Developing on the trance-induction and brainwave entrainment techniques explored on the first Ethernet album 144 Pulsations Of Light, Opus 2 moves into deeper, more introspective and emotive territory.

A stronger focus on melody and harmonic structure results in pieces that almost approach, but never quite arrive at, traditional song forms, while still leaving much to the imagination of the listener, evading mental categorization and revealing new sonic experiences with each listen.

The bulk of recording took place during the darkest months of winter in the Pacific Northwest, between late-night shifts providing technical support for hospital operating rooms. The pieces on the album each formed gradually and spontaneously during extended improvised sonic meditations as part of the composer's own trancework (or self-hypnosis) practice, this in an effort to remove specific compositional intention from the process, instead just allowing them to "happen".

If 144 Pulsations... was about expansion of awareness and opening to the light that surrounds us, Opus 2 is intended to induce inner contemplation and internalized focus on the light within us. It is also a statement on the gradual darkening and inexorable decay of our modern world, and the need to look within to find true support and sustenance from one's own energetic source. Patience and perseverance.

TRACK LISTING

1.Monarch
2. Correction
3. Cubed Suns
4. Dog Star
5. Dodecahedron
6. Pleroma

Melissa Guion’s second offering for Kranky retains the glassy gauze of her debut, 2016’s Precious Systems, but shaded starker and darker, framed by mechanical rhythms and humid industrial moods. She speaks of Sour Cherry Bell as something of a reckoning with her tools of creation: “I was curious to see how far I could go with them, even if that meant reaching the ends of their capacity to do what I wanted. But I never exhausted them and they never exhausted me.”

For Fans Of : Elizabeth Fraser/Julee Cruise/Siouxsie Sioux

Utilizing her trusted combination of instrumentation, Guion tracked the record between her New Orleans home and rehearsal space, capturing chemistries both intimate and expansive. The songs sway between twilit shoegaze, downer ballads, and gothic pop, mapping a delicate palette of electric melancholies, though in retrospect she cites as her primary muse the notion of power: “lost and found, corporeal and cerebral, harnessed and exploited, of one and many, in this reality and the next.” Sour Cherry Bell reverberates beyond the here and now into scenes unseen, worlds unheard. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Lowlight
2. The Steelyard
3. FM Secure
4. Cherry Bell Blacktop
5. Body Optics
6. Quiet Time
7. Simulus
8. Perfect Interference
9. Sourbell
10. Petrechoria 

The second offering by Julie Carpenter’s textural orchestral entity Less Bells takes its title from a storied strain of decorative objects worn in remembrance of lost loved ones: Mourning Jewelry.

The album shares a similar mood of devotional pageantry, stirring ornamental laments born from a need to “create beauty out of grief.” Utilising an amalgam of strings, synthesisers, and choirs, the pieces ascend and descend in grand, glimmering arcs, ebbing from passages of “baroque complexity” to expanses of haunting emptiness. Certain songs also skew more overtly western than ever before, deeply reverbed plucks of banjo refracted against glowing horizons of sunrise drone: Americana gone ambient.

Furthering the music’s mystic intentionality, the track titles comprise “the major arcana of a tarot deck from an alternate universe,” lorded over by the “Queen Of Crickets,” ruler of “The Gates,” “The Fault,” and “The Fang.” Even so, the record requires no psychic divination to glean its fragile majesty, its muted tumult of mirage and melody. The beauty it possesses is too blatant, and bountiful.

TRACK LISTING

1. Brooch
2. Fiery Wings
3. The Gates
4. Queen Of Crickets
5. The Fault
6. Plait
7. The Fang

'Allegiance and Conviction' is the first album in 8 years from the legendary Dearborn duo . Windy and Carl have been crafting inner space electric guitar and bass vistas for nearly three decades now, but their latest feels as vital and vaporous as any peak opus in their vast catalog. Written and recorded across six years, the songs swirl between shoegaze minimalism and stargaze drift, over which Windy Weber whispers veiled poetic narratives of transformation, isolation, and escape. Allegiance and Conviction is their first album since 2012's We Will Always Be. The six compositions are something of outlier in their catalog, shorter in nature than most on their previous releases. All of the tracks are saturated with Hultgren's signature guitar work, intimate constructions of murmurs, drones and his trademark layered filigree, gently amassed into alternately lighter and heavier than air atmospheres. Despite being their first full-length in more than half a decade,the album fully belongs to the bewitching galaxy of sound Windy and Carl innovated and within which they remain the sole occupants: music of thresholds and peripheries and eternities. Allegiance and Conviction is the multifaceted, contemporary take on their sound.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Stranger
2. Recon
3. Moth To The Flame
4. Alone
5. Will I See The Dawn
6. Crossing Over

Legacy Chicago craftsman Mark Nelson’s latest offering as Pan•American is less a distillation or divergence than it is a return to his musical and spiritual beginnings. Spare, subdued, and largely acoustic, A Son unfurls like late summer dusk on the edge of town, expansive but intimate.

Motivated by notions of “moving backward” and tracing roots – as well as a couple years of hammered dulcimer lessons – the album’s nine songs were written and recorded in his home in Evanston, Illinois, and honed during a recent solo tour in Europe. The emphasis on uncluttered arrangements and the centrality of the guitar and vocals reveal these songs as the most direct and emotional statement of his career.

Nelson cites everything from June Tabor, The Carter Family, Suicide and Jimmy Reed as oblique inspirations, though his truest muse was creative self-inquiry: “What does music do, Where does music start? How simple can it be? How honest can it be?”

After decades of mining post-rock pathways and latticework electronics in Labradford and early Pan•American, A Son strips away ornament and distraction in favor of a direct gaze into the heart of what is.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ivory Joe Hunter, Little Walter
2. Memphis Helena
3. Sleepwalk Guitars
4. Brewthru
5. Dark Birds Empty Fields
6. Drunk Father
7. Muriel Spark
8. Kept Quiet
9. Shenandoah 

“This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful—surely Grouper’s best.”—Tiny Mix Tapes.

