G.S Sultan's debut tape for Umor Rex was a chaotic, tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of pop banality. The digital alias of Roy Werner attacks audio like Foodman and Giant Claw, ripping the grains to shreds and flattening out atonal textures to create jarring, beautiful waves. His experiments contain a certain humanity within a mechanical and bloodless heart, which Werner brings to an intensely climax on "Crepuscule M," the final track on his upcoming album on Phinery tapes. Redundancy Suite will be the 4th G.S Sultan release, first full-length LP for a label that continues to assert its position at the forefront of experimental electronic music. In keeping with the digital theme, the cover is adorned with artwork by Birch Cooper. Werner digs deep into his artificial aesthetic, where ideas of physical space and shape are confounded. Machines perform organic activities, bubbling, hissing, sputtering, increasingly fluid and natural, pixels getting smaller and smaller, closer to the fundamental units of life they are based on. Acoustic instruments vs. digital instruments vs. reconditioned, recycled sounds of recordings of digital and real instruments. Digital technology, more and more, continues to lose its shape and its “edge,” in the sense that the boundary where technology begins and humanity ends. What’s interesting is how personal the music gets. This is immediately counterintuitive. Personal? The realm of lyrics, imagery? What is personal is also an atom bomb of public emotion, rendered in real time, spread across the digital plane and compressed into granular chords.
Texas-born artist Don Teel Curtis was born during a tornado and grew up on a ranch. Now living in Brooklyn, Curtis prepares to share a bill with Tim Hecker and Jessy Lanza for the Savages-curated Le Guess Who? festival in the Netherlands this November. He shares his a eidolic single, “Output Phantom” a crashing and cavernous call into a void. Curtis’ vocals seem to ricochet boundlessly over the warm humming of synths. The track reads as the non sequitur dream; one isn’t quite sure why events transpired as they did, but the dream still makes sense.
"Output Phantom" is out on Brooklyn-based label, Weather Patterns. Tour dates can be found below.
New York-based musician and performance artist Muyassar Kurdi is known, at least in part, for her powerful voice—a versatile instrument that fluidly mixes extended techniques (the kind characteristic to Kurdi's teacher, Meredith Monk) with more traditional approaches to folk and pop singing. In Kurdi's recent short film MACHINE//BODY, however, the artist's voice is silent; instead, Kurdi stages a conversation between, well, machine (a pulsing, circuit-bending electronic soundtrack) and body (Kurdi's own, painted chalky white, clad in leggings and, later, a torn trash bag). Contained within a white-walled, wood-floored room, the film cuts between shots of Kurdi's choreography: in some shots she's tethered by a rope to the room's column; in others she presses her body against the floor; then she stares into a mirror lying on the ground. In each segment, Kurdi, though vocally silent, speaks volumes with her expressionistic face, her waving arms, her contorted posture; coupled with the music, which maximally stretches its minimal means, Kurdi's elaborate exploration of her simple set-up conjures instense feelings of, on the one hand, containment and struggle, and on the other, the ability to, one day, dissolve boundaries.
Stream MACHINE//BODY below. Kurdi is performing throughout Europe in October as well as in Brooklyn in August—check those dates after the jump.
“Place pop” is a fitting tag for Tim Woulfe’s music, which swaddles comforting melodies in evocative atmospheres pieced through field recording. While the Apollonian Sound and Mt. Home collaborator's last full-length The Sleep Cycles was a (mostly) gentle and lulling chronicle of a passing night of sleep and dreams, his newest EP takes a concrete turn into the waking world, which turns out to be just as transient. “There is no right way to preserve the world around you / you’ll just start to hate it,” Woulfe sings over a light strum and quiet machinery in the wake of a loud recorded downpour. No World, All Thunder looks us in the eye with lines like these as it grapples narratively with feelings of vulnerability and an acute sense of impermanence. Even as it strives for groundedness, there is no staying in one place—the clop-clop of makeshift percussion in one moment makes way for transient clicks of electronics in the next, and the EP lands at its wooziest in the final track, with an echoic buzz and some kind of wave shuddering beneath Woulfe’s vocals.
