Rolling waves of white noise, feedback, and even mic noise wash over the clarion singing and drone-based ambience of Caldera Lakes (Eva Aguila and Brittany Gould) on their “arranged” cassette (out now on Ecstatic Peace). In the midst of this deliberately lo-fi and noise distressed ambience lies a primeval aesthetic that contrasts clangorous stabs, bleary utterances, and muscular cries with delicate arpeggios and strummed guitars.
While getting ahold of these limited run artifacts is great fun – a scavenger hunt for adventurous music listeners (I found mine on a recent visit to one of my favorite haunts Downtown in NYC: Other Music) – it’s a pity that this release hasn’t gained wider currency – as yet! The band, like so many others, is going to SXSWthis year. One hopes that they bring a bunch of their tapes, CDRs, and other releases along (may they need runs >100!), and that the resultant buzz yields anything but lo-fi results for their careers.
Saturday listening Steve Smith shared a variety of links about ambient drone artist Nova Scotian Arms yesterday via twitter. And when Night After Night praises something, it’s smart to take notice!
White Hills tours in support of release this Fall. Maybe they’ll bring their mix of drones, post-psych guitar work, and kraut rock signatures to a venue near you!
UPCOMING FALL TOUR
Sep 3 Brooklyn, NY Aviator Sports Complex w/Psychic Paramount, Pictureplane
Sep 8 Vancouver, BC The Biltmore Cabaret w/Sleepy Sun
Sep 9 Seattle, WA Nectar Lounge w/Sleepy Sun, Kinski
Sep 10 Portland, OR Ash Street Saloon w/Eternal Tapestry, Pierced Arrows
Sep 14 San Francisco, CA Rickshaw Stop w/Carleton Melton
Sep 15 Long Beach, CA Alex’s Bar w/RTX, Heavy Cream
Sep 16 Los Angeles, CA Nomad Art Gallery w/Sleepy Sun
Sep 17 San Diego, CA Soda Bar
Sep 30 Den Bosch, Netherlands W 2
Oct 1 Leuven, Belgium Het Depot
Oct 2 Cologne, Germany Underground
Oct 4 Vienna, Austria Arena
Oct 5 Feldkirch, Austria Graf Hugo
Oct 6 Stuttgart, Germany 1210
Oct 7 Weimar, Germany Werk
Oct 8 Cottbus, Germany Burning Earth Festival
Oct 9 Berlin, Germany White Trash
Oct 10 Hamburg, Germany Molotow
Oct 11 Bielefeld, Germany AJZ
Oct 13 Olten, Switzerland Quote D’Or
Oct 14 Wurzburg, Germany Cafe Cairo
Oct 15 Darmstadt, Germany 603
Oct 17 Savignano Sul Rubicone, Italy Sidro Club
Oct 18 Rome, Italy Sinister Noise
Oct 19 Quero, Italy Piettro Alternative Sound
Oct 20 Martigny, Switzerland Les Caves Du Manoir
Oct 22 Maastricht, Netherlands Musikgiterij
Oct 23 Birmingham, UK Supersonic Festival
Oct 24 London, UK Corsica
Aidan Baker is probably best known for his soundscapes that involve droning guitars and ample distortion. But this time out, on his Prima full length Still Life, the Toronto native left the guitars at home altogether. Instead, he performs all of the instruments himself, focusing on piano, electronic manipulations, upright bass, and drums.
Still Life contains four compositions, each exceeding ten minutes in duration, that combine the gradual, inexorable drive of slowcore with inflections of a modern jazz rhythm section and flourishes of avant-classical. Baker doesn’t shy away from crunching dissonance where required. A signature example is the opening of “Refuge from Oblivion,” where cascades of punctilious piano disrupt the calm surface that pervaded the previous track.
Often, multiple layers of rhythm compete for supremacy, creating a multifaceted, but never cluttered, interplay. All the while, there is a slow-brewing underlying pulse that undergirds the whole with a supply architectural sensibility.
Artists seeking to combine experimental music and jazz should take note of Aidan’s fluent amalgamations.
If you haven’t checked out Free Music Archive, their collection of seven albums by Uton, a project by avant Finn Jani Hirvonen, is a great place to dip in for outsider noise and drone soundscapes.
With thanks to Gacougnol from the Twittersphere for the link (embed below).
It wasn’t so long ago that people were counting out “hard copy” recording formats, prognosticating that digital would reign supreme and that vinyl and cassette tapes would be on the scrap heap or, at best, fodder for flea markets and garage sales. While the LP’s resurgence in recent years has been variously chalked up to increased attention to aesthetics, desire for higher fidelity, and a pop culture trend in its own right, many still assumed that cassettes were too sonically compromised and kitschy for a comeback in their own right. But then, lo-fi indie exploded, and the landscape changed.
While Northern Spy’s first in a projected series of Clandestine Cassettes isn’t just concerned with lo-fi aesthetics, one can see why the scrappy Brooklyn import, and others like it, embrace the cassette format. It’s inexpensive, easily portable, and yes, has its own nostalgic artifact qualities. But CC#1 isn’t a novelty item: it’s a fascinating mini-sampler of Northern Spy artists, revealing an EP length recording of avant rock drone-filled soundscapes by the likes of Zaimph and Messages. There’s also “August is All,” a beautiful track of slowly evolving, minimalist yet blues-inflected improvisation by guitarist Tom Carter. A little avant folk star power is in force on “Live at Union Pool,” a reverberant duet by Loren Connors and bassist Margarida Garcia. Garcia also contributes the cassette’s artwork, which recalls homemade mixes and tape trading.
