Revisions of the Past reissues two albums by Panopticon, the solo vehicle of Minnesota-via-Kentucky black metal musician Austin Lunn, here remastered by Colin Marston of Krallice, Gorguts, and others.

Revisions of the Past

Panopticon, the solo vehicle of Minnesota-via-Kentucky black metal musician Austin Lunn, has created an identity for himself by never sticking to one template or root influence in his work. As of late, he’s fashioned himself to the closest thing America will get to mid-period Bathory, where Quorthon elevated black metal by bastardizing Wagner. He’s also one of the first American black metal musicians to embrace his own country’s folk traditions instead of mining Nordic lore, evident on his covers of traditional coal miner songs on Kentucky and the banjo-driven “The Long Road I: One Last Fire” from Roads to the North. Revisions of the Past collects two of his albums, On the Subject of Mortality (itself a collection of his splits with Skagos and When Bitter Sleeps) and Social Disservices, and gives them a beefed-up sound, forging a stronger bridge between Lunn’s current work and his beginnings. The results aren’t equal, though: Mortality underwent more surgery and the results dazzle, but Disservices still came out more fully formed.
Mortality take us back to when Lunn was starting out, another musician under the spell of Wolves in the Throne Room. Unlike Wolves, he’s more in tune with his punk past, seamlessly integrating the intoxication of swirling black metal with crust aggression. In “Living in the Valley of the Shadow of Death” and “Living Eulogy,” delicate melodies shine through the maelstrom. His transitions from loose dreaminess to blasting fury feel so seamless the two sensations nearly merge. Lunn had the ideas down, the execution still only halfway, which is where the new production job comes in. It makes the material rise above its origin as a series of splits, giving it the grandeur it deserves. The spoken-word and acoustic section of “Valley” feels less hollow here than on the original, and better flows with the song as a whole. Still, it’s clear that he hadn’t quite found his real voice yet.
Disservices doesn’t benefit as much from a new sheen, but that’s because it was the more compelling album to begin with, and the moment he really began to come into his own. Colin Marston originally mastered the record (and he did the same for this collection), and Disservices has an alien death metal influence that suggests a spiritual influence, too. It’s more akin to the oppressive wall-of-death sound of Impetuous Ritual than any black metal, where beginnings and ends get tangled in confusion. (The opening riff in “Patient” in particular applies Meshuggah’s robotic groove to black metal.) While the sonic upgrades may not be pronounced as those on Mortality, they do serve Lunn’s drumming, where Panopticon really stands out from the vast majority of USBM. He considers himself a drummer first, a quality he shares with fellow USBM visionaries Erik Wunder (Cobalt) and Jef Whitehead (Leviathan), and that attention gives cohesion to both Mortality’s beauty and Disservices’ utter chaos.
Disservices’ sound is only rivaled by its lyrical matter, a critique of American social services system. If it sounds lost and disjointed, it’s meant to capture the uncertainty seemingly tattooed on the people he’s singing about. Lunn rejects the notion that speaking on “real life” or “social justice” matters makes metal weaker; in making the plights of damaged children a legitimate lyrical topic, he subverts how metal usually speaks from a position of wanting power. “Subject” puts you in a terrifying position: “I own you: Trapped in a corner, fear in your eyes. I own you: Alone and terrified, crying in the dark. I own you: Slave to disorder, forever ensnared. I own you and no one will ever care.” Towards the end of “Subject,” there are riffs that sound more jubilant and hopeful, a precursor to the Bathory influence on his later records, and his drumming resembles his crust origins, trying to unleash a Tragedy-esque battle cry. It’s ultimately a defeated lament in disguise; what good is optimism if we’re fucking over the most broken among us? Lunn plunged himself into such bleakness on Disservices that he had no choice but to explore more majestic territories on the albums after this.
Lunn considers these to be the definitive versions of Mortality and Disservices, and there’s no reason to doubt him, as both are faithful to the originals and heightens their respective strong points. It’s not best taken at once, as both of the records are vastly different. Panopticon diehards would get something out of the new Mortality; Disservices is a much more broadly appealing record, one that shows that black metal can be used to teach compassion.


Morbid Angel’s ninth album sets the death metal band back on course. Featuring Trey Azagthoth’s molten solos, the band rediscover what they did well across their career and double down on it.

