FR 125: Nameless Glories and Necessary Escapes
New music from Bea Brennan, Siavash Amini, Jonny Nash, and more
I woke up a few weeks ago with a ringing in my ear. Just the right one. Tinnitus, I knew immediately. I’ve had inklings of it before, but never anything like this. It was so loud that it almost seemed to be coming from outside my head. Fuck, I thought. I couldn’t think about much else. Where had it come from, I wondered? How had something this all-consuming descended upon me while I slept? It wasn’t there when I went to bed, and now it was all I could think about. At breakfast, I struggled to clock what my wife and daughter were even talking about. I felt cocooned inside the assault.
I figured it had something to do with my sinuses; I felt half stuffy, so I took two ibuprofen and hoped they might have some effect. After walking my daughter to school, I laced up for a run. Couldn’t hurt, I thought. Could I listen to music? Should I listen to music? Checked a few audiologists’ sites, checked Reddit, couldn’t find anything telling me not to, so I popped in my Jabras, hit the “run” button on my watch, and made for the trail.
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to spend some time with Shudder to Think’s Pony Express Record; today seemed like as good an opportunity as any. As I ran, a funny thing happened: The ringing in my ear dissipated; the adrenaline and the music took over. Hitting a long dirt road that’s a favorite part of my regular route, “X-French Tee Shirt” came on. I may have done a little bit of air-drumming as I ran. I came very close to shedding a tear or two from sheer pleasure.
I haven’t been running as much as I’d like over the past month, because I haven’t had the time—only two or three times a week, instead of three or four; I won’t even crack 100 kilometers for the month, which annoys me. Somehow, though, I ended up logging one of my best times yet on my regular route, and without even particularly trying. (It might help that I never actually looked at my watch—a first—which means that I wasn’t plagued by the nagging feeling that I ought to be running faster.) When I got home and took out my earbuds, I was thrilled to realize that the tinnitus was almost gone. Was it the running? The ibuprofen? Who knows, but I’m not complaining. Maybe I sweat it out.
A few hours after my run, I put on Shudder to Think’s Get Your Goat, an album I hadn’t listened to in decades, and instantly had a kind of sense memory of the Vassar College campus in 1992. The color of the air, the cant of the ground, the weight of a familiar anxiety in my bones. It flashed up and was gone, gone so thoroughly that I’m mostly inventing what it felt like, trying to chase down the tail of a memory. It’s funny, though, how music can open a portal to another dimension, a former you, however fleetingly.
Today’s newsletter is a roundup of as many new and recent releases as I could manage—after my two weeks in Portland, I still feel like I’m making up for lost time—featuring Bea Brennan, Siavash Amini, Andrew Pekler, Jonny Nash, Jo Johnson, and more. Every one is a portal, even if it’s the first time you’re hearing it. Or at least, that was the case for me.
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Record of the Week
Bea Brennan: Trances People Live (Old Technology)
“My mission is to explore the boundaries of psychedelic music,” Surgeon has said, which makes Bea Brennan the perfect fit for Old Technology, the label he runs with Dan Bean. That’s not to say that Brennan’s music is extreme. It is, however, uncommonly deep, even at its simplest. Just look at a track like “Focus,” from Day, Time Variations, her 2020 debut for the label, and the way it seems to smuggle untold dimensions inside the detuned shifts of her synthesized mallets, as though turning the marimba into a psychoacoustic Trojan Horse.
Her new album Trances People Live begins with surprising force, if only because the bulk of the LP is so understated: The opening track is dominated by a fat, buzzing synth lead, tossed this way and that by the pitch wheel—it feels almost like a slow, lyrical reinterpretation of a Mentasm stab as a doleful sawtooth lullaby, one that mellows as it twists and turns over the course of its five-minute run. What all these pieces bear in common is a spirit of simplicity: Most appear to have been made with little more than a handful of synthesizer patches, if that, letting timbral and rhythmic movement do most of the work. In “Chance,” a soft cluster of tones flutters just out of sync with a dubwise pulsing chord. In “A Fanciful or Impractical Idea or Theory,” a whimsical sequence blithely goes about its pinwheeling business, occasionally gliding over stumbling explosions of drums.
