Futurism Restated #91: Onomatopoeic Reflections

New releases from Félicia Atkinson, CCL, Jim O’Rourke, and more

Last weekend, my wife and I treated ourselves to a trip to Barcelona to see Jessica Pratt in concert—airfare, hotel, the whole shebang. It was worth it. Pratt’s Here in the Pitch is one of my favorite albums of the year, one of the rare albums that I’m so captivated by that I actually struggle to find words for it. All the frameworks that occur to me—its atmospheric qualities, its vintage air, its strange mix of eeriness and tenderness—feel both obvious and inadequate to pinpoint what’s actually so special about it. Maybe that’s what I like so much about it: its essential and enduring mystery. 

In any case, Pratt’s show exceeded my expectations in virtually every way. To begin with, her voice was far better in a live context than I’d imagined it might be; despite the absence of the studio techniques that give it that trademark yesteryear patina on the record, every iota of timbral nuance was happening right there in front of you, in real time. It was remarkable to witness a voice like that in all its effortless control (even more so afterward, when I learned she’d had to cancel a string of shows because she’d been ill). And she and her bandmates effortlessly recreated the snow-globe effect of the record, again, far more faithfully than I thought might be possible outside a studio (yet without ever sounding too much like a simulacra of the album; these songs were living, breathing beings). The bassist/backup vocalist, Nico of Harmony Index, was fantastic, and Matt McDermott’s keyboards provided crucial glue to keep it all together. I was shocked, when she introduced the band, to discover that the backup guitarist/saxophonist was none other than Diego Herrera, aka Suzanne Kraft. As I found out later, he was also mixing and processing her voice; no wonder there was such a foggy ambient sensibility to their melting-through-walls-of-sound approach.

Another welcome surprise was Mood Hut honcho Jack J’s opening set; I only learned he’d be performing a few hours before the show, when the ticketing platform sent me an email noting the night’s schedule. He played a stripped-down version of songs from his album (as well as a Spacemen 3/Spiritualized cover, the name of which I’ve forgotten), just him with an electric guitar, over backing tapes of skeletal drums, keys, and bass. He’s a real crooner, in the best way, and, for all his understatedness, a compelling stage presence; if it was your first encounter with him, you’d never have guessed that he came from underground house music. I’d love to see him be able to take the music further in that direction, with a proper full band, but this time, at least, the economic constraints of touring as a warmup act made that impossible—and no matter, because his stripped-down hybrid set was completely captivating on its own. (I wrote about his album in FR88.)

(If you do go see Jack J open for Jessica Pratt, be sure to bring some cash for one of his t-shirts. They’re excellent! A sort of ’90s hippie abstract design of, like, a dancing guy, but it doesn’t really look like a person, necessarily. It doesn’t even say Jack J anywhere; just a real if-you-know-you-know deal. Wearing mine, I feel like a hacky sack player going to compete in the regional finals, or maybe a college student backpacking through Ecuador in the early ’90s. Either way, it’s a surprisingly solid look.)

Via Ned Raggett, RIP to J. Saul Kane, aka Depth Charge / the Octagon Man, a towering figure in UK electro and breakbeats. And RIP, too, to Oakland rapper Saafir. I’ll confess that I only knew one song, “Not Fa Nuthin’,” which I bought on 12-inch at Amoeba records sometime around 1999 or 2000, and which I played the hell out of—especially in its instrumental version—in my Sunday night DJ residency at Dalva, in San Francisco’s Mission District. In its shimmering synth pads and reversed cymbals, the beat (produced by Carlos “Six July” Broady) might as well have been a Prefuse 73 or Dabrye record, easily as “electronic” as anything on Warp. 