Kingdoms Disdained

Kingdoms Disdained, the ninth album from Florida death metal legends Morbid Angel, centers around the destruction and recreation of Earth, of a god stripping their creation from humans. In 2015, guitarist and sole original member Trey Azagthoth was facing the apocalypse of his own band, most notably vocalist and bassist David Vincent, who left to pursue a country music career in Austin. 2011’s Illud Divinum Insanus, the sole record from Vincent’s reunion, was so widely panned that it plagued their momentum long after its release. One could argue that the 2013 anniversary tour for  Covenant, Morbid Angel’s 1993 breakout record, was as much about downplaying Illud as it was celebrating a classic. Vincent played the rockstar extrovert to Azagthoth’s shred nerd, and while his voice was in pristine shape, his ’80s metal theatrics stood in odd contrast to Azagthoth’s more serious approach.
Vocalist Steve Tucker, who first replaced Vincent in 1997, returned to the band following the mass exodus. Tucker’s delivery is lower and harsher, and his albums with Morbid Angel—1998’s Formulas Fatal to the Flesh, 2000’s Gateways to Annihilation, and 2003’s Heretic—accommodated. They picked up the speed and Azagthoth’s soloing went into further tripped-out, outré directions. Kingdoms follows the same path, although instead of making Morbid Angel more brutal than ever, it sets them back on course following a disastrous experimentation.
They rediscovered what they do well across their career and doubled down on it. “Piles of Little Arms” recalls both “Heaving Earth” from Formulas in its speed and macabre, almost black metal-like passages similar to those from their debut Altars of Madness. “The Pillars Crumbling” takes the more intricate stylings from Covenant and injects it with adrenaline, finding a sweet spot between both eras of the band. Even the tracks with groove holdovers from the ’90s—“The Righteous Voice” features a slew of tantalizing string bends, and “Declaring New Law (Secret Hell)” resembles sped-up Neurosis—they’ve never felt this alive or urgent.
With a fuller production and a renewed partnership with Azagthoth, Tucker sounds even deeper and gnarlier than he has in some time. Drummer Scott Fuller replaces Tim Yeung, and like his predecessor, he brings a technical, polished performance. It’s a contrast from classic drummer Pete Sandoval, who grew out of a more traditional approach, blasting with a more natural swing. Kingdoms is so blindingly fast that, most of the time, it works, though there is a slight sense that Sandoval’s touch could have served just as well. Azagthoth ran the risk of turning Morbid Angel into a faceless tech-death band by replacing Yeung with a younger, less recognized talent, but he and Tucker are dynamic enough forces that Morbid Angel is, well, Morbid Angel again.
Kingdoms is focused for a wandering spirit like Azagthoth, and yet it’s also pretty conservative by Morbid Angel standards. There is a tiny nagging sense that you want Azagthoth to fully freak out, to unleash a solo that would actually open a portal to every parallel universe over a drum pattern no man nor machine could pull off. Still, it is wonderful to see Azagthoth has again embraced lava, his term for his soloing. “My solos are not about technique,” he said. “They're about lava. About feeling without knowing.” As such, his lead work is both guided and free-flowing. His solo at the end of “Voice” dips into ever-sinking pools with brief spikes in ecstasy; “For No Master” sounds like if ravenous birds knew how to cry like Penderecki.
It’s been an especially fruitful year for death metal—Morbid Angel’s contemporaries Obituary and Immolation put out their strongest albums in years, and there is a slew of younger bands paying homage to classic forms with their own twists. It’s fitting that Morbid Angel’s new record provides a redemption narrative for 2017’s death metal bloom. Given our collective state of affairs, an album of “acid terror” where the all-knowing creator destroys us with bizarre guitar solos and double-bass drum doesn’t sound so absurd.


On an album created entirely using iPhone and iPad apps, the UK singer and producer trades his customary futuristic soul for the house and techno of his youth.

Houses

Steve Spacek’s career has never made many waves in the mainstream, but he’s a hero to the kind of music fan who worships Gilles Peterson and rare Japanese jazz records. In 2000 his band Spacek scored an underground hit with “Eve,” which was remixed by J Dilla and later sampled by the Roots, snagging the UK group an unlikely major-label deal. But their futuristic soul was too idiosyncratic to work in such a risk-averse setting, and the association was short-lived.
Two decades on, Houses is a record you could imagine a major label might happily work with. A distant cousin of Spacek’s smoke-infused psychedelia, Houses is a painless, largely unfussy album in which Spacek returns to the house and techno of his youth. The album’s 13 tracks play out over the steady tick of 4/4 drums; you can hear the influence of deep-house pioneer Larry Heard in the airy chords and spidery bassline of “Waiting 4 You” and Detroit techno originator Kevin Saunderson in the mottled, gnarly riff of “Love 4 Nano.”
Simplicity is baked into Houses’ production. Spacek recorded the album entirely on iPhone and iPad apps, and you can tell, for good and for bad. Bad because Houses at times feels oddly thin and underworked, more demo than finished article; and good because the album has an undemanding, even liberating, lightness that isn’t always present in Spacek’s more convoluted work. What sets Spacek apart from a legion of bedroom producers and their iPad presets is his distinctive voice, which occupies the glorious interzone between Marvin Gaye’s silky croon and Robert Wyatt’s troubled falsetto.
Lead single “Rawl Aredo” features a Latin-accented house shuffle and keyboard stabs—a not overtly challenging blend that legions of budding producers have created then discarded as they get to grips with their machinery—which he marries to jazz-influenced chords and a gloriously carefree vocal, the kind of semi-scat scamper someone might croon as they cycle down a sunny street. The vocal hook of “Waiting 4 You,” which follows, is absolutely undemanding and entirely catchy, a “Wild Thing” for the bedroom deep-house set.
This approach doesn’t always come off. “African Dream” sets a meandering, rather tuneless vocal against annoyingly stuttering production that even Spacek’s angelic tones can’t rescue, while the instrumental “Songlife” is far too flimsy, a collection of vaguely swinging electronic elements that have nowhere to go and no great hurry to go there. At times like these, you wish the album’s rare moments of eccentricity—the devilishly psychedelic ending to “Where We Go,” where the production sounds like it is being flushed down the drain—could have been more frequent.
And that’s the problem: Houses feels unadventurous by design. With judicious editing, the record’s frustratingly almost-there mix of unfiltered inspiration and sketchy production might have made a great EP; with more work it could have led to a decent LP. As it is, Houses disappoints as often as it delights.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Dominick Fernow's new EP rumbles inexorably forward until it reaches a Big Crunch that sounds as apocalyptic as the one promised by some physicists. The five tracks here seem to be slowly shedding the trappings of music itself.