Her canny use of contrast often gives the impression that multiple tracks are glimpses of a single idea from different angles, or in different light: The sharp attack and wavy lines of “The Unconscious” make me think of the beveled edges of a pane of patterned glass; “Flutes and Tubes” might be the same window glimpsed at night, the headlines of passing cars caught in its curves and crags. The final trio of tracks—“Freedom,” “Rushing In,” and “Lost Track”—is particularly rewarding, a 17-minute run of hypnotic liquid swirl punctuated by tufts of contrasting texture. The whole album is a masterful piece of ambient music, both challenging and immersive—a rare blend. It’s a reminder that the boundaries of psychedelic music needn’t be brash or chaotic; they can also be soft, stealthy, and welcoming.
Albums
Siavash Amini: Caligo (40 Rooms)
Siavash Amini speaks of Caligo in terms of mutilation and decay: “things collapsing in on themselves, self-decapitating, full of cuts and sutures.” To that end, it begins with a gesture of almost shocking violence: Fifteen seconds of chiming piano, tolling like bells, are interrupted by a blast of digital white noise, at least twice as loud, that comes down with the force of a collapsing building. Gradually, forms emerge from the wreckage, tones protruding like twisted rebar. Amini lives in Tehran, and it is hard, given recent headlines, to hear such violent sounds and not think of Israel’s bombing of Iran, and of the constant threat of annihilation that ordinary Iranians live under every day.
Caligo is an album in part about the distant past: For his source material, Amini turned to early Iranian solo piano recordings, which he then manipulated and mangled, in his customary fashion. Those ghostly recordings drift through a meandering expanse of hissing and grinding, sometimes identifiable but just as often smeared into the merest suggestion of a shadow. More than most electronic composers, Siavash makes work deserving of the term “soundscape”: These aren’t so much pieces with recognizable themes or repeated patterns as configurations of shapes in virtual space. To listen to them is to wander, to navigate unfamiliar terrain as if with multiple senses—sight and feel as much as hearing—where individual milestones are less important than the seamless flow of the journey.
To submit to Caligo is overwhelming, electrifying, seductive, and also at times mind-numbing; I feel challenged by the impossibility of achieving total presence before such imposing and bewildering forms. I’m never sure where the next bend in the road will take me. And in that sense, I suppose that Caligo is not just about the strangeness of the past, but also the unknowability of the future. Terrors await; Amini’s work smooths our path with empathy and grace.
Andrew Pekler: New Environments & Rhythm Studies (Faitiche)
With 2016’s Tristes Tropiques—titled after anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ melancholy and reflective 1955 memoir, an account, in part, of the author’s travels in Brazil—Andrew Pekler set out to map a new patch of musical turf: a kind of imaginary exotica, filtering the sense of wonder and sublime unintelligibility of mid-century ethnographic recordings through the tarnished psychedelia of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and other experimental electronic music of the same era. (Back in 2017, I took that album as the inspiration for my “Exotic Desktop” mix, which kicked off with a cut from the record and spent the duration of the set probing the shadows of the sound world he’d proposed.)
Nine years and three albums later, Pekler is still pushing into the wilderness. Like Tristes Tropiques and its follow-up, 2019’s Sounds From Phantom Islands, New Environments & Rhythm Studies offers a kind of ageless, placeless retrofuturism—an amalgam of shortwave signals and insect buzz, motor oil glistening on pond scum, warped tape and water drumming. It neither breaks from the sound design of its predecessors nor offers any radically new twists on the aesthetic—I suspect if I dropped all three albums in a playlist on shuffle, I might struggle to determine which tracks came from which album. Rather than newness, it offers increased depth: deeper haze, heavier fogginess, a headier sense of disorientation. Despite the title, it feels, if anything, even less rhythmic than Tristes Tropiques’ carefully knotted modular blips; it’s muggier and more sprawling, taking the sounds of Nuno Canavarro and early Mouse on Mars and atomizing them into a fine mist. And I’m tempted to say that the emotional register is heightened, too: Just listen to the mournful “Cumbia Para los Grillos,” in which teardrop-shaped marimba drips down against rolling waves of implacable crickets.
