Tips Zum Selbstmord

Mini album from Laurel Halo after last year's excellent Dust, this is more of an experimental side to Laurel I suppose - or rather a different experimental side. Six tracks all instrumental and all fairly straight forward dubby, drone-y pieces featuring cello and percussion but overall didn't stir much in me. Last track "Nahbarkeit" was good.

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 ...

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.

Pretty cool album compiling two long-lost tapes of a long-lost Sudanese musician Kamal Keila and his band. The songs are sung in both English and Arabic and the backing band is lightly jazzy, punchy, RnB...talented for sure. Not the most far-out interesting thing Habibi Funk has ever put out but nice.

I was not aware of these guys, who formed in 2010 as a noise duo, and slowly evolved and added more members and turned into a kind of death/blackened doom metal project. They've got ties to other noise acts I don't know (Sutekh Hexen) and other industrial acts I don't know (Only Now). Quite a stew and the band pulls of something that sounds truly different. It's got a tentacle in each of the aforementioned genres but blends them really well. It's quite hard to pin them down in fact. Big, heavy riffs with a production level along the lines of a sludge/black metal record but sharp instrumentation and just a dirty atmosphere...ambient noise passages separate a couple tracks as a nice diversion...very cool

Here's the other album, an intimate session recorded at a friend's house who used to put on this sort of thing. Imagine? Must have been something. Two ragas here 30 and 40 minutes a piece. The fidelity is obviously a little rougher here and the percussion is muted compared to what ramps up on the previous disc, which I prefer but still pretty cool.

Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ bringing Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar into the light, not somebody I was ever familiar with. From North India and a master of the dhrupad, and also a master of rudra veena, which Stephen describes as "a kind of noble deeper bass relative to the sitar". Over 65 minutes Dagar stretches out the Raga Yaman. It sounds more spacious, slower paced and more "open" than most sitar ragas I would be familiar with. There are some vocalizations but for the most part instrumental, and easy to get lost in Dagar's dreamy, ensnaring strings. This was recorded at a public performance in Seattle in March 1986, a stop on Dagar's final US tour but also as I understand it a place where he did some teaching. There's an accompanying release that I'll check out next, this is good stuff.

I've never really liked Grouper much, lots of other wogs go ga-ga over anything she puts out but it all leaves me cold. I wrote her off for a while, heard some hype for this new one, and I'm back to writing her off again. It's the same ghostly vocal samples/quasi religious/hymnal vibes..haunting and ethereal and...nothing that gets me all wound up. Pass.

Latest Cat System Corp. transmission purports to be a soundtrack of a TV...series or something. It chops up clips of fashion model interviews, pageants, etc. (Trump's voice wafts in at one point, unmistakably and uncomfortably). I really like this one best of all CSC stuff lately, the beats are chunkier and more aggressive than anything remotely "mallsoft", it's just a cool album. There's a couple of reworks on the B-side here, one of "Sussudio" and another of "Cruel Summer", of course both totally slaughtered...almost as disorienting as when I fell asleep with the album on and half-woke up to a French model speaking and thinking/dreaming I was inside a French fashion TV show...nice.

Nicolas Jaar released this album of odds n' sods under a seldom-used moniker, one solely relied upon for the house/disco edits and sample-heavy club bangers collected here for the first time. I don't recognize almost any of the samples, but pop/disco/soul cuts are scrambled into kick-laden techno thumpers - at times the songs seem a little faceless and maybe facile, I don't know Jaar too well but I figure he's more sophisticated than some of these straight-forward club hitz...nevertheless this set bumps and even if it's not a total revelation it's a head-banger and I could see myself coming back to this one when I need banger therapy. Neat.

DOPE re-ish of Midori Takada's 1981 debut album as MKWAJU Ensemble - you may recall last year WRWTFWW released Takada's Through the Looking Glass LP, but this one's even better - a wild mix of Japanese ambient and African rhythms played on marimba, vibraphone, synthesizer and percussion. RIYL Terry Riley or Tubular Bells, or even more new age-y weirdness like Vangelis, but these rhythms are so wild I wouldn't bat a lash at all if you told me the Animal Collective bros stayed up nights listening to these. Check out "Angwora Steps", totally out of pocket. "Hot Air" is a spacious breather, the other tracks pile up the rhythms in slowly-shifting crescendos...crazy stuff.

And here's a new 7" from Leviathan, a one-sider with the 9-minute long titular track. It's sludgy, with a couple of mood changes and some dope military-style drumming in the first half. Not bad.

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...

Real strange one. Justin C. Meyers is an instrumental builder, sound artist, label head, etc. Struggle Artist was created during on breaks from his job at a hospital and, later, in his free time once he got laid off (hence the title?). It's a collection of 14 micro-compositions, each one closing in anywhere from 1 to 4 minutes - quickly building, densely layered collections of sounds - field recordings, keyboards, synths, acoustic instrumentation. There's a lot to digest in each of these tracks. It was more admirable than enjoyable but I can't think of anything else it really sounds like. Interesting. I'll keep tabs on Mr. Meyers for what comes next.

Eartheater first came on my radar (and many others) with 2 Hausu Mountain tapes in 2015. She makes glitchy, disorienting music, combining electronics and synthesized percussion with voice, guitars and who knows what else. The whole thing is a confusing stew, kind of reminiscent of Inga Copeland but I would say even more detached from "song". Didn't do much for me.

Neat collection of recordings of Abu Obaida Hassan, the Sudanese tambour player once rumored dead. Few recordings exist, this collection was co-curated by Hassan himself, and the tracks were cleaned up beautifully. Hassan plays his electrified tambour alongside vocalists and percussionists (and dancers) and his music is rhythmic, hypnotic, swirling and ensnaring. Good listen.

Here's a new kd album on Tom Smith's Karl Schmidt Verlag label that's very much the opposite of some of the kd we've heard earlier this year - namely, it's loud as fuck. There's one 53-minute track here, "Schmickedtwice (Jury Prize)" and it sounds as chaotic and unhinged as anything from Drumm, certainly a return to the noisy Sheer Hellish Miasma days but sonically on par with analog Merzbow. Recorded this year though so not an old recording. It sounds like there's vocals buried way deep, somebody screaming through the TV static, maybe even some percussion? This one's a heater.