ETC | July 2024
Sonic Insurgencies: The Best of Contemporary Music This Month
This month's proposals, while diverse in their methodologies, collectively challenge conventional paradigms and represent a significant shift in the production and perception of modern music.
"Rupture In The Eternal Realm" by C. Lavender
Brooklyn-based C. Lavender's third full-length work, "Rupture in the Eternal Realm," presents a sophisticated exploration of timbre within the architectural structures of electronic composition. The artist's meticulous manipulation of synthetic sound sources—ranging from the Buchla 200 synthesizer to the Haken Continuum—creates a rich palette of textures that defy expository verbalizations.
A distinctive feature of Lavender's compositional approach is her use of microtonal elements, not merely as an aesthetic choice but as a structural element that underpins the album's conceptual framework. This compositional choice is particularly evident in tracks like "The Blue Expanse.", which employs subtle pitch variations challenging Western equal temperament, creating a vibrating frequency that trembles excitedly between soothing familiarity and intriguing dissonance.
Throughout the album, Lavender subverts conventional rhythmic structures. In "A Billion Worlds" for instance, she juxtaposes arrhythmic synthesizer textures with precisely timed electronic interventions, creating a polyrhythmic tapestry that forces the listener to engage with time in a non-linear fashion.
The artist's masterful control of spectral density is particularly noteworthy. In tracks like "The Empty Sky," Lavender employs sustained tones that occupy specific resonance bands, creating a sense of fullness despite the apparent simplicity of the composition. Conversely, she utilizes negative space as a compositional element in "Emptiness Itself," where silence becomes as crucial as sound in shaping the listener's perception.
Lavender's approach to harmony is characterized by its deliberate ambiguity. Rather than adhering to traditional tonal centers, she creates floating harmonies that resist resolution, a feat achieved through the use of complex FM synthesis techniques, like the flickering-moonlight-on-water textures of "Ocean of Ambrosia."
Lavender's mastery of spatial dynamics is evident in her use of stereo field manipulation and reverberation, creating immersive sound environments that expand and contract, challenging the listener's sense of acoustic space. This is particularly effective in "Masses of gathered clouds," where the spatial positioning of sonic events becomes an integral part of the composition's narrative structure.
A key feature of the album is its exploration of how metamorphosis interacts with timbre. Sounds undergo gradual transformations, blurring the lines between synthetic and organic sources, where synthesizer tones gradually morph into what could be perceived as ritualistic percussion.
C. Lavender has solidified her position as a vanguard in the field while creating a work that demands—and rewards—deep, analytical listening, showcasing a level of technical mastery that poses important questions about the nature of composition in the electronic age.
Chris Coco & George Solar: "Holy Sun / Holy Ambient"
The legendary chill-out producer, DJ and Balearic luminary Chris Coco and his equally distinguished Ibizan colleague George Solar offer dual interpretations of "Holy Rising", providing a compelling case study in the mutability of musical composition.
The transformation of the original piece is profound, as it is miraculously reconfigured into a shimmering ambient soundscape radiating ecstatic bliss after initially presenting itself as a summery slow-motion groove flowing somewhere between yacht rock and '70s soul instrumentals. The stark contrast between versions invites a discussion on the nature of authorship in the age of remixes and reinterpretations.
Skyminds: "Echoes On The Shore"
Based in Berkeley, CA and Seattle, WA respectively, Michael Henning and Sean Conrad's collaboration as Skyminds represents a shift towards a more contemplative approach in improvisational electronic music.
Their methodology, more the result of an aesthetic predilection than an impulse to establish rigorous discipline, involves building complex textures from improvised seeds while introducing the unpredictability of spontaneity in structured musical forms.
The ethereal music on their latest and fourth Skyminds album, released in 2024 by the exquisite Inner Islands label, floats dreamily on a gently vibrating undercurrent of vaguely organic frequencies and analogue washes.
Winsomely gentle, seductively hazy, and inclined towards a bucolic ethos of blissful contemplation circumscribed by introspective reserve, “Echoes on the Shore” flutters around the edges of the West Coast new age music scene, invoking healing frequencies and luminous harmonies. Yet, it is also a rich, organic sound that remains terrestrial as it resonates with a variety of perfectly contextualized genre tropes, including laid-back post-rock experimentation, charming field recordings, quaint references to pre-classical music, vestiges of folk murmurs, and an overall euphoric vibration.
The unedited improvisation "Springtime", a 20-minute drone piece gliding at a stately pace over a swelling background punctuated by a minimal key riff, was recorded live at the incredible Vintage Synthesizer Museum and its inclusion in the album serves as a control in this experiment, allowing for direct comparison between raw and processed freeform techniques, an approach that provides valuable insight into the group's creative process and the impact of post-production on unrehearsed music.
By incorporating diverse influences - from Eastern philosophy to vintage synthesizer technology – Skyminds are expanding the boundaries of what constitutes contemporary sound art, adding exotic elements to their eclectic sound horizons, while simultaneously disrupting the premeditated itineraries of algorithmic music distribution.
Challenging the complacence of instantaneous consumption with a deliberately slow, meandering, pensive attitude that stands as an important counter-example, demanding active engagement and critical listening, ultimately representing not just innovations in sound, but potential new paradigms for experiencing and understanding music in the 21st century.