“If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.” —The Quietus.

“This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them.”—Pitchfork “Harris nds a way to dive deeper in simple and unassuming ways.”—NPR.

TRACK LISTING

1. Moon Is Sharp
2. Alien Observer
3. Vapor Trails
4. She Loves Me That Way
5. Mary On The Wall
6. Come Softly

“This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful—surely Grouper’s best.”—Tiny Mix Tapes. 

“If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.” —The Quietus. 

“This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them.”—Pitchfork “Harris nds a way to dive deeper in simple and unassuming ways.”—NPR.

TRACK LISTING

1. Dragging The Streets
2. I Saw A Ray
3. Soul Eraser
4. Atone
5. No Other
6. Wind Return
7. A Lie

Canadian composer Scott Morgan’s 12th long-player as loscil takes its title from an influential series of early 20th century photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, abstracting clouds into miasmic, painterly canvases of smoke and shadowplay.

It’s a deeply fitting analog for Morgan’s own musical process across the past two decades, fraying forms and tones into widescreen mirages of opaque texture and negative space.

The name Equivalents referred to Stieglitz’s notion of the photographs as being equivalent to his “philosophical or emotional states of mind;” the same could be said of these eight weighty, shivering chiaroscuros of sound. Each piece unfolds and evolves enigmatically, adrift in low oxygen atmospheres, shifting dramatically from pockets of density to dissipated streaks of moonlit vapor.

The entirety of the record was created specifically for the album with the exception of “Equivalent 7,” which began as a dance score for frequent collaborator Vanessa Goodman.

The album version of this track was reworked with Vancouver musician Amir Abbey aka Secret Pyramid.Cloud photographs taken by Scott Morgan at various locations throughout Cascadia in 2018.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Scott Morgan has always excelled at dynamic ambient music, infused with a barely perceptible electronic drive rather than a slowly drifting cloud of sound. What we have here more all-encompassing electronic drone, subtly infused with latent dub atmospheres and tender plucks of acoustic strings or piano. Stunningly immersive, and hypnotic to the end.

TRACK LISTING

1. Equivalent 1
2. Equivalent 3
3. Equivalent 6
4. Equivalent 5
5. Equivalent 2
6. Equivalent 8
7. Equivalent 7
8. Equivalent 4

Anoyo ('the world over there') draws from the same sessions with members of Tokyo Gakuso which led to the 2018 work Konoyo, but rendered starker, solemn, and stripped back, with more of a naturalist tint. Hecker’s processing here moves in veiled ways, soft refractions and whispered shrouds woven within improvisational sessions of traditional gagaku interplay, evoking a sense of vaulted space, temples at dawn, shredded silk fluttering in the rafters.

This is boldly barren music, skeletal and sculptural, shaped from wood, wind, strings, and mist. Modern yet ancient, delicate and desolate, Anoyo inverts its predecessor to compellingly conjure a parallel world of illusion, solitude, and eternal return. 

TRACK LISTING

1. That World
2. Is But A Simulated Blur
3. Step Away From Konoyo
4. Into The Void
5. Not Alone
6. You Never Were

Experiential composer Tim Hecker’s ninth official full-length, Konoyo (“the world over here”) was largely recorded during several trips to Japan where he collaborated with members of the gagaku ensemble Tokyo Gakuso, in a temple on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Inspired by conversations with a recently deceased friend about negative space and a sense of music’s increasingly banal density, Hecker found himself drawn towards restraint and elegance, while making music both collectively and alone.

As with the Icelandic choir he arranged on 2016’s Love Streams, the heights of Hecker’s talent emerge in his manipulation of source material, bending and burnishing it into fantastical new forms. Keening strings are stretched into surreal, pixelated mirages; woodwinds warble and dissipate as fractal whispers of spatial haze; sparse gestures of percussion are chopped, isolated, and eroded, like disembodied signals from the afterlife. Both in texture and intent, Konoyo conjures a somber, ceremonial mood, suffused with ritual and regret. Visions flutter and fade; dreams gleam and decay.
Hecker will stage a series of special performances in tandem with the album's release, featuring members of the gagaku ensemble on shō, ryuteki and hichiriki, accompanied by Kara-Lis Coverdale. 

TRACK LISTING

1. This Life
2. In Death Valley
3. Is A Rose Petal Of The Dying Crimson Light
4. Keyed Out
5. In Mother Earth Phase
6. A Sodium Codec Haze
7. Across To Anoyo 

The full-length debut by Julie Carpenter’s Joshua Tree, California ambient orchestral project Less Bells, emerges from the drama and desolation of its high desert origins.

She cites certain compositions as being 'specifically inspired by August monsoons rolling in over the mountains, others by clear, starry nights.' Utilizing an array of electronic and acoustic instruments, including cello, Optigan, violin, voice, and modular synth, "Solifuge" conflates not only the solitude and refuge of its title but also intimacy and grandeur, fragility and force, 'building from austerity to wild overgrowth.'

She speaks of a creative process involving cut-ups and rearranging, mapping a melody for strings only to transpose it to synth, or refashioning a rigid classical piece as stream of consciousness soundscape. Carpenter’s versatility and embrace of flux fills these songs with a living, breathing quality, restrained but responsive, adapting to shifting conditions and emotions beneath the surface. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Bird In Hand
2. Forest Ghosts
3. Desert
4. Valentine
5. Bombardment
6. Golden Storm
7. Milwaukee Protocol
8. The Gills

Brooklyn trio Forma’s latest LP continues their mission to “broaden the idea of what an electronic music ensemble can sound like.” Semblance emerged from exploratory sessions at The Schoolhouse, the Bushwick loft where members Mark Dwinell and John Also Bennett live, then was tracked at Gary’s Electric studios, where their previous album Physicalist was also recorded.

Inspired by polyrhythmic composition, the human voice, and conceptual improvisation strategies, the songs are striking in their textural detail and emotional nuance, alternately synthetic and sentient, futuristic and intuitive. Incorporating flute, piano, guitar, saxophone, acoustic drums and cymbals alongside an array of synthesizers, the record persuasively demonstrates the group’s unique playing abilities and fluid chemistry – attributes they credit to “techniques we’ve developed to trick our electronic machines into mimicking the spontaneous character of live instruments.”

