Since their 1983 debut Knees and Bones, the Long Island-based Controlled Bleeding’s 30-plus albums have spanned a dizzying array of genres including noise, industrial, no wave, prog, psych, and jazz (just to name a few). Likewise, Larva Lumps and Baby Bumps — the band’s first album since 2002, and also their first since the deaths of key members Chris Moriarty and Joe Papa — cuts a wide swath through musical styles. But at this stage of a four-decade career defined by relentless exploration, it would be too easy for Controlled Bleeding to rest on the audacity of its kitchen-sink mentality alone.
Bandleader Paul Lemos imagined the album’s grotesque cover art (by musician/visual artist Gregory Jacobsen) would fit the music because he found it “simultaneously beautiful and revolting.”
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Following 2016’s much-lauded Larva Lumps & Baby Bumps, Controlled Bleeding returns with Carving Songs, a massive remix album totalling 20 tracks, including a 21st track, TROD, a brand new Controlled Bleeding composition which founder Paul Lemos referred to as “a really a major piece for us… a very dark song.”
The hand-picked cast of remixers includes Japanese noise-guru Merzbow, Justin K. Broadrick from industrial-metal act Godflesh (not to mention Jesu), as well as Monolake, Crowhurst, Ramleh, Child Bite, and many others. Even notorious experimental guitarist (and current Lydia Lunch Retrovirus member) Weasel Walter makes an appearance.
The remixes range from straight up power noise, to post-black metal, to industrial-influenced beats,…
Harry Bertoia designed furniture – most famously wire chairs, amorphic and functional – but he also built sound sculptures and left a collection of huge pieces in a converted “sonambient” barn in Pennsylvania. These metal rods and gongs and look majestic, a cross between mid-century modern art and Fingal’s Cave, and they can be played as vast resonating instruments.
So when New York’s Museum of Arts and Design commissioned the polymath composer/vocalist/ drone metal artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe to respond to a Bertoia exhibition and gave him full access to the barn, he came up with a stunningly immersive album in which he weaves through the sculptures and makes them throb, shimmer and sing. He sings himself, too, high and eerie,…
Though they were already well known separately, 2014 brought Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale, Zu bassist Massimo Pupillo, and all-around avant-garde jazz saxophone svengali Mats Gustafsson together for the first time. What started as a temporary thing evolved into Melt, an album that documents well what each of these players is so sublime at in their respective groups whilst managing to retain a likeminded, collaborative feel. Nothing sounds too disjointed or out of place and the trio seems to have a sense of humor that lends itself well to alleviating the heaviness of their playing.
Amid a European tour from that August, the trio got together to record in Berlin at Radialsystem. The fruit of their labors is here in three extended…
John Cage was a quotable artist. On the subject of albums, he once remarked that “records ruin the landscape.” Elsewhere, in a treatise collected in his 1961 book Silence, the composer offered some opinions about jazz. The genre “derives from serious music,” he wrote, “and when serious music derives from it, the situation becomes rather silly.” Given those harsh judgments, it makes sense to venture an opening question about Cage’s one-off appearance alongside swing-and-improv icon Sun Ra. If Cage himself thought jazz unsuited for “serious” contexts and recordings lame, why should this document of their 1986 shared bill be anything other than a curiosity?
John Cage Meets Sun Ra: The Complete Concert has an answer for that wariness — and…
One of the principal pleasures of improvised music resides in the idiom’s amenability to virtually every conceivable combination of players and instruments. Ply one’s patience long enough and it’s entirely probable that a pined for aggregation will find the wherewithal and resources to convene and record. Whether New Artifacts fits that bill as an object of anticipation for a listener will of course hinge upon collective opinion toward saxophonist Tony Malaby, violist Mat Maneri and cellist Daniel Levin, but the merger of the fecundity and profundity that marks each man’s body of work in isolation speaks for itself.
As if to echo that sentiment of imminent and indelible rewards, Marty Ehrlich, reedist and immediate peer to the participants, lends his…
While Dietrich Buxtehude is remembered chiefly for his organ and harpsichord music, as well as for his influence on a young Johann Sebastian Bach, little of his chamber music survives. The first of his two sets of trio sonatas was published in 1694, and this recording by the period ensemble Arcangelo presents the seven sonatas of Op. 1 in the conventional instrumentation for a trio sonata, with Sophie Gent on violin, Jonathan Manson on viola da gamba, Thomas Dunford on lute, and Jonathan Cohen on harpsichord. Buxtehude’s writing is far from conventional, though, mainly because of the distinctive part writing that puts all the players on equal footing, instead of providing only harmonic support for the violin. Arcangelo makes the most of Buxtehude’s highly imaginative…
Gang of Youths don’t do things by halves. Their 2014 debut was about disintegrating relationships, cancer, and suicide attempts: its follow up is a sprawling, magnificently realised double album that poetically explores the human experience in all its bleakness and triumph, confusion and clarity, heartbreak and joyousness.
