Make It Real
Wait, this is the new Pocahaunted album cover? Gone may be the days of cassette cases featuring creepy collages and hand-dyed bags with feathers attached, but this is something else entirely. I mean, there’s a parrot with blue Ray-Bans, a giant dollar sign, a “He’s on fire!” NBA Jam-style basketball…What is going on? After the shock of the cover art, I waded into the unfamiliar soup that waited within. From the opening thrums of “Touch You”, the lo-fi recording aesthetic seemed to be held …
Split
Finely dressed in a full-colour Maya Miller sleeve, this split release from Ex Cocaine and Yellow Swans captures two wildly differing bands on great form. Ex-Cocaine is the collaboration between guitarist and vocalist Brian Ramirez and percussionist Mike Casler, who fashion psych-heavy instrumental jams leading way out into oblivion, even having a go at a Meat Puppets cover on 'Sexy Music'. Yellow Swans meanwhile don't come nearly so close to that sort of song formatting, instead offering…
Oltracuidansa
Oltracuidansa is the radical questioning of the relation between the performer’s body and instrument: What is the language of the contrabass? How to give voice to the thought? In the variety of the contrabass voices, how to find “The Voice”? And finally, if “the voice’s flight in the language must come to an end”, if “the achieved thought has no more thought”, doesn’t one arrive at the abyss of silence? Stefano Scodanibbio — regarded as one of the great interpreters of the contemporary con…
Mineral orange
Vanessa Rossetto is a composer and painter living in Austin, Texas. She uses primarily chamber instrumentation, field recordings, electronics and a wide array of different objects, exploring them through extended and traditional techniques. In 2008, she launched her own CD-R label, Music Appreciation, and through this imprint has released four solo albums: Misafridal, Imperial Brick, Whoreson in the Wilderness and the award-winning Dogs in English Porcelain. Her most recent release, the PDD-NOS …
2 seconds / b minor / wave
Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto are not generally closely associated, but have quite a bit in common. Both are composers whose primary instrument is the guitar, both have close ties to the Wandelweiser collective (Pisaro is a longtime member), and both have pursued their unique paths without much concern as to how the rest of the world will perceive them. 2 seconds/b minor/wave marks their first collaboration, but these aesthetic overlaps allow their independently conceived recorded parts to fi…
Fields Have Ears
Fields have ears 1' (2008) - for piano & tape. 'Fade' - for piano (2000). 'Fields have ears 4' - realisation for 14 players (2009). Philip Thomas: piano + members of the edges ensemble. 3 varied works by the US-based composer Michael Pisaro. Fields Have Ears 1 interweaves a surprisingly lyrical piano part with layered field recordings and sine tones. Fade is a beautifully austere minimalist piece for solo piano, expertly played by Philip Thomas. Fields Have Ears 4 is a prose score, realis…
Expanded Slam
Expanded Slam and Extended Slam, two new compositions by one of America's most consistently explorative and radical artists. Presented in a blazing gatefold package designed by Jupitter-Larsen, including an essay on the permawave, the polywave and the hoopla. Utterly delightful. GX Jupitter-Larsen is an media artist, based in Hollywood, California, who has been active in a number of underground art scenes since the late 1970s. He has been involved in punk rock, mail art, cassette culture, the no…
The Immeasurable Gift
The Immeasurable Gift is a testament to cathartic possibilities and the role of creation/release as a means of understanding. Recorded throughout the past three years in a variety of locations and personal moments; encapsulated by a common, unrelenting concern. Beautifully delicate, elegiac melodies concealed within curtains of dense electronic ambiance reveal themselves like the light at the end of the tunnel; a signifier of the temporary vessel form. Balancing recklessness with care and…
Warmth
Even though Warmth main man Steev Thompson still appears to be incommunicado, totally epic recordings continue to surface. Before Roxanne Jean Polise was officially over and Steev still lived in Chicago, he joined up with another then-Chicago resident Branden Diven of Quilts/American Grizzly Records. The jams that were created filled a couple of CD-Rs and the Warmth side of the split with Quintana Roo on Not Not Fun. This LP consists of a remixed and edited version of the original CD-R ru…
Off Duty
As if the music of lysergic, lo-fi drugdub one man band Sun Araw wasn't flipped out and damaged enough, on this latest joint, those already tweaked and twisted sounds get even more far out, the vibe WAY druggier and spacier, a 26 minute blast of crumbling wah-guitar laced psychdub comedown in the form of three skull caving soul freeing innerspace excursions."Last Chants" begins with a dense swirling cloud of white noise and damaged effects, shot through with barely there melodies, and loose detu…
False Flag
"When witch-gods collide, it might sound something like this. Six Organs of Admittance...Richard Bishop...Chris Corsano. Riders of the apocalypse, it's them vs. us. After absorbing their über-holy dynamo, you'll be prepared to join up with these wraiths, making it all of us against...well, whomever's fool enough to stand in our way. To evil! Rangda's been building up behind the scenes for some time now. As label mates and members of an exclusive mutual admiration society, Sir Rick …
Completed Rotations of the....
