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.