This week’s recommendations lean toward the ambient end of things, including new releases from Félicia Atkinson, Zaumne, and Earthen Sea, and some late-’80s reissues from Jim O’Rourke in his tabletop guitar era

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Record of the Week

Zaumne: Only Good Dreams for Me (Warm Winters)

The ghost of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II would be right at home in Zaumne’s new album for Warm Winters; the opening “Lucid,” with its cottony vocal samples and humid shimmer, sounds a little like a mashup of SAW II’s first and third tracks (which is of course to say that it’s manna from heaven); the closing track, “The Open Window,” could pass for one of the Aphex album’s sweeter, more consonant tracks (“Blue Calx,” say) played back at 45 instead of 33. But Only Good Dreams for Me is more varied than your average RDJ homage. There’s whispery ASMR poetry on “Angel Security” and “Love2,” featuring Natalia Panzer, and gothed-out ambient dream pop on the title track. The ’90s vibe is strong: “Airport City” whips up skeletal trip-hop out of little more than sub-bass, dubbed-out snare, and sad pads, while the cottony “Iskra” channels Seefeel and Mark van Hoen. A stray thought: the string pads on the title track also remind me of Astrid Sonne’s dirge-like pop; it’s a good year for hynagogic misrememberings of long-ago sounds. And as far as bleary-eyed psychedelia, the melted strings and standup bass of “Sleepwalking” make for one of the most captivating moments of the whole record. 

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Albums

Earthen Sea: Recollection (Kranky)

Black Eyes / Mi Ami alumnus Jacob Long’s latest album as Earthen Sea, his fourth for Kranky, was inspired by a year spent listening to ECM records, a factoid that’s not hard to imagine, given the soothing reverb and abiding hush of the recording. (A wise choice, then, to opt for a decidedly non-ECM-looking sleeve, to avoid appearing too on the nose.) And, thankfully, Recollection doesn’t really sound to me like an out-and-out pastiche, or even an outward homage; I hear just as must post-rock and dub in its serpentine movements and muted glow. Dub techno and ambient dub have always been key influences for Earthen Sea’s work, but part of the pleasure of Recollection is how it moves away from explicitly electronic terrain and into a zone where you could conceivably imagine everything being played by a three- or four-piece band. And, indeed, Long has returned to the electric bass here, and plays drums for the first time on record—shifts in methodology that go a long way toward the warmth and looseness of the recording. In many ways, it feels like the quintessentially Kranky record, positioning itself right at the midpoint of all the sounds—ambient, dub, post-rock—that comprise the Chicago label’s enduring Venn diagram. 

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Félicia Atkinson: Space as an Instrument (Shelter Press)

True to its title, Félicia Atkinson’s Space as an Instrument feels less like a collection of songs, or even a single longform composition (a more apt description), than a three-dimensional (or four-dimensional, even) space that invites you to wander, hover, drift, and linger. Slow, path-seeking piano improvisations, like Harold Budd via Grouper, meander—in the oldest sense of the term, which comes from the Turkish river Menderes—through a shapeless terrain of field recordings, synthesizers, and sourceless rustle, giving shape and perspective to the formlessness. Atkinson’s voice comes and goes, sometimes audible, sometimes masked by stray sounds like the wind against the grille of the mic. Her reflections contribute to the pensive mood but never dominate, never dictate the terms; like the splashing water and birdsong half-registered at the edge of the recording, they’re simply another eddy in the current, small vortices carrying stray thoughts on their journey to nowhere. The centerpiece, “Thinking Iceberg,” was inspired by philosopher Olivier Remaud’s Thinking Like an Iceberg, which invites us to consider the passage of time from the perspective of a frozen aquatic mass as it dissolves into the warming seas, and you can really feel that zoomed-out sensibility in the song’s flowing movements.

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Jim O’Rourke: Steamroom 63 (Steamroom)

Jim O’Rourke: Steamroom 64 (Steamroom)

Jim O’Rourke: Steamroom 65 (Steamroom)

My first Jim O’Rourke solo album, many years ago now, and quite early in his career, was 1992’s electroacoustic Disengage, which I probably bought at Other Music or Kim’s Video sometime around 1994 or 1995, and which I had absolutely no idea how to process at the time, though I was fascinated by it—and more than a little intimidated, too. But much of his early work, which I quickly immersed myself in, was guitar-centric: records like the 1992 K.K. Null collaboration New Kind of Water; or his 1992 collaboration with Henry Kaiser, Tomorrow Knows Where You Live, an album so dizzyingly complex I had to check just now to make sure I didn’t have a second YouTube window open; or the quartet record Acoustics, where he and Kaiser both play acoustic guitar, with John Oswald on alto sax and Mari Kimura on violin. I had largely forgotten about that facet of his work until last week, when O’Rourke put up a trilogy of late-’80s guitar recordings on the Steamroom Bandcamp.