Members George and John Also Bennett also cite as an influence their recent stint in minimalist composer Jon Gibson’s ensemble, performing his 1973 proto-ambient masterwork Visitations. The long- form modal piece requires restraint and deep listening to execute, qualities especially apparent in the more muted moments of Semblance, such as “Rebreather” and “New City.”

The group states the intent of the new album as “to be more direct and exacting”, which it is. Over half a decade spent writing and recording together has distilled Forma’s hybrid electro-acoustic interplay into an attuned and astounding language, capable of articulating impossible symmetries and reflective states.
The stunning visuals of the artwork are by frequent collaborator of the group Peter Burr. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: I can't remember a week THIS good for instrumental synth music for a long time, and now to add to the excellence, we have a new one from forma. Finely structured cosmic melodies, perfectly produced to weave its way into your consciousness. Sit back and zone out.

TRACK LISTING

1. Crossings
2. Ostinato
3. Three / Two
4. Rebreather
5. Cut-Up
6. New City
7. Ascent 

Not long after recording her 10th album, Ruins, Liz Harris traveled to Wyoming to work on art and record music. She found herself drawn towards the pairing of skeletal piano phrasing with spare, rich bursts of vocal harmony.

A series of stark songs emerged, minimal and vulnerable, woven with emotive silences. Inspired by “the idea that something is missing or cold,” the pieces float and fade like vignettes, implying as much as they reveal. She describes them as “small texts hanging in space,” impressions of mortality, melody, and the unseen – fleeting beauty, interrupted. Grid Of Points stands as a concise and potently poetic addition to the Grouper catalog.

From Liz Harris: Grid Of Points is a set of songs for piano and voice. I wrote these songs over a week and a half; they stopped abruptly when I was interrupted by a high fever. Though brief, it is complete. The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs lyrics speak more directly of. The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column,
missing. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Simmering slow piano, beautiful layered vocals and cavernous reverb all form together to make this one of Harris' most enthralling outings to date. Perfectly tender but undeniably hard-hitting, these pieces are brimming with emotional heft and speckled with moments of spine-tingling beauty. Stunning.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Races
2. Parking Lot
3. Driving
4. Thanksgiving Song
5. Birthday Song
6. Blouse
7. Breathing
8. Coal Train 

Belgium-based composer Christina Vantzou’s fourth full-length for Kranky ventures further into the uniquely elusive and evocative mode of ambient classical minimalism which has become her signature: a fragile synthesis of contemplative drift, heady silences, and muted dissonance. In regards to the new album she speaks of focusing particular attention on the effects of the recordings on the body, and of “directing sound perception into an inner space.”

No. 4 took shape across roughly two years, incorporating a diverse array of musical and conceptual collaborators, including fellow Kranky artists Steve Hauschildt and John Also Bennett (of Forma) as well as Angel Deradoorian (ex-Dirty Projectors), Clarice Jensen, Beatrijs De Klerck, and members of Belgium’s Echo Collective. During the creation process Vantzou wanted to “blur lines of hierarchy,” and thus allowed all ensemble members and technical assistants to add or delete elements. Despite such a spectrum of input the eleven tracks feel distinctly cohesive, weaving elegant textures and resonant open spaces within a twilit landscape of eclectic instrumentation: piano, harp, vibraphone, voice, strings, marimba, synthesizers, gong, and bells.

Vantzou describes the recording process as one of prepared spontaneity: that is, “having plenty of ideas ready to explore going into the session, but with enough time to depart from those ideas and see what happens.” This mindset of premeditated exploration informs the album’s emotive textural intuition, with hushed drones and delicate gestures eliding in the periphery of the mix. She cites sleep and “the loosening of time” as two formative practices in her private and professional life, which manifests in the quietly hallucinatory properties of Vantzou’s music. No. 4 feels both endless and ephemeral, immersive and immaterial. It’s a music of horizon lines and half-light, mapped with feeling and foresight.

Recorded in New York City and Brussels. Mixed in Berlin.

TRACK LISTING

1. Glissando For Bodies And Machines In Space
2. Percussion In Nonspace
3. At Dawn
4. Doorway
5. Some Limited And Waning Memory
6. Staircases
7. No4 String Quartet
8. Sound House
9. Lava
10. Garden Of Forking Paths
11. Remote Polyphony (feat Steve Hauschildt) 

Northern California electronic producer Fred Welton Warmsley III’s solo work as Dedekind Cut (pronounced “dead-da-ken cut”) has evolved from fractured industrial design into increasingly subdued and sublime ambient meditations across two years of dedicated activity. His second full-length collection, Tahoe—so named after the mountain lake town he now calls home—swells with widescreen grandeur, evoking vistas both inner and outer. There are echoes of his earlier, more tempestuous mode in tracks like “MMXIX” and “Spiral” but overall the album skews panoramic and pensive, muted synthetic mists contoured with choral melody, field recordings, and radiant drone. His compositional instincts feel alternately classical, contemporary, and conflicted, befitting an artist whose discography spans labels as divergent as Hospital Productions, Ninja Tune, and NON.

Warmsley characterizes Tahoe as a “time peace,” sifting through “the past, the present, future, and fantasy.” Recorded primarily in New York, with additional sessions sourced from Berlin, Cambridge, and Placer County, California.

TRACK LISTING

1. Equity
2. The Crossing Guard
3. Tahoe
4. MMXIX
5. De-Civilization
6. Spiral
7. Hollow Earth
8. Virtues 

"A few years ago we received an anonymous email with a link to three tracks and a simple message: “Hi, maybe you would be interested in this music.”

It’s easy to be skeptical of yet another link from yet another artist in a world overcrowded with them, but listening is our job and so we do it. The songs were instantly striking: extraordinarily slow, somber, and spacious, each vaulted cathedral chord reverberating poetically into the distance, the melodies rolling out like fog across a cemetery.

