Venetian Snares & Daniel Lanois - Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois (Timesig/Planet Mu, 2018)

Melvins and Lustmord released "Pigs of the Roman Empire" some...many years ago. Also an odd-duck-but-it-could-work collaboration. Much like Venetian Snares and Daniel Lanois here. Anyway not long after it came out King Buzzo made the comment that "some of the things people think he did were actually us and some of the things people think we did were him". That's the sign of a good collaboration, when all limbs get absorbed into one megalithic beast and the entity operates as an indiscernible One. Such is not the case for M. Funk & M. Lanois. It very much, almost constantly, sounds exactly like Venetian Snares' breakcore playing over Lanois' guitar glossolalia. Lanois is in dreamy, shimmery, ambient mode here, very cinematic and nuanced, and in fact it sounds like it would make a good listen on its own. Snares (whose game I know well and typically enjoy) just slathers his own beats atop with little regard for anything else that's going on. I know Snares is a smart, versatile and thoughtful musician - I guess that's why I'm disappointed he seems to be the one making zero effort to engage with Lanois. On a couple of tracks the duo come together well enough - the 9-minute centerpiece "United P92" does showcase Lanois' guitar snaking and unfurling around Snares' prickly beats and "Mothors Pressroll P131" is so furiously aggressive it almost beats you into submission. But overall the two just don't connect like they should which is too bad.

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Nachtmystium/Leviathan - In the Valley of Death, Where Black Metal is King: An Homage to the Roots (Ascension Monuments Media, 2018)

What the fuck is that title. Okay I get the first part is a Judas Iscariot tribute, but did we really need "an homage to the roots" in there? Hey wouldn't it be funny if these were actually covers of the band The Roots? Anyway. This album was supposed to come out 10 years ago, but it was blocked by the bands' respective labels. Now I guess they've figured out a way, or Blake Judd needs money for drugs so he's figured out a way, to put this out. The Bandcamp version has 8 tracks, 5 from Nachtmystium and 3 from Leviathan, but I've seen a 10-track tracklisting elsewhere. On the version I have, we have Nachtmystium covering Judas Iscariot, Ildjarn (twice), Von and Burzum. Leviathan tackles Ildjarn (twice) and Von once. I seem to be missing Leviathan's Judas Iscariot cover ("Where the Winter Beats Incessant") and one of Nachtmystium's Von covers ("Von"). Weird. Wonder if there were some licensing issues or something. All four Ildjar...

Sunburned Hand of the Man - Get Wet with the Animal (Manhand, 2018)

I keep up with Sunburned only intermittently these days, they seem to be taking a more rock-ist approach lately. Like this one. Each track is about 4-5 minutes of pretty ramshackle, jammy, funky, boogie rock...almost spoiled by the throaty, beery vocals shouted over the top of each one of these tunes with nonsensical platitudes. I almost shut it off after a couple tracks but I stuck it out and kinda came around on some level. I was oddly reminded of My War era Black Flag sludge punk. The band sez "these Holy Grail fueled recordings are a mix of iphone and zoom recordings run through garageband, reaper and some plug-ins. We're still working on the much more listener-friendly Black Dirt session..." and point taken, listener friendly this ain't.

Jan Jelinek - Zwischen (Faitiche, 2018)

Last year's reissue of Jan Jelinek's Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records put him on his radar for me forever. This is an shortened version of a radio play he put out called Zwischen. Jelinek sources interview clips from a pretty diverse cast - John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Slajov Zizek, Lady Gaga, Yoko Ono, Marcel Duchamp - and extracts all the pauses, silences, gaps, ums, ehs, ahs, hahas, etc from their answers. So you get track titles like "Yoko Ono, you were born into a rich, aristocratic family in Tokyo. Do you see that in yourself?" and "Karlheinz Stockhausen, which difficulties are involved in conserving electronic music on magnetic tape?". On top of that the audio cues present trigger synthesizers creating undercurrents of sound amidst the quasi-verbal utterances. It's a cool concept, interesting listen - all the responses have different moods. Zizek's is particularly stressed as he seems to be rushing through an explanation of something important ...

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