You can tell from his notes that he’s in archive-sifting mode. Steamroom 63, a 1987-88 cassette recording of solo tabletop guitar, was meant to be released on France’s SJ Organization label, but never was. “i don’t remember what happened,” he writes. “Some tracks may have ended up on a compilation or different cassetes, but again, i don't remember. maybe not.” Steamroom 64’s two long tracks are live recordings from Chicago, which may have been edited down for early cassette releases, but again, O’Rourke’s memory fails him. “these are the original unedited recordings, for better or for worse,” he notes. He’s similarly fuzzy—and similarly self-doubting—about Steamroom 65’s unreleased 1989 recording: “i think it may have been intended for G.R.O.S.S., but have a feeling i may have decided it wasn't very good. that may still be the case.”

Such self-deprecation is par for the course (Byron Coley noted O’Rourke’s extreme humility in this 2018 piece), so we can simply ignore it. Abstract in the extreme, these (presumably improvised) albums may not have the complexity of his electroacoustic work, to say nothing of his “rock” records, but they’re overflowing with atmosphere, mood, and even attitude, that most rock & roll of all qualities (even though these are decidedly not rock records). They remind me a bit of the late Dean Roberts’ work from the same period; beneath the sooty reverb, they’re swimming with ghosts. They’re not really close-listening records; I like to have them on in the background, letting the color the air of the room. Steamroom 63 collects five rusty, ragged drone pieces—sometimes aggressive, sometimes barely audible. Steamroom 64’s A-side is 18 minutes of nervous flicker and Sonic Youth clang, while the B-side is a perpetually shapeshifting drone swarm (with a somewhat distracting drop in volume about halfway through, but you get over it). Steamroom 65 is the most expansive of the three: 38 and a half minutes of subway-tunnel creak and ringing dissonance that veers into surprisingly lyrical fingerpicking in its back half; from the piece’s gentle drift and elliptical movements, if you told me he’d used an Alexander Calder mobile as his “score,” I’d believe you.

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Joseba Irazoki: Gitarra Lekeitioak (Onomatopoeikoa II) (Cafe OTO)

While we’re talking about guitar, it’s a good moment to mention the new album from Euskaldun (Basque) artist Joseba Irazoki, released via Cafe OTO’s Otoruki label. For Futurism Restated readers, the immediate appeal may be the appearance of Raphael Rogiński on one song, “ORKA,” where the pair’s parts slip together like interleaved feathers. But the solo tracks hooked me. Irazoki has a slightly more aggressive style than Rogiński; he likes his guitar coated in a layer of fuzz, and his attack is a little more jagged. But he also favors clean lines and empty space; even at their busiest, his songs don’t have the chaotic edge of, say, Tashi Dorji’s. His playing can be both whimsical (particularly in the tremolo-affected “RO27,” say) and wistful, sometimes at the same time. I particularly like the openendedness of it; on songs like “OAM,” he sketches out lyrical melodies, only to bend away from them, scattering the notes like light through a prism.

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Best Buy Soundsystem: on sale now (3 X L)

Between the corporate cosplay alias and album title and the vernacular architecture of the (wonderful) cover art, it’s not exactly surprising that this three-track EP from Shy’s 3 X L should toy with ambient anonymity. All three tracks keep it low key to the extreme, but there’s still plenty to sink into. “Indica K” stirs up 18 murky minutes of errant laser zaps, metal clang, and underground parking garage reverb, like an extra numb y2k-era Vladislav Delay; “lostride the fuck” is a combination of Windex streaks and headstone rubbings, trip-hop rendered in the negative. My favorite is DJ Paradise’s “april 22,” a nine-minute dip in the flotation tank in which fogged-out fifths are sloshed to and fro by the gentlest back-and-forth rhythms, an ominous rumbling vibrating the walls of the chamber. Dream Collision Center, indeed.