Time's Arrow EP

"Time's arrow" is a lovely phrase to describe the seeming unidirectional progression of time, the sense that it's been traveling perpetually forward from the Big Bang to whatever the ending point of the universe will happen to be. It's also the cheeky title of Dominick Fernow's new Prurient EP, which itself rumbles inexorably and sometimes unbearably forward until it reaches a Big Crunch that sounds as apocalyptic as the one promised by some physicists. The five tracks here seem to be slowly shedding the trappings of music itself, all the dark-pop armature Fernow has grafted onto Prurient's old shriek-the-pain-away sound over the last few years, until all that remains is fearsome and formless noise.
On Time's Arrow, the comforts of familiar rhythm and melody are stripped back, track by track, to reveal the snarling, primal sound mass from which they were beaten into shape. With a jittery programmed beat that recalls Big Black at their most despondent and yet more sour synth squiggles that prove John Carpenter is the biggest influence on the darker end of electronic music in the 21st-century, the title track takes off from the creepy-but-clearly-defined hooks of Prurient's brilliant Bermuda Drain album from earlier in 2011. It's a possible contender for jam-of-the-year for all the ex-goths, one-time industrial obsessives, and collectors of soundtracks from obscure 1980s horror movies. But the rest of the EP sounds like it was made by a lunatic from one of those obscure 80s horror movies, as if that deranged slasher had somehow escaped into real world and been asked to record a few tunes for a cassette label. And you can imagine the sort of emotions such a jolly fellow would want to express through sound.
So the beat becomes a nearly arrhythmic clattering on "Let's Make a Slave". They keyboard melodies become cover-your-ears squeals of distortion, as if someone were jabbing a knife into an amplifier. Following the brooding but almost catchy "Time's Arrow", Fernow's most conventional song yet, order itself seems to be breaking down across the rest of the EP, a vibe brought home by the blasted, end-of-the-world atmosphere and Fernow's increasingly desperate last-man-on-Earth vocal perfomances. By "Maskless Face", his eerie monotone monologues have given away to frustrated howlings that express nothing but rage, and even that connection to human pain is severed by the EP's end. "Slavery in the Bahamas" plays like a rapid-fire tape collage of the ugliest sounds the post-industrial world has to offer-- the spluttering of downed power lines, the disembodied groans of information sluicing through a modem, buildings and machinery being crushed to nothing-- as if the whole show was coming to a swift and brutal end.
But Time's Arrow ends not in a deafening silence after the final track’s implosion. It's perhaps no accident that "Slavery in the Bahamas" ends with the faint sound of a lovely tune sneaking its way out of the squall. If you play the EP on a loop, this snatch of pleasant human music-making seems to lead quite naturally back into the title cut. Of course if you then play the EP straight through again, everything comes crashing down once more. With a kind of grim pleasure, Time's Arrow suggests that all that effort, writing songs and constructing coherent albums, will always eventually give way to the chaos that rumbles dangerously under any attempt to impose control over noise, if you just let go.


The rising producer has made records with John Legend and Perfume Genius. On his new instrumental record, he expresses exquisite vulnerability at the intersection of ambient and modern classical.

Look

Look begins with an exclamation mark, the silence broken by what sounds like a bell and a kettle drum struck simultaneously with Thor-like force. The sound hangs in space for an instant before slowly floating out like airborne debris from an explosion, captured in high-definition video and played back at a glacial pace. It unfurls into a drone, swaddled by soprano vocals and supported by electronics that groan like tectonic plates. For nearly eight minutes, “One” lingers here, seesawing between seraphic majesty and geologic force as digital curlicues and aerated guitars fade in and out of the background. Somewhere between Arvo Pärt and Sigur Rós, it marks a tremendous introduction to a surprising new voice at the intersection of sound design, chamber music, and post-rock: Blake Mills, a young star of the Americana-adjacent record-producing orbit with an audacious and personal approach to sound.
The clatter that launches Look is a requisite line in the sand, a jolting notice that this music is nothing like that of Mills’ past. A little more than a decade ago, Mills split from the band that would become Dawes, the country-rock stars who are now the proverbial creek cutting through the bottom of Laurel Canyon. Since then, he has steadily ascended to the rank of top-shelf session musician, having played with the likes of the Avett Brothers, Norah Jones, and Lucinda Williams. He’s also released two stunning albums that have tested the edges of what might be called millennial folk, his wide-eyed musical vision informing songs that still feel like homestead confessionals. Most notable, though, is his emergence as a top-notch producer: Nominated twice since 2015 for the producer-of-the-year Grammy, he has helmed records by Perfume Genius, Alabama Shakes, and John Legend. And he seems only to be getting started: “I think the questions I was asking made him suspicious of whether the record was done,” he recently told Pitchfork—about 4:44, after JAY-Z himself asked for his input.
But Look is a world away from the Carters or the Avetts; in fact, it’s a miniature world unto its own. For these five mesmerizing tracks, Mills began experimenting with 1970s guitar synthesizers, intricate systems that allow guitarists to alter their basic input infinitely and create, say, a choir or drone where there once had been a strum or a chord. These were private experiments with a technology he had once written off, but, as his amusement sublimated into infatuation, he began recruiting collaborators to help shape these pieces: experimental saxophonist Sam Gendel, hypnotic Weyes Blood singer Natalie Mering, hyper-collaborative violinist Rob Moose. Together, the ensemble built a suite of subtle instrumental beauties, all traces of Mills’ phosphorescent guitar wrapped and bound in a patchwork of soft yarn and tensile wire.
At least on its surface, Look bears the telltale signs of ambient music—long tones that seem to gradually splinter into minute particles, parallel senses of space and stillness, a meditative reverie that elicits a sort of cosmic wonder. If you push play and go about your day, you may notice its presence less than you notice its sudden disappearance, when its symphonic vanishing point actually vanishes. There are traces of Eliane Radigue’s immersive Adnos series, Keith Fullerton Whitman’s teeming Playthroughs, and Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s The Pearl, all genre touchstones perfectly in tow.
But lean in just for a moment, and Eno’s gentle maxim—“Ambient Music… must be as ignorable as it is interesting”—becomes untenable. These placid settings veil tugs of war between brittle timbres and romantic textures, blended into the backdrop like figures camouflaged inside wallpaper. “Three” puts a throbbing rhythm behind a luminous hum, pulsing somewhere between Dead Can Dance and Jon Hassell. But Moose’s strings and Mills’ guitar pull against the rhythm, temporarily forcing it off its axis and creating the terrifying sensation that the world has stopped turning. As dreamlike as it is, there’s always an undercurrent of corrosive dissonance just beneath the lip of “Five,” as when the strings flash like flare guns at the five-minute mark or a sample rips through the mix like a serrated blade early into the piece. Look into these emotionally and texturally turbulent compositions, and it’s hard to look away, to “accommodate many levels of listening attention” other than rapture.
On 2010’s Break Mirrors and 2014’s Heigh Ho, Mills seemed eager to let the listener into his world, to expose his vulnerabilities and worries without hesitation through country-rock tunes. “Don’t Tell Our Friends About Me” is a ruthlessly raw apology, “It’ll All Work Out” an unvarnished how-did-I-get-here manifesto. Maybe it seems surprising to consider wordless music candid, but Mills again appears to show us exactly what he’s feeling—the admixture of hope and unease that defines “One,” the calming perseverance of “Five.” And “Two” treats nostalgia like a childhood blanket, practically radiating warmth as it invites you into its pizzicato folds. As magnificent as Look sounds, that essential humanity—or the apparent sense that these instrumental abstractions are rooted as much in experience as aesthetic, if not more—is its masterstroke. Perhaps Mills, something of an enthusiast for artistic restlessness, never returns to this liminal space of drone and dream. If not, that’s OK; in these 25 minutes, he has said so much.


