two sets. Played before a small and extremely attentive audience, many of whom lingered on long after the last set was over. At which point someone made a run to the convenience store down the block and venerable Ftarri owner Suzuki cleared away some CDs from a table, soon bursting with many cans of beer and chuhai in various stages of degustation, packets of dried squid and fiery wasabi snacks. Always the perfect end to these nights of great music. [Jason Kahn]

Mark Fell (SND/Sensate Focus) and Gábor Lázár’s scintillating and innovative debut collaboration marks The Death of Rave’s tenth release, following 2015 editions by The Automatics Group and N.M.O.
The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making explores a radical re-calibration of conventional meter and tone in modern electronic music, probing specific aspects of Max/MSP software with the potential to acutely challenge our perception of time and space. It’s a maximalist, future-shocking play of tension-and-resolution created from minimalist elements, featuring Lázár’s calligraphic, torso-morphing chromo-notes punctuated by Fell’s signature Linn drum cracks at ostensibly obtuse, yet deeply funked-up junctures across ten tracks in 50 minutes.

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They range from precision-tooled two-minute scrambles to swaggering showpieces, culminating in what has become a meme for Mark Fell albums with the uncannily emotive closing statement – a 12-minute masterstroke consolidating all the album’s ideas in one breathless, beguiling arrangement. If music can be considered a catalyst for social change, what are the implications of this mutant record? Considered in terms of the dancefloor, it mirrors the muscle-memory re-programming impact of OG hardcore and jungle or Chicago footwork — think of scattered bodies attempting to synch with new, accelerated and “irregular” rhythms – offering a freedom of expression and interpretation that’s typically scarce in most gridlocked musics. Likewise, the inversion of melodic convention in favor of warped, dynamic contours and visceral, psychoacoustic timbre offers a sharpened grammar of emotional expression and sensation that doesn’t wilt to ordinary sentiment. Yorkshire-based Mark Fell is among the world’s leading sound artists and sonic thinkers. Owner of an illustrious and influential catalog of releases spanning early works in the SND duo thru to solo work under his own name and Sensate Focus, and collaboration with DJ Sprinkles, Errorsmith, and Sandro Mussida. Gábor Lázár hails from Budapest, Hungary. In 2014 he presented his debut album, I.L.S., via Lorenzo Senni’s Presto!?, followed by EP16 for The Death Of Rave. He has previously shared a split tape release with Russell Haswell, presented work at Karlsruhe’s ZKM, and undertaken a residency at Stockholm’s EMS. Recorded in Budapest, May 2014. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.

Diminished Composition is Willamette’s first full-length in almost five years. This degree of deliberation has yielded nine stunning ambient tracks that, taken together, suggest a soundtrack in search of a film. And yet there is a semblance of a narrative, a sense of the cinematic, as the faintly rendered samples evoke longing and heartbreak. These compositions are deceptively simple, with sound textures playing such a key role that the sublime details are easy to overlook. A good of set headphones will help nurture these songs, coax out their subtleties, and allow them to reach full bloom.
Brushstrokes of drone are applied with deftness to a sonically eroded canvas. The looped breaths on “At Last and Dead Horse” are nearly imperceptible, while “End of Good Discipline” pairs wistful…

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…strings and piano with the rattle of a film projector. Many songs, like “Four Films (Films Four)” paint serene soundscapes in layers of warm tones.

Understated and unadorned, Diminished Composition erodes beautifully, then invites listeners to survey the ruins.