End of Time (2016)

Kirby announces that his Caretaker has dementia, an awkward statement which had some thinking that Kirby himself was diagnosed with alzheimers (sending best wishes until he clarified), and others taking issue with the macabre romanticisation of the disease as-concept. Fwiw I was never a Caretaker believer, but Everywhere at the End of Time is warmer, cuddlier, and less terrifying than its pre-alzheimers antecedents, which makes it all the more affecting (and indeed terrifying). The next six albums will show a degeneration of form and memory, which likely means more dust and hiss, more repetition, and more insidious nostalgia

bandcamp / -o- / boomkat

Tide Ripples (2016)

The layering of what appears delicate to the point of being ephemeral- Asuna has 22 minutes each song to make something monumentally delicate before stripping unexpected layers away and leaving others, actively avoiding density and leaving the listener feeling elated

bandcamp / -o-

Ditties (2016)

Bitchin Bajas cutting up, arranging, sometimes disembowling Bonnie Prince Billy's donkey cries = best donkey cries of the year and at a time where we want our voices processed and ghostly, a stand-out processed ghost voice record too. Bitchin Bajas aren't focused like they might have been on swirling arpeggio symphonies because that'd be competition and not collaboration- instead they use the donkey cries like an instrument and the result is low-key bizarro melancholy. Which on the surface sounds like them, but put this way sounds like a new way of Bonnie Prince Billy doing Bonnie Prince Billy

drag city / -o-

Only the Youngest Grave (2016)

Seems driven by the desire to uncover a human past in the landscape but rather than rekindling a relationship with the elemental (as in the Scandinavian tradition), finds a kind of abandoned occult sadness (as in the British tradition), which is to say that it's all bones and no spirit. A few things strike me every time (one good, one subjectively not good_)- I have no idea what makes good music much less good mixing but the sparseness of Only the Youngest Grave allows me to hear around the noise in a way that I'm not accustomed to (good!), and also I am all attention whenever the music wanders, but it every now and then builds instead (repeated motif, click distortion pedal) which is a thing I am most allergic to thanks to post-rock but which is quite moving if you are into that, and which I consciously overlook as the noise actually overrides the loud-quiet dynamic and maybe inadvertently distracts from it. So there's something for everyone there

bandcamp

Clonic Earth (2016)

boomkat / -o- / spotify / pan

Hearing Music (2016)

Although new age music found an audience willing to overlook or even embrace its dorkiness via obscure tape rips in the music blog era, it was only recently that it became properly accepted and even declared fashionable. Far from cashing in on this via unearthed archival material Hearing Music offers nothing in the way of antique synths and dolphin noises for new age fetishists- rather it sits on the threshold of 'tasteful' minimalism and forays into the kind of sounds one would expect with that recently de-stigmatised genre tag, which is to say soulful repetition and rainy elegance

numero / -o- / boomkat / spotify

Dreamboat (2016)

mie / -o-

Nettles (2016)

Don't be scared that it's an ode to person and place (even Neil Young made "I'm sorry. You don't know these people. This means nothing to you." a voyeuristic nightmare that the listener couldn't help but share in)- A Pot of Powdered Nettles is an open-invitation welcome to the farewell ritual which is, in spite of its players' links to unsettling and abrasive musical projects, peaceful and affectionate.

house of mythology / stream / -o- / stream(2)

Pèkisyon Funebri (2016)

Segondè Saleco saw Mohammad's landscape trilogy to a close with abstracted elemental power- sounds were processed so that they did not have a human cause- they emerged vibrating with the inevitability of seismic activity rather than some musical composition. Pèkisyon Funebri is free from this conceit but of course the discoveries made through it have become Mohammad's sound, meaning that we are still hearing tones and textures and processing them through space and duration (which is what gives them this imagined physical quality), while Mohammad also allow themselves parts and passages where we can hear the instrument being played (!). The piano in Az álmok itt érnek véget (rész 3) feels earned, while the opening of Qoxra and voices of Ankourajman remind us that rather than being used simply to pigeonhole, Mohammad's music has been described as both metal and folk to better understand their sounds and concepts ('the elemental')- these moments are heavy metal both quieter and louder than expected, and the cello screech in the latter humanises the group which again tends to (obsessively) sound anything but. On that last one the music was neither dark nor light but indifferent as the landscape it was evoking, but Pèkisyon Funebri veers into both doom and sentiment- its grandiose abstractions become metaphysical (rather than superphysical) and its human moments jolt us into the present- this is our funerary passage

stream / buy

Megafauna

Whiiirrrr bllllmmmmmm reeeee thck thck whirrrrr (repeat)

