ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

2021

Apart from one PTSD-flavored post (since deleted), this is my first missive for PROTEAN NORM in a year. Those who know me know why to the fullest (sorry all them poor peeps) but in barest form if you need it: I needed more CA$H to pay for hospice care for burdens both Mom & Pop --- then some more for the constant travel from coast to coast, then a bit more to relocate to a hostile Buffalo I hardly recognised --- hey, rent #1 in Cali wasn't killin' me quick enough. This meant doin' MUCH more of the music PA puff I write by the yard, where I fritter my precious time on meager talents (more on them later), when I wanted/tried in this blog and some places beyond to fritter my meager talent on precious talents (more but not enough of them later). If you need endings (happy or not), then Pop passed first (mercifully, noisily) on a hot day in June, Mom soon after (quickly, gratefully). The death rites and other dance steps kept me occupied till the fall when I finally returned to listening to music for pleasure - not comfort or relief or therapy - but actual pleasure.

And thank the skies, there was the plenty of it and plenty of time to hear it on flights and super long car journeys cross country and up and down state. I even caught some stuff live (all hail them SanFran venues). On the downside, feel like I got some very heavy doses of the usual in my inbox: underwritten, overproduced note-rote-indie; limp, mithering faux folk; breast-formula-one misogyny hiphop....and....and this a very special appeal....can we please, please, please quit the duvet mountain of medicinal ambient shit soon? Please? Even in my fragile state, I craved some barbs and flint. And, on the flip (but actually not): if I have to endure another interminable-atmospheric-portent-with-fuck-all-else-digi-collage-record/cassette (but it's "a dystopian vision", see?) generally (but not exclusively) produced by the men children, I will gladly swap 'em all to listen to Doris Day forever.

All that said, this is a pretty strong list if a bit hasty and late in the assembly. Some BIG caveats: there's heaps I wanna listen to and haven't yet (a zillion Jad Fair albums AND a new Jonathan Richman record!!!), but for where I am now and where I was when this music spoke to me, this is it and I will try not to retrofit too much later...though it could expnad to a 50.

Just a couple of notes: Besides being a fucking masterpiece, the Santa Sprees' record also boasts the stand out single song of the year in Run Wild When I'm Gone and is even more remarkable for the bait and switch (late) turn it takes from wild, hingeless pop to songs about death and dying that are as funny and odd and flat out brilliant and unprecedented as pretty much anything this one-off duo have ever done...and in a year when I'd had more than my fill of death and dying, that seemed an extra special feat and an extra special solace. The new Phew has never been far from me since it came my way, its riches of experiment and detail and beauty have gotten richer and closer with every listen. In an age when the a superficial put-some-near-past-in-a-blender-with-a-vintage-patch approach guitar pop/rock classicism can get you a long, long way (for 15 minutes), Leapardo's Malcantone is a thrilling, winning blast of artful, anti-diffidence with all the right kinds of sonic roughage, ragged edges, wrong rightness, and an assured simplicity that a) melts your heart and b) turns you into a reckless driver. 

I think there are signs of my need for warm milk and cookies and a good darn sob elsewhere here but we all permit ourselves that sometimes, right? Click on the title to link to the music and buy direct from the artist when you can...and digital really is best y'know...unless you really love the pointless and ruinous use of postage, plastic and petro-chemical byproducts.                    

1 Santa Sprees / Fanfare For Tonsils
2 Phew / New Decade
3 Leopardo / Malcantone
4 Blusens Fasong / Gaute Granli
5 Old Million Eye / Warm Alliance with the Outside 
6 Moor Mother / Black Encyclopedia Of The Air
7 Ben LaMar Gay / Open Arms To Us
8 Xenia Rubinos / Una Rosa
9 Shuko No Omit / Himitsu-no Kaiko-Roku 10 Low / Hey What
11 Kramer / And the Wind Blew It All Away 
12 Mdou Moctar / Afrique Victime
13 Aquaserge / The Possibility of a New Work for Aquaserge
14 Sourdure / De Mort Viva
15 Bons / Ready Reckoner
16 Dry Cleaning / New Long Leg
17 Jazmine Sullivan / Heaux Tales
18 Matt Sweeney and Bonnie "Prince" Billy / Superwolves
19 Tony Jay / Hey There Flower
20 Cassandra Jenkins / An Overview on Phenomenal Nature
21 Ben Pritchard / Up In Air 
22 Josh Medina / Drifting Toward the Absolute
23 Lev Kowalczwk / The Young Woman Crosses Herself as an Ambulance Goes Rushing Past 
24 Pauline Ana Strom / Angel Tears In Sunlight
25 Cindy / 1:2 and Standard Candle Demos 
26 Lingua Ignota / Sinner Get Ready
27 Faye Webster / I Know I'm Funny Haha
28 Les Filles de Illighadad / At Pioneer Works
29 Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt / Made Out Of Sound
28 Snail Mail / Valentine
30 The Modern Folk / Primitive Future

