Machweo - No Way Out EP

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Indian Gold Records starts to become one of my favorite netlabels, not only because of the quality of music they offer (first SLZR, then Rancho Shampoo), but also because of how open they are to the music from outisde the designated “psychedelic” comfort zone. “No Way Out” EP from the Italian electronic youngster Machweo is not psych rock, but might be just as trippy. It treads the ground somewhere between slowed down, deconstructed hip-hop filled with dark undertones and field recordings to the cavernous, star-gazing minimal techno in the vein of Pantha du Prince. Plus lots of scary, super-echoing vocal samples, Holy Other style. The two remixes are ace too. Recommended!

Mortal Mountain Band - Mortal Mountain Band

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Listening to Mortal Mountain Band is like going to some high mountains: you never know how the weather will surprise you. Same with MMB: you never know what to expect musically, what moods might be hiding just around the corner. It wears the clothes of a lo-fi psych folk record (down to the artwork and the group’s name), but it’s not afraid into a psychedelic kaleidoscope of sounds and ideas. Sometimes it hits the moments of dark ambience, other times it’s just the good ol’ bucolic and carefree acoustic guitar noodling - while those moments prevail (often equipped with vocals to a greatly ballad-like effect), there is often a hint of something more primeval and non-human lingering under the folky exterior with its lo-fi field recordings having something of a legacy of Stunned Records. A loose collection of guitar beauties with a trippier twist between the smart melodies.

Blezna - Árbole

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Here’s something for all you field/nature recordings enthusiasts: a great, yet completely overlooked, absolutely free album from the Spanish sound artist Juanjo Palacios, who takes a totally auteuristic approach here, doing absolutely everything, from choosing samples and recordings to making the album artwork. The result is an adventurous and absolutely compelling journey through the various areas of northern Spain, from forests to meadows and little shepherd sheds, completely organic and enveloping. There are also moments of hypnotic ambience, which tends to occasionally touch on dark ambient areas with its unsettling ,slowly unfolding structures, almost cosmic in its sheer scope and vastness. Highly recommended to all fans of Francisco Lopez, Chris Watson or Loren Chasse.

Blezna - Árbole (immediate download)

Label page

Archive.org page

Kissy Suzuki - Rubbish & Beauties

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Named after one of James Bond’s girls from “You Only Live Twice” and one of the few Bond girls to die of non-violent, natural death, sound artist Kissy Suzuki operates in the field of ambient. The most minimal, stretched and atmospheric ambient - pure background music, employing processed guitar improvisations and field recordings, “Rubbish & Beauties” is massive in its length, yet fragile in execution. In the artists own words:

“Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture. An “ideal beauty” is an entity which is admired, or possesses features widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture, for perfection.”

Review: Homogenized Terrestrials - The Contaminist

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(CD, Intangible Cat, 2012)

Don’t be mistaken by the word “Terrestrials” in this artist’s name, because little is terrestrial here, unless we add the prefix “extra” to the name, then we’re getting closer (well, further, actually) home. “The Contaminist” is both long and well-executed - Phil Klampe has spent a lot of time on creation of the album, and it can be heard from the start. It’s an exhausting compilation of tracks composed over the course of a few years with a plethora of means, both instrumental and electronic, extending out of the 3” CD-R format the label Intangible Cat got many used to, toward a full CD.

Like the super-zoomed photo on the album’s cover, “The Contaiminist” plays like an alien’s chronicle toward documenting Earth’s nature and living creation. While we, as Earthlings, know perfectly well what animal and plant is safe or dangerous (as in: which ones we can touch and which ones we should avoid like fire), it’s all completely new to a visitor from another planet. Klampe translates the human sounds and music to a hearing process of an alien, often weaving samples or found sounds in the mix. Most of the time the music sounds utterly alien and otherworldly - it’s based on ethereal, spacey ambience. Sometimes, however, some of the more “normal” music seeps into the psychedelic experience - which doesn’t make the alien ambience any less alien - in fact, it just enhances the sense of wonder and isolation from all that is known and named. Sounds of bells are reversed and glitchy. Church choirs are devoid of any religious associations, instead appearing to be chants in unknown language from an unknown, astral culture. Which is not to say that “The Contaminist” is a purposely diffucult and unlistenable. Quite the opposite - everything is new and unexplored, but friendly and welcomes further exploration.