Lippard / Arkbro / Lindwall: How Do I Know if My Cat Likes Me? (Blank Forms)
“Blue” Gene Tyranny and Phil Harmonic’s “Timing,” from Tyranny’s 1979 album Just for the Record, is a minimalist masterpiece: a series of buzzing tone clusters, played on what sounds like an organ but I presume to be the Polymoog of the album credits, punctuated by the softly murmured phrase, “Change now.” Listen long enough, and the structure of the piece reveals itself: With every “Change now,” Tyranny plays a new chord. (In an added twist, the left and right channels appear to be independent of one another, contributing to the dizzying, hall-of-mirrors effect.)
A cover of “Timing” is the first track on this remarkable album by Hanne Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwall; Lippard recites the muted instructions while Arkbro and Lindwall play organ, with the two parts once again split between stereo channels. The rest of the album plays with similar materials, to gently surrealistic ends. In “Unavailable,” Lippard gives sing-songy, Laurie Anderson-esque voice to a call-center recording (“Thank you for waiting, thank you for your call; unfortunately, all our operators are currently unavailable. You are number 6,531 in line”) over looping organs and errant splashes of telephonic tones; in “Modern spanking,” a simple enough list of recited terms (“Online banking, private banking, secret banking, silent banking”) gradually unspools into increasingly strange, playful configurations (“Knock knock, who’s there? Banking”; “Nothing between me and my expensive underwear but my own expenses… banking”), like an LLM chatbot hallucinating at the sunset of late capitalism.
My favorite is “Did you know,” which begins with a series of banal-enough facts and factoids (“Did you know that a cloud weighs over a million tons? Did you know that we are more creative in the shower?”) before gradually disintegrating into absurdity and truisms (“Did you know that maths are wrong? Did you know that you can’t fold a piece of A4 paper more than eight times? Did you know that on Venus, the day is longer than the year?”) and, eventually, cryptic poetry (“Did you know that the sun makes a sound, but we are unable to hear it? Did you know that the sound makes a sun, but we are unable to see it?”). Set against vaguely mournful, “Timing”-esque chords, Lippard’s wise, reassuring tone feels like a reminder of the way that the internet is a sea of so-called experts peddling nonsense; it might be an elegy for truth itself.
Jonny Nash: Once Was Ours Forever (Music From Memory)
Once Was Ours Forever plays like a companion to Jonny Nash’s 2023 album Point of Entry, right down to Denise Gons’ gorgeous cover art for both. The mood is hushed; the instrumentation revolves around softly strummed guitar and synths that pool like shadows in evening light. Differences between the two are subtle. I’m tempted to say that his electric guitar’s tone is even more Durutti Column-like this time around. Acoustic guitar features more prominently (see, for instance, the ruminative “Moon Seed”). The melodies are ever so slightly stickier. One song, “Rain Song,” features Satomimagae, whose barely audible murmur is the perfect fit for Nash’s music. And when Nash sings, as on the opening “Blue Dragonfly,” his voice is more upfront than before. The main difference between the two albums, though, might be a sense of easygoing confidence; without overtly changing anything, he’s gotten deeper inside the spirit of this kind of tranquil, porch-sitting ambient folk. There’s a risk, with music this gentle, that it might not go much further than “pretty,” but even at their featheriest, Nash’s sweet nothings feel quietly substantial.
Plume Girl: Unnameable Glory (mappa)
On her debut album as Plume Girl, In the End We Begin (FR 08/29/23) Austin, Texas’ Sowmya Somanath seemed to dream a new sound into being, fusing Hindustani classical singing, Auto-Tune, indie guitars, and abstract electronics into something that sparkled like the surface of a lake. She builds on that ethereal foundation on Unnameable Glory. It is, above all, an album about transformation—she weaves rāga forms through burbling pitch correction and twists the laughter of family members into rhythmic ribbons. The guitar takes on a newfound role, as ML Buch-like arpeggios snake through “Chain” and a dreamy folk melody grounds “Trees People Words,” a highlight; like Juana Molina, Somanath seems determined to strike a balance between atmosphere and song, maintaining the open-endedness of the former while placing new emphasis on the structuredness of the latter. In “Pilu,” that translates to mournful singing over simple harmonium chords; in “Holy Creek,” is plays out in more intricately crafted loops and multitracked vocals. In both cases, the results are breathtaking.
