brainwashed

New music is due from Edward Ka-Spel, Thorsten Quaeschning and Ulrich Schnauss, and Heather Trost, while old music is due from Kenji Kawai, Chris Watson, and Univers Zero.

The Podcast returns with special guest Amber Goers of Troller and Holodeck. We also get to hear music from The Tear Garden, Can, Justin Walter, and Arnold Dreyblatt's The Orchestra Of Excited Strings.

Clodagh Simonds and her impressive coterie of collaborators have returned for the much-anticipated second installment of the planned Salt Garden trilogy.  In a broad sense, this latest EP is a clear continuation of its predecessor, consisting of three timeless and drone-informed pieces of sublime and Siren-esque choral beauty and an instrumental coda.  However, this release also marks an intriguing evolution upon the aesthetic of the first Salt Garden, opting for a more understated and unadorned approach.  As such, there is not much here that offers quite the intensity and immediacy of "The Golden Sun" or "The Undone Mother," but the compensation is that Simonds has further distilled her vision into something more naked and pure, eschewing ornamentation and orchestration to shift more of the heavy lifting to her voice and her words.  They can certainly handle it.

Fifty years ago, one of the greatest (and most short-lived) psych-rock bands of all-time (Pärson Sound) was formed in Sweden, though it was not until 2001 that their amazing collected recordings were finally released.  Despite only recording one album, the core of Pärson Sound never actually went away and the band has evolved and taken on new guises over the ensuing decades (International Harvester and Träd, Gräs och Stenar), erratically surfacing every now and then and sometimes flirting with greatness anew.  This latest release is a somewhat bittersweet affair, as two founding members (the whole rhythm section, actually) passed away during the recordings, albeit not before leaving an intermittently stellar and incandescent swansong in their wake.  Tack För Kaffet / So Long is easily the best Träd, Gräs och Stenar album in ages.

This is apparently Janek Schaefer's 30th album in 20 years, a milestone which surprised me a bit, as there is a considerable portion of his oeuvre that I have not heard.  That said, the handful of albums that I have heard have been kind of hit or miss, as Schaefer often errs a bit too much on the side of high-concept, cerebral sound art for my liking.  Glitter In My Tears, however, is right up my alley: a sustained and hallucinatory fever dream of brief and frequently beautiful vignettes (or "microcosms of haunted memory," as Schaefer himself describes them).  The inevitable downside to such an ambitious endeavor, of course, is that Glitter is exasperatingly populated with wonderfully promising themes that appear and vanish again in a minute or less.  In most hands, that would be quite a big problem, but Glitter is so uniformly strong and flows along so fluidly that I am left with little time to lament the more substantial pieces that might have been.  This is a wonderfully shifting, evocative, and immersive album from start to finish.

Brainwashed is happy to premiere the first song (and video) from Scratched Glass's new release, Two, due out July 7 on Negative Capability.  The duo of Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf and Jonathan Lukens are both multimedia artists, and this is evident on "Duet".  The video's pulsating, digital/organic hybrid visuals perfectly accompany the sound:  a lush mixture of warm, surging tones and skeletal beats that are hypnotic from beginning to end.  The nine song album will be released on cassette (limited to 100 copies) and digital, and mastered by Lawrence English.

Check out the video here.

An exclusive preview of the album is available to stream here.

Physical and digital pre-orders are available now through Bandcamp.

The usually prolific Richard H. Kirk has been unsurprisingly quiet as of late.  Playing shows as Cabaret Voltaire again (which I have conflicted feelings about) and a small reissue campaign via Mute and Die Stadt has been about the extent of his recent activity. Which, admittedly, is odd from a man who used to make up projects just to fill out his own solo compilation albums. So when first hearing about the new material that makes up Dasein being released, I was eager but unsure what to expect. Thankfully, the hiatus has done nothing to deter Kirk, who has put together yet another exceptional work of his own take on electronic music, and one that channels moments from his entire career.

This is the debut release from Peter Kolovos's Black Editions, an imprint embarking upon the ambitious and necessary task of reissuing classic albums from Japan’s legendary and defunct P.S.F. label.  Naturally, Kolovos wanted to start with a bang, making Watashi Dake? an obvious choice: originally released back in 1981, it is the first solo release from the mercurial and iconic Keiji Haino.  Spontaneously composed at night in a completely dark studio (presumably while wearing sunglasses), these hermetic, haunted, and idiosyncratic songs make for quite a challenging and uncomfortable listen, but that is precisely the point: for better or worse, there is nothing else on earth quite like Watashi Dake?

I must admit to still being a bit perplexed by this release.  Can, for all their greatness, were never really a singles band.  Most of those that were issued were edits of album material, so there is little exclusive material to be had here, barring said edits, which usually just remove material rather than presenting it in an appreciably different way, and a handful of non-album material.  However, when viewed as a career overview or sampler (something essentially replacing those Cannibalism compilations), it is a different matter, and the set provides a good opportunity to revisit the latter, often maligned recordings.

For his third boxed set on the label since 2011, prolific ambient artist Tor Lundvall collects another four previously released (but limited) albums and a rarities compilation into a diverse sounding, yet thematically unified collection.  Essentially the soundtrack for virtual environments, such as rainy days or visiting a park, Nature Laughs as Time Slips By is another suite of beautiful, if often melancholy instrumental music that covers the vast spectrum of Lundvall’s beautiful work.