Housecraft label head Jeffry Astin has been releasing music for over a decade under various monikers including his Xiphiidae and Digital Natives projects which have releases on esteemed labels such as NNA Tapes and Beer on the Rug. Jeffry Astin's Bhsaaveagi, the latest release off of the Gainesville, Florida art collective and label Elestial Sound, is a resurrection of music thought to be lost forever. Thought to be lost in a hard drive crash, Astin was able to miraculously recover the album. Bhsaaveaegi is an aural voyage that transcends into many listening realms, floating effortlessly in the clouds, or being dragged deep under the dirt. These soundscapes peel away at your sense of space and time, as you peer deeper into them. “Hair Spun Gold," the first track on side B of Bhsaaveaegi is a collaboration between Astin and Jonathan Coward. Eerie, drones slowly weave into a visceral cacophony. Rich melancholy textures unfold slowly beneath the shrill staccato of bowed stringed instruments. Similar to the rise and fall of ocean tides, the billowing harmonies from the drones move in complex variation with an almost fierce uncertainty.
On their debut Kranky outing, the upcoming 2xLP Physicalist (with breathtaking Robert Beatty art), Forma have carved out a new niche for themselves, forgoing their full-frontal synthesis attack to make way for acoustic sounds. For those familiar with the project, there are still plenty of pristine synth sounds, albeit one with a more kosmische bent than the band’s earlier techno-leaning outing on The Bunker New York. Physicalist is also notable for being the group’s first go-round with John Also Bennett, new member and multi-instrumentalist. For sufficient background, the album name comes from the idea of physicalism or “the philosophical belief that all phenomena in the universe are created entirely from physical interactions,” which, to make the appropriate jump, implies a structure in which Forma improvises—like variations on a theme, permutations, and fractals. The impossibly small is just as infinite as the sublimely huge. Physicalist is out September 23 on Kranky.
AdHoc: What prompted the inclusion of acoustic instruments on the new Forma 2xLP?
George Bennett: The instrumentation change I made on Physicalist was less about moving from electronic to acoustic and more about a distinction between automation and hand-playing. In our earliest days, FORMA did lots of manual work. Mark was hand-playing arpeggiated sequences and I was playing a drum kit, so in a sense we’re coming full circle. If there was any conscious shift for me on Physicalist, it was a return to hand-playing, where I have more opportunities for spontaneity and can get off the grid with my rhythms. Some of that was done on acoustic cymbals, and some of it on electronic sample pads.
John Also Bennett: We’d been tossing around the idea of including some acoustic instrumentation, or even just more hand-played instruments for a while, though we hadn’t much tried it out until we got to the studio. I was trained classically on flute and piano (and saxophone!), before trading in my flute for a guitar as a teenager, and then later trading my guitars and amps for synthesizers. So this is really just coming back to my roots after a long journey. I brought my flute to the studio, where there was also a great Steinway grand piano, and George brought a cymbal and some percussion instruments. After almost two days of tracking synthesizers, we took some time to work out on the piano, Mark and I trading off, and me on flute. It’s a way for us to free ourselves from the sometimes musically constraining idea that electronic music needs to be danceable.
Although Ohal Grietzer's debut solo material materialized only this year, she's managed to carve out a substantial, hyper-stylized but altogether genuine niche of her own. Acid Park, released back in May on Styles Upon Styles, finds the Israel-born, Brooklyn-based musician in various states of unguarded awareness of both her self and her surroundings. Ohal's Cancelled Faces, also released this year, score extended the producer's quixotic curiosity with dark but optimistic meditation. Ohal's output turns another new leaf as a fertile source of remix material. This time around, Matt Morandi (aka Jahiliyya Fields) reconfigures Acid Park's opener "All Mine" from an airy, agile drift of shimmering vocals and vibrantly fleeting textures into a denser, more claustrophobic affair. A sifting strobe of percussion ruffles through the entire piece, carrying movements of open space and throbbing elegance.