Although you can still get MP3s or FLAC, this tape’s already sold out. But rest assured, there will be more cassettes to come: from Northern Spy and elsewhere on the scene.
Already got rid of your tape deck? No worries; for now, they’re not expensive to acquire. But be warned: I recently learned from Twitter that no less a tastemaker than Steve Smithhas gotten a new Walkman. Can it be long before this microtrend explodes and cassette decks are the new iPad? Stay tuned.
After nearly a decade of silence, experimental electronica act Oval has returned in 2010 with a vengeance; and, with a spate of new releases. Although it was once a collective, now Markus Popp retains sole responsiblity for the proceedings. Earlier in the year, he released an EP entitled Oh! Today, its longer cousin, the 2xLP O, sees its much anticipated release. Add to that a second EP, Ringtone II, that’s being offered by the label for free download here.
O retains some of Popp’s previous proclivities – glitchy technobeats, strummed string sounds, drones, textural juxtapositions, and repeated-note ostinati. What’s brought to bear here most overtly is an interest in pithy forms. Indeed, the second half is called “Ringtones,” and consists of 50 miniature compositions. One can imagine more than a few experimental electronica buffs installing one of them on their smartphone stat! What’s more, there’s a relaxation of one the more extreme aspects of glitch: the avoidance of pulse seems a bit less pronounced. Rather Popp seems content to flirt with metric obfuscation, but in an overall rhythmic scheme that also embraces at least occasional phrasal regulation.
Thus, on O, Popp has created music that still has an experimental edge, but seems willing to seek rapprochement with a wider range of techno/electronica styles.
For the past five years, Richard Skelton’s music has been imbued with elegy. Since 2005, under various artistic monikers, the Lancashire, UK native has released recordings featuring his late wife’s visual art; dedicated to her memory. Even without knowledge of the weighty biographical background of these works, there’s no denying their exquisite, lonesome lyricism.
The original limited edition of Box of Birch was aptly named: it came in a hand-crafted birch wood box. While most listeners will have to content themselves with a CD, LP, or even download, the musical contents are fashioned with equally attentive care.
In the ancient spirit of the term – in the Renaissance, a broken consort was an ensemble containing instruments from more than one family – acoustic guitars, bowed strings, reeds, and pitched percussion combine in slowly evolving soundscapes. Evocative simultaneously of Celtic folk, raga, and post-minimalism, Skelton’s work has a lovely surface and creates a meditative, gently dolorous ambience.
A dozen years in, Mark Nelson’s Pan American project is still with the same label (Kranky) and still creating fascinating ambient soundscapes. But one shouldn’t mistake continuity for stagnation!
Indeed, there’s a combination of novelty and comfortable familiarity to be heard on the LP. Joined by bassists Jim Meyering and William Lowman and percussionist Steven Hess, Nelson pursues a more collaborative sound scheme than on some of his more soloistic recent recordings. Hess’s co-authorship of two of the cuts, as well as his tasteful vibraphone playing and drumming, lends an organic quality to “For Aiming at the Stars” and “Dr. Robert Goddard in a Letter to H.G. Wells, 1932.”
At the same time, there are echoes of Labradford, Nelson’s other outfit, to be found amidst the reverberant soundscapes here. “There Can Be No Thought of Finishing” and “Literally and Figuratively” feature deliciously sepulchral (and ever so well-recorded) bass drones; akin to bass-lines found on some of Labradford’s most winning work (E Luxo So, Fixed: :Content). Indeed, Meyering’s strummed chords provide a beautiful counterpart to Nelson’s treble-register harmonic pads.
“Is a Problem to Occupy Generations” demonstrates a capacity to be simultaneously ambient and experimental; its questing melodies are awash in reverb, arching towards an endpoint never quite to be reached. Conversely, the folk-like pentatonic phrases that inhabit “There is Always the Thrill of Just Beginning” seem to give the lie to much ambient-inspired “World” music, by eschewing its easily palatable background designs in favor of a more enigmatic – and far more interesting – hypnotic blurring.
Pan American remains a hardy, worthwhile endeavor; White Bird Release features some of Nelson’s most beautiful music to date.
Matt Valentine and Erika Elder (professionally MV & EE) have a tellingly named publishing concern: Child of Microtones. While the duo’s latest recording with their band the Golden Road, Drone Trailer, does indeed include drones, the music never seems static. Rather, these children of microtonality create shimmering, slowly but constantly evolving soundscapes. Some of the compositions hew closer to bona fide songs of the alt-folk variety; “The Hungry Stones” puts the sonic experimentation on the edges of the proceedings and places Valentine’s gentle singing and acoustic guitar strumming front and center. On “Weatherhead Hollow,” the singing becomes more blurred, receding from the foreground into a tapestry of keening guitars, Fender Rhodes, and slowcore rhythms.
The title tune features a fetching introduction; drones swell, pedal steel swoons, and glissandi whirl about in the cracks between the notes. This yields to a countrified psych-folk song, in which trippy singing is distressed by layers of instrumental experimentation. The album closer, “Huna Cosm,” presents arcing guitars and lap steel over a sepulchral bass ostinato in a burnished, rustic valediction.
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