brainwashed

New music is due from Kawabata Makoto, Pole, and Nomine, while old music is due from JJ Cale, Carter Tutti Void, and Whitehouse.

Basinski and Chartier have collaborated a number of times in the past, and their disparate, yet complementary approaches to music have always complimented each other perfectly.  An uncharacteristic vinyl release for Chartier (a digital loyalist), these two sidelong pieces embrace both loops and melody, coming together beautifully as a sparse, yet forceful piece of music.

Fun is too often ignored when talking about experimental music. The language surrounding works by composers like Iannis Xenakis or Luc Ferrari is usually technical or mathematical, and sometimes political, but it’s rarely euphoric or exuberant. Which is a shame, because the flash of their audaciousness and the buzz of excitement their music generates is just as dignified and as worthy as the theory running beside it. Devin DiSanto and Nick Hoffman’s Three Exercises, which takes some inspiration from both Xenakis and Ferrari, is a lot of things. There should be no shame or reticence in recognizing that chief among them is fun. Recorded at St. Thomas the Apostle Elementary School in West Hartford, Connecticut, it spins amusement and pleasure from sources both unusual and mundane, with humdrum objects like ping pong balls and duct tape, and with homemade instruments like the one Hoffman tests in this video, which utilizes dynamic stochastic processes. Tucked away behind these sounds are ideas about the relationships between artists and audiences, structures and performances, and between spaces and sounds. Theory and technicality still figure into the mix, only they are inseparably attached to the noises that DiSanto and Hoffman deploy, and are as much a part of the fun as the chaos of the music.

On his previous album for 12k, Twenty Ten, Kenneth Kirschner compiled three full discs of material.  On Compressions & Rarefactions, he ups that even more by including a download with the CD of three additional pieces, totaling over five and a half hours.  It is a lot to take in, especially given Kirschner's understated approach to composition, but the result is more than satisfying.

New music is due from Thighpaulsandra, Stephen O'Malley, and Francisco López, and while old music is due from Nurse With Wound, Mark Van Hoen, and Robbie Basho.

It has been roughly 10 years since Thighpaulsandra’s last solo album, which is notable because it definitely feels like an entire decade-long backlog of ideas has been poured into this sprawling and overstuffed release.  Fits of great inspiration, masterful songcraft, baroque orchestration, meandering filler, and plenty of very ill-conceived motifs all tirelessly vie for their moment in the sun over the course of an exhausting 2-hour tour de force of intermittently wonderful and oft-grueling excess.  The Golden Communion is simultaneously a celebration of the joys of unfettered imagination and the perils of complete creative freedom.  There is probably an absolutely perfect LP buried in here somewhere, but Thighpaulsandra certainly does not make it easy to find.

For some reason, this seems to be one of the most weirdly overhyped albums of 2015 (at least in the underground/indie/experimental music spheres that I travel in), suggesting that: 1.) people absolutely cannot get enough Grouper, 2.) people are desperate to find a new album to be excited about, and 3.) widespread cultural amnesia has set in.  That is not a knock on the band though: Liz Harris’s garage/indie-pop trio is certainly enjoyable, but it is disorienting to see such a jangly, pretty, and breezily lightweight affair be so celebrated at a time when no one seems to clamoring to name-drop Tallulah Gosh, Opal, The Shop Assistants, or any similar late '80s/early '90s indie pop bands as major influences (though they totally should be).  In any case, The Original Faces certainly has its appeal–despite being inherently a modest event with very low-key aspirations, it is not every day that I get to hear Harris let down her guard and bash out fun indie-pop confections with her friends (imaginary and otherwise).

In the mid 1980s, there was no internet, eBay, discogs, and if you didn't live in a metropolitan area, music was expensive. These two releases were the first affordable releases to surface on the North American continent from Cocteau Twins, and while neither were issued by the band themselves in this form, the arrangement of the collection and the pairing of the two EPs are flawless and remain a fantastic listen three decades later.

The origin of this collection is a bit peculiar: originally sold through television commercials by the Polygram TV division in 1995, reclaimed by Beggars two years later, and now presented on LP for the first time, 20 years later. Essentially this is just about every Numan song a curious listener could want, featuring singles and popular album cuts. Aesthetically, however, the quality control in the art department could have taken a closer look.

To my great shame, I slept on this excellent album for entirely too long, as Thomas Meluch’s mannered songwriting has never quite connected with me despite my appreciation for his hushed, bleary, and languorous aesthetic.  With Sonnet, however, he largely dispenses with vocals in favor of a suite of warm, lush ambient drone, which is (predictably) far more to my taste. That said, I would definitely hail this as a stellar album even without the benefit of my unfairly subjective stylistic predispositions, as it is an archetypal Great Kranky Album, consistently hitting the same woozy, blissed-out sweet spot as other label luminaries like Windy & Carl.  As if that were not enough, the end of the album shows hints of something even better (and far more distinctive).  This may very well be Benoit Pioulard's masterpiece.