Albums Of The Year

It's been something, ain't it? A long, weird mush of tumult and tedium, churn and stasis. Happy it is done. Happy the orange demagoguery is done. Happy the folks are still alive. Happy this fucking list is done. Trends to detect if that is your bag. Have written about them here and elsewhere, but to briefly rethread, 2020 in music has seen: a general flight to the comforts of an untroubling, ambient glow, solipsistic solo projects with zero or solo audiences, the diminishing return of the collaborative shared file, the arching and unstartling narration of isolation, the glue of reverberated gloom, deadly online spectacles that only magnify the lacuna of life and, the continued ecological terror of tape & vinyl and its attendant global shipping. And yes it is true that the vast majority of releases this year, as ever, have been completely worthless. A smaller percentage have been worthy and good but will almost certainly never compel me to return to them. And the very tiniest slither, a micron shaved from the mountain top, have stirred me, moved me, bothered me, intrigued me, delighted me, amused me, educated me, followed me and near as damnit made me put them on this list.

1 Linus Vandewolken / Het vlier, een hommel op aarde
2 Santa Sprees / Sum Total Of Insolent Blank
3 Blake Hargeaves / Improvisations On The Pipe Organs Of Europe
4 Horse Lords / The Common Task
5 : : / Words That Don't Rhyme
6 Tori Kudo / The Last Song Of My Life
7 R.A.P. Ferreira / Purple Moonlight Pages 
8 The Neverending Trio / Side 2: 2 Month Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition
9 Star Feminine Band / Star Feminine Band 
10 Isayaah Wuddah / Urban Brew
11 Cyril Cyril / Yallah Mickey Mouse 12
12 Cindy Lee / What's Tonight To Eternity
13 Jerry Gordon / Sink: Songs For These Ends
14 Caroline McKenzie / Citizen Of Nowhere
15 Meridian Brothers / Cumbia Siglo XXI
16 Still House Plants / Fast Edit
17 Aksak Maboul / Figures
18 Carl Stone / Bojuk
19 Lewsberg / In This House
20 Keiyaa / Forever, Ya Girl
21 Blanche Blanche Blanche / Seashells  
22 Fiona Apple / Fetch The Bolt Cutters
23 Lori Goldston / On A Moonlit Hill In Slovenia
24 Yaseyuki Uesugi / Don't Know That I'm Losing My Place 
25 Jennifer Walshe / A Late Anthology Of Early Music Vol 1
26 Natalia Beylis / The Steadfast Starry Universe
27 Caleb Landry Jones / The Mother Stone
28 Phil Maguire & Tim Olive / Invoer
29 Bill Callahan / Gold Record
30 Waxahatchee / Saint Cloud
31 Heather Frost / Petrichor
32 Blóm / Flower Violence
33 Ana Roxanne / Because Of A Flower 
34 Calineczka / What Is Music And What Should It Be
35 Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra / Dimensional Stardust
36 Wilder Gonzales Agreda / I Was a Teenage Post-Rocker
37 Various Artists / CosmoPraesidium
38 Beatrice Dillon / Workaround
39 Angel Olsen / Whole New Mess
40 Kramp / Nervous Rattles




 
 

Cyril Cyril / Yallah Mickey Mouse

The Swiss Cyrils, Bondi (drums, percussion and voice) and Yeterian (guitar, organ and voice), roll again to deliver on the promise of their 2018 debut 'Certain Ruines' and thrilling live shows. The assembled elements are discernible again (if a little cleaner) and, occasional echo and plate reverb scattering aside, untreated. The vocals (a declamatory, oratorial lead with harmony and chorus) are all pleasing in their texture and placement on and against the rhythms and progressively righteous in their rhetorical thrust (this based on a written translation of the lyric rather than live interpretation). The Levantine guitar and organ figures are artfully draped upon the hard logic of a through-line bass, insistent and elasticated with the the cold near-funk of Plank-produced Les Rita Mitsouko or even the pre-pomp Simple Minds of 'Empires & Dance', and Bondi's fabulously un-splashy drums and non-ornate overlay of percussion - enslaved to rhythm but rich in timbre. There is a just-so rightness to everything, the decisions and delivery and production, that probably sounds arid on the page - and it is undeniably grounded in control, craft and facility - but the sum is alive with a wilful wit and a broad, wanton wisdom - intoxicated by a fanned-out sense of pop possibility that one might expect from the founder of the great globe-trawling label Les Disques Joe and a leader of the Insub Meta Orchestra.  

Yasuyuki Uesugi / I Don't Notice That I'm Losing My Place

Another cavernous labyrinth of abraded, tubular noise from the Hokkaido sound artist Uesugi Yasuyuki. The cold control one imagines from surface evidence is actually born of a riskier process of pre-set analog synth, initiated and abandoned (but observed) to run a course that never fades or decays but mutates fitfully and often eventfully, as in the opening piece, 'My Body Is Following A Mental Anomaly'. The myopic proximity to the nature of the change involved and the decisions related to halting and sequencing each piece, make this an aesthetic task rather than (mere) ritual process but the process does captivate in both its pathology and the filling in of an attendant story via exegesis and the run of troubled and troubling titles that suggest a mind poured into (rather than released from or by) these deep but relatively short furrows of sound. An artist and a recording that demand and reward your attention unsplit. 