It’s a staggeringly cohesive multi-generational musical piñata: cross-pollinating Springsteen’s sweeping Americana, the National’s piercing truths and the sweaty insistence of LCD Soundsystem, with splashes of Arcade Fire, War on Drugs and U2 swirling amid its emotional tornado. There’s the Japandroids-channelling, punch-the-air final moments of “Atlas Drowned”; frontman Dave Le’aupepe’s jaw-dropping “get shitfaced on you”…
City of Light is the second album by French brothers Théo Ceccaldi (violin, voice) and Valentin Ceccaldi (cello, voice) with the Portuguese musicians Luís Vicente (trumpet) and Marcelo dos Reis (acoustic and prepared guitars, voice).
Recorded live on April 28th, 2016, at Les Soirées Tricot Festival in Paris, City of Light is fifty minutes of improvised chamber music. Clean Feed Records proclaims there were “no scores, no structures of any kind, no previous discussions about what to do or not to do or any type of conceptual reasoning,” yet the three movements impress as if they were a single impassioned composer’s carefully-constructed thoughts concentrated and immortalized in a written score. Each musician effortlessly nourishes an intimate exchange of…
New York artist and Astro Nautico label co-founder Samuel Obey has been pushing a mix of R&B, soul, hip-hop and bass music for around eight years. For most of that time he was known as Obey City. Recently, citing a shift towards more use of live instruments, his own voice and traditional song structures, he changed his production moniker to Sam O.B., and put out two digital singles, “Midnight Blue” and “Common Ground,” through LuckyMe as previews for his first full-length effort.
Positive Noise dips its toes into the sounds that stem from Sam’s vast record collection, most notably his 70’s and 80’s disco and funk wax. This influence has been expertly rolled into 10 delicately produced smooth jams that are perfectly primed for late night drives and sessions chilling on the deck.
Having come through the same secondary school – Shawlands Academy – as Moors Murderer Ian Brady, John Martyn was wont to present himself as a Glasgow tough in his darker days, a mask that suited him well as alcohol and drug use exacerbated his meanest tendencies.
The bumbling ‘curly-haired child’ that contemporary Michael Chapman recalled meeting in Les Cousins in the late 1960s morphed into a carousing monster as his musical reputation grew. This unplugged two-CD remix of Martyn’s career shows that he wrote some of the most luminously beautiful love songs of his age (“Couldn’t Love You More”, here stripped of its One World varnish, for a start), but it is a truth that sits uneasily alongside his reputation as one of jazz-folk’s most notorious ratbags.
Catharsis is Brand New‘s stock and trade, but they’ve never let that emotional release come easy.
Over the course of their career, the mercurial Long Island crew have taken increasingly puritanical strides to put a cork on their rage, opting to stimulate minds rather than bodies. On Science Fiction, their long-awaited (eight years!), surprise-released fifth album, they might have finally succeeded.
In the years since their last record, Daisy, the mainstream music press stopped treating Brand New as an emo curio and finally accepted the group as a rock band with something to say. Despite this, frontman Jesse Lacey’s world continues to be a hermetic one (if you’re looking for the source of the band’s rabid fan base, look no further).
Melbourne, Australia-based ambient producer Nico Callaghan is back on the perennially strange Orange Milk label with an LP’s worth of soothing tunes that play out like low-key dance music with the beats stripped away.
In a Silent Way is a synth-derived album (the only other instrument specifically mentioned is Joseph Buchan’s tenor saxophone) that condenses from vapour, slowly filling the listener’s eardrum with its gentle arpeggios. The music’s gaseous and rarefied nature is evocative of the blurry, dream-like cover art created by label co-founder Keith Rankin, with its multi-coloured steam and dripping, blood-like cherry juice. Appearing on a number of tracks is a warped, “wooden flute coated in icicles” sort of synth sound that really pushes to…
Legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen is an Afrobeat pioneer best known for his tenure as musical director for Fela Kuti. American jazz was an early influence, and he pays tribute to hard bop icon drummer Art Blakey and his band The Jazz Messengers here. In a way this is full circle, as Blakey was greatly influenced by African music.