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John Hudak: Field House Five (sirr-ecords)

It’s been far too long since I paid close attention to the work of John Hudak; I remember his 2001 album Pieces of Winter, with Stephan Mathieu—in which falling snow and freezing ice cover a contact mic left outside overnight, the sounds subsequently sculpted into shimmering pieces that resemble icicles of sound—as a fundamental example in my understanding of that era’s microsound and so-called lowercase sound. The same, really, could be said of Sirr, founded in 2001 by Paulo Raposo, Carlos Santos, and António Graça; their catalog has long been a platform for the wispier end of noise music (Pimmon, Jason Kahn, M. Behrens, Steve Roden, et al.). I don’t know exactly what processes the Upstate NY artist used to create Field House Five; the notes tell us only that these four longish pieces are meant to “evoke the cyclical patterns of the natural world,” which feels about right. The faintest sounds of chirping and humming—insects? frogs?—supply the gentle backdrop for chiming tones and warmly consonant chords whose irregularity suggests they might not even be played by human hands, but perhaps triggered by some other processes, like melting icicles or gusting wind patterns. Who knows. The four pieces feel like variations upon a theme, with the sound shifting subtly from track to track. The toy-like keys of the opening piece become organs in “Field House Five 2,” lending a Baroque, or perhaps liturgical, air; “Field House Five 3” is a Shrinky Dink guitar rattling around the interior of a broken music box, while “Field House Five 4,” my favorite, is a duet between crickets and what might be a very tired oboe. 

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RAMZi: moon tan (FATi)

A new report from the RAMZi universe is always a welcome development, and moon tan—Montréal composer and DJ Phoebé Guillemot’s first album in nearly a year and a half—is no exception. This time around, her vibed-out slices of outernational psychedelia feel even more like snapshots of pure flow state, particularly in rushing, rolling cuts like the appropriately titled “loopi.” There’s a jazzier tinge than before, too, whether it’s in the echoes of Ethio-jazz in “tutti frutti” or the liquid sax of “noite de verão”; there are also nimble breaks (“amour et paix”), shuffling street soul (“bombetta ft. Linda Fox”), reggae (“dubini,” “cha cha”), and groove-heavy steppers that don’t hew to any established template (“por el universo #2”). Throughout, it’s all steeped in RAMZi’s characteristic wash of seafoam, petals, and diamonds—a soft-focus feast for the senses.

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Singles and EPs

CCL: Plot Twist EP (K7)

For their debut solo record, CCL taps into the unconventional, neither-this-nor-that rhythms and tempos that form the core of their DJing. “Plot Twist” is a stonking breakbeat anthem whose murmured voiceover reminds me a little bit of the sci-fi vocal samples that techstep producers loved to use, except this time instead of Alien dialogue it’s a scene from the library. D. Tiffany delivers a rushing speed garage mix and Piezo sinks into a half-speed grind suffused in radiant keys. My favorite might be “Strange Attractor,” which begins as a kind of needlenosed dnb before CCL flips it into rushing breakbeat trance. I’d love to hear what it sounds like at 33 instead of 45; I suspect interesting things might happen. 

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James K: Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream (AD 93)

James K quietly became one of the year’s defining voices. There was the ethereal trip-hop of “Blinkmoth (July Mix)”; her appearance on Priori’s “Wake”; her divine track on 29 Speedway’s Ultrabody; and, especially, her turn on Fergus Jones’ Ephemera, which yielded what might be my favorite “pop” song of the year. (I’m pretty sure I’m missing some, too.) “Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream” is the next phase in her dream-pop takeover campaign, a gossamer scrap of Cocteaus-keyed ambient jungle led by some of her most honeyed singing yet. I can’t wait for the album that I can only hope will drop next year.

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Time Cow & Shani DBB: Duppy 1+2 (Precious)

Equiknoxx’s Time Cow (Jordan Chung) turns in some of his most adventurous work yet with his new single “Duppy 1+2,” commissioned as the score to a gothed-out dance video by his friend and collaborator Shani Strand. Forgoing samples and turning to generative and modular synthesis, the instrumental veers sharply away from Time Cow’s dancehall work. Lurching electronic kicks and snares occasionally congeal into dembow patterns before the slowing and speeding tempo pulls them apart again; brittle clicks and noxious synths blanket the track in a thick haze of unease.

That’s it for this week—thanks for reading!