"Iniquitous" by The British Stereo Collective
The British Stereo Collective's "Iniquitous" emerges as a provocative exploration of temporal dissonance in contemporary music production. Phil Heeks, the creative force behind this project, has crafted an album that challenges our understanding of nostalgia and authenticity in the process.
Building upon the foundation laid by his previous work, "Mystery Fields," Heeks continues to reimagine the sonic landscape of 1970s library music and soundtrack compilations. However, "Iniquitous" pushes this concept further, presenting itself as a collection of television themes from an alternate reality. This bold premise invites listeners to engage with a past that never existed, yet feels hauntingly familiar.
Heeks' approach is a masterful synthesis of diverse influences, drawing from electronic pioneers like Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre, Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream, Barry Gray, Francis Monkman, Paddy Kingsland as well as BBC Radiophonic Workshop luminaries such as Peter Howell and Paddy Kingsland.
The resulting soundscape is a carefully constructed conundrum - simultaneously evocative of a specific era and entirely unmoored from historical reality.
A collection of no less than 21 thematically inspired vignettes, "Iniquitous" borrows library music affectations, particularly the illustrative intentions of music deliberately composed to accompany specific visuals and broadcasting themes.
Some narratives are more abstract than retro-futuristic, like “Language and Culture” where the racing mind aspired to by an educational program is evoked by the otherworldly sitar flourishes luxuriating above a synthetic trance groove, while other tracks remain rooted in decidedly non-electronic spaces, like the ghostly children's chorus on “Come what may”, a stand-out track which is billed as a theme song to an imaginary TV series, most probably about some haunted orphanage or some such '70s suburban gothic premise.
Heeks' claim of achieving "greater authenticity" with this volume is particularly intriguing, given the inherently fictional nature of the work. It raises profound questions about the nature of authenticity in music production. Can authenticity be achieved through skilled imitation? Or does the very act of creating a convincing pastiche become a form of authenticity in itself?
The album's appeal to those "perennially nostalgic for the golden age of TV" presents yet another classic paradox. It evokes nostalgia for a time that never existed, challenging our understanding of how memory and emotion intersect with cultural artifacts, the psychological mechanisms of nostalgia and its relationship to fictional constructs.
By describing the album as "part-electronic, part-traditional," Heeks acknowledges the eclectic nature of television music from the referenced era, which even includes Morriconesque exercises such as “Iniquitous (End Titles)”.
This deliberate blurring of genre boundaries contributes a tonal variegation to the album's sense of temporal ambiguity, further destabilizing the listener's sense of musical historicity.
"Iniquitous" represents a significant contribution to the discourse surrounding hauntology in music. By creating a coherent body of work that exists outside of conventional temporal boundaries, Heeks challenges our understanding of musical historicity and the role of context in sound appreciation. His work invites us to question the nature of cultural memory and the power of music to construct alternate realities.
As such, "Iniquitous" is a bold statement on the malleability of cultural memory. It demonstrates the potential for music, not only to evoke the past but to actively construct it, blurring the lines between recollection and invention. As such, it opens up new avenues for exploring the intersection of sound, memory, and cultural reconfiguration in the post-everything era.
“All Life Long” by Kali Malone
Kali Malone's "All Life Long" emerges as a monumental testament to the artist's ability to fuse classical forms with avant-garde experimentation.
This collection, meticulously crafted over three years, showcases Malone's technical virtuosity and singular creative vision, presenting a series of works for pipe organ, choir, and brass quintet that challenge our perception of time and sound.
Conceived between 2020 and 2023, a period marked by epochal ubiquities and their consequential upheavals, "All Life Long" offers a sonic refuge amidst chaos. The choral segments, performed by the Macadam Ensemble under Etienne Ferschaud's direction, were captured in the resonant Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-L'Immaculée-Conception in Nantes, France. This architectural choice infuses the music with a sense of historical weight and spiritual gravitas, contrasting the celestial and the terrestrial.
Malone juxtaposes the ethereal voices with earthy brass quintet pieces, performed by Anima Brass at The Bunker Studio in New York City. This duality creates a palpable tension throughout the work. The organ compositions, performed by Malone and her partner, the acclaimed experimental musician Stephen O'Malley on historical meantone tempered instruments in Lausanne, Amsterdam, and Malmö, add another layer of temporal complexity as if channelling the ghosts of organ masters past.
Malone's music unfolds with clarity, purpose and methodical precision, drawing listeners into evolving harmonic cycles. While echoing minimalist composers like Steve Reich or Philip Glass, her approach is distinct, focusing on the vertical dimension of sound rather than forward momentum. Her manipulation of temporal perception aligns her with Morton Feldman or La Monte Young, yet her compositions exude warmth and emotional depth that set her apart.
By reimagining centuries-old polyphonic methods through a contemporary lens, Malone creates a sonic landscape both familiar and novel. Her treatment of counterpoint pays homage to Renaissance masters like Palestrina while embracing 20th-century innovations akin to György Ligeti.
"All Life Long" marks Malone's triumphant return to organ compositions since her 2019 release "The Sacrificial Code." The album presents recurring themes in various forms and instrumentations, reminiscent of Guillaume de Machaut's isorhythmic motets.
The introduction of choir and brass brings adds an organic element to Malone's typically mechanistic approach. This interplay between human breath and mechanical precision, imperfection and rigour, evokes the work of Alvin Lucier or Éliane Radigue, exploring the intersection of electronic and acoustic production.
Malone's use of organs dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, coupled with historical meantone tuning systems, adds complexity to the harmonic landscape. This exploration of alternative tunings places her in lineage with composers like Harry Partch and Ben Johnston.