Jo Johnson: Alterations 5: Unpicking (self-released)
Jo Johnson: Escape Now (Quiet Details)
Jo Johnson is gradually unspooling her new “slow album project,” Alterations (and its subscriber-only Remnants series of offshoots and outtakes), across the course of the year via her Bandcamp page; the latest, “Unpicking,” might be my favorite of the set yet. She recorded it just a month ago, using a handful of hardware synths and sequencers, then spent a few more days arranging it. For music this ethereal, there’s a real feeling of physicality to the way her synths zigzag across the spectrum, seeking out new paths over the track’s 12-minute run. For synth fans of a cosmic predisposition, it’s essential. (The track isn’t available for streaming on Bandcamp, but you can hear a sample in the YouTube clip below.)
In the meantime, she’s just released another full album, Escape Now, for the Quiet Details label. Like all of Johnson’s work, it’s quietly intense music that rewards focused listening. Her use of dynamics is downright daring: The album opens with nested oscillations so quiet that you’ll need to turn up your system considerably in order to appreciate them—beware, then, the sudden entrance of plunking bass tones just past the two-minute mark, which seem to grow even louder as the song drifts forward. “Beyond the Light” might sound negligible at low volumes, a mere fistful of wispy synth figures; but turn it up, and the friction generated by the rapid-fire LFOs becomes almost overpowering, creating an unsettling psychoacoustic counterbalance to the gently turning melody. “An Unexpected Observation” offers a brief respite—soothing, SAW II-like chimes paired with lyrical synth lead and the occasional flute—before things turn more ominous on the pensive, bassy “Stop the Transmission.”
I find a new favorite every time I listen; right now I think it’s the comparatively placid “A New Movement,” whose pauses are as crucial to its development as its deeply resonant synth tones. “I think there’s a quiet absence in places,” Johnson said in a recent interview. “I’ve focused on tails—extending the edge of sounds with various fx. Pauline Oliveros said ‘Listen right out to the edge’ and ‘It’s all in the listening, not in the playing.’ So I’ve given sounds space and I’ve given a lot of attention to the non-musical sounds made playing live instruments, details like the brush of fingers on strings, a creak from Emile’s chair, my breath and non-verbal utterances.” Nowhere is that attention to detail more apparent than in the gradually unfurling “Lessons in Listening,” a 19-minute journey notable for its extreme patience.
OSMIUM: OSMIUM (Invada)
OSMIUM make very good music for very bad moods. The quartet is something of a supergroup: cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, vocalist Rully Shabara (of Indonesian avant-metal duo Senyawa), Emptyset’s James Ginzburg, and producer/sound designer Sam Slater, whose credits include work with Ben Frost, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and Guðnadóttir. That list of names tells you that texture will be paramount here, and it is—a veritable feast of scrape and clang and churn, viscous as sludge metal, treacherous as floodwaters brimming with debris. I saw them at Unsound last year, yet I’d still be hard pressed to say exactly what they’re doing here; save for Shabara’s guttural grunts and screams, the rest is all swirled together in a gut-punching amalgam of rhythmic bursts and monotone throb. There’s a reason the album’s eight tracks are untitled—they aren’t so much discrete songs as varied snapshots of a single oppressive, claustrophobic state of mind. The album didn’t click with me when I first heard it, but lately, as the news is making me angrier and angrier, it’s suddenly making a lot more sense.
Kirk Barley: Lux (Odda)
Kirk Barley: Billow. (Health)
The electroacoustic etudes of Kirk Barley’s 2023 album Marionette were good, but Lux, released this past March, beguiles in a whole new way. Physically modeled synth plucks and microtonal chimes occasionally recall the blazing timbres of Aleksi Perälä’s music, while the oddball percussive bursts—like the ersatz metal drum rolls of “Verre”—bring to mind Rupert Clervaux. Barley’s tracks feel like small, self-contained machines, Rube Goldberg contraptions in which sequences spin like wheels and any given ping or thwack, might set off a chain reaction of cascading tones. Despite the extreme repetition, the timekeeping is liquid, lending an elastic back-and-forth as patterns expand and contract, over and over. It’s incredibly hypnotic stuff.