The Soods / Ornaments Of Affection

The longer I remain a critic the more I criticize. I would call it a hazard of the job except I am doing this particular element for nothing. It takes a toll on me. The time. The torture of critique. The torment of knowing how easy it is to dismantle in a paragraph what may have taken months for a band to assemble. Knowing how hard it is to create something interesting and worthwhile. It takes a toll on the artists who have to endure the vagaries of my intemperate mood and the narrowing eyelet of my tastes. Sometimes, I zero in on an unwitting release as an exemplar of what I identify to be a wider failing, and ravage it as prey of collateral guilt. I hold the artist's accountable for the daemon object now loose in a landscape of rubble. So, what am I criticizing? Mostly, I hope it is the music as cultural orphan sticky with the mucus of its birthing labor. But this is a fallacy. Because I can't shake off the nice people who send me things in eager anticipation of attention or affection. If it really were the attention economy, my listening closely, reflecting and writing would be enough. But it isn't because this is an economy of approval...of like and its big sister love. And I like and love less than I once did. 

What a wretched preamble for a band like The Soods to wade through. The attention was sought. Feels consensual. They seem like good people. Their process as a recording band looks archaic and unwieldy but I imagine it to be a lot of fun. Fourteen different people contribute to 'Ornaments Of Affection', not just as musicians but as singers and writers, too. Three produced. Two mixed. I marvel at this feat of collective sharing and production and the egalitarian division of tasks on the record. I imagine the joy of this social grouping would be present in a live setting with fourteen members crowding a stage, baton-passing instruments, calling out to a circle of friends in the crowd. But while there is an undoubted broader communal unity brought to bear on the thirteen songs presented here, it is the same diffuse and rotating of personnel and writers that undermines the album as a whole and makes it an egg for an invested and patient curate. 

Hard to speculate on a discreet process, but I doubt that Jason Roy, as leader and shaper, for all his other evident talents, is a tyrant of unbending vision and I strongly suspect that fun, fraternity and égalité were much higher priorities than the rigid rule of a guiding aesthetic (and maybe that is a nobler cause). So, for every moment of melodic flight there are three of leaden thump. For every graceful couplet, there are too many weighed down by the alignment of lockstep meter and overly full rhyme (houses, blouses, you, true) or lines awkwardly attenuated. For every leaner and cleaner musical idea, there are ten baggy ones, bloated in their arrangements or veiled in the gauze of misapplied effects post production. All of which is a shame if the unity of an end product is the only measure of its worth. Personally, I generally do end up taking the best of an artist forward with me (often in the form of just one or two songs) rather than the median or aggregate of an album or career and the best here is pretty good. Opener 'Oh, Mersey Days' is a wistful song of minor moods and the kind of unapologetic classicism of The Las's and The Go Betweens that boasts a great nasal & head lead vocal from Shane Tripp (sadly underused later). There is more Anglophilia in the other stand-out 'There To Be Had', a song that is slightly over-engineered with risers & bridgers, somewhat anchored by its couplet meter and rather blighted by a mismanaged fadeout (a recurring problem...Pam's prescription: listen to Jonathan Richman to learn how to end a song) but just about outruns all these impediments with its bright and shiny ribbons of Paisley underground guitar and another Shane Tripp vocal, sounding like a low rent Wayne Coyne. Elsewhere, things are a little more competent and ordinary, licks and solos are evidence of the quality and craft of the players and their careful interaction, but the constant committee-like crisis of congress makes it hard to discern a Sood identity that isn't really much more than the sum of the psych rock/pop spectres (Echo & The Bunnymen, Energy Gown, Missing Monuments, Camper Van Beethoven from my notes) that passed quickly through my head during the thicket of songs and I never escaped the feeling The Soods are a live band compromised by the choices and processes of a studio,  

Survey Channel / Pumice Stone & Other Vignettes

This is an ultra-modest petri dish of tiny, tentative experiments of synth and tape warp which is all the better for its refusal to open out into the puffed-up grandiloquence of that perplexingly vast genre of ersatz-vintage electronica that seems to preoccupy the minds and wallets of every sunless male I meet these days. It has no boring narrative or OST pretensions of being from an imaginary but wholly boring movie. It never wades out into developed themes of pomp prog and it refuses to don a supporting truss of tired, tired, tired, tired beats that tired, tired, tired, tired men reach for whenever their ladle fulls of analog synth gloop are sounding too much like ladles full of analog synth gloop - you know, gloop you have heard a million times this year even though you tried your best to turn off the tap. So bravo, Survey Channel for making a collection of virtuous and engaging vignettes that whimper and flicker and flash and bend and fold and stop and rub up against each other in interesting ways and don't amount to much more than a tiny test-tube testament to their creation by an alert musical mind.    