The Danish experimentalist turns toward singer-songwriter introspection, finding drama and yearning in melancholy, understated arrangements.

Great Doubt

Astrid Sonne wastes no time getting to the heavy stuff on her third album, Great Doubt. After a vanishingly brief introduction—a 61-second prelude for flute and viola that starts off sweetly and turns unsettling in its closing seconds—she cuts to the chase on “Do you wanna,” the album’s first real song. “Do you wanna have a baby?” she asks, her voice cool and affectless over lumbering piano and a plodding, rickety drum beat. Then she twists the knife: “I really don’t know.”
Singing from a position of vulnerability is a shift for the Danish musician. For most of her career, Sonne avoided lyrics entirely. “I’m so awful at writing them, I would do anything to avoid it,” she told an interviewer in 2019. Instead, on her first few releases she struck an unusual balance between ambient electronics, trance arpeggios, 20th-century minimalism, and the stark, unadorned sound of her viola. On the rare occasion that she did include voices, they were just another layer of tone color. On 2018’s Human Lines, her debut, she smeared choral samples like daubs of oil paint; she closed 2019’s otherwise resolutely electronic Cliodynamics with a piece of chamber music that recalled Renaissance polyphony. On largely a cappella tracks like “Fields of Grass”—partially recorded in a parking garage—and “How Far,” the words were secondary to the songs’ whorled textures.
But Great Doubt is, in many ways, a singer-songwriter record, swapping electroacoustic abstraction for plainspoken intimacy. Second-person address bleeds into first-person introspection; Sonne can be unnervingly direct. On “Do you wanna,” her great doubt turns out to be trepidation about civilization itself, her interlocutor not a lover but herself: “I think to myself/Do you wanna have a baby/Do you wanna bring people into this world?” she muses, before repeating the word “people,” rolling it around in her mouth like a foreign object.
Tirzah’s hermetic brand of R&B is a clear influence on Sonne’s skeletal arrangements and carefully shaded portraits of ambivalence. On “Give my all,” the slow-moving drum programming is an uphill trudge, the strings sour and dirge-like, yet her voice—singing words borrowed from Mariah Carey—is radiant with longing, capturing lovelorn dejection with a songbird’s grace. “Almost” is similarly conflicted, filling in the outline of a breakup with a series of stark, simple images: “A woman passing by/Clouds moving across the sky/Warm rain on my face.” Her smoky alto resembles Sade Adu’s; for all the song’s inherent sadness, it’s weightless, a bittersweet nothing rendered in little more than voice and plucked strings, with a fadeout that seems to say, this too shall pass.
As on Sonne’s previous albums, the mood is somber and restrained, but what was once a heady remove has turned melancholy. A bit like her compatriot ML Buch, she finds unexpected drama in her low-key palette. Contrasts abound: canned string synths and real viola, booming 808s and acoustic drum kit, doomy pads and wistful harp-like plucks. “Overture,” a brief instrumental interlude featuring London saxophonist Ben Vince, sounds like Arthur Russell via ECM. “Boost,” another instrumental, provides a glowering counterbalance to the album’s wispy songs of yearning in its detuned synths and mazelike, stop-start structure. It also shows just how tricky Sonne can be: After two and a half minutes of latent violence and steely resolve, the sullen drumbeat cedes to a cotton-candied dream-pop swirl.
The album’s contradictions snap into vivid focus on a dovetailing pair of songs in the album’s back half. Musically, they’re nothing alike: “Everything is unreal” is a muttered meditation over droning string loops and a funereal beat, “Staying Here” an ethereal ambient-house anthem made with church organs and no drums. But despite their differences, the songs’ lyrics overlap: Each begins with a scene in a park—ground “soft and damp” in one, “sun swallowed by clouds” in the other, the narrator looking up at planes in the sky in both—before converging upon a shared chorus: “Everything is unreal/But I’m not going anywhere/Not going anywhere/Staying here with you.” One scene, two radically different treatments; one is gloomy and paranoid, the other ebullient and joyful. For a singer who once shied away from writing lyrics, this lenticular image is a remarkable trick—proof that Sonne’s pop instincts are every bit as singular as her soundscaping.


Like Flying Lotus, Nosaj Thing has a great ear for odd, leftfield sounds and makes gorgeously haunted, glitch-y hip-hop.

