I’m back on track with this column, but this one was tough to get together. We’re here, though. We made it. I’ll try to keep this intro short. Some notes:
- I do weekly updates on Patreon (this is a post from a couple of weeks ago I made public) each weekend. Personal reflections, news, recommendations, and more. Your support means the world
- Songs of Our Lives this week is with my old friend, the boss himself – Lawrence English! Don’t miss it. And hey, if you like the show, please consider leaving a rating on Apple or wherever you listen. It really helps.
- Clarities is still cooking. Great write-up from the inimitable Marc Masters last month on Bandcamp.
- I’m thinking about not doing premieres anymore starting next month.
Some jams:
Agnes Haus Everything is Resurrection (Opal Tapes)
Singed electronics fray at the margins to pull focus inward as the veil drops on Everything is Resurrection. Sonic miscalculations reform into charred paeans wrapping around the end of days like a silk noose. Agnes Haus plots forward paths while facing backward, letting the unrelenting static storm envelop our every move. Drones grow in the margins stretched across slow-moving, heavy-handed rhythms in search of descending scales. Textures saturate the dense arrangements and make them seem lighter and more permeable. It leads to surprisingly melodic escapes before descending back into the all-encompassing, disorienting aural whirlpool. The best kind of trip.
Mike Cooper & Jason Kolàr Mauve/Pink (Mondoj)
This was an immediate ‘must listen’ for me because I love Mike Cooper’s work and I love unexpected collaborations. Named after Cooper’s neighborhood in Valencia – La Malvarrosa – Mauve/Pink is distilled in time, playful and languid, like being lost within the shapes of passing clouds. Steel-string illustrations flicker on woozy layers creating throughlines to sea. Kolàr’s gentle, inquisitive electronics buoy Cooper’s aural travels into miniature galaxies, aqueous and sunbleached. Crystalized timbres dance through woozy tonic prisms tinged with the feeling of escapades in the small hours. Lap steel sequences bloom, gentle waves in the midnight air catching a ride on cascading electronic bubbles. This surprise connection between two diverging approaches builds a new sonic language by celebrating the expansive worlds that can live in small spaces.
FM Forest Before The Forest (VILL4IN)
A shroud of tape fog swirls, inviting us inside. Synth sequences burst into life and spin melodic kaleidoscopes into the canopies to wash the air in faded neon rainbows. FM Forest’s music, at times, reminds me of PNW legend, the late Norm Chambers, in the way he uses an array of instrumentation (electronics, percussion, acoustic and electric guitar, etc), but this space is more green and hazy. Melodic whispers ping the gray skies for moments of light and whimsy. Arpeggios come and go, moving at different speeds to heighten the wistfulness and wonder, carving out channels for shimmering, elegiac guitar ruminations. It’s an organic, cosmic soundworld. Minimalist rhythms bounce toward a clearing in the path where the horizon beckons.
Daphne X An Echo Of Something I Don’t Remember (Paralaxe Editions)
It’s easy to get lost in Daphne X’s latest. From the beginning, her voice is an invitation, an entry point to this multi-hued dreamworld. Electronics bubble and scrape their way through decaying landscapes and lucid fantasies. From incandescent, searing drones to resonant blacklight invocations and minimalist, textural ghost melodies. An Echo of Something I Don’t Remember is rich and beguiling, an album of aerated densities that make it immersive and stokes the need for repeated, deep listens. Silhouetted harmonies form under lost, rain-soaked memories, building intricate tonal shapes like the distance singing those memories back to us in an indecipherable language. Sadness searches for puncture marks in these sounds to sneak in, but with each expansion is an opposite contraction, keeping An Echo of Something I Don’t Remember locked tight. An incredible album from start to finish.
Early Fern Memory Garden (Aural Canyon)
Whimsical decadence spills from every sequence and arpeggiation dancing through Memory Garden. Early Fern’s work projects a dream-like quality. Bright, bouncing corridors open up to enchanted electronic expressions spread across endless green. Repetition becomes almost meditative through boundless movements. Synthesizers bubble up through the soil, flourishing in the bright sun. Quiet moments pop up, too, like the magnetic “Milky Weather,” where emotive synthscapes glow in early morning fog. Melancholic undercurrents drift forward before drying up. Memory Garden is an absolute delight.
Untight Fair (Self-Released)
Intimate just-intonated guitar explorations from Sam King (Untight) build into slow reflections. Fair builds toward its moment in the sun and earns the gentle come down, the declination of those near-fraught emotional highs. Sweet melodies repeat into oblivion, tinged with longing and distant sorrow. But each note, each sequence loosens the knots. As Fair unravels, resonance builds. With its just-intonation tuning, Fair takes on an ancient sheen as though this music has always existed, waiting for someone to pull it from the ether. Even though it’s improvised, King’s exploration has a narrative form as it searches for, and finds, catharsis with grace. Fantastic.
Rob Logan Explode the Rose (Trouble in Mind)
Explode the Rose takes us on a journey through our inner lives. Electronic vistas are condensed into emotive, exploratory vignettes built on synthesizer waves, guitar spells, minimalist beats, and a heavy dose of nostalgic drift. A host of guest musicians broaden the spectral plane, notably Richard Trunbo’s flute playing in “Portal” and Neal Vandenberg blasting theremin chaos across “Thought Loop.” Melodic arpeggios flicker and bop through broken neon corridors in search of those times that feel happier beneath a worn-down sheen. It’s all interconnected, though, and darker truths lurk in the winding, kosmische sequences. Haze obscures the sharpest frequencies, giving weight and focus to the bass underscores and rhythmic architecture bounding Explode the Rose forward. The tension between past lives and fading destinies is intertwined within each sonic narrative, and it all just pulls us in deeper.
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