Repo Fam / Whipped Cream

Apart from the price tag ($8!), this EP could have come out in 1987. Maybe it did. Repo Fam may or may not be happy with that notion. It doesn't matter either way. Does it make it timeless? Static? Conservative? Depends on your age, I guess. It does sound like a tidier Sonic Youth or a looser Lovechild. That is going to be no bad thing for many. And a ho-hum thing for some. Sonic Youth were a ho-hum thing for people who saw Television. Who were ho-hum if you'd seen The Modern Lovers. Who were overly naïf arrivistes if you'd ever borne witness to the Velvets and the Stooges. Who came over white and stiff if you had encountered Bo Diddley in a small room. The present needs its present but it isn't the present of churn, novelty and progress. It is a present of recherchement and recovery, reminiscence and reference. Pop's present is the youthful clamour for unclaimed points of a highly-indexed culture. And if you are do go back and uncover, best make sure you are cool about it and recognise what is cool and remains cool and then stay cool when you deliver and record. Repo Fam are cool because they dig cool stuff like Beat Happening and Kenneth Anger films and 'The King Of Marvin Gardens' and their PR puff pulls the levers marked The Fall and Half Japanese because they are cool - not cos they are happening hipster catnip but cool. Hipsters aren't cool 'cos they end up in knots thinking that shit like Toto or Van Halen or Fleetwood Mac are cool when they are not and never will be.

There are four songs here and the third and fourth ones are best: 'Whipped Cream' and 'Here We Come'. They walk the precious/cheap, art/pop, pretty/petty, poetry/thump lines most successfully. Singer Michelle Peña's delivery is best on those two songs, too...escaping the Gordon-isms of  track 1 to find something that is winningly off-hand and beautifully off-key and resonant with something more private, less historical. Peña's timely tufts of synth speckling are another very positive feature of a promising set of recordings. Now, Repo Fam just have to find more of now and more of them to put into whatever they do next. I'll be listening.

: : (Four Dots) / Words That Don't Rhyme

This is what the full bore overflow pipe of modern music production should facilitate: those grandest of grand follies that dizzy and defy the listener comforts of genre gutters and the expectations of reasonable folk partly because they can and partly because they must. Art that flees not only fashion but the age itself by the primary means of not giving it a second thought.

: : (four dots if you really have to utter it) are two people, David Fair (Half Japanese, Coo Coo Rockin Time) and Swedish experimental artist Sara Ohm. The impulse on 'Words That Don't Rhyme' is that of a thought experiment made into music because there would be no other way to behold it if the artist did not make it. The idea is sound and simple enough - pair lots of non-rhyming (mostly concrete) nouns in a long inventory and set to music. That even makes the concept sound low but the effect of the whole is a mind-furring act of pure revelation. For over forty minutes and what feels like hundreds of pairings, the brisk and initially graspable inventory, transmogrifies into a pulmonary gasp of prosody and a thick weave of resonant poetry. Sara Ohm's delivery of the words & phrases is unwavering and unmannered without being inhuman. Stresses wander on and off meter or the meter corrects and drags itself. There is a non-native speaker energy in Ohm's probably novel encounters with couplings like "ankle bracelet and parrot cage", "newsprint and sun dial", "micro-management" and "dangling participle" that adds another layer of pleasure. There is no inherent momentum in her delivery even though I sometimes projected surges and peaks. There is no deliberate dampening down of the expressive intonation like John S Hall, or any adoption of a speech music lilt 'n' roll of Robert Ashley or Harry Partch even though both came to mind. The music is a fabulous, maddening maze of puce muzak, sickly and comic in its surfaces of shiny washes, brassless parping and synthetic birdsong, progressed by a brilliantly daft/deft and arresting (in both senses) rhythm that helps make the whole hover somewhere between the mall and museum, the Residents and Raymond Scott, but wholly within the singular vision of David Fair. The sum is hard to describe. There is a first tier conscious listen where you can revel in your favourite couplings ("bagpipes and lipgloss". "mistaken identity and shoehorn")....and even laugh out loud....which gives way to the tier 2 listen where totems from the subconscious conspire to make connections without your consent ("postcards from China and a snake shedding its skin") and then, there is tier 3 where the whole congeals into a vocal/music blancmange where meaning cannot be attended to, like an aria in a foreign tongue, and a hypnotic property takes hold and, before you know it, forty minutes have gone by and the piece has started playing again. I think...."conga drums and flossing"...."sugar bowl and prescription lenses"...."blueberry muffin and hello my name is blank sticker"....did I hear that?