Captivated, we requested more, receiving a single word in response: “Yes.” Then, nothing. Eventually, three months later, we received another email with slightly more information: a name (Irma Orm), a location (Stockholm), and a bit of context (she worked alone, and progress on music was slow but steady ).

Fast-forward to mid-2016: we’re informed the album is complete, and it is breathtaking. Hermetic gothic swan songs conjured from funereal piano, twilit ambience, minimalist percussion, and spellbinding vocals.

The mood is lulling and lush but lost in sorrow, stark grey structures looming in the night. Majestic open spaces between notes heighten the melancholic grandeur of Orm’s arrangements, blurring the line between lament and lullaby. The songs less end than ebb away, succumbing to their own downcast beauty." - Kranky.

High Plains is the duo of Scott Morgan and Mark Bridges.

Morgan, based in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, is predominantly known for his drifting, textured soundscapes released under the pseudonym LOSCIL.

Bridges is an accomplished, classically-trained cellist residing in Madison, Wisconsin.

The two met in Banff, Alberta while they were simultaneously there on residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2014. They first collaborated when Bridges contributed cello parts to Morgan’s generative music app ADRIFT, recorded in Seattle in 2015.

In early 2016, the duo embarked on a collaborative set of compositions in the oxygen thin air of Wyoming, spending two weeks holed up in a refurbished school house in the town of Saratoga, where this album was recorded.

Inspired by Schubert’s Die Winterreiseand the rolling landscapes of
their surroundings, the collaboration culminated in a collection of recordings that evoke a shadowy, introspective and dizzying winter journey.

Cinderland takes cues from classical, electronic and cinematic
musical traditions but is mostly a product of the rugged, mythic landscape; vast and sprawling with a wild, uncertain edge.

The recording was made with a portable studio and all sounds were sourced on site, most notably from Bridges’ cello, the resident Steinway D piano, and field recordings collected from the local soundscape.

The results are a site specific, wide scope view of the high valley terrain the duo worked in, a mix of analog and digital, neoclassical and modern electronic sounds, a complemental series of tracks to become absorbed in, a truly deep listening experience.

The cover art for Cinderland was created by London-based artist, Peter Liversidge.

TRACK LISTING

1. Cinderland
2. Blood That Ran The Rapids
3. The Dusk Pines
4. A White Truck
5. Ten Sleep
6. Black Shimmer
7. Hypoxia
8. Rushlight
9. Song For A Last Night 

Ambient power duo Anjou's sophomore statement continues in the vein of their 2014 debut, unfurling a full hour of mesmeric synthetic drift and veiled melodic undertow.

Comprised of Mark Nelson (of pioneering post-rock experimentalists Labradford and Pan·American) and Robert Donne (of Labradford, Aix Em Klemm, Cristal) , the group work largely in long-form suites of sound, alternately spacious and dense.

The new LP's six pieces embrace flux and ambiguity: drones swell and shudder, hushed currents of noise glitch and dissolve, atmospheres congeal and liquify. As with the participants' prior projects, Anjou evoke a shadowed, mysterious mood, variously melancholy and transcendent.

The album is an accumulation of craftsmanship and experience, blurred forms traced in light and fog. 

Jacob Long’s newest recordings under the Earthen Sea moniker deepen his compelling synthesis of shadowy rhythms and opaque atmospherics, drawing on the most potent qualities of melancholic ambient and dub techno.

“An Act Of Love” follows 2015’s “Ink,” released via Ital’s Lovers Rock imprint,
and was inspired by internal tribulations and the experience of exploring an empty nocturnal metropolis. Careful waves of tones drift and decay; beats materialize and pulse across twilit landscapes; a noir mood reigns.

Given Long’s background as bassist for revelatory tribal-punk trio Mi Ami, “An Act Of Love” showcases a musician in the midst of transcendent redefinition, crafting an immersive language of texture and motion.

From Jacob Long:
This record was made over the course of the most emotionally difficult and stressful year in my life thus far. As such, it is both a reflection of that experience and also something that gave me space to begin working through issues to see a way forward, to a better place both psychically and physically.
An idea that was also central to my thoughts while creating the album was the concept and reality of being out in the city at night, wandering around a large urban area after dark – the contrast of empty streets but with life still going on all around, and the openness and possibilities that can bring. This
music was an attempt to capture that feeling.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Present Mist
2. About That Time
3. Delicately In The Sunlight
4. Apparent Lushness
5. Exuberant Burning
6. Above The Clouds
7. The Flats, 1975
8. Also An Act Of Love

Monument Builders is the new album from Loscil, the ambient/electronic project of prolific composer Scott Morgan.

It was primarily created on sample-based instruments in Morgan’s century-old Vancouver home. Like that aged space, this music is also rough-hewn, with rickety samples of boiling kettles and resonant moving air. Recordings from a vintage micro-cassette recorder contribute distortion, rattles and textures that serve as both percussion and abstract aural colour.

According to Morgan, the genesis for the album may have begun as he viewed an old VHS copy of the American experimental film Koyaanisqatsi . “Something about the time-tarnished visuals and the pitch warble on Philip Glass’s epic score added a new layer of intrigue for me,” says Morgan.

“Glass has always been an influence but lo-fi Glass felt like a minor revelation, as if the decay was actually enhancing the impact of the film’s message.”

The investigations on Monument Builders also took inspiration from the anti-humanist writings of influential philosopher John Gray, as well as photographer Edward Burtynsky’s iconic aerial photographs of pollution and environmental destruction. “Gray’s writing, particularly his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals , reinforced a bleak notion I had that we humans don’t have much say in how it all turns out,” says Morgan. “With Burtynsky, I was struck by the fact that something so strikingly beautiful could be the result of large-scale waste and exploitation.”

Monument Builderswas composed during a period in which the life-and-death battles of close friends and family forced Morgan to examine his own feelings on mortality. In the course of that introspection, Morgan found himself buoyed by a feeling of celebration and a stubborn sense of survival – an acknowledgement of what it means to be able to breathe and create amidst the clash of love and chaos. Ultimately, Morgan hopes the music here can offer listeners solace while leaving room for exploration and surprise.

