★Kranky
Recollection
Jacob Long’s fourth full-length for Kranky began as a notion to reimagine Earthen Sea as a “piano trio,” inspired by a year-long immersion in the ECM label catalog, but the compositions soon grew more complex. Elements were chopped and resampled, then layered with bass, drums, percussion, and additional keys. The result is a fusion of live band acoustics and downtempo loops, sculpted into nine smoke-and-mirror dubs of fractured jazz, soft-focus noir, and trip-hop dust: Recollection.
Like the tit…
Triple Point
"Loscil — who may be more familiar to some as Scott Morgan, the drummer for indie-popsters Destroyer — is the exception that proves the rule. And his debut album Triple Point, an ambient-techno concept album about thermodynamics (no, really), is no less exceptional. Burbling and pulsing along to smoothly running cybergrooves, tracks with names like Hydrogen, Ampere, Pressure and Conductivity present a chilly antiseptic front broken only by the odd, seemingly random injection of assorted clicks, …
Temple IV
This is the first vinyl issue of Temple IV, arguably Roy Montgomery's finest solo album, originally released in 1996 on CD. The original album has been enhanced with two newer tracks that constitute side four of the album. Montgomery states: "The two new tracks recorded in 2018 were about asking the question "Can you step into the same river twice?" Heraclitus said you cannot. I say you can ..."
Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline
2023 Re-press. Triple LP. Painstakingly recorded, processed and assembled over the last five years, Stars Of The Lid once again deliver a massive work filling two compact discs and three vinyl albums, clocking in at over two hours. While most albums of this length would be considered tedious at best, SOTL are arguably the only contemporary composers who can seemingly alter the time-space continuum simply through the playback of their organized sound. They take time itself and stretch, compress a…
Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid
2023 repress on triple-vinyl. "Are there other earthling-conjured soundworks rivaling the majesty of Henry Flynt's minimalist hillbilly fiddle fantasias or the heavens-rending power of Olivier Messiaen's works for organ? Undoubtedly, else why bother listening. But the only thing speaking at us right now from these charmed regions are the celestial airs of these Stars of the Lid. Alternately lulling and wielding a potency that wholly escapes 'experimental' musics, Stars of The Lid bring big, whom…
Avec Laudenum
2023 repress. "The first vinyl release in the U.S. for this, the fifth Stars of the Lid album, originally released by Sub Rosa in 1999 and then reissued by Kranky in the fall of 2002. A pivotal album in their career, this marked the first time the duo completely stepped away from the more abstract sound pieces of earlier albums and engaged with the more symphonic and compositional approach that has become the forte of their more recent recordings."
No Highs
The latest by Canadian composer Tim Hecker serves as a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers – this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined.
Morse code pulse programming flickers like distress signals while a gathering storm of strings, noise, and low-end looms in the distance. Processed electroni…
Colours Of Air
The union of composers Lawrence English and loscil aka Scott Morgan is seamless, sublime, and long overdue. Born of a conversation centered on the notion of “rich sources” as a forge for electronic music, Colours Of Air is a collection of recordings of a century old pipe organ housed at the historic Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia, which were then processed, transformed, and elevated into eight majestic electro-acoustic threshold devotionals. The timbre of the instrument and spatial fluctuatio…
Clara
The latest collection by Cascadian resident Loscil aka Scott Morgan is a stunning meditation on light, shade, and decay, sourced from a single three-minute composition performed by a 22-piece string orchestra in Budapest. The subsequent recording was lathe-cut on to a 7-inch, then 'scratched and abused to add texture and color,' from which the entirety of Clara was sampled, shape-shifted, and sculpted. Despite their limited palette, the compositions summon a sense of the infinite, swelling and s…
No. 5
LP version. "While on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea for a film festival performance, Christina Vantzou experienced what she characterized as 'a moment of focus' -- a specific vision for the sprawl of raw recordings she'd been amassing for her fifth album. Upon relocating to the Cycladic island of Ano Koufonisi, she situated herself outside at a patio table with a laptop and headphones, taking brief breaks to swim, and began the 'reductive process' of shaving and shaping the source materi…
Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire For An Aquatic Life
2022 Repress ***Received a 7.7 rating from Pitchfork. The release of Music For Nitrous Oxide, the 1995 debut by Stars Of The Lid, heralded a new strain of the American underground music scene, one born of the heat and humidity, boredom, and the insular, constipated, rock-ist music scene of Austin, Texas, home of the duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie. It was a muffled lashing out against surrounding musical conventions, a small middle finger to the local dominant “Americana” scene, but one th…
The Patience Fader
The glacial distillation of Pan American aka Mark Nelson’s “romantic minimalism” achieves unique fruition on his latest Kranky collection, The Patience Fader. A suite of solo guitar instrumentals accented with lap steel, harmonica, and twilit atmospherics, the strings smear and sparkle in elegant, windswept swells, a guitar mode once described by Brian Eno as “Duane Eddy playing Erik Satie.” These are elegies as much as songs, lulling and lilting in private currents of beauty and bereavement. Ne…
Shade
Liz Harris's 12th album is a heart-melting anthology of songs written over the last 15 years. A mixture of 'Dragging A Dead Deer...' emotional rawness and 'AIA' -style tape-dubbed sonic fog, it's a timely reminder of why she's one of the crucial underground voices of the era. When Harris's early Grouper material began to emerge thru the cracks in the wall of wyrd folk CDRs and hand-made cassette tapes, we could already sense it was something different. There was a bare quality to it that set it…
Coast/range/arc//
Loscil's dreamy 2011 ambient classic "coast/ range/ arc/" gets the deluxe reissue treatment with a fresh remaster and an additional track. Originally released in 2011, "coast/ range/ arc/" is a dense, evocative ambient record - the kind of album that set the stage for plenty of music that now clogs up playlists, but has rarely been done more effectively. Stylistic touchstones might be Thomas Köner, Angelo Badalamenti and Stars of the Lid (to a degree), but Scott Morgan takes things to shadowier…
A I A : Alien Observer
**2019 small repress on Kranky** The tools Liz Harris uses to make music as Grouper tend to be pretty basic: piano, guitar, synths, drones, hiss, and lots of reverb. If you've been following along with the twists and turns of noisy ambient music these last few years, this collection of elements may sound familiar, possibly bordering on cliché. But it's all in how you fit the pieces together. Despite sharing characteristics with a lot of other current music, Harris' has a distinctive sound that s…
A I A : Dream Loss
'This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful -- surely Grouper's best.' --Tiny Mix Tapes. 'If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Liz Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.' --The Quietus. 'This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools …
Equivalents
Canadian composer Scott Morgan’s 12th long-player as Loscil takes its title from an influential series of early 20th century photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, abstracting clouds into miasmic, painterly canvases of smoke and shadowplay. It’s a deeply fitting analog for Morgan’s own musical process across the past two decades, fraying forms and tones into widescreen mirages of opaque texture and negative space. The name Equivalents referred to Stieglitz’s notion of the photographs as being equivale…
Cloud Room, Glass Room
With percussionist extraordinaire Steven Hess now a full-fledged member, Mark Nelson and Pan American deliver their first new album since White Bird Release in 2009. This collection of new sounds began with the duo rehearsing for a series of shows in southern Europe in late 2011 and early 2012, the songs written together as a group to be played live. Bobby Donne (Labradford, Cristal) plays bass on multiple tracks, further emphasizing the live band feel. Mark Nelson's deft production touches abo…
Dream Memory
"Guitarist Ken Camden returns for his third solo album, continuing his explorations to seek out new techniques and sounds from the electric guitar. By utilizing both a steel slide and e-bow technique, Camden has moved into micro-tonal territory to bridge the textural gap between guitar and synthesizer while examining their inherent differences. The palette is further broadened by introducing an organic vocal sampling machine described as a Vocaltron. Much like a Mellotron, vocal samples (contri…