The three tracks on the new EP Billow., out this week, date from around the same time as Lux was recorded and share the same basic vibe—shimmery microtones, bauble-like drops of sound, loping rhythms that roll from side to side like tennis balls on a fishing boat. If anything, they’re both simpler and more captivating than Lux’s tracks: “Knead” could soundtrack a character pushing through a beaded curtain in a video game, the joystick toggling back and forth over the threshold; “Blues Wash” mimics flotsam in the tide. The longest track, “Beach,” is the most static: It reminds me of fogbanks clutching the long sweep of the Oregon coast at Manzanita or Cannon Beach, stick figures every now and then emerging and being swallowed back up again.
EPs
ex_libris: ex_libris 001 (ex_libris)
ex_libris: ex_libris 002 (ex_libris)
After nearly a decade away, Dave Huismans—better known as 2562 and A Made Up Sound—returns with a new alias, ex_libris, and two EPs filled with some of the most singular music of his career. To borrow a quote that Will Lynch referenced in his great Pitchfork review, Huismans once said, “I probably never even expected my music to be played in a club.” That sentiment resonates from the two EPs’ six tracks, which could clearly care less about anything as base as DJ friendliness or dancefloor functionality. “26 (Chapel)” is a seven-minute-long, 100-BPM dirge. “#25 (Below Surface)” is marginally faster but even sludgier, with Dettinger-like reversed drum hits congealing over a sluggish 4/4 kick. “#8 (Cascade)” feels like it’s been fed through the digital mulcher, Actress-style, turning its flyaway synths into confetti. That’s not to say that there aren’t some powerful grooves here: “#13-20 (Wetlands)” is a collage-heavy trip, a DJ set condensed into just under 11 minutes, that has me thinking of Moodymann and Ricardo Villalobos in its shapeshifting slouch toward bedlam.
But even the heaviest tracks—just check the incendiary percussion programming of “#3 (Running Out)”—feel like they’re maybe only incidentally floor-oriented; they may be body-moving, but the real emphasis is on the low-key psychedelia of Huismans’ sound design, which manages to weave untold numbers of samples (I’m assuming this stuff is mostly sample-centric) into a four-dimensional space of total possibility where everything feels interconnected, from butterfly-winged shakers to tsunami-grade bass swells. He’s clearly positioning this stuff in conversation with any number of artists, past and contemporary, including the ones I’ve mentioned and scads more, but even when you can tell where a given idea comes from, something about its unusually holistic nature—plus the simple fact that it hits so satisfyingly, whether hard or soft—makes it the freshest, most original club-not-club music I’ve heard in ages.
Various: Dial 25 Pt. 1 (Dial)
Hamburg’s vaunted Dial label turns 25 this year, and to celebrate, they’ll be putting out a series of anniversary releases. Part one is a four-track EP featuring three new names to the label, as far as I can tell, and one longtime confidante. With few exceptions, Dial releases very rarely fall far from the tree, and the same goes here; much like Smallville after them, the fundamental Dial-ness of any given Dial release is a big part of their draw. They’re one of the most consistent labels in European house and techno, even if that sometimes means sacrificing a little bit of surprise. All four tracks here offer small but significant tweaks to the atmospheric deep house playbook. Swiss producer Lb Honne’s “Untitled Wechsel” arrays a handful of wriggly little riffs over a dry boom-tick pulse and sunset-pink chords; Barcelona’s Tibi Dabo pulls triumphantly colorful chords out of a stripped-down drum groove, like a magician producing knotted scarves from a black felt hat. Swiss producer Dolomea’s “Wrapped in Space” neatly balances melancholy chords—always one of Dial’s calling cards—with sneakily complex drum programming, with all manner of almost inaudible details flickering in the background. Best of all is Efdemin’s “Be Here Now”—in many ways, it’s the subtlest of them all, with little in the way of hooks or riffs or standout details. But, like so-callled quiet luxury, it simply exudes sumptuousness.