The album's structure navigates a dynamic interplay between repetition and variation. Brass, organ, and vocal pieces are asymmetrically interspersed, creating continuous shifts in tone and timbre. This approach recalls Karlheinz Stockhausen's “moment form”, where individual sections retain autonomy while contributing to a larger whole.
Each composition's internal framework crafts anticipated moments of dramatic reverie while inducing an illusion of endlessness. This manipulation of listener expectations echoes John Cage's number pieces, balancing indeterminacy with structure.
"All Life Long", the titular composition appears twice: first as an expansive organ canon, then as a concise vocal arrangement paired with Arthur Symons' poem "The Crying Water." The organ version unfolds patiently, generating and releasing tension through shifting tonalities. This treatment of dissonance aligns Malone with Second Viennese School composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg.
"Passage Through The Spheres," the album's opening piece, incorporates lyrics from Giorgio Agamben's "In Praise of Profanation," exploring the reclamation of the sacred for secular use and other aspects of deconsecrated space, an intersection of music and philosophy that recalls Cornelius Cardew's conceptual approach to composition.
While carrying the weight of liturgical chant, "All Life Long" draws its gravity from human experience. Malone's work shares commonalities with the "holy minimalism" of Arvo Pärt or Henryk Górecki, yet remains decidedly secular and abstract, beyond religious reverence, immersing itself the present by allowing self-discovery within intricate patterns mirroring time's passage, creating an audio mechanism focused on presence and mindfulness that evokes Pauline Oliveros' concept of "deep listening."
"All Life Long" extends the notion of drone into orchestral realms, creating a patient, elegant sonic experience that transcends its avant-garde leanings, remaining surprisingly accessible, challenging yet approachable.
This album showcases Malone's continued evolution as a compositional voice, blending her fascination with the organ's possibilities while maintaining emotional depth and contemplative calm. Slow tempo and uniform techniques create a sense of stasis, with themes reappearing in altered forms, challenging conventional structures and durations, particularly in the organ tracks, where crescendos unfold with unhurried grace and vibrant resonance, centred on the emotional impact of instruments and voices, reflecting the paradox of unique moments within repetitive cycles.
Recalling the otherworldly incantations of Stockhausen's "Licht" cycle or the cosmic terror of Scriabin's unfinished "Mysterium.", the album's closing track hints at the impossible goal of uniting grandeur and stasis while offering a fluid temporal space where each moment resonates with deep emotional significance.
Malone's achievement places her among the vanguard of contemporary composers, such as Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Kaija Saariaho, and Olga Neuwirth. Demonstrating a keen awareness of music history while forging a distinctly personal path forward, while influences of minimalism, spectralism, and electroacoustic music are evident yet synthesized these into a unique voice, using of extended techniques, alternative tuning systems, and unconventional structures.
"All Life Long" redefines the possibilities of classical music, challenging listeners to engage with sound not only in novel ways but in grasping the outline of registers outside learned parameters of emotional proprioception, creating counter-intuitive soundscapes and multi-dimensional music expressing complicated states of being, hinting at inner lives whose sometimes contradictory yet always co-existing intricacies lie beyond the basic spectrum of primary feelings like anger, sadness, joy or fear.
“Three” by Four Tet
Kieran Hebden's latest opus under the Four Tet moniker emerges as a paradigm of calculated precision of ephemerality as parameter often superseding permanence,.
"Three," the twelfth solo venture from this digital auteur, presents a fascinating paradox: a work that simultaneously embodies the Dionysian spirit of live performance and the Apollonian rigour of studio craftsmanship.
Hebden's persona manifests a striking duality. When performing live, he assumes the role of sonic provocateur, transgressing genres and audience expectations with audacious, shapeshifting sets, generating aural maelstroms that defy categorization.
Conversely, his studio output reveals a composer of exactitude. "Three" exemplifies this meticulous approach, offering a carefully curated odyssey through the artist's sonic lexicon.
The album synthesizes elements from his extensive corpus - from syncopated UK garage rhythms to diaphanous ambient textures and frenetic rave anthems - into a cohesive whole.
The opening composition, "Loved," serves as a microcosm of Four Tet's artistry. Its undulating breakbeat and luminous synthesizer lines evoke earlier works and showcase Hebden's evolved production techniques. Each sonic element is positioned with surgical precision, creating an ever-shifting acoustic topography.
Throughout "Three," Hebden maintains a contemplative atmosphere, even as tempos and textures fluctuate and guitars are integrated on several tracks, both structural and aesthetic deviations that add unexpected dimensions to the digital soundscape. "So Blue" exemplifies this fusion, where synthesized vocals, slow-burning percussion and distorted fragments of rock-sounding samples intertwine to create a rich, multifaceted composition.
Through his exacting accuracy of sound design and thoughtful approach to composition, Hebden continues to push boundaries - not through shock, but through advanced exploration of sound.
In conclusion, "Three" reaffirms Four Tet's enduring relevance in the ever-evolving landscape of electronic music. It is a work that reflects Hebden's past while boldly stepping into new territories, inviting listeners to engage deeply with the subtleties and layers that make his music such a compelling beacon of artistic integrity and innovation.
"Disconnect” by KRM & KMRU
In the aspirational space between solitude and connection, KMRU and Kevin Richard Martin's collaborative opus "Disconnect" emerges as a profound meditation on the human condition in our hyperconnected yet alienating era. This six-track exploration delves into the interstices of difference, unity, and the colonial violence that continues to shape our collective consciousness.