Um

The last time I heard something this silly I was sitting at work listening to a grown man w/ hammered dulcimer singing about how the plants were gonna eat me. I tried buying the t-shirt but the thing broke on the website and I have this (thing) where I blame myself and not the website when that happens and I always think it's a sign or something, that sign being evidence of the Scrooge McDuck that looks over me but doesn't give enough of a shit to stop me spending money on food, that sign telling me it's just not worth it and to give up and just go eat something. He (SMD) draws the line at grown men w/ hammered dulcimers singing about how the plants are gonna eat me, but is okay with regular pie+sushi+sandwich lunches. Enough of those and I'll never be able to buy the damn t-shirt! He knows it, and I know he knows it. If he knows I know he knows then he's not just looking over me, and the thought of SMD being anywhere other than strictly above me (e.g. in my brain or in possession of a family member) is far more frightening than anything found on Megafauna. It's scarier than Goblin's Suspiria too, but not quite as pretty. And because Megafauna sits somewhere between grown man w/ hammered dulcimer (...plants...eat me) metal and Goblin's Suspiria, it's sillier but also prettier than all of that.

Crucially though the Goblin connection goes deeper than the similarity of sounds. Unlike other black metal weirdos that shoot for atmosphere over impact, Megafauna sounds like Yoga scoring the kind of suffering that aforementioned weirdos think atmosphere evokes. I don't want to call it a parody or anything, but it's like Megafauna is the soundtrack to the act of listening to black metal and feeling something (sadness, affirmation of nihilism/misanthropy/whatever). Detached yet curious, knowingly silly, admittedly moody, and importantly, very pretty.

try
buy

THE PEARL V2 (2013)

Ensemble Pearl is a group consisting of Stephen O'Malley, Atsuo, Michio Kurihara, and William Herzog. Other than Kurihara, all of these people played on Altar. The group's name comes from a Brian Eno and Harold Budd album from 1984 called The Pearl. On The Pearl, the musicians played quietly and sparsely to give silences a presence and make every detail equally important. Rather than being cosmic, its trick was focus. A microscope rather than a telescope, the effect was nontraditionally or obversely sublime. Ensemble Pearl was conceived by O'Malley as a commission for a theatre piece. The music itself reflects of O'Malley, Atsuo, Kurihara, and Herzog's chemistry, O'Malley's admiration of Eno's/Budd's focussed sublimity, and his life's work playing and pioneering the music he loves. Ensemble Pearl is built from multiple histories but it is also spontaneously rockish. It is allegedly informed by spectral music, but also phenomenology, "stoned discovery," and an intimate "back to basics" creative approach. In its non-competing, that is naturally occurring, intuitive environment/atmosphere, its histories come into play unselfconsciously and are all the while bound by the same vision and focus on a Pearl-ish sparseness. A chamber piece does not feel out of place surrounded on either side by guitar songs. Michio's guitars yearn in that distinctly Michio way, but he has abandoned the individual ego for something bigger. O'Malley mimics Dylan Carlson. He repeats phrases but changes them slightly. We're asked to pay attention but these phrases are returned by a guitar that sort of distracts as its strange playing makes little sense next to O'Malley's rigidity. Ensemble Pearl is not Altar and it is not Monoliths & Dimensions and it is not Rainbow and it is not Hex and it is not surf music or country music or rock n roll and yet it is an unselfconscious stoned discovery/uncovering/interplay of all of these things. It works because of the collaborators' expertise in and dedication to form, and of course understanding of when to merge a sound, offset a sound, sit out for ~10 mins, or lead the others in trying to imitate or channel the wind and waves (oh Michio!). As focussed/collaborative as it is, its images are ambiguous and if they were decided on, its discrepancies come down to each individual. The cover is a planet and a woman and whatever the viewer sees. Not simply a case of microscope v telescope, Ensemble Pearl could be a physical Hex-ish ghost town, a scene of the fury of the elements, or a psychological state (elated or despondent). Its vision/focus is ambiguity, the important thing is whatever the listener hears.

A-

try / buy

Diversions

Diversions is a wordy and neurotic process involving dis/re/configurations, phantasms, and memories which results in:

INCREDIBLE ambient, ghostly because it sort of reminds of a time&place I was never a part of and also because the intention is not to just bring these visions of the past into the present, but have them falter, disembodied, and blurred together. Poignant lo-fi ambient.

A

try / buy

downer dub (2013)

because 2013 doesn't have a clear narrative yet, the self-sufficient or enclosed uncomfortably-modern-armchair-looking-out-over-any-city-at-night-through-the-huge-glass-wall-of-some-modernist-house-inherited-or-broken-into-however-you-did-it indifference of a record like You Are Eternity is really able to thrive (or just exist, if it wants) without seeming too incongruous, casually helped of course by the listener's list of things that have sort of stirred or interested (the listener) in this vague new/old soundworld which goes like this: UMO (timeless) then Waka (ephemeral). that is to say you'll dig it because you like it, or dislike it because you don't, and that's it. the record doesn't tease, twist, or change, but typifies. where we're headed, i don't know, but this one'll assuredly stay put. return trips are welcome, of course, but not at all necessary.