TRACK LISTING

1. Drained Lake
2. Red Tide
3. Monument Builders
4. Straw Dogs
5. Deceiver
6. Anthropocene
7. Weeds

The Benoît Pioulard Listening Matter is the sixth kranky album from Thomas Meluch under the nom de plume Benoît Pioulard. It arrives on the 10th anniversary of his first LP Précis, and offers a rekindled focus on self-examination, as well as a return to vocal-based pop structures following the mostly instrumental Sonnet (2015).

Recording for the Listening Matter began during a period of grief, turmoil and self-medication, and continued throughout two years of growth and healing. Reflections on vice (“Layette”, “Anchor as the muse”), virtue (“Narcologue”) and death (“A mantle for Charon”) feature equally in this concise treatise aimed at the flawed-but-resilient core in us all.

By coincidence this album was completed on the very day Meluch’s only brother died; accordingly, it’s dedicated to him and anyone seeking paths away from their demons.

TRACK LISTING

1. Initials B.P.
2. Narcologue
3. Anchor As The Muse
4. A World Of What-There-Is
5. Layette
6. I Walked Into The Blackness And Built A Fire
7. Like There’s Nothing Under You
8. Perennial Comforts
9. Defect
10. A Mantle For Charon
11. In-The-Vapor
12. The Sun Is Going To Explode But Whatever It’s OK
13. Ruth

This is the first vinyl issue of the classic fourth Loscil album , originally released in May of 2006.

Scott Morgan notes: Compositionally, many tracks on Plume are similar in approach to First Narrows; they started with a harmonic root from which sounds were processed into a loose structure over whcih the live players could improvise. There was substantially less editing this time around with the live tracks. I opted to choose the better improvised passes and merely mix them in and out rather than cut them up. I think this leaves a lot more natural space and balances the heavily structured and repetitive electronic elements with more organic performed layers.

Jason Zumpano returned from the First Narrows ensemble and I aslo recruited long time friend Steve Wood and my partner Krista to play some ebow guitar as well as Josh Lindstrom to play some xylophone and vibraphone which added some new elements into the mix.

Thematically, I stuck with things that are quintessentially loscil; flow, subtle movement, gradual transition, growth. Also of significance to this album is the family connection. "Charlie" was composed after seeing and hearing my daughter Sadie through ultrasound while still in the womb. The track was also composed as a womb-like sound experience for her to sleep to after she was born, hence the heart beats.

When I was a child, I spoke to Helen.

Helen is a pop group from Oregon. Liz Harris (vocals/lead guitar) AKA GROUPER, Jed Bindeman (drums/tambourine), Scott Simmons (bass/guitar), and Helen (back up vocals).

Originally started with the intention of being a thrash band, it turned into something else entirely.The Original Faces was recorded over a period of several years in Portland by the band members, their friends Nick, Chris and, largely, Justin Higgins. Written together, some songs based on Liz and Scott?s demos. 

Guitarist Ken Camden returns for his third solo album, continuing his explorations to seek out new techniques and sounds from the electric guitar. By utilizing both a steel slide and e-bow technique, Camden has moved into micro-tonal territory to bridge the textural gap between guitar and synthesizer while examining their inherent differences.

The palette is further broadened by introducing an organic vocal sampling machine described as a Vocaltron. Much like a Mellotron, vocal samples (contributed by Emily Elhaj and Angel Olsen) are chromatically organized in half steps from the lowest note to the highest possible. Each set is specific to the contributor's range and each note is unedited to keep all original characteristics of that particular individual's voice. This organized organic information adds a contrast to the electric guitar and synthesizer arrangements on the album.

The development of all of these systems gives Dream Memory a diversity throughout its tracks while maintaining an atmospheric bond that weaves the ideas into a thematic whole. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Adenosine
2. Time Bend
3. Renewal
4. Curiosity
5. Melatonin
6. Dream Memory
7. Brain Work
8. Asleep At The Wheel

Recorded at home over the course of a year, Nature evolved as a collaboration between Honey Owens, Fauria, and drummer/bassist/keyboardist Mark Burden. The album ?nds the trio crafting enveloping layers of guitars, synthesizers, and reverb to create a shimmering, wide open sound.

It's a restrained, direct style, but tying it all together is a lulling, dreamy melodic sense that is distinctively Valet. At the center stands Owens' ethereal voice, which has transitioned from evoking trippy fantasies to creating space for honest contemplation. 

Informed by Honey Owens early musical life in the 90s Bay Area underground music scene, Nature slyly synthesizes the DIY spirit of punk, the expansive guitar whirl of shoegaze, and the propulsive rhythmic drive of dub.

For Valet, Nature's sound is a change in style, but not substance. From the haunted blues of 2006's Blood is Clean to the Fourth World free fusion of 2008's Naked Acid, Owens and company have always demonstrated a mastery of bringing together disparate musical genres into a uni?ed musical whole.

The sound of the ?fth Benoit Pioulard full length is lush and verdant, a temperate rain forest of ear ecstasy that re?ects the environment surrounding the artist. A mostly instrumental work, it is an adept melding of song and sound, melody and texture, the intangible and the palpable, that in an abstract sense recalls the more fractured and loose end of the 70?s krautrock movement.

"The basis of the album was a series of ?eld recordings of tones and unintentional harmonies that I made in the summer & fall of 2013 - whistling industrial air conditioners, bird songs, locust drones, washing machines - that I mimicked or interpreted on the guitar, making loops that developed into fuller compositions. Several of the pieces are recreations of harmony loops that I heard in a series of extraordinarily vivid dreams, and then woke up and recorded. A few pieces had lyrics and vocal parts that I ultimately removed; at a certain point the album became an exercise in restraint, so I strove to leave only what I felt absolutely essential.

Unlike most of my previous recordings, there are no digital / software after-effects on the album; all sounds are from analog tape and / or my few guitar pedals." Thomas Meluch (Benoit Pioulard).