Braga Circuit: Fall (air miles)
I’m not sure who Braga Circuit is, and I don’t know much about the air miles label, either, but this record sank its hooks in me as soon as I heard it. Three tracks of the lushest deep house imaginable—shades of DJ Koze, Axel Boman, even Pépé Bradock—with an uptempo skip and sweetly summery vibe. I love the garagey rattle of the syncopated snares, and I love the way he uses carefully placed samples—the “fall in love” hook of the title track, or a little fillip of Ronny Jordan-style guitar in “Closer”—to draw out a little extra emotional juice. There’s really nothing fancy about ’em—just perfectly calibrated heartstring-tugging house jams for feeling sentimental on a summer’s eve.
Car Culture: Nothingburger (naff)
Here’s a curveball from Physical Therapy’s Daniel Fisher, picking up his Car Culture project for the first time since 2021. The dubbed-out, filter-heavy guitar and drum loops of “Coping Mechanism” sounds a little like yacht rock as filtered through OPN’s Chuck Person; the title track flips a two-note bassline and a single murmured refrain into dream-pop perfection. Curveballs upon curveballs: New York rockers Hotline TNT deliver a fuzzed-out kinda emo cover of “Nothingburger” that’s totally unexpected and kinda rad, while Purelink bring it all back home with an ambient dub reduction of “Coping Mechanism” that burbles like prime Vladislav Delay.
Ali Berger & the Next Level Commitment: Triangle / Presentation (Trackland)
Ali Berger makes some of the sleekest, most propulsive house and techno out there. This is not that. Both of these tracks could easily have appeared on Rephlex in the mid 1990s: “Presentation” is a weirdly lumbering, eight-minute fugue for FM keys and disjointed drum programming—imagine someone sleepwalking into the kitchen and absent-mindedly drinking milk directly from the carton, and that’s a little what this feels like. (To me, anyway.) But it’s the A-side’s “Triangle” that really grabbed my ear: The analog squiggles are dead ringers for a sound from the legendary 1993 Vibert/Simmonds album Weirs (one of my all-time Rephlex faves); the whole thing, in fact, channels that record’s bizarre, utterly wonky mechanical charm.
Recommended Reading / Watching
Andy Beta on Tim Barnes
I’m frustratingly unfamiliar with Tim Barnes’ work, despite the fact that he’s worked with many of my favorite artists over the years. Today, he’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, and unable to make music, but a pair of recent collaborations gather his collabs with Oren Ambarchi, Joshua Abrams, Roberto Carlos Lang, Mike Watt, various Tortoise members, and others. Andy Beta looks back on his own formative interactions with Barnes in early-’00s NYC.
Marc Masters on Tim Barnes
Marc Masters, who profiled Barnes in the Wire nearly 20 years ago, digs deeper into his story, speaking with Ken (“Bundy”) Brown, the Tortoise co-founder who organized a pair of benefit compilations for Barnes, Lost Words and Noumena. [Bandcamp]
Ben Cardew on Crydamoure
I’d always considered the Daft Punk-affiliated labels Roulé and Crydamoure to be two sides of the same Franc, but Ben Cardew—as authoritative a critic as French house has, at least in English—makes a good argument for what makes Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo and Eric Chédeville’s Crydamoure the more entertaining of the two labels, at least if measured by the sheer number of thrills packed into a single side of a 12-inch record.
Balmat News
Patricia Wolf: Hrafnamynd (Balmat)
Patricia Wolf’s second album for Balmat is finally out in the world, and—of course I’m going to say this, but it’s true—it’s a special one. Melodic, richly textured ambient music that’s contemplative, atmospheric, and a little bit moody, but never lapses into sentimentalism or cliche. She made much of the album using a synthesizer called the Udo Super 6, and it’s a good thing that I don’t have any free time, because otherwise I would be very tempted to buy one.
Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty and Hahn Rowe: Second (Balmat)
Stephen Vitiello’s collaboration with drummer Brendan Canty and multi-instrumentalist Hahn Rowe came out a month ago, and it’s been a real treat to see people picking up on it, including Zensounds, Bandcamp’s Ted Davis, and writer David James, whose Bluesky account is one of the best sources of music recommendations I know.
That’s it for this week—thanks for reading!
I’m afraid I can uniquely testify to the sad fact that repeated listens of X-French do not help tinnitus):
Shudder To Think! This music video was filmed at my town’s pool In Maplewood, NJ when I was like 12 years old. https://youtu.be/-p01aPWsJw0?si=Y3G1bF0o-NAu4A1i