The album's origin story is the unlikely pairing of two sonic auteurs from disparate generations and geographies. Joseph Kamaru (KMRU), a Kenyan-born sound artist pursuing graduate studies in Berlin, and Kevin Richard Martin (AKA The Bug), an English producer steeped in the traditions of dub and noise, found unexpected synchronicity in their shared sensibilities and experiences of otherness.
"Disconnect" opens with a creeping sense of unease, as if the fabric of its own reality is slowly unravelling. The initial tracks, "Differences" and "Arkives," unfold across expansive runtimes, accumulating layers of greyscale textures that evoke a bleak, windswept landscape, covered in radioactive dust. This austere yet imposing sonic palette serves as a canvas for Kamaru's spoken word passages, which Martin skillfully deconstructs and recontextualizes throughout the album.
The duo's creative process, conducted entirely remotely, mirrors the album's thematic concerns. Their methodical approach to composition involved extensive conceptual discussions, followed by an iterative exchange of ideas and sonic materials. This collaborative method allowed for a seamless integration of their distinct artistic visions, resulting in a work that transcends the sum of its parts, a main one being distance itself, both cultural and geographic.
Central to "Disconnect" is an exploration of otherness and the politics of representation. Kamaru's vocals, drawn from his academic writings, interrogate Western notions of archival practices and the commodification of African cultural artifacts. By fragmenting and recombining these spoken elements, Martin creates a palimpsest of meaning that resists easy interpretation.
The album's structure, consisting of variations on two core tracks, embodies the mutability of oral traditions and the fluid nature of cultural memory. This approach stands in stark contrast to the rigid, "ontologically concrete" Western emphasis on written documents, establishing a syncretised escalation of diversified echoes, repetitions, murmurs and sigils
"Disconnect" sonically manifests the eschatological regime of late capitalism and ecological collapse. Moments of ethereal beauty emerge, offering brief glimpses of sublime truth amidst the pyre of burning dreams, adding romantic fatalism to the monochromatic soundscapes and ominous drones that evoke a world teetering on the brink of catastrophe.
The duo's masterful use of dub techniques further reinforces the album's themes. By treating their compositions as mutable entities rather than fixed artefacts, KMRU and Martin honour the fluidity of tradition and resist the ossification of cultural narratives.
"Disconnect" ultimately enunciates a vital contradiction: through the exploration of difference and otherness, it reveals the potential for profound connection.
The seamless integration of KMRU and Martin's distinct artistic voices serves as a microcosm for the broader human experience, demonstrating the beauty that can arise when divergent paths converge and offering a poignant reflection on the human condition. It challenges listeners to confront the complexities of identity, colonialism, and our relationship to history and tradition. Through its haunting soundscapes and fragmented narratives, the album invites us to find unity in our shared experiences of alienation and recognize the transformative power of collaborative creation.
"Portable Reality Generator" by Field Lines Cartographer
Field Lines Cartographer's "Portable Reality Generator" emerges as a beacon of innovation and a radical study in waveforms. Mark Burford, the Lancaster-based genius behind the project, has created an immersive experience that posits foundational revisions for the architecture of sound.
The album unfolds like a complex dialectic of sine and sawtooth waves, each track acting both as a proposition and its negation, synthesizing into a higher form of auditory consciousness. "The Sun In Splendour" and "Scattered Light" serve as gentle introductions that invite deep listening and a profound meditation about the quantum nature of modular synthesis
At the core of this electronic symphony lies "Collapsable Mantra," an almost 20-minute composition that exemplifies this granular complexity, it operates like a sonic particle accelerator, smashing together disparate elements of noise and melody to create new, unstable isotopes of sound, arranged within a motorik framework reminiscent of the infinitely transmogrifying pulsations propelling a Klaus Schulze epic. "Fog Warning" is a complimentary hyper-galactic meditation pondering logical impossibilities with its sweeping chords and taut strings, challenging conventional composition and inviting listeners to experience.
In "Ascending Waves of Consciousness," Burford creates an auditory archive of infinite permutations that reveals new layers with each listening, teasing our ear with previously unnoticed frequencies that were just waiting to be discovered, articulating a metaphysical process of perpetual citations tapped into the akashic records of sound, presenting us with a glimpse of the infinite through the demarcations of recorded sound events arranged in iterative permanence. This fractal approach to composition ensures that detail begets further detail, providing endless intrigue.
Challenging the very nature of perception and reality, Burford posits a new fundamental truth: existence is not predicated on thought but on the ability to generate and manipulate waveforms. The listener becomes both observer and participant, a modality that transforms the listening experience into an active engagement with sound itself.
"Portable Reality Generator" serves as a transcendental deduction of sound categorizations. Field Lines Cartographer's compositions exist not in time and space but as things-in-themselves defying conventional ontology, critiquing pure resonance, and challenging our a priori assumptions about what music can and should be.
The album embodies the concept of eternal recurrence through its cyclical structures and looping motifs. Yet, it transcends repetition, each iteration bringing new shades of meaning and layers of complexity, creating a rich, evolving soundscape that rewards repeated listening.
Burford's approach to composition is a masterclass in deconstruction, creating a complex web of interrelated sounds, where each listen potentially reveals new connections and meanings, making the album a living, breathing entity. Each sound carries within it the trace of its opposite, each silence pregnant with potential noise. The album is a text that constantly defers its own meaning, inviting endless interpretation and reinterpretation.
