The Body‘s 2013 EP Master, We Perish arrived in between All the Waters of the Earth Turned to Blood and Christs, Redeemers, the two full-lengths in which they evolved from their doom/sludge metal beginnings and began making additional elements like choirs, samples, and electronics an integral part of their sound. Beginning with a blaring air raid siren, guitars so distorted they’ve been burnt to a crisp, and pummeling drums, opening track “The Ebb and Flow of Tides in a Sea of Ash” establishes a state of emergency, as Chip King caterwauls about structures collapsing and life falling into the void. “The Blessed Lay Down and Writhe in Agony” introduces haunting choral vocals and a tinny, barely audible voice of someone who’s trapped and can’t escape no…
Category: experimental
Lucy Liyou’s work has always been almost painfully exposed, her preferred form being foggy collages seemingly because it’s the closest method to actually being in her brain, the affectations of traditional songcraft merely a barrier to getting into the real mulch of herself.
MR COBRA takes the form of what is essentially a radio play, though admittedly one fractured and shredded until it’s a long way from anything you’d get on Radio 4. But Liyou’s self-excavation is still present. In her own words, the record is “a revisionist retelling of a time back in high school when I fell in love with a predator.” She’s at her probing, terrifying best here.
Despite the confines of narrative, Liyou’s pieces still exist in constant motion, always a stream…
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (aka MIDI) has such a pervasive presence in the musical landscape that it’s easy to take it for granted. Yet, when it first appeared in the early 1980s, the standard felt miraculous. Back when technology was more meaningful, MIDI’s ability to bridge physical and digital domains meant that devices like synthesizers and keyboards were suddenly able to talk both to each other and to computer programs. The protocol has countless applications today, many of them purely software-based, but this particular facet remains its most fascinating, even serving as a core aesthetic principle for acts like Berlin’s Gamut Inc.
Since the early 2010s, Aggregate Festival founders Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki…
Ka Baird is known for passionate, unpredictable vocal performances. Whether solo or in collaboration with others, Baird’s kinetics tend to be the focus. Their latest release, Thinking Music (For Just Intonation Rhodes Piano), sounds like quite the departure, and indeed it is.
No vocals here, no collaboration, no exploration of a physical space. (Though the piece was written for live performance.) It’s a 40-minute piece, in four movements, for solo Fender Rhodes. The twist is that the Rhodes is retuned in just intonation. This isn’t your Herbie Hancock-loving grandfather’s Rhodes.
A just-tuned Rhodes is a pile of contradictions, and Baird’s exploration of them is what makes this album compelling. Individual tones…
Šimanský Vaľko Podracký pick up where Spacemen 3 left off. The Czech-Slovak trio of experimental musicians apparently share Pete Kember and Jason Pierce’s guiding principle of “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to”. The group’s psychedelia was inherited from the freewheeling 1960s, a decade when Western music – from rock to minimalism – was infused with the meditative transcendence of sustained tones. But the most important question is left unanswered: what drugs to take to make drone music to take drugs to? The album’s title may offer some cues.
Born of spontaneous free improvisation sessions, K-drone is the joint journey of three psychonauts: experimental guitarist Jakub Šimanský, hurdy-gurdy player Michal Vaľko and…
When these guys strip down to the basics, they don’t joke around. Ondanaconda is a quartet of Geneva-based musicians with connections that extend into nearly every conceivable genre, certainly into every corner of the city’s experimental scene. They include a clarinetist, a vocalist, a multi-instrumentalist, and a composer for electronics. Yet here, on the self-titled Ondanaconda album, they play four jaw harps.
Sure, yes, there is some electronic manipulation in the mix. But less than you’d expect. Most of the time, they twang away, letting the harps harmonize and the overtones sing. The band name seems to mean something like “wave-snake” (“wave” from the French onde), which pretty much sums it up. The sound waves are undisguised,…
The line between poetry and music has always been a blurry one. Christopher Nolan recently claimed he cast musician and hip hop artist Travis Scott in his epic The Odyssey because the Homeric saga has been handed down through civilisations as “oral poetry, which is analogous to rap,” and therefore he was directly evolving the craft. Now, perhaps more convincingly and certainly less commercially, Tehran-based composer Siavash Amini and Brooklyn author Eugene Thacker take this statement one step further. Songs for Sad Poets, Vol. III sees the creative duo deliberately breaking down poetry into microfibres to thread back through ambient compositions, thus merging music and poetry at a more atomic level.
Songs for Sad Poets, Vol. III follows Amini and…
The first thing you hear on Opening, the new record from Swedish musician Klara Lewis, is a grainy fog of ambient noise: the sound of waves, a roadside or perhaps just the creaks and echoes of the room she’s recording in. The whining reversed strings that soon emerge from the murk create a wistful atmosphere, but then things take a turn: the loop clips and distorts with strobe-like intensity; after several minutes, it cuts off mid-bar, as though it’s been unplugged.