Irreal, the fifth long player from Chicago's Disappears, is another trip down the rabbit hole. The album plays out as a dream sequence - hazed dub landscapes give way to the groupʼs most experimental and open music yet.

If their last album Era confirmed the fact that Disappears are on their own trip, then Irreal is where it kicks in. Eternalism, roboethics, identity - it's a Ballardian mix of imperfect melodies, half thoughts and good ol' dystopian modernity. Itʼs a master class in texture, pace and control.

Produced by John Congleton at famed Chicago recording institution Electrical Audio, Irreal sits in the negative space where art rock and post punk collapse onto each other. It's the sound of Disappears reporting back from The Void.

TRACK LISTING

1.Interpretation
2. I _ O
3. Another Thought
4. Irreal
5. OUD
6. Halcyon Days
7. Mist Rites
8. Navigating The Void

Sea Island is a collection of new material composed and recorded over the past two years. While many of these compositions were performed live extensively prior to recording, others were constructed in the studio and are being heard for the first time here.

Musically, the album represents a range of compositional approaches. Murky, densely textured depths of sound are explored with subtle pulses and pings woven within, contrasted with composed or improvised moments of acoustic instrumentation making a move into the foreground. Certain tracks on Sea Island such as album opener Ahull make rhythm their focus by exploring subtle polyrhythms and investigating colliding moments of repetition and variation.

Though staunchly electronic at its core, instruments such as vibraphone and piano make appearances, and layers of live musicality, improvisation and detail appear in the looped and layered beds of manipulated sound recordings.

A varied cast of players appear in the loscil “ensemble”, some familiar collaborators from the past such as Jason Zumpano on rhodes and Josh Lindstrom on vibraphone, and others new to the mix such as Fieldhead?s Elaine Reynolds who provides layered violin on Catalina 1943, and Ashley Pitre contributing vocals on Bleeding Ink. Seattle pianist Kelly Wyse, who collaborated with loscil on his 2013 edition of piano-centric reworks Intervalo, performs on the tracks Sea Island Murders and En Masse.

Engineered by Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie (Stars of the Lid / A Winged Victory for the Sullen) who also added some of his signature sound texture, at his studio in Brussels, Belgium.

Developed over a four year period, and entirely funded by a part time job working as a SAT university entrance exam mathematics tutor, Nº2 was composed using synthesizers and a variety of unidenti?ed samples that were manipulated beyond recognition.

Christina Vantzou then collaborated with Minna Choi of the San Francisco based Magik*Magik Orchestra. Vantzou and Choi worked on the notation and arrangements and recorded the compositions with a 15-piece ensemble at Tiny Telephone studios in San Francisco.

The chamber layer on Nº2 follows a similar pattern as her ?rst record with the addition of bassoon, oboe, and an enhanced string section. Vantzou spent four months premixing the album before Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie (Stars of the Lid / A Winged Victory for the Sullen) engineered the ?nal mixes,

Perhaps a better title for the album would be “Symphony Nº2” as it was composed as a cohesive whole, much like her ?rst album “Nº1”. Dense layers of strings are augmented by angelic voices, piano, woodwinds, & various synthesizers. Instrumental music, especially that which is scored with strings & horns, is invariably described as “?lmic”. This is even more likely when the composer is a ?lmmaker such as Christina Vantzou.

Welcome to the future, which luckily for us is ?lled by a woman?s voice with a beautiful narrative. A recording that is a meeting of personalities is like the contact of chemical substances: if there is any reaction, all are transformed.

'Virgins' exchanges gristled distortion and cavernous sound in favour of a close, airy, more de?ned palette. At times it points to the theological aspirations of early minimalist music. But it is not 'fake church music' for a secular age, rather something like an attempt at the sound of frankincense in slow-motion, or of a pulsing, ?ickering ?uorescence in the grotto.

Virgins was recorded during three periods in 2012, mostly in Reykjavik, Montreal and Seattle, using ensembles in live performance.

While this album remains committed to a painterly form of musical abstraction, it is also a record of restrained composition recorded live primarily in intimate studio rooms. This record employs woodwinds, piano and synthesizers towards an effort at doing what digital music does not do naturally—making music that is out oftime, out of tune and out of phase.

Some pieces go off the rails before forming into anything, others eschew crescendo compositional structures or bombastic density while going sideways instead. It points to the ongoing development of Hecker's work. It suggests illusory memories of drug- hazed jams or communal music performance that may have never been performed or been heard.

It is an offering of music into the void, a gift of digital ?ller between distractions. Yet hopefully it also stands as a document of the enduring faith in the narcotic, enigmatic function of music as long-form expression.

Mixed by Valgeir Sigurðsson and Tim Hecker. Additional assistance by Randall Dunn and Ben Frost.

Mastered by Mandy Parnell at Black Saloon Studios in London, UK.

There are some musical traditions - ancient ones - that are grounded in the natural soundscape; the everyday sounds of life arranged into patterns, attempts at mimicking the whoosh of wind, the howls of an animal, the crack of thunder, the thump and scrape of a rice mortar. We emerge into the world having been exposed to these sounds, along with the vicissitudes of our mothers? heartbeats, and we connect to them as we grow. To the extent that we can train ourselves to remove subjective notions about music, we can ?nd musical potential in virtually every sound.

Some prehistoric ancestor slithered out of the ocean and its perceptions of reality were changed forever. Murky ribbons of light were replaced by the warm glow of the sun, rhythms dampened by seawater became sharp and brazen in the air. These sounds and images from eons ago stamped themselves indelibly into our consciousness and have remained there as we have evolved.