When one thinks of the musical centers of New Zealand, the city of Tauranga doesn’t have as celebrated a history as Dunedin, Auckland or Christchurch. Which is apt, in a way, as the artist known to us only as Rotate The Completor makes music that sounds unconnected to any scene in NZ or elsewhere. A chance encounter with an enthusiastic passerby while busking on the streets led to the receipt of a home-recorded cassette, which caught the ears of the outsider music community, although any attem…
Split
As the cassette market becomes more and more over-saturated, it’s nice to see some of these artists break out onto the vinyl format. This is, I believe, the first vinyl outing for John Elliott’s Outer Space project. Apparently John plays in some other group called Emeralds and shares a side here with like-minded artist Raglani. Both cuts on this album promise globular analog synth glory; pre-orders have started and this split LP will set your bank account back $18. Limited to 500
Hexadecagon
The Octopus Project as a performance piece meant to bring the audience into a world of total sound and image submersion, Hexadecagon is now an album. The special vinyl version of the album is a bit complicated, so I’ll let the band explain: “The vinyl is a gatefold double LP spanning three sides. The fourth contains several unique tracks unavailable on any other format, interlaced in concentric spiraling “roulette grooves,” so that the listener never knows which track they’ll get when they pu…
Mind Ctrl: Psychic
A new label (The Fader) brings a deluxification of 2009's Psychic Chasms, which now also contains the bonus album Mind Ctrl: Psychic Chasms Possessed, featuring nine exclusive remixes and cover versions by Toro y Moi, Body Language, Javelin, Bibio, Yacht, Darby Cicci of The Antlers, Twin Shadow, Dntel, and Anoraak!An elusive new project from composer Alan Palomo, Neon Indian delivers equal parts synthetic nostalgia, dream-pop lullabies, and grinding guitar noise to create something eerier t…
Olives and Orchids
Terrific stuff from Chicago's Herculaneum – a fresh, modern take on postbop and 60s avant garde jazz that's as addictive as anything the group has done to date – possibly their best yet! The group is a sextet with four horns, providing a really energetic front – with parts that give way to looser, improvistational moments, before rolling back into a tighter groove. The compositions are split between drummer and vibes player Dylan Ryan and alto sax player David McConnell – and the group…
III
I don't care how many goddamn cute hobo bands there are out there right now. Not two runny shits. There's something Hank IV knows that few other current "of interest" bands realize, and it's a painfully simple thing: guitars were meant to sound like this, not that (pick something). That's as plainly as it can be put. This is twin-guitar punk rock in a class of its own, driving more than dueling and hot-sauce-free. I'd say "power with taste" but then I'd have to kill myself. I will say that…
Black Summit
Strictly limited to 400 copies only, already sold out at source* Garden Söund is the rewarding collaboration of two hugely respected outfits: Barn Owl and Eternal Tapestry. Word of the album has spread like wildfire on a vast midwest plain, hence all 400 copies are sold out at source. 'Black Summit' finds the commonalities in Barn Owl's epic desert scapes and the crushingly potent psychedelia of Jed Bindeman's Eternal Tapestry with immeasurable success. The two characters stalk moonlit ca…
Castings
Castings is the third VHF release of lovely psych/folk by East Coast quartet Fern Knight, written, arranged and performed with their trademark quality and verve. Somewhat less fastidious than 2008's exquisitely arranged Fern Knight CD, Castings has a warm, analog feel, with looser and louder performances. Led as always by Margaret Ayre's voice, guitar and cello, the group stretches out on rockier fare like "The Poisoner," growling with fuzz, while leaving plenty of room for softer moments of bea…
Small Craft On A Milk
If you were to dig through a random neighbor's record collection, chances are you'd come across something with Brian Eno's fingerprints on it. Maybe massive-selling offerings by Coldplay or U2, the still commercially viable art-rock of The Talking Heads and Devo — or, if your neighbor is anything like a TMT reader, perhaps there are a few Roxy Music albums, the Eno-curated No New York no-wave compilation, Bowie's Krautrock-leaning "Berlin Trilogy," or My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Eno's 19…