MUSIC
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The latest act to emerge from MFM's new album series is another super-powerful one. Heisei No Oto" is a masterpiece that presents even Japan's unique book-off style digs to the world, and "Virtual Dreams" is a must-have 90's techno and house compilation that looks through the prism of the new age revival. The Zenmenn, a mysterious new band from the newly established Music From Memory label, has released their debut album. Their fresh and organic indie music is a combination of oriental lefty pop, new age/ambient, Sufjan Stevens, and even Shintaro Sakamoto. The band's name may also come from the word "Zen"? Their timeless sound and vibes make for a great listening experience no matter where you are!
Originally released in 1978, Music By William Eaton is a private-press album from the accomplished experimental stringed instrument builder. The atmospheric recording techniques, mixed with a hint of Fahey/Takoma-lineage make for a listening experience akin to the mountainscape drawing represented on the album cover. The experience may seem simple at first, but like any great trip in nature, new details consistently reveal themselves upon each listen.
“When I started building instruments, playing guitar took on a whole new dimension. From the conception to the birth of each instrument, new layers of meaning unfolded. Cycles, connections and interdependencies became apparent as I contemplated the growth of trees from seed to old age, and the transformation from raw wood to the building of a musical instrument. I sought out quiet natural environments to play and listen to the “voice” of my 6 string, 12 string, 26 string (Elesion Harmonium) and double neck quadraphonic electric guitar. Deep canyons contained a beautiful resonant quality and echo. A starlit night with a full moon provided all the reflection and endless space by which to project music into the cosmos. The sound of a bubbling stream and singing birds added a natural symphonic tapestry to a melody or chord pattern. As I perceived it, everything was participating in a serendipitous dance. Everything was part of the music.
During this time, I decided to record an instrumental album of music. The idea was simple; it would be a series of tone poems with no titles or any information attached, only the words ‘Music by William Eaton.’ While some of the songs evolved out of composed chord progressions, most of the songs were played spontaneously, only on the occasion of the recording. These improvised songs haven’t been played since.” -- William Eaton
EM Records celebrates Roland P. Young’s 80th adventurous year on the planet with “Spontaneous Bounce”, the sixth RPY solo release on the label. After a musical youth in Kansas City followed by audio activities in San Francisco and New York and elsewhere, he began releasing self-produced solo music in 1980 with “Isophonic Boogie Woogie”, the title of which hints at the forward-thinking yet earthy nature of his sound, a soulful and spiritual multi-world avant-music, drawing on elements of ambient, jazz, soul, new age and electronic music. His ‘Isophonic Music’ concept crystallizes these elements through a comprovisational use of soprano sax, keyboards, drum machines and the possibilities of the recording studio. This release features 13 new pieces, a diverse array of appealing and joyful celebrations of music and life. Available on CD, LP and (DL/download). Come and join the celebration!
When it first appeared in 1986, the Desert Equations: Azax Attra album was greeted with enthusiasm, awe and disbe- lief: nobody had done anything quite like that before, and this dizzying, inspired blend of Persian tradition, New York avant-garde and electronic music remains incomparable, powerful and mesmerising to this day.
Combining the sublime voice of Iranian vocalist Deyhim and the electronic wizardry of US composer Horowitz, Desert Equations wonderfully blends the duo’s multiple sources, including their experiences at the epicentre of New York’s early ‘80s avantgarde music and theatre scene, Sussan Deyhim’s intimate knowledge of traditional Persian music and its reverberation in modern Iranian arts, and Richard Horowitz’s background in jazz (he spent time with Paris-based US freejazz expats in the ‘70s, and played with Braxton, Steve Lacy and Alan Silva), electronics and the folk music of Morocco (where he lived for a while).
This haunting and futuristic album prompted writer Paul Bowles to wonder: “Was this composed under the influence of Majoun?”. It then convinced filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci to entrust the soundtrack music for film adaptation of Bowles’ cult novel The Sheltering Sky movie to Richard Horowitz (which earned him a Golden Globe), and also led to a series of music/theatre Azax Attra performances at New York’s iconic experimental La MaMa Theatre.