Spacelab / Kaleidomission

What is the upside of the enormous, assymetric supply-side proliferation of music when the audience is so small, cashless and uninvolved? Uninvolved in their commitment, their stamina, their devotion...rather than their endlessly fitful diversion to the next thing...and the next..and the next. The ancient obstacles to the mountain top of music production and dissemination from the pre-digital age of capital exchange have been vaporized like pixel rock. What does it mean to be an artist like Spacelab in the ruinous rubble of 2020? Where do they site themselves? What do they think they are doing? Do they know how many other Spacelabs there have been (seriously)? Do they have any desire to individuate themselves at all?

It is so early in their development (this is their debut) it almost feels intrusive hearing it even in this shrunken public sphere and it feels borderline indecent for a wizened old critic like me to have at it. It is gauche enough to make you blush but competent enough to be routine. It is spirited enough to refer to Can and Faust and foolish enough to be made pale by the very thought of the comparison. It is earnest and untutored in a way that could turn out alright one day...with requisite abandonment and endeavour and adventure and real experiment rather than approximations of vintage signs uprooted from a once-rich semilogical realm, now floating, aimless and thin and stripped of meaning and resonance. Perhaps, that is the point. 

We could blame the parents. We could blame their education. We could blame the internet and Vaporwave 3.0. But we won't. I could have written about a thousand other efforts of similar status. An artist I know has been speculating that the landlside of ambient/auratic music released this year is part of a terrified flight to comfort and is as bourgeois and regressive as easy listening was in the age of atomic anxiety. There is plenty that is comforting and pleasant here....nothing would make me turn it off or run from the room or trouble me or make me fathom its source. And there is enough evidence to show that Spacelab can get myopically close to the surface textures of (mostly ersatz vintage) electronic voices to suggest they could yet fall into future wells of sound and stay submerged for (much, much) longer and emerge as spectralist composers of unheard scope and color. Kaleiodomission's sequencing and framing are never pompous (the label's publicity puff less so) and the fragments are rightly fragments stitched, rather post-facto, into a clichéd narrative whole that says nothing yet says it all. 

Jerry Gordon / Sink: Songs For These Ends

This is the second of two recent releases from the Osaka-based musician and poet Jerry Gordon, both of which are quietly compelling and beautifully realised in up-close recordings that bear the dampening acoustic imprint of a small room of wood and tatami....but maybe I'm projecting.

'Sink' begins with its most satisfying piece, 'Slouching Away From The Womb', which emerges slowly from a shallow well of brushed drum circles and tubular mouthpiece spittle, and builds into a dry and insistent pulse of Togashi-like tapped toms and brushed snare beneath overdubbed & understated, and largely descending & centering, tenor sax phrases - these are attentively co-joined and developed melodic fragments that feel more thematic than look-at-this soloing. Gordon's hushed and contemplative tone is attractive throughout, more poetic and damaged than didactic or defiant skronk. 'Trips, Taps & Torn Maps' journeys further in its dynamics and phrasing, but the components of drums and tenor sax remain - or saxes, as two are included here in dialogue). 'Wolf At The Door' is darker in tone and more fitful in progression, with some fantastic flights of deviant rhythm. In the closing track, 'Taken Down A Notch', the drum patterning is gently oblique and played with great feeling, matched at every measure by tenor soliloquies that move organically from a lamplit pre-bop mood, via mid-century modalities, to the kind of extended technique and controlled overblowing that only a deep listener and deeply sensitive artist could deliver this purposefully and present this plainly. A real find.  

Lori Goldston / On A Moonlit Hill In Slovenia

A quick and careless survey of cellist Lori Goldston's career (yep, guilty) reads like that of an itinerant jazz sideperson of yore, how else to account for someone who studied under Maxine Neuman and Milford Graves at Bennington, played with Nirvana, Earth and David Byrne as well as with and for a host of composers ranging from Terry Riley to Ellen Fullman but who seems most at home and at rest improvising with others (Lonnie Holley, Dana Reason, Jaap Blonk to name a few) or alone as evidenced in these two beguiling and unhurried solo improvisations recorded with crickets and night air on the Slovenian moonlit hill of the title. This set consists of two extended pieces that both unfold with the kind of melodic and thematic unity that seems like an impossible feat of forethought and online thought to a non-musician or a musician who cannot improvise at this level, which for all her claims of being "rigorously de-trained" after a period of classical training, is very much the result of an extreme facility as well as the kind of musical intelligence and bold melodic and timbral invention that owes as much to Garrison as it does to Gorecki. The first piece (Side A of this cassette release)  moves from a beautiful opening of plucked and picked figures of descending verse-like lines - largely tonal, some dampened, most allowed to ring. This is followed by a short bowed section that echoes some of the picked descents in a shifting modal orbit and a quieter section of folkish lament, that serves as a rest before a rapturously-intoned ascent of bowed intensity in which a drawn and redrawn motif is worried into strips of umber, atonal bark. Side B is underlit by the spirit of Carpathian folk song and later art song, gradually disassembled into a  circling flight of its own constituent elements, less resolved and distinct than the first piece but it still offers a welcome proximity to a live performance of invention and character at a time when that is sadly absent.  