An impactful medium, "Portable Reality Generator" kneads our neurons, ignites our synapses, and leaves us intellectually and emotionally limber. Burford hasn't just created an album; he's recalibrated our very nervous systems, tuning us to frequencies hitherto unexplored, inviting us to view electronic music from a new perspective, highlighting its vast potential.
In an age where reality seems increasingly portable—compressed into smartphones and streamed through the ether—Field Lines Cartographer reminds us that the most profound journeys are those taken within the theatre of the mind. "Portable Reality Generator" is not just listened to; it is experienced, contemplated, and ultimately, lived. It is the soundtrack to a cave rave where the shadows on the wall have seized the means of projection and are now throwing their own party.
As we remove our headphones and reluctantly join the world of the mundane, we find ourselves changed, our inner oscillators forever altered. In that moment, we realised that the true portable reality generator was within us all along, waiting for Burford to provide the instruction manual.
"It's A Beautiful Thing" by Warriors of the Dystotheque
In the eclectic realm of dancefloor-adjacent (but not necessarily uptempo music), a wide scope that includes anything from the vast array of choices appropriate for an after-hours DJ set, usually playing in a chill-out room or a back-to-mine impromptu congregation, where genres often blur and metamorphose, Warriors of the Dystotheque's latest offering, "It's A Beautiful Thing," emerges as a dazed reverie about unapologetic hedonism, a sonic manifesto advocating for the pursuit of pleasure in its myriad forms. This eight-track opus, released on Chris Coco's extremely chic DSPPR label, serving a potent reminder of music's power to transport, transform, and transcend.
The Warriors, a quintet comprising Jonny Mac, Sean Graham, the twin virtuosi Mike and Nick Rufolo, and drummer Kevin Sharkey, have crafted an album that functions as both a mirror and a portal - reflecting the kaleidoscopic experiences of its creators while inviting listeners into a world of sensual delight and expanded consciousness.
From its inception, "It's A Beautiful Thing" eschews the mundane in favour of the extraordinary. The album's title sets the tone for what follows - a celebration of life's ephemeral joys, a clarion call to seize the moment and revel in the beauty of existence.
The opening track, "On the Balcony at Sunrise," evokes that fleeting moment when last night's excesses give way to the promise of a new day full of languid rhythms and shimmering textures.
As the album progresses, it becomes clear that the Warriors are not content with mere musical tourism. Each track is a fully realized environment, inviting deep immersion. "Hashish Dreams," with its hypnotic bassline and swirling psychedelic overtones, sways woozily to the mesmerizing haze alluded to by its onomatopoeic title.
The Rufolo brothers' jazz influences come to the fore in "Telepathic Tacos," a track that defies easy categorization. Its freeform structure and unexpected tonal shifts recall the rich post-funk instrumentals of the legendary Steve Cobby.
In "Beachside Drive," the Warriors capture the essence of a sun-soaked coastal journey. The track's indolent pace and glimmering instrumentation conjure light-saturated images of palm-fringed roads and endless horizons
Throughout the album, the Warriors demonstrate a masterful command of illustrative dynamics and psychoacoustic mise en scène, consciously invoking a synaesthetic summoning of the "endless summer" ideal filtered through a contemporary electronic lens.
Moments of blissful calm give way to peaks of ecstatic release, mirroring the ebb and flow of a perfect summer day or an ideally calibrated psychedelic experience. This is not background music, nor is it disposable pop: a nuanced approach to composition elevates "It's A Beautiful Thing" above mere party fodder, transforming it into a soundtrack for expanded consciousness.
The album's centrepiece, "Looking Through Balearic Es," is a tour de force of production and arrangement regarding both its geographic inspiration and its chemical subtext. The track's lush instrumentation and rolling rhythms evoke the sensory overload of an Ibiza beach party at its peak, where the boundaries between self and other, music and dancer, become delightfully blurred.
In lesser hands, such hedonistic themes might result in music that's shallow or repetitive. The Warriors, however, bring a depth of experience and a breadth of musical knowledge to their craft.
Their diverse backgrounds - from the war-torn streets of Belfast to the sun-drenched beaches of Florida - infuse the music with a richness and complexity that testifies to the benefits of creative autonomy.
With layers of sound that reveal themselves gradually over multiple listens, the mix is spacious and three-dimensional, allowing each element room to breathe while maintaining a cohesive overall sound. This meticulous attention to sonic detail creates an immersive listening experience, providing textural and emotional cues without imposing rigid narratives.
In many ways, "It's A Beautiful Thing" creates a self-contained world, a space where the normal rules of reality are suspended and the only imperative is to explore and enjoy. It's music that could soundtrack a beach party in 1971, a warehouse rave in 1991, or a beachfront sunset in 2024.
One of the album's greatest strengths is its ability to function in multiple contexts. It's equally suited to soundtracking a lazy afternoon by the pool, providing the backdrop for a late-night philosophical discussion, or fueling an all-night dance party.
In the grand tradition of hedonists from Dionysus to Brian Wilson, from Alexander Shulgin to Jose Badilla, Warriors of the Dystotheque have created a work that celebrates our capacity for joy and transcendence. It urges us to find beauty in the moment, to connect with each other and with the universe at large, and never underestimate the transformative power of a perfect summer day, a transcendent party, or a truly great album.