The CD is very varied and full of different “sound quotes” manipulated to the point of becoming a guessing game - “what was that sound originally coming from?”. Klampe had a lot of fun with composing the pieces, smuggling little pieces of melody under the droning exterior. There are also moments of pure bliss, like the 7-minute “Plastic Resonance Key”, which floats on a single droning note like a liquid nirvana pointing straight at heavens. English track titles are interspersed with strange, randomly titled tracks, like “Sroa”, “Spurk” or “Forn Poclipse”. Maybe the title of the release refers to the gradual contamination of the Earth’s atmosphere with the alien matter? This album surely is contaminated with some alien matter. Recommended for all ambient fans.

Review: Swartz Et - Respire

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(CD, Cognito Percepti, 2012)

Detroit based experimental musician Steve Swartz decided to go the bodily way on his album “Respire”, which, as you might have already guessed it, is based mostly around… breathing. The sound of breathing and the possibilities that lie in ehnancing the sound of breath with studio technology. Not the first artist to base his music on sounds of the body, and not the last one. But Swartz gets into some almost monumental results with his approach.

Like on the opening “Butterfly Flaps Its Wings”, the title of which is likely a reference to the “butterfly effect” theory - where a small change in one place can produce large changes in another - thus, butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil may cause a tornado in Texas. The “normal” breathing sounds in the beginning gets gradually amplified and harsher in the process, becoming a relentless storm with brutal gusts of wind and deafening chaos that almost resembles harsh noise towards the end. The first track is total abstraction, completely relying on breathing sounds getting closer and closer to the ear, swallowing the listener whole, pushing them into a gigantic pair of lungs, where air becomes a hurricane.

The following tracks have a slightly more traditional sound, building instrument-based ambience around slow, meditative breathing with pianos, synthesizer drones and guitars, which themselves become highly breathe-like in the processs, swelling slowly, signifying the calm, slow movement with the shimmering beauty and always reminding the listener of its bodily presence. We keep breathing all the time and that’s what connects us - no matter what music we’re listening to or what mood we’re in at the moment, we’re always breathing - this is something critical, starting with the first second of our lives and ending when we welcome death sooner or later. Swartz Et simply amplifies and stresses this fact, to sometimes overwhelming and visceral effect, but without leaving a certain sense of beauty and a sense of experience behind.

Binarii Weave - I

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Wow, the beginning of this album got me all freaked, with the tangled, whispered French phrases emerging from the rustling forest soil, like some ethereal nymphs who deceive you with their beauty, only to pull you underground with a thousand hands. There are brief glimpses of relief to be found here, only to withdraw and retreat, replaced again with dark matter and ominous atmospherics. The six short exercises in style combine dark ambience with field recordings and speech samples to an unsettling, confusing effect. “I” is as difficult to clearly define as its cover artwork - just what exactly is this on the cover?

Review: Daw Nusk - Hunter Gatherer (Koppklys, 2012)

Norwegian micro-label Koppklys developed a unique artistic direction, combining beautiful artworks with informative and neat inlay cards. The clear cassette reveals an impressive spool of magnetic tape inside - there’s almost 70 minutes of music in here, provided in a series of somewhat disorienting ambientalistic explorations. Like the cover photo, revealing a bright, yet extremely blurry background seen through a hole in an old, heavily textured plank, Daw Nusk’s (real name: Todd Klempner) moments of beauty are buried deep within rumbling drones, distant ringing and spliced field recordings.

The music on Hunter Gatherer is undeniably cinematic, and this feeling is further augumented by the label and the track names themselves: the blurb on Koppklys’ website describes the album as “an alternative soundtrack to Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life” and one of the tracks is entitled “Tarkovsky’s Mistake”, possibly with a reference to a certain Andrey. The cassette is the kind of ambience that blurs the line between “real” and “artificial” instruments, there is no point in telling whether the nearly Easter Orthodox-style vocal moans are real or they’re just synthesizer lines or whether the heartfelt string lines are made with actual violins or they’re just a product of electronic hardware. Because it’s not what it is about: it is about creating heavily textural, contemplative mood, switching locations between a beach on a cool, cloudy day to the deep woods or a nostalgic playground of the old days. Daw Nusk’s music may be difficult to penetrate at first, but a few flips of cassette later the subsequent layers of beauty begin to emerge. Patience is the word.

Tapes still available from Koppklys!