The band Implodes has, on their previous albums, tapped into the deep psychic recesses where our sonic memories ?rst took shape. They have played the part of the ancient ancestor, lying submerged in the shallows, waiting to make its gambit onto dry land and into a new world. With their new album, Recurring Dream, Implodes breathes fresh air. Melodies that were once distant echoes are now suffused with energy and clarity of purpose, submerged rhythms now walk in the light of day. Implodes does not, however, eschew its heritage. Heaviness abounds. The band has not abandoned the crushing pressure of the deep, dark places. But Recurring Dream breaches the thin membrane that contained its previous efforts and preys unmolested in its new environment. There has always been an organic component to Implodes? music, and not just because the band is comprised of humans. Its music is tied to those very earliest of our sonic traditions, to the sounds of Earth and space and deep water and simple machines.

Recurring Dream is about waking up in the dark and witnessing the slow birth of consciousness, still tethered to fantasies and nightmares, and walking into the unknown.

Presenting a new collaboration featuring Oren Ambarchi on guitar, the electronics of Robin Fox, and both performing on various other instruments. The music on this album came about as the result of the two being asked to co-compose the soundtrack for a new production by renowned Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move for their Connected production.

"Chunky Move's artistic director Gideon Obarzanek was drawn to the organic and deeply musical qualities of Ambarchi's work and the digital, almost scienti?c quality of Fox's sound. Over a process of many weeks these two aesthetics were merged. Working both in the Chunky Move studio and Head-gap studio in Melbourne, new works were forged from both digital and analog sources.

"This release brings together two of the most extraordinary artist/musicians working in Australia today. Both are renowned internationally for their individual practices, and here they join forces to produce powerful music that fuses Ambarchi's legendary guitar sound with Fox's mathematically rigorous tones and textures. This fusion results in sound works that stretch in scope from the sublime and spacious to the intensely dense and foreboding. Treading a precarious line between music and abstract sound, between organic and inorganic tones, this collaboration is a must listen for anyone interested in contemporary soundworks.

Kranky was a bit surprised earlier this year when Jessica Bailiff contacted them and asked they wanted to preview her new album for possible release. They had no idea she had even been working on an album, let alone had completed one, and they were rewarded with a listen to her most compelling album to date.

After being in Europe for 5 weeks as a touring member of Boduf Songs, Jessica Bailiff spent much of 2011, writing and recording At the Down-Turned Jagged Rim of the Sky in her spartan home studio. Sequestering herself through the hot summer months until finished, she then passed the tracks on to her friend Odd Nosdam for final mixing.
*Down-tuned, distorted bass guitar adds a new color to her palette, but familiar ones also come into play: fuzzed and delayed electric guitar, organ, piano, cello, and drums. Noisy pop-tinged love songs nestle slyly in a bed of off-kilter lullabies and dark, metallic waltzes.

No need to recycle descriptives like “lo-fi” or “hushed vocals” - these are spurious words. This is another intimate collection of songs recorded entirely by Jessica at home, in a room next to where she sleeps. If you listen carefully, you might hear her dreaming.

TRACK LISTING

01 Your Ghost Is Not Enough 
02 Take Me To The Sun 
03 Sanguine 
04 If You Say It 
05 Violets & Roses 
06 This Is Real
07 Goodnight 
08 Slowly 
09 Firefly

Atlas Sound is the solo moniker of Deerhunter frontman / provocateur Bradford Cox. Here on his debut album, Cox's sound moves out of dank nightclubs filled with eternal existential drone punk, and relaxes at home in his Grant Park, Atlanta bedroom. And this is, essentially, a bedroom album, a collage, mixing the garage rock and ambient electronic influences previously explored with Deerhunter into a new context, with newly explored recording techniques, mainly laptop-based, learned with guidance from Kranky artist Nudge's Brian Foote. The result is fourteen songs of melancholy and mania. This is a true solo album, entirely created and produced by a single person. That is certainly not unique, especially in the contemporary scene. But Bradford Cox's unusual talent is the ability to take a wide variety of seemingly incongruous sound elements, and seamlessly meld them into a cohesive pop narrative. Ultimately it is this innate ability to combine all these disparate elements into a singular whole that makes this album such an enjoyable, and unique listen.

Charalambides are the true originators of the US free-folk psyche movement. Tom and Christina Carter aka Charalambides have been recording and performing live in various configurations since 1991 and run their own highly acclaimed label Wholly Other. "Likeness" is the newest release from the duo. Recorded over a period of several weeks during the Spring of 2006, the album is a return to the spontaneous composition of previous Charalambides records such as "Houston And Union". Musically, the album departs from the warm psych of "A Vintage Burden" (their album from 2006) in favour of the lush and layered vocal strata of Christina's later solo works, and a chillier, more abrasive guitar sound that favours the Velvets over the Byrds. Lyrical content largely derives from public domain American popular song from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, edited, rearranged, and largely deconstructed by Christina into abstract protest songs for the century at hand.

Portland, Oregan based Adam Faulkner aka White Rainbow has worked with a number of artists including Dirty Projectors, Devendra Banhart and Jackie-O Motherfucker. With the release of "Prism Of Eternal Now", White Rainbow has surpassed typical solo project territory and is now a virtual elemental force. His Kranky debut pulses and flows with mantric chants, clattering percussions, sighing sustains and guitar leads unashamed of their scorching transcendence. He breathes new life into archaic sub-genres such as prog-rock, new age, and hippie folk incantations, while never stooping to the negative aspects of any of them, and at the same time remaining a step ahead of the technologically crippled and virtuoso-less looper pedal scene.

"Silver Tongued Sisyphus", the first Cloudland Canyon release for Kranky was recorded in Brooklyn, Germany and Memphis. It follows on the heels of the well received "Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004" album released on the Tee Pee label. "Silver Tongued Sisyphus" is a secular call to prayer with humming, looping and loping ambient passages interspersed with bursting rhythmic energy and agitated guitar lines. Recent live shows have sounded like an unauthorized soundtrack to netherworld versions of The Swimmer or The Scorceror. In Greek mythology Sisyphus was a king punished in the underworld by being cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill throughout eternity. '...A stunning neo-psychedelic experience where the musical spirits of This Heat, Ash Ra Temple and The Mahavishnu Orchestra are evoked, celebrated and absorbed inside Uhlhorn and Wojan's shifting cloud formations of sound.' - The Wire.