"Playing Life" by Ferdi Schuster
Ferdi Schuster's sophomore album, "Playing Life," emerges as a formidable challenge to the ontological foundations of contemporary music, proposing the dissolution of musical taxonomy.
Transcending mere genre classification by positioning itself as a sonic treatise on the nature of artistic expression, Schuster's meticulous three-year crafting process has yielded a radical reimagining of instrumentation, orchestration and arrangement as epistemology.
At its core, "Playing Life" is an exploration of knowledge acquisition through sound. Schuster's virtuosic multi-instrumentalism serves not as mere technical display, but as a means of interrogating the very nature of musical understanding. Each note, chord, and rhythm becomes a proposition in an ongoing dialectic between artist and listener. The album's sonic palette—ranging from precise drum machine patterns to fluid guitar work while including a multitude of localized genre aesthetics and ethnohistorical influences—functions as a complex system of signifiers, inviting deep hermeneutic engagement.
Schuster's approach to composition dismantles traditional notions of musical structure. The 13 tracks of "Playing Life" operate not as discrete units, but as a continuous flow of auditory information, suggesting a rhizomatic model of musical experience where entry and exit points are fluid and meaning is perpetually deferred.
The album's sonic landscapes engage in a complex negotiation between spatio-temporal dialectics. Tracks like "The Fuzz Version" and "Gentle Man" do not simply evoke specific locations; they problematize the very notion of place in music, generating heterotopias—sonic spaces that exist simultaneously within their origins and outside of conventional temporal and geographical constraints, ethnic music without borders, of no particular national pedigree, formally specific yet not of universal imperative.
While echoes of jazz luminaries, Polynesian exotica and Brazilian rhythms permeate the album, Schuster's treatment of these influences goes beyond mere homage. Instead, "Playing Life" engages in a form of musical hauntology, where past styles and genres are not simply referenced but actively reconstructed and recontextualized, instigating an ontological inquiry about originality, authorship, and the nature of creativity in an age of infinite mechanical reproduction.
Schuster's production techniques on "Playing Life" are based on a meticulous layering of sounds that creates a hyperreal auditory environment, challenging traditional notions of authenticity by blurring the lines between inspiration and fusion, quotation and reference, the organic and the synthetic, inviting us to question the very categories we use to understand and classify sound.
In its bold fusion of diverse musical traditions and cutting-edge production techniques, "Playing Life" opens new avenues for artistic expression and critical engagement. It's a record that stands as a testament to the potential of electronic music to serve not just as entertainment, but as a vital medium for intellectual and philosophical exploration in our increasingly deterritorialized world.
“Motherless Father” by Lefto Early Bird
Established Belgian DJ and producer Lefto Early Bird aka Stephane Lallemand recently released "Motherless Father," via Gilles Peterson's Brownswood Recordings. This work, billed as a pre-club record and sounding exactly as warm and stylish as one would want their night to be, emerges as a connoisseur's meditation on house music, subtle and considered, crystallizing over two decades of sonic exploration.
The album's genesis lies in the global crucible of pandemic stasis - a period of enforced introspection that catalyzed Lefto's creative process. This temporal suspension allowed for a deep excavation of emotional strata, resulting in a work that defies facile categorization. "Motherless Father" exists in a liminal space - a pre-club reverie that invites both contemplation and physical release.
The opening strains of "Diane Charlemagne," featuring Iman Houssein's ethereal vocals, establish a tonal foundation steeped in after-midnight moodiness, setting the scene for the slinky deep house sway of "Love Supreme (Part 1 and 2)," a track that connects the dots between cosmic soul grooves and sophisticated interpretations of house music pioneered in the '90s by Chicago legend Larry Heard. "The Elegance of a Dancing Body" channels the kinetic spirit of another late-night kindred spirit, this time the impeccable Detroit techno guru Theo Parrish, while "Electric" pulsates with the fractured rhythms of West London's broken beat scene.
Lefto's curatorial acumen shines throughout, seamlessly integrating disparate genre elements into a cohesive whole. Jazz, downbeat, electronica, and avant-garde flourishes coalesce, decorating what is ultimately a classical framework of house music principles.
The inclusion of Lefto's own spoken word passages adds a layer of raw intimacy to the proceedings. These vocal interventions serve not merely as textual addenda but as integral rhythmic components, driving the album's propulsive force. On "I Sing to Find Peace of Mind," Simbad's saxophone intertwines with vocal elements, exemplifying Lefto's alchemical approach, fusing techno-inflected deep house with jazz motifs to create a singular auditory experience. This hybridization extends to tracks like "Live in Darkness and Wait for Brighter Days" where Lefto's reverent fidelity to four-on-the-floor rhythms is tempered by subtle textural manipulations and cinematic sound effects.
The album's title, "Motherless Father," alludes to Lefto's dual identity as both progenitor and orphan. This paradoxical state informs the work's emotional core, imbuing it with a palpable sense of longing and resilience.
Resonating with heavy bass and hip hop reverberations, tracks such as "I Feel Pain but Can't Describe It" and "One Day You Smile, One Day You Cry" exemplify this emotional complexity.
"Motherless Father" is a significant milestone in Lefto Early Bird's illustrious career and a lasting testament to the enduring power of club music as a vehicle for seeking new sonic frontiers and vital context for personal and collective transformation.