Calineczka / What Is Music And What Should It Be

As abstract paintings on white gallery walls are nudged from abstraction into another weave of discourse by the presence of a title, so too the worldess drone is rendered a new agency in the bestowal of a name. Here Calineczka (the Spanish based artist and label owner, Michal Stanczyk), plainly puts an otherwise polite and rather humble (in all but duration) drone into a position of opposition and provocation which ultimately helps the mental effect of listening and anticpation of listening. Over two 40 plus-minute sides of refrigerated hum and microbial progression, this cassette release affects a pleasing, arms-folded defiance of inaction and then repeats the feat on side B which is literally the piece played in reverse. It all fascinates in its non effect. As a lure to listening of the deep well variety, it is extremely effective in provoking the best kind of long drone thoughts: "Is this happening on the tape or in my head?"

  

Caroline McKenzie / Citizen Of Nowhere

The non-auratic elements of this piece by the sound artist Caroline McKenzie (aka Beth Gripps) are its title, which refers to a notoriously callous statement made by the British Prime Minister Theresa May, and its alternative title 'More Music For Drowning'. It is interesting the damp shadow this casts on what might ordinarily drift along in that most bourgeois and comforting of forms: the ambient mist. As ambient mists goes, this is a fine and vital example. Separated tiers of shifting gauze ripple in a pleasing co-dependance with tiny grains of static. The whole is artfully controlled with more subtraction and absence than presence. For the still and attentive listener, there is a sad drama in the flagging cadence that emerges, a bobbing figure at mid-distance, mouth and ears at the water line. 

Kiki & The Cosmic Egg / Guided Visualization

 

OK...I live in California...not native...so not native...and therefore I have seen this stuff up close...even dabbled at the fringes but I had absolutely no fucking clue whether this was a sincere arrow of truth or some crooked hipster pastiche with a red rubber sucker on one end. Kinda glad to find that on closer examination this is actually completely humourless and irony free...cos..you know what...the 33 minutes 33 seconds does slowly accrete some tincture of wonder in its cycles within cycles of cotton wool synths and later interlocking chimes. The opening gambit from the liner notes only make me love it more "The inpsiration for this tape came during a session given by reiki master Turita Madireddi in which faeries began to appear...from there I was directed to meditate and meet with them." Got through my filter as though I had been hypnotised....wait a minute...

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Pterygium / Stoic Ubiquity

Doomy is easy. Doomy is down boys. Glum and doomy. Being young and of unhappy hormone is an excuse. Noise is easy. Easy making. Easy listening cos only noise people bother with it. This is easy listening. It has no material terror in its acoustic properties. It has not a single formal surprise. You know what you are gonna get 20 seconds in. Vertical atmospherics in standard issue warehouse reverb. Routine genre cliches can be crossed off for those of us playing doomy boy noise bingo: fragrant white noise wash, wafty synthetic choir (the worst), distant static, film/tv dialogue, soft crackle to peaks of static, winning hum, stench of faded goth. It is inexcusably ordinary and coy. What can be done? Is it just the mood I am in today? Bored of doomy down boys and the lumpen mud they reduce the world to. Now if this was three 15 year old girls at the controls....that would be different. Yeah! It isn't though, is it?

Thought it was a good name for 20 seconds....but I'd misread it as Pteryglum. 

Tori Kudo / The Last Song Of My Life

Is this the sound of music melting?
The disassembly of an ensemble?
I call the pine beams and frame prone in the field my 'wooden house'.
As wet clay rotating like a drunk on the wheel is a pot.
The nodes of rhythm slalom in loose correspondence, so time warps and is hard to gauge. How long is it?
It is frequently fantastic, like a dream.
A melodic figure descends again and becomes a theme.
It is being played live to accompany a film. The images are absent. Sometimes, an illustrative surge of silent film piano cuts against the cycled undertow. Falls of brass, accordion, piano, guitar, voice, topple forward into the same confined space. The whole never stops shifting.
It has a group mind and one mind...the liberated kind.
The rare, rare, Tori Kudo kind.
Not many antecedents.
Attending closely is hard but loving it is easy. 

Wilder Gonzales Agreda / I Was a Teenage Post-Rocker

Released in May, 'I Was A Teenage Post Rocker' is a four-track album by the Peruvian electronic composer, writer and philosopher, Wilder Gonzales Agreda. Track one, 'Sierra Florian', fidgetty with arhythmic radiator-clang percussion, is followed by 'Fearless Muziq' a feint galactic smear of flubs, dribbles and pops that de-evolves into a buffering signal of broken sonic data. 'No Habia Hispters...' is a slow alignment of squash-ball percussive pulses with a rising loop of cotton-cladded sawtooth synth and a wave of softly abraded metal discs that settles into a more locked and hypnotic Ciani-like motion with a Stockhausen palette. It could have gone on much longer like this for me and the fade out suggests there may be a longer version somewhere. Agreda's compostions here are eventful and creative and the sense of play and humour makes them much more listenable than many of his peers, however, sometimes a stronger commitment to duration and intense immersion helps to leave a more lasting impression, and this is more than evident in the monumental closing statement, 'Et Etereo', which magnificently winds itself out over an entirely called for 28 minutes of multi-planetary terrains as if piped directly from the mind of Olaf Stapledon.