Stream/download the track below and consider donating $1 to the song's cause: the Ali Forney Center in NYC, a space in NYC that helps, houses and educates LGBTQ homeless youth.
Earlier this month, Ryley Walker shared "The Roundabout", a flowing Americana jam inspired by a Wisconsin bar he had frequented with his family. Produced by Wilco's LeRoy Bach, the beautifully arranged track is dripping with appreciation for the fleeting moments of comfort one can only find in a hometown bar. Now, the song's aura of simplicity has found a visual companion in an accompanying video directed by Joe Martinez Jr. The visuals find Walker wandering Chicago's streets during this most recent Independence Day. Scenes of backyard hangs and shotgunned beers transition into a celebrations of Chicago's nighttime revelry, where DIY fireworks shows happening in the streets. “Dozens of crews with ad hoc explosives and a beer in hand make for a blitzkrieg celebration." Walker says of the video. "I lived at 21st / Leavitt some years back and got to know this evening first hand very well. Forever my favorite part of summer in the city. This video hopefully captures a few of those moments of joy from the people involved.”
Golden Sings That Have Been Sung is out August 19th on Dead Oceans. Ryley Walker plays Market Hotel with Circuit des Yeux on November 3rd.
Some people can't pick out Staten Island on a map. Outside debates about gentrification and changing neighborhoods, there are pockets of the city that get forgotten. For Bueno, there's beauty in nostalgia for that forgotten, "old New York". As five boys raised in Staten Island's pseudo-suburban, Catholic-school culture, the band's immersed themselves in New York's rock n' roll traditions and stylistic devices, embracing the spectrum from the hazy narrations of late 70's Lou Reed to uptempo locomotion of early Strokes. Overall, the band's love for the city extends beyond the purely musical. Frontman and primary songwriter Luke Chiaruttini dug his roots into the city's music scene via his work at the venue Shea Stadium. On "Blown Out", off their upcoming Illuminate Your Room LP, Bueno delivers a personal take on a familiar rock narrative. Waking up to a world they don't understand or particularly like, Chiaruttini's narrator confronts a vapid and unforgiving wasteland from the perspective of an outsider. "I love rock n roll but it has a tendency to reinforce some very negative male stereotypes and lend a voice to those who probably don't necessarily need their voices amplified." Chiaruttini told AdHoc via email. "So this is a rock record that isn't a power fantasy but a vulnerability fantasy, where that vulnerability is seen for its own merits and not as a weakness. So it's an inversion of a lot of poor narrative cliches that I didn't really identify with.”
Illuminate Your Room is out August 19th via Babe City and Exploding In Sound Records. Bueno's record release show is August 26th at Shea Stadium. More tour dates after the jump.
George Xylouris and Jim White were vetted by distinct musical schools of thought. The son of one of Crete's most beloved traditional musicians, George Xylouris has realized his legacy over the course of a lengthy career playing in ensembles led by his father and, later, himself. In Xylouris White, he works his robust voice and eight-string laouto alongside Jim White, foreword-thinking drummer of Australian avant-rock outfits Dirty Three and Venom P. Stringer. The two men collaborated in the 90's, with Xylouris occasionally joining Dirty Three on stage and in recordings. In 2014, their 25 year-old mutual admiration culminated in the release of Goats, their recorded debut as a duo. Bridging continents and drawing from diverse stylistic backgrounds, the men, in collaboration, become explorers, charting unknown musical landscapes through mutually induced discovery. "Black Peak" is the first look at the group's sophomore album of the same name due out in October. The record was produced by Guy Picciotto (Fugazi) and features guest vocals from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy.
Tom Sheehan