“Color of Time II” by Color of Time
In the ever-expanding universe of so-called quiet music, which includes a seemingly never-ending array of sub-genres like new age, ambient and drone music to mention but the most popular, where the boundaries between sound and silence blur into a beatless, time-sensitive, hypnotic haze, Color of Time emerges as a singular force.
Their second LP, "Color of Time II," is a testament to the power of long-distance collaboration, bringing together the talents of Kévin Séry and Nick Turner, known respectively for their solo projects From Overseas and Tyresta. This ethereal creation, birthed from the crucible of The Past Inside the Present collective and record label, stands as a convincing chapter in the annals of quiet music.
The duo's creative process, akin to an alchemical experiment conducted across vast distances, transmutes base elements of guitar, synthesizers, and Mellotron into meticulous compositions that evoke trembling abstractions of naturalistic elements, like rising heat distorting a sunny landscape in a teasing approximation of watery ripples, each extended note and treated texture carefully placed to create a beautiful cascade of impermanent harmonies.
"Color of Time II" unfolds like a series of interconnected tone poems, each track a meditation on sound as esoteric reality in itself, creating its own introverted ontology.
"Free For a Moment" opens the proceedings with a delicate interplay of bell-like tones and swelling bass, reminiscent of a choir humming. As the piece progresses, evolves into a teeming ecosystem of sound, alive with possibility and wonder, shapeshifting from intimate to cosmic.
In "While We Can," the duo conjures an aural landscape that mirrors the placid surface of a lake beneath overcast skies. Plucked strings create ripples across this sonic expanse, while beneath the surface, muffled currents of mystery ebb and flow, juxtaposing tranquillity and hidden depths.
As the album progresses, its thematic concerns with the Anthropocene era become increasingly pronounced. "When Will We Learn" poses its titular question with heart-rending poignancy, its sweeping drones and crystalline resonances evoking the bittersweet beauty of a world on the brink of irreversible change.
Despite the often sombre subject matter, Color of Time infuses its aura with a profound sense of empathy and compassion. "Something Better" introduces a haunting contralto vocal, a fleeting human presence in an otherwise abstract soundscape.
The album reaches its zenith with "All That Remains," a sprawling composition that weaves together the myriad threads of the preceding tracks. Here, undulating guitars and vaporous voices intertwine with saturated drone and tender static, creating a soundscape that is at once elegiac and transcendent.
In crafting "II," Color of Time have created a work that invites deep contemplation while offering a persistent light that illuminates even the darkest hours.
"Ventas Rumba” by Ezéchiel Pailhès
With his latest album, "Ventas Rumba," French composer Ezéchiel Pailhès emerges as a master of tonal alchemy in the field of contemporary classical music, transmuting the familiar into the extraordinary by creating a work that is at once deeply rooted in tradition and daringly innovative.
For years, Pailhès harboured a desire to craft a solo piano album, a project that seemed perpetually on the horizon. Despite his formal training in classical and jazz piano, the siren call of electro-pop has led him down a different path since his debut in 2001. It was not until 2022, as he stood on the precipice of composing new songs, that the long-deferred ambition crystallized into reality.
In pursuit of novel timbres, Pailhès embarked on a pilgrimage to Kuldīga, Latvia, the sanctum of David Klavins' revolutionary piano designs. There, he encountered the Una Corda, an upright piano with a single string per note, crafted in 2014. This exceptional instrument, with its crystalline yet soft-focus resonance, became the cornerstone of Pailhès' sonic exploration.
The album's appellation, "Ventas Rumba," is a linguistic sleight of hand. While it may evoke images of distant, sensual dances, it refers to the rapids of the Ventas River near Kuldiga. This clever nomenclature encapsulates both Pailhès' sojourn in the Baltic and his penchant for playful exoticism.
Returning to his Montreuil studio, Pailhès began the alchemical process of blending the Una Corda's unique timbre with warm synthetic tones. The result is a seamless fusion where the boundaries between acoustic and electronic dissolve, creating a lyricism whose alternately melancholy nuances and wry tones defy easy categorization.
Each of the album's fourteen tracks unfolds like a vignette, rarely exceeding three minutes in duration. Throughout "Ventas Rumba," one can discern the spectral influence of classical virtuosi. "Pianovado" pays homage to Chopin's "8th Nocturne," catapulting its lyrical fragility onto a bouncy castle of throbbing bass synths and pads, while "Opus 53" draws inspiration from the harmonic structure and sweeping urgency of Beethoven's "Waldstein Sonata No. 21." Pailhès also acknowledges a debt to Olivier Messiaen, whose devout compositions have left an indelible mark on the album's spiritual undercurrents.
Despite these classical inspirations, Pailhès' work remains uniquely his own. He continues to explore the themes that have defined his previous solo albums, now translated into a purely instrumental format. The result is a collection that oscillates between effervescence and introspection, emotional intimacy and communal sentiment, capturing the universal imperative within an ephemeral cosmos.
"Ventas Rumba" is a triumph of musical imagination, a work that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant, cementing Pailhès' place as one of the most innovative composers of his generation.
"Midsummer, London" by Kate Carr
Few works capture the fleeting acoustics of urban existence with such intricate precision as Kate Carr's "Midsummer, London" Released on June 20, 2024, through Persistence of Sound, this album represents a pinnacle in the field of environmental recording, offering listeners an immersive journey through the British capital's multifaceted acoustic landscape.
