Live at Issue Project Room (2016)

-o- / important records / boomkat / bandcamp / norman

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

MORE LIGHT (2013)

Colin Stetson is a saxophonist who uses circular breathing and well placed mics to play/record in a way that sounds like he's using loops or even a 4-piece noise band, but it's just him (!), and there are no loops or tracks, and so every sound is alive and real and immediate. His drones soothe and his melodies repeat and whirl. He wails as he breathes circularly. We hear his hands move to create the minimalistic whirls and their movements are percussive. Often when people write about him they either exhaust the less strange suggestions on thesaurus.com for searches 'difficult' and 'beautiful', or they write about catharsis, delayed gratification, masochism, minimalism, and drone. This album is the final entry in his New History of Warfare trilogy and as with the others, it is concerned with loneliness. But it is also different. Bong Iver rocks up and not only sings into a mic that isn't placed near/on Stetson's sax (I have no way of confirming this), but requests that typically Iver-ish multi-track on his falsetto. Vernon's additions upset those invested in the purity of Stetson's method. Or who just don't like Vernon. I don't mind Vernon and I appreciate the contrast. Because contrast is such a big part of To See More Light. As the trilogy's final entry, it's important that it displays a wide variety of sounds and emotions. It's physical as ever (as well as thesaurus.com search 'difficult') but spiritual. Hypnotic but gruelling. Cold but heartfelt. Lonely but searching. To See More Light is darker than ever because sometimes it goes from an anxious, rapid anger to completely losing itself and slowing down and wandering alone having expelled its evils and presumably passion/spirit along with that, that's where it's darkest, where it goes from angry to devoid (of anything other than its own lack), but then sometimes this thing happens where it finds hope or a redemption somewhere/somehow having been 0 and it doesn't end there but rather we get to see it ascend and improve and it's so fucking beautiful that you might just cry when you hear it. To See More Light didn't have to be hopeful and it didn't have to be different. But it's both and it's incredible.

A

try it out cheapo / buy it cheapo

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Penguin Cafe Orchestra (1981)

Escapist minimalism residing deep in the listener’s warmest thoughts and memories. All this thanks to Jeffes’ willingness to at times seemingly sidestep ideology for the sake of aesthetic: his instruments acoustic and his melodies changing when he thinks it’ll sound good. And it does! Hypnotic throughout as good minimalism should be, at its best every note also just hits right.

A-

spotify