Drift

Nosaj Thing is Jason Chung, a 24-year-old producer from California with loose ties to Flying Lotus and the L.A. glitch-hop scene. His gorgeously haunted debut Drift makes it clear that while he shares a lot with Flying Lotus-- a base of operations, like-minded compatriots, a deep love of hip-hop and a thousand strains of electronic music-- they're pretty far apart in terms of approach. Spatially speaking, Flying Lotus' music is like a cluttered studio apartment overflowing with interesting bric-a-brac-- hip-hop records, comics, pieces of modern art. Chung's music, meanwhile, is spacious and reverberant, every element echoing into the emptiness surrounding it. Drift came out on Alpha Pup, the label run by underground hip-hop producer Daddy Kev, and Nosaj Thing produced tracks on Busdriver's latest record, but Drift has little of anything that might be recognized as "hip-hop" on it, none of Flying Lotus' breakbeats or his analog-tape warmth. From a mood point of view, its gloomy beatscapes have a lot more in common with the bass-heavy London dubstep scene than anything his fellow L.A. laptop nerds are doing.
*Drift'*s dubstep influence is immediately apparent in the chilly minor-key synths and fractured, ghostly drum programming of "Us" and "Fog", which evokes Burial. Chung has a similar flair for atmospherics and fondness for dank spaces; the drum sounds on "IOIO" resemble both the dripping of leaky pipes and swarming, squeaking rats. He also shares a firm belief that great drum sounds come from everywhere. On "1685/Bach", for instance, they come from the peeling of masking tape and jingling change.
This magpie ear for odd, leftfield sounds is Drift's most explicit link to glitch-hop. The endlessly pinging synthesizer on "Light #1" seems to careen off every available surface, while it's companion "Light #2" builds from a prism of Tron-like laser blurts. Chung clearly relishes a good rug-pulling, and he plays a thousand little tricks on your senses throughout the record-- breathing sounds fluttering high in the mix, echoing, hall-of-mirrors synthesizers. Occasionally, things get a little too lava-lamp; I wouldn't want to listen to "Coat of Arms" while stoned, as I think the halting strobe-light effect might make me seasick.
Chung is clearly also fascinated by darkness and impenetrability, and Drift is filled with nighttime sounds. The brief moments of light, when they penetrate, feel slightly unreal; the woozy major chords of "2222" sound submerged, an impression reinforced by the sucking sounds surrounding them, similar to the noises you hear in your ears as you swim for the surface of a pool. At the two-minute mark in "Light #1" synths streak across the track like shafts of sunlight, and on "Lords", the final track, we're surprised by the late entrance of a rarely heard sound on the LP-- harmonized human voices, relatively untouched by filtering and effects, cooing wordlessly. It's a last dose of cold water to the face on a record full of such moments. There are sonic Easter Eggs for a thousand listens here, and it would take six pairs of headphones and an equal number of high-grade strains of weed to track them all down. Happy hunting.


Ty and Denée Segall, along with the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly, refine their abrasive sound on a record that writhes, swells, and undulates like the belly of a serpent.

Surgery Channel

Ty Segall has spent the past 15 years building a vast discography of solo releases, side projects, and genre experiments branching into familiar yet distinct phenotypes of the California auteur’s strummy rock’n’roll. The C.I.A., however, is an outlier within the Segall-verse, expanding his scope rather than filling gaps. Formed in late 2017 by Ty, wife Denée Segall, and the Cairo Gang frontman Emmett Kelly, the trio emerged with a unique amalgam of threadbare electronics, tinny bass, and Denée’s snarling spoken word. While their 2018 debut occasionally drowned in its own marinade of squelching reverb and unbridled feedback, Denée’s charisma and the band’s playful rhythms dredged a solid record out of its still-forming ethos.
Returning five years later with Surgery Channel, the C.I.A. ditch the cavernous echo and zero in on the whirring, abrasive textures of a well-oiled torture device. It’s an upgrade in every sense, hitting harder and delving deeper into the band’s flickering modular synth work while cleverly detouring from their established post-punk blitz. Though the majority of Segall’s releases are identifiable by their twangy barre chords and distorted leads, no member of the C.I.A. wields a six-string guitar. Instead, Ty and Emmett both primarily play bass, splicing fragmentary riffs and gurgling bits of atonal synthesizer atop bare-bones drum machine loops.
There’s little in the way of melody on Surgery Channel. Instead, the band forms a curtain of fuzz that writhes, swells, and undulates like the belly of a serpent. Denée’s writing works in the same vein, communicating through quick rhythmic pulses. She layers disjointed phrases in a brusque fashion that’s opaque yet impressionistic, as if she’s covering a canvas in black paint and drawing attention to each brushstroke. After a brief salvo of hollow snares on “Better,” she conjures a series of images like an overstimulated brain scrambling to process its surroundings. “A flush within/A red upon the skin,” she mutters before offering herself empty consolation each time she reaches the chorus: “It gets better, it gets better, it gets better.” The band’s wriggling low end, which resembles the sound of a groan tube, adds a sense of urgency.
Denée’s range as both a writer and performer has expanded over the past decade, evolving from a garage-rock yawp to a more sinister, assured presence. On “Inhale Exhale,” she barks like a drill sergeant, while on “The Wait,” she bounces between a whispered verse and growled chorus that sounds downright inhuman against a short-circuiting bassline. Her ambitions in turn push Ty and Emmett out of their own comfort zones, especially on Surgery Channel’s second half, where the band gets creative with its drum programming and palette.
“Construct” is the surprise highlight of side two, repurposing the C.I.A.’s past studies of Dilloway-esque junk noise into a scuttling instrumental that vaguely resembles “Get Ur Freak On.” Denée’s stream of two-syllable phrases acts as an anchor for abstract improvisation, slivers of reversed strings, throttled synths, and syncopated kicks forming a terrifying backdrop. Though the more straightforward stabs at dance-punk like “Better” and “Impersonator” are catchy and effective, it’s more exciting to hear the band break from these eighth-note grooves and explore looser song structures at greater length. Surgery Channel’s closing tracks beyond the C.I.A.’s more obvious influences to carve out a niche all its own, building tension during “Under,” whose intro is comprised almost entirely of clean bass plucking, or plunging headlong into industrial atmospheres with atonal bursts of static on the closer, “Over.” Such experiments make Surgery Channel one of the most radical departures in Segall’s catalog and a significant breakthrough for the band, exposing and refining the complex mechanisms behind their murky sound.


