BETA TWO AGONIST
Autumn Perdue
DB08021
Databloem Records 2008
08 Tracks. 52mins53secs

Autumn Perdue has a well-defined identity, yet the music is continuously allusive, evoking diverse compositional styles and traditions.  The album comprises a series of interconnected miniatures, sprung from an over-arching tension between the mellifluous and the abstract, the judiciously hesitant and the prudent.  Kamunyak bears out these family resemblances, its careworn fuzziness being overlaid with static, a clip-clop beat, and some random noise, as if a satellite signal had begun to drift away.

It’s all arranged in a manner that is adventurously loose and full of rich, slow-burning incidents that heat up and flicker away in an exquisitely subdued manner. Continue Reading »

AIDAN BAKER & TIM HECKER
Fantasma Parastasie
ALIENCD81
Alien8 Recordings 2008
66 Tracks. 33mins48secs

This Fantasma Parastasie sees Canadian musicians Tim Hecker and Aidan Baker fuse together in a constantly shifting surge punctuated throughout with barks, growls and excited panting in the dark from Hecker’s seemingly endless store of electronic distortions and Baker’s fractured instrumentation, which ambles to the rhythm of madness, joy and sheer exultation.

Phantom On A Pedestal supplies the first rumble of revolutionary thunder, opening with an astonishing array of guttural squeaks, burps, groans, and gasps: what sounds like their very souls were straining to burst free. Continue Reading »

TUJIKO NORIKO, LAWRENCE ENGLISH & JOHN CHANTLER
U
RM435
Room40 2008
08 Tracks. 38mins57secs

Room 40 captain Lawrence English, musician John Chantler, and chanteuse Tujiko Noriko tumble together and tug apart over the course of U, inexhaustibly stitching the strong physicality of melodic lines to acoustic nuance, whilst crisp, agile, insistent digital tattoos envelop them and insinuate into every interstice.

Far from the jerky, skewed cut-ups of some of Noriko’s earlier work, U develops a judicious restraint to create a space for listening.  The album, though hardly esoteric, and sometimes lacking the edge of discovery honed by a confidently individualized voice, is thus easy to get lost in. Continue Reading »

HENNING SCHMIEDT
Klavierraum
FLAU06
Flau 2008
15 Tracks.  61mins01secs

As his wife’s belly bloomed, pianist Henning Schmiedt similarly filled her room with chirruping meander-melodies that alternated with low-end frequencies like the earth’s crust fissuring and climaxing with seesawing hypno-patterns.

Schmiedt is an accomplished pianist, composer, and arranger, having studied music in Rostock, and having since scored works for several films and theatre productions. Continue Reading »

GOLDMUND
The Malady Of Elegance
TYPE039
Type Recordings 2008
15 Tracks.  55mins57secs

Keith Kenniff’s solo piano recordings show an unironic childlike wonder.  The Malady of Elegance, like Curduroy Road before it, is conservative in its tonal focus.  While its manner is reflective and studiedly neutral, the effect of these beautiful miniatures, performed with sublime delicacy, is oftentimes quietly haunting.

Pieces prove rather hypnotic in small doses.  Particularly during the first half of the recording, unfurling in an almost folk-like manner, tracks secrete tiny details at a meandering pace, fading in an out of earshot, and when they finally do well up and state their case, it’s a real event. Continue Reading »

JEREMY BIBLE & JASON HENRY
Vryashn
GOS37
Gear Of Sand 2008
02 Tracks. 54mins18secs

The two suites of ambitious, sweeping sounds that express but never wholly manifest themselves here, superimposed as they are in layers to infinity, were inspired by the shifting perspectives and hallucinogenic detail of dreams.  The mind reels in the declamatory breathlessness and multilayered incantations, out of which slip assiduous sonic close-ups that are soon swallowed by depersonalized electronic shadows, and which return hereafter only as distorted or transformed traces that haunt and push the works further still. Continue Reading »

KAMRAN SADEGHI
Through Thickness
DE5018
Dragon’s Eye Recordings 2008
12Tracks.  58mins08secs

Kamran Sadeghi confronts one with grand interlocking structures and micromanaged outbursts of intense digital incident on Through Thickness.  As Sadeghi juxtaposes these incongruous traits, setting off mobile, surprisingly rounded, fulsome structures and then, in various manners, swiftly testing them for flexibility and points of weakness, he exploits space to draw out a sense of transience and ending so far as the human species is concerned.

The predetermined orderliness of something like Through is given a virus; its polished, not to mention elaborate, percussion arrangement is slowly infiltrated by fleshy, fatty tones that render its gait sluggish and leave it worse for wear, speckling a trail of goo over its stainless surface. Continue Reading »

MIKO
Parades
PLOP005CD
Plop 2008
12Tracks.  46mins57secs

Beyond the surface diverseness, a deep consistency and coherence can be heard in the debut effort from Miko, an artist dwelling in Yokohama, outside Tokyo.  The pieces bear traces of someone who was willing to relinquish a certain control, to make herself the instrument and allow each self-contained event unfold according to its own internal dynamic.

Works like Kingdom and Ride On Time thus come across as much as natural processes as proper songs. Continue Reading »

MACHINEFABRIEK
Dauw
DEKORDER029
Dekorder 2008
05 Tracks. 47mins06secs

As an audio collagist, structure is Rutger Zuydervelt’s particular forte, and in this respect Dauw is one of his strongest works to date.  Zuydervelt’s evinces noticeable compositional control over how he arranges and uses a small, considered palette of sounds.

An orderly canon structure builds soberly then breaks apart beautifully in Singel, the twenty-five minute closing track.  Zuydervelt has clearly matured in his ability to recontextualize traditional instruments with small scufflings, rich washes of surface noise and other infinitesimal sounds. Continue Reading »

YUKI KANEKO
Rut
MOAR2
mOAR 2008
11Tracks. 49mins08secs

Yuki Kaneko’s programming, though it often bears resemblance to the whistles and squawks of an obviously intrigued and excited parakeet, operates well within the contours of coherent identity. With continued attention, what at first blush seemed a trifle meandering and indulgent, soon leaks into the subconscious owing to its untrammeled imagination, natural lucidity, and stylistic and thematic considerations and limitations. Continue Reading »