Ann Ihsa (アン・イーサ) / Ann Ihsa Solo (緑の人)

Even if you are predisposed to this strain of very reserved and fragile Japanese song (think quieter Tenniscoats, Reiko Kudo, Jon the Dog), you might still need to pick the right moment of the day for this. With minimal means, slow and deliberate forward song motion, and a narrow range of expression, Ann Ihsa will still draw harder hearts than mine close and whisper unto them delicate nothings of feathered keys and guitar, roughly glued patches of field recordings, timid drum presets and a winning whole of light-headed, pearly tumesence.  

Quimper / Dejado

Operates like the cough syrup-dosed recall of a lost Leloux film, tremulous and unsteady, a sticky ebb and needy pulse of antique futures that is made out of a charming, geeky devotion rather than a distant poster print cool. The guiding aesthetic and patina of acoustic wool keeps everything together. The melodic and percussive invention and just audible vocals serve the atmosphere and thematic conceit a little too slavishly at times, putting BG in front of a potentially more engaging foregrounded M or even TEXT. 

Kramp / Nervous Rattles

Grainy, interior music for clear ears and headphones. Shuffles along a little meekly at first but is heard to best effect on 'Red Faced Demons', rich with congealed tape warp and stress, distant Yoshi Wada-like pipes and frosted with fairground shrieks and close copper cymbal ticks and splash. The housebound guitar of the final track, 'Outro', is a quietly satisfying conclusion.     

Linus Vandewolken / Het vlier, een hommel op aarde

Ideologically, if that is any way to apprehend art at all, albums like this can trouble me, such is its leave-it-in-any-setting prettiness, its take-it-anywhere good manners, its clinging to the bosom of folk identity, its auratic distance (even flight) from any form of the ugly deep trough of now, that it must be reactionary. And yet, two tracks in to this 15-track album of music played on the near extinct and mostly fretless Flemish hommel, a long spell is cast that makes me stare at the grain of wood in my desk and fall into that coveted mode of deep listening where every thumb abraded string resonates with a plain and restful truth. 

Blake Hargeaves / Improvisations On The Pipe Organs Of Europe

This record might read different to Europeans, I guess. Is it stodge and reverence and old stone and the low stink of hymn books? Something bound to Bach and rules and the virgin? Blake Hargreaves is a new worlder like me, excited enough to find something exotic in a grand tour of old organs and a close enough listener to finger new feeling from each encounter. There is nothing abusive in the improvisation here, no flock-bothering atonality or shrill modernism, no Charlemagne Palestine key-jamming, mass saturation or extended technique, just onward steps of refined inner logic (or the wandering anti-logic of a reverie), extrapolations of musical thought and excerpts of dialogues with tradition and the materiality of acoustic time and space - recorded here to beguiling effect.   

Prana Crafter / Bodhi Cheetah's Choice

The tilting of music-release culture (or commerce) that has formed a Himalayan supply-side range of product that dwarfs its audience in number, time, energy and labor should at least have this upside: if you want to make music for a micro niche-within-a-niche audience spread all over the world, you can. Similarly, if you want to pursue an ancient (in pop years) and arcane (to pop ears) path no one is going to stop you. So, this must be the most fertile and potent period for the expression and expansion of musical freedom in the age of mechanical reproduction (and its subsequent digital echo). And it might be. It is difficult to survey it in real time (it was probably once a manageable feat).

Records like this only make the case for a cultural stasis and retreat. It is the musical equivalent of staying in a Malay jungle until 1995 convinced that WW2 rages on. This is not a hard listen. It rolls along. The players are very competent. They are feeling something and connecting as they play. They create a feel. They are working in a clear idiom. It is too sincere to be pastiche. BUT the date stamp matters. If this was made in some cabin in the Washington woods in 1967, I could like it more. I am no more able to offer an aesthetic assessment of this than I am to write a critical appreciation of a piece of reproduction antique furniture. Plenty of artists are taking psych to new places. Maybe this band will, too but I suspect the fact that the 'Limited Edition Copper & Bone Swirl Vinyl' version of their album has SOLD OUT tells me everything I need to know for now. I am not singling this release out, it just represents something that I see a lot from the supposed liberated margins of music production.  

Rose Mercie / Rose Mercie

This came out in 2018 and was actually recorded further back than that. They are a French quartet whose publically-professed points of reference, the Shangri-Las, Raincoats, Rosa Yemen,  Electrelane & Josephine Foster, draw out a pretty neat pentagon of turf for what they do best: a kind of rattly, roomy, rural folk-pop with unstable joints and affecting, unobvious vocal lines and harmonies. Lots of charm.