Clinic asked Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin to mix their 2012 album, Free Reign, only to shelve all but two of his submissions. On this complete album overhaul, the Liverpool band reinstate Lopatin's mixes and rejig the sequencing to astonishing effect.

Free Reign II

Clinic have never been ones to heed conventional wisdom, the logistics of singing through surgical masks being but the first of many aesthetic hurdles they've erected between themselves and pop accessibility. After all, here is a band that, in an attempt to overcome the seven-album itch-- and possibly give themselves something new to talk about with interviewers after 15 years in the game-- turned to acclaimed sound-collagist Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never) to mix their 2012 release Free Reign, only to shelve all but two of his submissions. You could sense that second-guessing on the final product: While Free Reign saw the band stretching out more than usual, with its psychedelic drones and funkier grooves, the album was still quintessentially, claustrophobically Clinic, caught between competing desires to expand the band's sound without dramatically altering it.
But Free Reign's shortcomings aren't anything some corrective surgery can't fix. And so, just months after the album's release, we have Free Reign II, which is not so much a remix album or a sequel companion piece as a complete do-over-- the U.K. indie equivalent of Bobby Ewing suddenly turning up in your morning shower. Free Reign II reinstates Lopatin's original mixes (plus new ones for "Miss You" and "You", the two songs of his that made the previous cut) and resequences the album in reverse order. But while this may read like some egregious ploy to make fans buy the same record twice-- song titles are merely appended with a "II"-- they should be thankful Clinic are going through with the plan. In this revised form, Free Reign is elevated from an intriguing if flawed work into the band's most consistently illuminating and sonically adventurous album since 2002's Walking With Thee.
In Lopatin's hands, Free Reign's subliminal textural details take the starring role, smashing through the original's glass-ceiling containment to reveal a vaster sense of space and far greater dramatic tension. The album's low-key, wandering closer, "The Sun and Moon" is reborn as Free Reign II's deliriously disorienting opener, its Manzarekian organ pumps amplified into glass-shattering tremors and free-jazz sax squeaks heigthening the carnivalistic clamor. On the original Free Reign, the blissed-out reverie "Misty" gradually eased you into the record, establishing a slack, laissez faire tone; here, "Sun and the Moon II" violently thrusts you in, foreshadowing the more turbulent funhouse experience to come. Even the found-sound recordings of children at play that permeate "You" assume a more sinister, predatory tenor on "You II", their increasingly mutated voices fusing into the sheets of guitar noise that eventually consume the song. In this revamped context, the ascendant organ drone that rises above the song's fiery outro feels less like a simple Suicide tribute and more like a spacecraft escape from an exploding planet.
Lopatin can't rehabilitate every track-- "Cosmic Radiation" is still a scatterbrained psych-jazz scribble of a song. But his gnarlier mix and flipped-script sequencing do wonders for what was Free Reign's most rudimentary turn, "See Saw". Where the original overemphasized its temper-tantrum bashed beat and remedial, morse-code melodica riff to the point of annoyance-- its position as second-track nearly derailing Free Reign's momentum from the get-go-- the song is utterly transformed into Free Reign II's explosive side-two climax. It's the moment where all the strategic soundscaping Lopatin has exercised over the course of the record comes to a head: The drums stomp with crater-inducing force, the guitars turn several degrees thicker and nastier, Blackburn's impetuous vocal is reverbed into a more antagonistic scowl, and whole thing swirls and snarls like a fairground attraction spun out of control. And in its wake, "Misty II" finds its true calling as the album's comedown closer, sending us adrift on a billowy bed of analog-synth starbursts. (It's followed by a tacked-on bonus track, "Done and Dusted II" that hearkens back to the motorik bounce of early singles like "The Second Line", but doesn't quite fit with the album's droning, cerebral vibe; nor does it give Lopatin much opportunity to go crazy on the console.)
One can only imagine that Clinic's reticience to initially release this vastly superior version of Free Reign can be chalked up to misgivings about showcasing Lopatin's textural trickery at the expense of the group's performances. But Free Reign II is precisely the sort of risky, rejuvenating album Clinic needed at this point in their career, one that audaciously upends the perception that this band just releases the same album over and over. Sadly, it's been brought to market as a secondary, supplemental release whose belated appearance may have bypassed the window of opportunity to recapture some of the considerable buzz the band enjoyed back at the turn of the millennium and re-stoke the interest of fans who may have tuned out since. At the very least, it puts lie to that old shampoo-ad slogan: sometimes, you do a get a second chance to make a seventh impression.


One of rap’s most inventive stylists surfaces from his memories to reflect on himself and his vocation, transforming his latest record into a searing, soulful gem in his catalog.