B-

try / buy

Pacifica (2013)

Holy shit nature and warm and the sublimity of dub but warm and rumbling and like the cover and it won't change anything but it doesn't want to and doesn't need to and it's so warm

B

wait for re-release / chill til then

lost songs washed up all sad & sick (2013)

I mean, I was gonna wait 'til I understood it properly, though it's fragments and that's all, then BAM bnm

It's all just moments and ideas any way... glue them together and give it a title and people will find or project meaning onto it. Understandably some take issue with Harris' openness about this procedure- they want a concept, dammit! Likely fragments as a concept won't cut it, particularly as it threatens the illusion of Dead Deer's narrative. I thought she'd done it all with A I A and those Violet Replacement tracks, so naturally I wanted songs again. I'm willing to see past the illusion and glue it together myself. Did it with Dead Deer and doing it all over with Man Who Died. Projection or not, it works. Laziness or not, it works. Just try not feel sad and sick, 'cause then she's not done her job. Worked on me, great job.

A+

buy / try

Growing - The Sky's Run Into the Sea (2003)

I found this album when I first started 'discovering new music' or sitting on /mu/ all day and getting everything from sharethreads and going to music blogs to find 'drone' and 'post-rock' and trying to find something to wean myself away from Street Horrrsing, and any way most of what I found got deleted or ignored over the years, but not The Sky's Run Into the Sea. Unfortunately it's Growing's only fully realized ambient record, but whatever, they had it right for one album and it's a good one. They manipulate their guitars into layers and waves of drones which with the help of the minimal album art bring about that sublime feeling that droners/post-rockers often aim for but rarely achieve. Most of the songs don't go anywhere in themselves but all head in one direction- Pavement Rich in Gold, a blissful conclusion made more enjoyable by the work the listener has to put in to get to it. The epic collision of atmospheric drone and soaring guitar-tone had me thinking it was like Sunn O))) gone optimistic the first time I heard it which sounds crazy in retrospect, but maybe there's something there. Cleaner but just as soaring as Street Horrrsing, sweeter than Sunn O))) or Earth, more abstract than Boris, less cathartic than Yellow Swans, but heavier than Eno.

A-

buy
try

Ben Frost - Steel Wound

Ben Frost's debut - haunting, drone-heavy guitar experimentation with a melancholic core.  Great ambient record.

Steel Wound

Deaf Center - Owl Splinters

Deaf Center is a Norwegian ambient duo that has included modern classical influence to create a record that is very dark and dense but beautiful.  One of the better ambient records from last year.

Owl Splinters

Aphex Twin - Richard D. James Album (1996)

Having gone techno but good then consciously messing his chances at mainstream success with techno for losers and then avant-garde techno for migraines after his Eno for depressives phase, James went avant-garde migraine pop with his Richard D. James Album. I got it when I liked an Animal Collective/Black Dice split and found that the most common complaint was that it sounded like Aphex Twin gone shit. Then Richard D. James Album started playing when I took a trip through Desolace and entered the wonderfully tranquil Feralas for no reason and I got this vibe from 4 that I couldn't believe. THAT VIBE. I like it when Aphex is difficult- he really drills your brain with his drums and noises- but Richard D. James Album has a few pop songs which make it stand out. It's really very sweet. Fingerbib alone would sell me on the whole thing. Whether he went pop for the sake of introspection as the title suggests, or to push electronica into a more generally human area as fans believe, it's certainly human- this sounds corny but every time I hear 4, Fingerbib,To Cure A Weakling Child, Goon Gumpas, and Girl/Boy Song I get all warm inside knowing that a) they exist, and b) I've heard them. Even the more difficult tracks often have appealingly odd structures, sweet ambience behind the drums, or unsettling mini-atmospheres like there's a beautiful/sad world behind all the layers and avant-garde showiness. It might just be that he knows when to pair two obvious elements- the sample toward the end of Girl/Boy Song slowing to a close as he continues to aggressively scatter his drums- but that's still worthy of praise. Really though, it's the vibes, however he went about breathing life into various sources, mechanical drums and senseless noises. Fact is there's the life there and I'm gonna stop writing now 'cause that cover is staring right at me

A

buy 1/2
spotify

Polygon Window - Surfing On Sine Waves (1992)

Oh music! How something like

Surfing On Sine Waves is rave music for weird people on downers who won't dance

can either be a compliment or an insult depending on who reads that/agrees with it

A-

I think it's cool

bitch

spotify