Michael O / Power's Out

Like lots of small labels that struggle to get singles and cassettes released, it is a shame that Fruit & Flowers looks kinda dormant right now. Hope it's not a fatal bedrest, cos they had a nice thing going mostly based around stuff like this from Michael Olivares (ex The Mantles): slight, mildly depressed, unvarnished pop made with thought and feeling and much harder to do well than the thousands who try imagine. Think top tier Flying Nun and early Pastels if you need the quick ref.

  

Blóm / Flower Violence

Unpitying proletarian punk liberated by rage and mutated by improv (as found- and-noted accident), reploughing old fields oblivious to the fact that they have long since been concreted over and sold to land banking developers. Words circle back with double force. Strong, affectless vocal. Chrome-y, hit-all-pedals guitar. All told, an apt and urgent thump elevated by the right kind of excitable pretension. 

Various Artists / CosmoPraesidium

This is a loose and unhurried collection of folk, psych and dusty, field scratching that encapsulates nearly all of what Eiderdown do so well. The selections span porch-caught guitar wandering (Jon Collin, Phil Neff, Alex Archibald), galactic reverb exploration (Natalia Beylis, Ecstatic Cosmic Union Orgastra, Prana Crafter) and acoustic experiment (Coyote Teeth providing the most succesful example). Sometimes feels as though it has all fanned out from a primordial single playing of 8 Miles High but it is a testament to the curatoril care of the label and it is all for a good cause, too - with proceeds going to food banks in Washington, NY and Cali. 

Rabbit Island / In The Forest, Far Away

This wants to sound like a song made up at bedtime to soothe a child. The non-rhymes are cute. The too-many-syllables-for-the-line-meter are cute. The Oz accent is kinda cute unless you can't get Wake In Fright out of your head. The  unfurnished room acoustics are cute. The trouble is everything is cute, defiantly, unfailingly cute.And the effect is as ultimately irritating and empty as those gift shops that sell upcycled plant pots for 15 bucks and plain card birthday cards with line drawings of balloons on them. 

  

Santa Sprees / Sum Total Of Insolent Blank

Modern music feels like it is in reverse. There is a lot of it...probably way too much. Nearly all of it is very familiar. This was sent addressed to my old blog and I only played it because the description in the email was real funny but it turns out Sum Total Of Insolent Blank is going somewhere entirely of its own accord. It does not seem accountable to the present or many of the comforts of the past although that does not necessarily stop the X-meets-Y type descriptions that are the easiest way to mainline the core content of most reviews. A quick survey of links throws up the names Pere Ubu, Daniel Johnston, Sun Ra, The Residents but I think these could all be just a code for "strange" but equally grasp at trying to describe an album that is vast in its scope, invention and orginality and boasts a lyrical and musical wit that is funny, sad and poetic. It is over 90 minutes long...and kinda all over the map but very much one distinct thing at the same time....I wrote n told em it will be a hard sell....and they seemed to like that idea....and in a way that says everything about how you begin to make a record like this.

Beatrice Dillon / Workaround

I wanted to like this more. So much more. My third fairly attentive listen now and unfortunately I think I know it does not have any great secrets left to offer up. It is pleasant. Its surfaces are modern and clean and careful and mannered and arranged just so. Like nice tiling rather than the rush and pulled rug logic of the best footwork and dub which it estimates in a kinda deskbound way. It is all a little untroubling and easy to know. I think she definitely has the potential and capacity to do something great. Something stranger, less in step, more other.

Frans de Waard, Takuji Naka & Tim Olive / False Mercury

The parameters for this kind of music might seem different but when you listen to enough you are still trying to filter out the massive quantities of ho-hum and get to the good stuff. Sometimes I think it is the time you listen. I have listened to quite a bit from this label (845audio) over the long hours of Templetown lockdown and most of the releases maintain a good standard, generally interesting and full of sonic detail. They are mostly in the rinse, cycle, repeat mode of drone, click, whirr applied in thinnish washes and waves. Gentler, satisfying explorations, then. And the fetish-sating sleeves don't hurt at all in the sell especially for anyone keen to accesorize with their soft furnishings, ceramics and pot plants like me.

CB Radio Gorgeous / Babylon

Chop and churn punk a bit by the numbers across the whole EP but some neat drum falls and snatches of declamatory vocal that suggest they could become something more. I prescribe a month listening to Rosa Yemen or Suburban Lawns or something to help them transition quicker. However bits of the last track 'Babylon' have some good signs of pleasing non-crowdpleasing behaviour.

   

Jade Hairpins / Harmony Avenue

"You'll like this, Pammy. You will! I promise." Well, I don't. Actually, three tracks in I started to hate it. I hate it even more after a week. Hollow and whacky when I want insightful and mad. Polished and trite in a restless, needy, jumping-around-in-front-of-your-parents-face manner, in a way that makes you desperate for something relentless and real. I only kept listening to find out which track I hated the most. I am sure they are nice people.