A Martyr’s Reward

The art of Ka is quiet. He raps in a smoky mutter, subdued yet trenchant, and over the last decade, his largely self-produced beats have molted into wispy, drumless loops. But listen closely and you’ll be rewarded with rich networks of detail that bore into the realities of a 49-year-old’s neglected Brownsville neighborhood. This music is often likened to audiobooks, literature, epic poetry, which is to say that it defiantly demands your full attention. And as the zeitgeist has centered steely, East Coast formalism the last couple years from the Griselda crew and the Alchemist, Ka seems to be receiving plenty of it.
On 2020’s world-weary Descendants Of Cain, Ka negotiated pathways to harrowing memories, casting jail bids upstate and “brothers killing brothers” in the frame of that doomed biblical allegory. The songs had a reporter’s eye—“I live this vivid shit, I ain’t that creative,” goes one line—but they felt like wounds healing. Through Cain and Abel, and Orpheus and the Sirens, he’s grappled with big, existential questions about what we learn versus what we inherit; how, in an environment designed to destroy your existence, family extends far past blood; and how traditional moral codes are stretched and distorted while living in the belly of the beast.
That symbolism builds itself into the intrigue of his music, which at times, can deflate without a compelling frame. But on his latest album, A Martyr’s Reward, Ka scales it back, instead coming to terms with his growing status as a leader and role model in hip-hop and his local community. One of rap’s most inventive stylists surfaces from his memories to reflect on himself and his vocation for a moment, transforming Reward into a searing, soulful gem in his catalog.
Where on past records, Ka would often play a slightly detached narrator, here he inserts himself into his own mythologizing as a kind of truth-bearer or guiding light, breaking up his dense lyricism with gnomic screeds and calls to action. This clarity allows Ka to twist his tales in compelling new directions. On “I Need All That,” he plainly unpacks everything that’s been stolen from Black people: “My braids, my waves, my gold/My chance, my dance, my stance, my soul.” This may come off as preachy in another rapper’s hands, but Ka stakes these claims on needing to rap to survive, seeing the world through the music he grew up on, losing friends who couldn’t turn a new leaf. He doesn’t sound grumpy; he sounds exhausted.
That tiredness sinks into the next song, the heaving “Peace Peace Peace,” which marries Ka’s mournful singing to the soul of Tennessee singer-songwriter Joi, famous for her work with the Dungeon Family. Together they sing of seeking peace, their voices swelling and soaring over a spare bassline and clattering drums, before Ka unspools line after line trying to make peace with his upbringing: “The saddest fact: they stole my youth, wish I had it back.” Joi’s contributions to spiritual songs like OutKast’s “Liberation” highlight one of Ka’s own strengths: his deep, almost religious reverence for culture, craft, and humanity. The best Ka songs feel like prayer, dirges, incantations, and A Martyr’s Reward is full of them.
This album doles out the meticulously constructed rap verses and dust bowl soundscapes you can reliably expect from every Ka album. Like a face-scrunching spitter from the New York mixtape circuit, he finds ways to coax science, rap history, animals, and whatever else he’s been reading about into dystopian images. “Cops got us under a microscope, to make sure we see cells/Know my first vitamin was iron, but I just wanted to be/beat/B 12,” he raps on “I Notice,” connecting ideas of crime, surveillance, and technology in one deft move. On that same song, he later cuts away all the fat to meta-analyze: “I noticed the onus was on me...to speak the truth.”
From early records like 2012’s dark Grief Pedigree onwards, Ka has gradually burrowed deeper and deeper into a more mystical, more intimate musical universe. You can hear the drums slowly melt into the background, and the synths and guitars froth a little more. On A Martyr’s Reward, the beats dissolve into some of his finest, serving his often breathless rapping as a Tibetan healing bowl might guide a meditation. Ka handles most of the production himself, veering between ominous tones and chintzy, major-key loops, but brings in long-time collaborator Preservation for the haunting “Subtle,” and Brooklyn rapper-producer Navy Blue for “We Livin’ / Martyr.”
Navy also delivers a staggering verse on that song about emerging from his darkest days, and their steady working relationship highlights the growing influence Ka exerts on a newer generation of underground rap. It makes every aside about going to sleep hungry, staying true to your art, and choosing brothers who’ll bleed with you feel like a lesson passed on. “Having nothing gave me everything,” goes the somber refrain of the final song, the sample glowing with the weird joy of something off Ghostface’s Ironman. It might sound romantic, but in context, A Martyr’s Reward reads as a spellbinding affirmation for a man who’s defied all odds, and a beacon for those who need direction.

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In a dozen somber, elegiac pieces for piano and electronics recorded in the wake of a cancer diagnosis, the Japanese composer reckons with his own mortality.