Paul Dickow aka Strategy releases music on his Archigramophone imprint and curates monthly Community Library nights at the Dunes club in Portland, Oregon. Strategy has released dance singles (with Seattle's ORAC label), remixes and a debut album, "Strut", on the Portland-based Outward Music label in summer 2003. Strategy wires together Dickow's programming and performing experience via a hodgepodge of table top electronics, computers and realtime musicianship. Combining a granular ambient aesthetic with an abstract, percolating rhythmic sensibility, Strategy unites small parts into complete melodies motivated by complex pulsations. The Portland Mercury described Dickow as 'Portland's laptop prankster/meister of disquo'. To date you've heard Strategy dabble in everything from headphone-oriented ambient music to house and dub; this is the work that brings it all together.

Christina Carter approached her new solo album with the specific idea of recording all of the songs in the same key and using the same guitar tuning. While some artists would be hampered by such self-imposed constraints, Christina uses it to her advantage by exploring seemingly innumerable ways to twist and turn the same basic notes into new shapes, creating just as much a mood as a song cycle. With "Electrice", Christina has created the most cohesive and fully realized version of her unique musical vision to date.

"Feels Like Home" is Jessica's fourth full length album, and is the most refined example of her musical vision to date. Jessica combines folk acoustic guitar, droning guitar, gossamer vocals and piano filgrees to create a lush, mysterious world. Beautiful stuff!

"Through The Cardial Window" is the first album Gregg Kowalsky has recorded under his own name, however his previous efforts under the name Osso Bucco from last year have been released world-wide to much acclaim. The music he creates is situated betwixt and between textural ambience, psychedelia and pure noise.

This is the first solo album in six years from Dawn Smithson, singer/bassist in Jessamine and Fontanelle and recent Sunn O))) collaborator. "Safer Here" is an emotive listen. Smithson's vocals are both intimate and revealing, a perfect accompaniment to the gentle guitars and aching synth drone soundscapes.

Nudge is a group consisting of three artists more than well versed in the underground music world. Honey Owens is a member of Jackie-O Motherfucker, Brian Foote and Paul Dickow have each played in Fontanelle. Beginning with the balanced melodies of guitar and vocal that lead off on the song "Classic Mode", Nudge demonstrate a remarkable range and mixture of real time playing and electronic processing. Rhythms flirt with dub reggae or high life patterns while the accretion of electronic textures goes on above and below the melodies and beats.

Bird Show is the alter ego of Ben Vida, an active member of a whole host of experimental bands including Town & Country, Pillow and Central Falls. On this album he's tapped into the much admired free-folk psyche movement for inspiration.

Autistic Daughters are a new ensemble formed by Dean Roberts as a vehicle for his collaboration with influential musicians Martin Brandlmayer and Werner Dafeldecker. "Jealously And Diamond" picks up where Robert's "Be Mine Tonight" album left off, pulling apart the threads that hold together the contemporary song, blending genres, musical approaches and traditions to create unique song structures and an inventive, emotionally potent form of contemporary.

Originally released on Sub Rosa in 2000, this ultra classic Stars Of The Lid album has been out of press for years. An expansive and ambitious album, this at the same time is probably Stars Of The Lid's most cohesive and accessible album, a moving work struck through with subtle melodies and a compositional aesthetic.

This is the third in a series of Charalambides - related reissues from Kranky, following Charalambides' "Unknow Spin" and Tom Carter's "Monument" album. This album was originally released as an extremely limited CDR by Wholly Other in 2001. It features recordings from the period between Charalambides' "Union" and "Houston" albums, with most of the material being recorded in 1995/6. This album proves that the simplistic combination of one woman's voice and guitar can be as ethereal and heavenly as a full band of musicians.

"Somnia" is Greg Davis' third full length release and the first to be released on Kranky. Greg made his name as an innovator of a movement which latterly became known as laptop folk. His previous two releases broke new ground and helped establish a generic template for other inspired artists to follow. "Somnia" is a fusion of drone based work recorded over the last three years. Like labelmate keith Fullerton Whitman, Davis' trade is in digital manipulation of organic sound sources; teasing hidden harmonics, melodies, frequencies and rhythms from an electric sonic pallet.

The Dead Texan is the first solo album from Adam Wiltzie (Stars Of The Lid and WIndsor Of The Derby) and as you expect from someone with his pedigree, this is without doubt one of the most beautiful ambient/ avant album releases of the year. The 11 tracks sweep between noctambulent piano and string infiltrated mini symphonies and 60s filmic vignettes.

A unique mix of instrumental and computer aided improvisation. They take drums, keyboards and guitars and then interplay and weave sounds into tight patterns.

After her first two highly acclaimed albums recorded with Low, Jessica Bailiff's third album is a massive leap forward. The album has a much more acoustic focus than her previous two, with beautiful ambient interludes, violin, piano, tin whistle, smeary guitars and even sitar.

Sixth album from Low, once again combining their beautiful vocal harmonies, alongside sparse guitar and bass, and simple drum rhythms. The album was recorded in their hometown church, which emphasises perfectly their minimal, emotive grandeur.

“...achingly slow, unabashedly sad, and beautifully spare; consistent enough that you know it'll bring you down, but diverse enough that you're not sure how." - Dusted.

“On first listen, it's quite difficult to square the two distinct facets of Trust; it's almost gothic morbidity, and it's candyfloss, campfire breeziness. And yet, it's this polarity that makes Trust the masterpiece that, on reflection, it quite obviously is." - Drowned in Sound [10/10].

“From the high plains of Duluth, Low continue to create music true to the universe they invented without standing still." - Popmatters.

Fontanelle's second release for Kranky. The Album bridges the gap between Chicago post rock and alternative rock, like Low meets Tortoise.

A collaboration between Bobby Donne from LaBradford, and Adam Wiltzie from Stars Of The Lid. Immediately identifiable by the tradmark guitar of Stars Of The Lid, and Bobby's bass clanks, augmented with a mixture of samples and keyboards. And Adam sings.......Occasionally.