In the late 1940s he visited West Africa, and recorded several albums reflecting that experience, including Orgy in Rhythm (1957), Holiday for Skins (1958), and The African Beat (1962).
The instrumentation — a septet with four horns — is slightly larger than the average Jazz Messengers lineup, which was most often a quintet with two horns, sometimes a sextet with three horns.
The EP kicks off with what is arguably…
2017 has been a busy year for Iceland’s favourite techno producer Bjarki. The трип mainstay has founded his own label bbbbbb with Jonny Chrome Silver, released under new alias Cucumb45 and continued to perform his live show across Europe, from The Peacock Society in France to Printworks in London. Now he’s back on Nina Kraviz’ трип label with a four-track EP of techno treats designed for the dancefloor.
The EP’s four “trance-leaning tracks” have been cropping up in the DJ sets of ТРИП founder Nina Kraviz this past year. Bjarki, full name Bjarki Runar Sigurdarson, has been a key producer on Kraviz’s label since it launched in 2014.
Taken from Bjarki’s expansive archive of unreleased tracks, Kraviz has brought together four tracks…
Montreal’s thisquietarmy is the ambient, drone, experimental project of Eric Quach. Throughout his 26 full-length releases (some of which contain collaborations with other artists, this number however, does not include his EP releases), Quach builds sound structures that range from ambient drones, to dreamy shoegaze, to fuzzed out noise, and so on. It’s very hard to pin down a genre for thisquietarmy, because each release is different in one form or another. His two releases this year are drastically different than his previous 24 full-lengths, in a very inspirational way.
Quach starts with an idea and then builds layers upon layers to create sonic structures (songs) the same way an architect starts with a blueprint and does the same with a physical structure.
Charles Griffin Gibson, aka CHUCK, is the type of artist who not many know, but those who do, instantly fall in love with. The New York native, who describes his music as “eclectic weird kid alt. pop”, released one of 2015’s best, yet most unheralded records, My Band Is a Computer, a gloriously unhinged collection of songs that combined bedroom pop and DIY indie with wry lyrics and a wicked sense of humour.
His new record continues right where he left off; sweet acoustic tracks and catchy melodies abound, everything tinged with a sense of hope and brightness. His songs are fuzzy and rough around the edges, but the out of focus quality simply adds to the charm and beauty that he finds in everyday life and the mundane; truly CHUCK’s…
People and Their Dogs is the debut album of Oxfordshire singer/songwriter Willie J Healey. Grounded in observations of everyday mundanity, it is a cool breeze of youthfulness. At times it is utterly inspired and romantic, at others trying to get something seriously substandard past you, pretending that it brushed its teeth by putting a spot of toothpaste on its tongue.
It’s as if there are two performers on this recording, evidence, perhaps, that Healey is still trying to find his voice – literally. It’s a bit of a lucky dip which Healey you will get on each track. The most distinctive and possibly authentic songs are the gentler tracks. ‘Marie’s Balcony’ is predominantly acoustic guitar and bass. It is a romantic melody of ‘sweet dreams and pretty things’.
Toronto-based Whitehorse lends itself to flowery adjectives such as “retro psychedelic pop,” “pop neo-noir,” “psychedelic Spaghetti Western” and, perhaps most vaguely but intriguingly, “space cowboy duo.” Once you spin this third studio full length you’ll probably add more of your own.
Married multi-instrumentalists/singer/songwriters Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland have been traveling an impossible-to-pigeonhole style since their 2011 debut EP. Each release brought a mysterious, swampy, reverb-laden sound, gradually adding elusive, subtle elements of hip-hop and blues (their previous 2016 release was an often radical interpretation of classic blues gems) that expanded their boundaries while staying true to core roots values of creatively…
Terence Blanchard’s soundtrack for The Comedian is a classic case of movie music that’s likely to be appreciated long after the film for which it was created is forgotten.
Blanchard has composed scores for more than three-dozen films since the early 1990s and has evolved into a reigning master of the art. For this assignment, however, the trumpeter-composer realized that conventional “film music” wasn’t going to cut it, so he did what he still does best: make killer jazz. The Comedian — its abysmal commercial performance aside — required it. De Niro’s Jackie Burke is a fan of the music with a penchant for Art Blakey, and it would have been wrongheaded for the film to feature incidental music whose primary purpose is to be actively unnoticed.