This deconstructed, shape-shifting approach is typical of the self-styled “sound sculptor”, who has been composing uncanny instrumentals from a combination of acoustic instruments and processed samples since 2014. As always, she imbues the harsh experimentalism with real…
PRAED is an amalgamation of Raed Yassin (electronics, vocals) and Paed Conca (clarinets, bass, samples), from Lebanon and Switzerland respectively, who have worked together as a duo since 2006. Recorded between Beirut and Berlin, they’ve invited a large group of string and percussion players, well suited to the pair’s devotion to incremental layering and massive pulse-states.
The tracks range from 19 minutes down to four – ample time for expansion! Conca stacks up his clarinet parts to make a veritable horn section, while the hard-attack frame and goblet drums attain an abandoned ecstasy. The strings are strong, but sit just below the synths on the equality meter, with underlaid drones…
The Will of Tongues, the latest record by performer-composer Sarah Davachi, is a marvel of time. The record draws on Davachi’s many years of engagement with historical instruments and fascination with various tuning systems, textures and harmonic structures, featuring reconstructed period wind instruments, historically tuned organs and an abstracted Renaissance choral form. It also makes excellent use of the centuries of combined musical experience brought to bear by her many collaborators, most of whom are noted performer-composers themselves (Whitney Johnson, Eyvind Kang, and Lucy Railton among them). And then there’s the two-hour-plus runtime.
Taken as a whole, The Will of Tongues feels like the culmination of a gradually developed…
Lebanese vocalist Sandy Chamoun‘s second solo album is inspired by Sardinian polyphonic folk music the Arab ecstatic forms, modernized by synths from her SANAM and Ghadr collaborator Anthony Sayhoun and percussion from Ali Hout.
If you caught either of those heavy SANAM albums – but especially 2023’s Aykathani Malakon – then you’ll already be familiar with Chamoun’s voice, that carries the Beirut-baed band’s hallucinogenic blend of folk, free jazz and acid rock. On her own, however, Chamoun gives her voice even more room to breathe, following loose historical threads to re-interpret concepts that surge through her music. The album’s title means “the sound of tears” and it directly addresses the war and genocide in the Levant; Chamoun looks to tarab,…
Kassel Jaeger (aka François J. Bonnet) returns to Shelter Press after Swamps / Things, Shifted in Dreams, and the recent reissue of the classic Zauberberg, co-composed with Akira Rabelais and Stephan Mathieu. With this major new album, entitled Sub Re, Bonnet continues his long exploration of the musical possibilities of sound, extending the concrete approach developed at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the historic and essential Parisian studio that Bonnet has been directing since 2018.
Sub re, in Latin, can mean “under the thing, under the substance, under the matter.” It’s precisely this direct approach to music, drawing on the extraction of raw sound material, that forms the basis of this album.
Across three Ghosted records Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin have expanded the possibilities of the guitar-bass-drums trio with slippery yet rigid, kosmische yet earthy music that challenges the idea time exists in neatly parcelled, indivisible increments.
For Serpentine they’re joined by multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothén, who contributed Donso n’goni to Ghosted I’s opening track. Bothén’s first instrument is the bass clarinet. In the 70s he studied the donso n’goni, a six-stringed ‘hunter’s harp’ from the Wassoulou region in Mali, eventually bringing him into Don Cherry’s orbit. He’s also versed in Gnawa, learning guinbri in Marrakesh. This worldliness ripples through Bothén’s 1984 record Trancedance,…
Stephen O’Malley’s name is synonymous with duration fascination. His performances with Sunn O))) seeming to stretch out indefinitely. The sprawling recordings he also makes with Äänipää, KTL, Khanate, and Æthenor, alongside recent collaborations with his partner Kali Malone, ask that listeners sit quietly as the music slowly unfolds over lengthy intervals.
Named after a thousand-year-old tree on the Swedish island of Fårö, Avaeken is no different. Clocking in at forty-two minutes and formed of long, sustained tones that ebb and fluctuate, this work was initially composed by O’Malley for the Belgian electric guitar quartet Zwerm. It then accompanied Wish You Were Here, a site-specific exhibition by multi-disciplinary…
Art is rarely as orderly as a gallery — or a rock album, for that matter. Even when restraint is involved, even when it’s finished, shit’s all over the place in the studio. That’s kind of the point, really: There’s always a bit of chaos in getting the ideas down. Tyondai Braxton understands this. Those who existed, perhaps lived through the late 2000s, recall his stint as frontman of experimental wunderkinds Battles. But his path was never truly meant to be with a rock band, as the aftermath of his exit indicated. Rather, it was to revel in the discord of music in different forms through composition. He’s the type of guy who fits in more with collaborators Kronos Quartet and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma than, say, Grizzly Bear. Braxton was more at home with orchestras and museum…
An atonal meeting of the minds with David Watson on highland bagpipes and small pipes, and Bill Nace on 5 and 2 string taishōgotos and harmonica. Simply listing the instrumentation should be enough to thin the herd on this blistering full-length platter. But far from being a collection of traditional tunes from their respective motherlands, or some sort of angular take on cultural appropriation, On Bats delivers a sound world situated firmly in the saddle of a shared singular vision. Watson and Nace approach their instruments and compositions with an endurance and intensity that make a false chord growl sound like one-dimensional cartoon fodder.
Similar to his taishōgoto work on the stream of LP’s Nace has released on his Open Mouth…