Carr, an Australian expatriate who relocated to London in 2016, embarked on her ambitious project during the Summer Solstice of 2023. Her expedition traced the sinuous path of the Thames, from the city's western fringes to its eastern extremities. This temporal and spatial framework serves as the foundation for a composition that transcends mere documentation, evolving into a nuanced exploration of London's myriad sonic identities.
The artist's methodology, which she terms a "sonic transect," builds upon her earlier work in Spain, where she developed this concept on a mountainous terrain. In "Midsummer, London," Carr applies this approach to the urban environment, meticulously sampling the acoustic niches that define the metropolis.
The album unfolds in sections, each bearing descriptive, almost journalistic, titles. From "A Strangely Located Cafe, Echoes of St Paul's and a Drain that Drew Breath as I Moved into Blackfriars" to "Walking Down to the Thames at Woolwich I Banged Some Guard Rails, Thought About a Recording of Another Station Piano," these appellations serve as cryptic signposts in Carr's acoustic cartography.
What distinguishes this work is its seamless integration of ambient musical elements with the raw material of field recordings. The cacophony of urban life - the rumble of buses, the metallic clangour of waste disposal, the polyglot murmur of voices - is subtly underscored by composed elements, creating a harmonious discord that reflects the city's metropolitan echoes as a solstice symphony.
Carr's composition invites the listener to traverse London's expansive geography, from Loughborough Junction to Slade Green, with numerous waypoints in between. This auditory peregrination offers a unique perspective on the city's socio-cultural stratification and historical layering, surpassing the limitations of conventional guided audio tours.
The artist's keen observational skills, honed by her status as both insider and outsider, allow her to capture the subtle nuances of London's atmosphere - its distinctive humidity, and its fluctuating pressures, both meteorological and social. The juxtaposition of frenetic street scenes with moments of unexpected serenity creates a dynamic tension that mirrors the city's inherent contradictions.
In "Midsummer, London," Carr demonstrates a remarkable ability to transmute the ephemeral into the eternal. Her work probes the ambiguities inherent in the act of field recording, questioning the relationship between the captured sound and the reality it purports to represent. This philosophical underpinning adds depth to what might otherwise be a mere collage of urban noise.
The album's success lies in its capacity to engage the listener on multiple levels. It functions simultaneously as an impressionistic travelogue, a sociological study, and a meditation on the nature of perception itself. Through Carr's artistry, the quotidian sounds of the city are elevated to the status of music, revealing the hidden melodies in the mundane.
With "Midsummer, London," Kate Carr has not only created a compelling portrait of a specific place and time but has also advanced the possibilities of field recording as an art form. Her work challenges listeners to reconsider their relationship with their acoustic environment, to find beauty and meaning in the overlooked and the everyday power of sound to evoke memory, emotion, and a sense of place.
In the canon of contemporary sound art, "Midsummer, London" is an atmospheric achievement, an artificial facsimile that captures the essence of a city in all its chaotic, beautiful, and ever-changing glory.
"Speak, Thou Vast and Venerable Head" by Loula Yorke
In the electro-acoustic space where silicon oscillations intertwine with organic whispers, Loula Yorke's latest album, "Speak, Thou Vast and Venerable Head," emerges as an ineffable testament to the alchemical fusion of human intuition and machine precision. Released through the discerning quiet details label, this album serves as a plank in the hull of an imaginary vessel, setting sail on a quest following the siren call of synthetic spheres.
Yorke, long revered for her intricate modular performances and sophisticated synthesizer work, ascends to new heights of artistry with this release. The album's opening salvo, "Monolithic Undertow," is a 13-minute descent into chthonic depths of electronic rich, squelching textures that pay homage to Yorke's dance music lineage while charting new territories of sonic exploration.
The extended track durations serve not as indulgence, but as necessary temporal expanses for full immersion. "Matter Tells Spacetime How To Curve" stands as the album's gravitational centre, a masterclass in unexpected juxtaposition and narrative sound design that demands—and rewards—complete engagement.
Yorke's compositional approach reveals a symbiotic relationship with her arsenal of electronic instruments. Galvanic analog vibrations collide with acidic resonance creating a constantly shifting landscape of timbres and spaces. These endless drones and atmospheres form the foundation of a uniquely tactile, voltage-controlled universe.
Field recordings and environmental sounds are woven seamlessly into the electronic tapestry, bridging the gap between the natural world and synthetic oscillations. This integration of organic and artificial elements creates an uncanny sense of familiarity within the otherworldly soundscapes.
For "Speak, Thou Vast and Venerable Head," Yorke imposed strict creative constraints, eschewing granular synthesis, vocals, and percussion. Working from her rural Suffolk studio—a space where wildflowers coexist with modular synths—she adhered to a monastic routine of daily composition, having faith in the alchemy of limitations.
Yorke's mastery of monophonic synthesis creates the illusion of rich polyphony through the deft use of delay and harmonics, a technique that leads to trance-like emotional peaks sparkling with the energy of distant cosmic phenomena, building momentum like a celestial clockwork.
In crafting "Speak, Thou Vast and Venerable Head," Loula Yorke taps into the ancient concept of the music of the spheres—the Harmonice Mundi of Kepler's imagination. Through her voltage-controlled alchemy, she renders audible the hum of celestial bodies, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant. It is a journey through inner and outer space on the glinting surface of infinite waves, inviting listeners to dive deep into the vast and venerable ocean of sound itself.
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, July 2024
thanks for reviewing qd19 loula yorke 🙏💛