This 2022 remastered reissue includes three previously-unreleased bonus tracks, and a rich booklet with photographs and extensive notes recounting the duo’s fascinating life stories
Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz went on to record numerous albums, together and separately, including Majoun, Logic of the Birds, Madman of God and Shy Angels (Sussan’s albums devoted to Persian Sufi poetry), Possessed and Turbulent (Sussan’s albums in collaboration with renowned visual artist Shirin Neshat), and La Belle et la Bête. Sussan Deyhim also worked with the likes of Peter Gabriel, Jah Wobble, Bobby McFerrin, Adrian Sherwood, Bill Laswell, Ornette Coleman, and Alexandre Desplats (on the soundtrack for Argo). Richard Horowitz collaborated with Jaron Lanier, Hassan Hakmoun, David Byrne, was the original artistic director of the Gnaoua Festival in Essaouira, wrote and recorded film soundtracks for Oliver Stone, Bob Swaim, and several Mococcan filmmakers including Nour Eddine Lakhmari, Faouzi Bensaidi & Souheil Ben Barka. Prior to Desert Equations, Richard had recorded and released two albums, including cult record Eros in Arabia (1981, recently reissued on NY label FTS/RVNG)
In April 2021, Deyhim and Horowitz have performed at the Nobel Prize Summit. Deyhim is currently collaborating on a new project by Philip Glass and filmmaker Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi).
Major new work from GRM director François Bonnet (aka Kassel Jaeger), featuring recent "Portraits GRM" stars Lucy Railton and Jim O’Rourke and filtering eerie drones and tones into a shapeless but deep-hitting rumble of waterlogged sound. It's a hypnotic, deeply human album that enshrines Bonnet's memories in layer upon layer of tonal mud; if we dig too deep or concentrate too hard, we are ourselves become engulfed in the swamp, part of the opera. Highly recommended listening if yr into Iancu Dumitrescu, Richard Lerman, Jimmy O'Rourke.
When Bonnet was a child, he would venture out every Sunday to his favorite spot in the countryside: a swamp. Years later, he has composed a drone opera to memorialize these pivotal early moments, drawing a parallel between his love of the swamp and his own musical output, which was described by a teacher as swamp-like. "I guess because of the lack of demonstrative musical shapes and articulations," Bonnet admits.
Regaled with an awesome capacity for inducing ur states of trance, and just as likely to rip you out of it and off onto darker paths, ‘Swamps / Things’ blurs the line between the organic and synthetic, as instruments are contorted to sound like synthesizers and heaving pulses take on the character of orchestral flourishes. Layers of sound come on in diffracted waves of elemental and perplexing emotions that speak to Bonnet's remarkable breadth of vision as much as his rich palette. In a sense, he extends his role as artistic director of the GRM to a metaphorical director of sound in a mostly instrumental and multi-dimensional opera whose meaning may be elusive, but whose dramaturgy is enacted in the most absorbing, ravishing ways.
"Sound is abstract. When the source is elusive, narrative and meaning shift between the concrete and obscure. With his first solo LP with Shelter Press, Swamps/Things, Kassel Jaeger wades into this foggy, conceptual realm. From memory and metaphor - sliding fluidly through the imagistic and emotive - emerges an immersive, cavernous world that rethinks electroacoustic music on organic terms.
‘Swamps/Things’ was conceived as an opera without distinct characters or text. It draws Kassel Jaeger into his own history, experiences, and the unlikely double of the swamp, a landscape that has held literal and metaphorical sway over him since childhood. Merging 8 works as a total environment, abstaining from distinct shape or discrete articulation, across the album's breadth, sound becomes a shifting mirror for the bubbling, ordered chaos of organic life.
Resting at the junction of concept, emotion, and phenomena - tapping the multidimensional potential for narrative and meaning possessed by each - Swamps/Things encounters an artist of remarkable craft, delving toward the unknown, deploying organized sonority as object and environment, as much as action, movement, passage, and arc. Seemingly possessed by an entropy entirely its own, the temporal gives way to the poetics of space, while the density of an endlessly evolving climate, laden with cacophonous happenings, renders itself still. Flickering images of the natural world - memory and the imagined reformed as sound - present an operatic double for human action and thought. From deep, fog like banks of minimalist long tone, to industrial clamors left as tracks in the mud, or the collisions of shifting pulses, overtones, and textures - captured from across the murky, drone laden waters between the acoustic and synthetic realms - moody, howling cries and tense meditations merge in ambient sheets, capturing a fleeting image of where decomposition gives way to new growth.
A remarkably intimate and forward-thinking aural balm, bristling with complex beauty, Shelter press is overjoyed to present Kassel Jaeger’s Swamps/Things. Two immersive, intoxicating sides overflowing with humanity and ideas."
Antidawn reduces Burial’s music to just the vapours.
The record explores an interzone between dislocated, patchwork songwriting and eerie, open-world, game space ambience.
In the resulting no man's land, lyrics take precedence over song, lonely phrases colour the haze, a stark and fragmented structure makes time slow down.
Antidawn seems to tell a story of a wintertime city, and something beckoning you to follow it into the night. The result is both comforting and disturbing, producing a quiet and uncanny glow against the cold. Sometimes, as it enters 'a bad place', it takes your breath away. And time just stops.