Review: Ypotryll - Solar Tongues (Sangoplasmo, 2012)

The description of the cassette released by Polish tape label Sangoplasmo Records bears a somewhat cryptic, brief, yet interesting explanation on the name “Ypotryll”:

Ypotryll is the name of a beautiful legendary creature with the tusked head of a boar, the body of a camel, feet of a goat, the tail of a serpent and a huge penis. However, Ypotryll is also a meditative experimental music project of an artist from Brooklyn.

After a brief search, I’ve found a picture. An Ypotryll looks like this:

Looking at the picture of this fantastic creature, it’s not hard to imagine a sort of mysterious, veiled sound that is steeped in nearly dark ambient-like atmospheric and ritualistic drones in the style of Super Minerals’ more unsettling moments - a sort of sound the source of which is hard to pin down, the sound that simply exists, as if it existed for centuries before, the sound that was here long before humans and will probably stay long after the humans are gone. Ypotryll manages to pull it off - the last time I’ve heard drone sound so primeval is the opening track of Loren Chasse’s The Buried Stream (recorded under the moniker Of, that was a huge sound).

Swelling well beyond the shy, field recordings-laden opening minutes, the music on side A’s “Sun” reaches (as the name of the track suggests) sunlit rainforest canopies in a series of bucolic synthesizer cascades echoing both the solo efforts of Daren Ho under his Driphouse moniker and wildlife sound-galore New Age of Ariel Kalma. There’s a deep sense of spirituality and connection with nature in Ypotryll’s sound and the fact that the person responsible for this project comes from one of the most dense urban areas in the world makes it even more impressive. Because Ypotryll’s drones sound like the result of constantly being very close to nature. Solar Tongues might be the soundtrack to non-human sounds that will ring out in Manhattan overgrown with a jungle - like in those many “post-human” drawings that give us the sights of modern skyscrapers leaning slowly toward collapse, water flowing down the subway tunnels and streets, forming natural lakes and rivers, moss overgrowing art deco and modernist details, buildings gradually crumbling and forming a sort of a man-made mountain range. And the circle would be over - everything will be reclaimed by nature.

Brian Eno once stated that he created his Ambient albums to get people prepared for death. This is also what Solar Tongues managed to do - it seems to say: “it’s okay if you die, it’s completely natural, don’t fight it, welcome death with open arms - but remember to do it in a beautiful place”. Like a rainforest.

Listen to the sample and buy the tape from Sangoplasmo Records!

Review: Andy C. Jenkins - Matsubara Conical (Sunshine Ltd, 2012)

It is not just mere coincidence that for a cover of his cassette, released by up-and-coming ambient Floridian label Sunshine Ltd. the American sound experimentalist Andy C. Jenkins used a photo of an installation of Japanese visual artist Shinya Aota. Just like Aota places ordinary, everyday objects (a bottle of detergent, a piece of pipe, a mosquito coil) in surprising configurations leading to their re-birth as works of art, Jenkins takes usual, everyday, sometimes even unwanted sounds and places them in new context, removing the status of “accidental sound” and bringing it to the more organized - musical - levels.

The music on the tape is an ever-changing and fluctuating kaleidoscope of sounds; by combining pulsing synthesizer drones, seemingly random guitar noodling, field recordings and found sounds Jenkins walks the path somewhere between cluttered electroacoustic improvisations and down-to-earth ambient music. The opening “Tone Poem” is a drifting, lethargic drone miniature that slowly delves into a GY!BE/Tim Hecker sort of distorted police radio/CB radio blabber, only to explode in sudden, brief yet intense, blast of guitar violence. Things kick off from there, with the deconstructed math folk of “Going to Gurgaon”, which sounds like a big Sunburned Hand of the Man jam that can never really take off, wasting its energy on a series of false starts.

One thing that is very distinctive about Matsubara Conical (and the releases of Sunshine Ltd in general) is how “lowercase” it sounds: the sound is never heavy nor bombast, it doesn’t impose itself on the listener, rather, it invites the listener to listen closely to the microscopic structures that constitute the tracks, the short, warped guitar/synth compositions that require (and reward) a heavily focused and repeated listening. With each listening there is more to be discovered: the j-card lists an impressive (and international) list of places, where various field recordings were taken from and cites a few tracks, from which the samples were taken. Once one gets deep into Matsubara Conical there comes a realization that there is so much more to it than just some simple, distorted guitar scales or a pulsing synthesizer patch. There’s always more sounds lurking in the background: modified, re-shaped, often muted or playing on the very barrier of hearing. Andy C. Jenkins rewards those who listen - those who listen instead of just hear.

Listen and buy Matsubara Conical from Sunshine Ltd.