12

In 2014, a medical diagnosis changed Ryuichi Sakamoto’s life. The pianist, composer, and Yellow Magic Orchestra member was told that he’d contracted throat cancer, forcing him to reluctantly cancel live performances while he underwent treatment. “I honestly don’t know how many years I have left,” he would later reflect in the 2017 documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda. “I’m not taking anything for granted. But I know that I want to make more music. Music that I won’t be ashamed to leave behind—meaningful work.”
This sense of renewed ambition led Sakamoto to abandon an album he was then recording and begin anew with async, a somber, introspective release informed by his cancer diagnosis. The 14-track album channeled the melancholy reverence of Bach along with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, situating sparse piano pieces within electronic soundscapes imbued with a sobering weight.
Nearly a decade removed from his initial diagnosis and more than five years on from async, Sakamoto has continued making music, even as his battle with cancer persists. His latest album, 12, was written and recorded during the course of an especially difficult 13 months. After being diagnosed with rectal cancer at the height of the pandemic—“From now on, I will be living alongside cancer,” he announced—Sakamoto retreated from public life, and the disease escalated to stage four in 2022. Nevertheless, he began hosting occasional instrumental livestreams as part of his “Playing the Piano” series, for which he performed career-spanning material in short takes that were edited together into virtual concerts. Following his 2020 and 2022 livestreams—the former was later released as a live album—12 wades further into the emotional landscapes that defined async.
A collection of ambient etudes for piano and synthesizer, the album is strikingly minimal in its arrangements. Tracks are titled and sequenced in the order in which they were committed to tape, lending the album a diaristic feel. (Only the final cut, an atmospheric, minute-long recording of tinkling bells, is presented out of order.) The pieces move softly through space and time, emphasizing the reverberant textures of the room in which they were recorded. “20210310” opens with a bristling synth tone that grows and expands slowly, alternating between high and low notes that brush up against the thresholds of human hearing in each direction. The piece rises and falls with a clear contrapuntal arc that never resolves into a melody. Others, like “20220202” and “20220214,” are similarly atmospheric, made up of raw, unvarnished sounds; they feel more like demos than the focused interventions of Sakamoto’s past solo records.
In addition to the weight of the room around him, you can also feel the presence of the composer himself. A steady pulse of strained breathing persists across many pieces, driving home the image of Sakamoto seated at the keyboard. “20211201” begins with the sound before introducing a piano melody draped in a foggy reverb reminiscent of Harold Budd, and the sibilant texture continues across much of the album. Against the backdrop of his carefully sculpted piano lines, the inclusion of Sakamoto’s breathing feels deliberate, quietly reminding listeners of his health. The smallest details take on heightened significance as he returns to themes and ideas from throughout his catalog. Pieces like “20220207” and “20220307” build on the mournful, elegiac tone of his film scores for The Fortress and The Revenant, while “20220302 (sarabande)” looks to Sakamoto’s heroes—Bach, Chopin, and Debussy—in its warmth and melodic simplicity.
The chronological, piecemeal nature of the album means that the audio quality and execution are often inconsistent from piece to piece. Couched in an impressionistic, sketch-like feel, the pieces rarely develop as they unfold, and even when Sakamoto pursues more than one theme or idea, as on “20220302,” he avoids any dramatic, risk-taking gestures. Much like his friend and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence castmate David Bowie did with Blackstar, as well as Leonard Cohen with You Want It Darker, Sakamoto is staring down the prospect of his own death, meditating on the legacy that he will leave behind. But rather than mythologize his life in narrative songwriting or theatrical instrumental fireworks, he’s chosen a quiet grace, one more subtle and restrained than even his softest prior work. Rarely does an album this understated say so much.


The Mid-Atlantic’s grindcore standard bearers have never done it better than they do on their sixth studio album, the strangest, strongest, and most accessible record in the band’s 20-year history.

Head Cage

A Pig Destroyer album in the Age of Trump, huh? It feels too easy—a standing invitation to catharsis, complete with a return envelope and postage already paid. The Mid-Atlantic’s grindcore standard bearers have rarely been overtly political, but they’ve often been relentless with their social critiques. A mental health regimen meant to curb eccentricity, a power structure where shutting up advances résumés, a religious system where ideas are presented as directives: Especially during the last decade, Pig Destroyer have attached J.R. Hayes’ subtly poetic and explicitly scathing notions to music so meticulous and belligerent that it could drive you to enlist with whatever side he’s on. Now seems like the time for Hayes to rage, to make his coded frustrations loud and clear.
But Pig Destroyer are not the kind of band to fulfill expectations. During their 20-year career, they have morphed in stepwise, deliberate fashion from grindcore exemplars into subgenre subversives, interrupting tantrums with plunges into doom and coarsening their sound with sheets of noise. They’ve never done it better than they do on Head Cage, the band’s strangest, strongest, and most accessible album ever. The landscape it paints is of a planet more terrifying than a mere president or the politics he represents could ever be. Pig Destroyer sidestep political diatribes to build a world of sheer terror, where broken hearts sink into abjection and satisfaction is a quasi-religious myth. There is a scene of Lovecraft-like horror and another of apocalyptic gloom, all animated by music as uneasy as the tribulations these dozen songs portray.
Head Cage is a vivid compendium of modern crises, where the likes of Trump are symptoms of causes too complicated for a single impeachment to eradicate. Hayes lambasts social ills one at a time, an outsider criticizing the inner workings of systems he abhors. During “Army of Cops,” he rages that we enjoy the complacent glow of contentment too much to overrun the heavy hand of the state. On “Terminal Itch,” he notes that we’ll try anything to stay young and beautiful for now, even if it means an uglier death later. And in “Mt. Skull,” he laments how we exploit the places we love until we’ve choked them into wastelands. Hayes shifts briefly into fantasy for “The Adventures of Jason and J.R.,” where a run-in with deep-state operatives and “Dick Cheney in his Halliburton jet pack” ruins a trip to the hardcore show. Even ordinary nights get crazy now.
Pig Destroyer answer these odd times by ripping apart their grindcore fabric for good, twisting the threads into surprising chimeras. In the distant past, they could fit 38 tracks into less than 40 minutes. While they’ve slowed that pace, in general, they reverted to their more straightforward hustle as recently as 2012’s Book Burner. But these dozen songs are an unabashed detour. “Army of Cops” and “Circle River” are meant for shouting out loud, anthems waiting to be echoed back to the band by heaving, sweat-soaked clubs. Navigating a hangman riff, “The Torture Fields” moves from an invocation of lumbering doom to a sermon of circle-pit madness. Grand finale “House of Snakes” suggests Neurosis writing after epinephrine injections. This is as close to crossover approachability as Pig Destroyer have ever gotten.
As with 2007’s Phantom Limb, Pig Destroyer’s breakthrough with a wider audience and their earliest clean split with genre orthodoxy, the success of Head Cage stems in part from a new addition. A dozen years ago, it was Blake Harrison, whose squeal of squelch and samples added a terrifying depth to Pig Destroyer’s charge. This time, it’s John Jarvis, the band’s first-ever bassist and the cousin of drummer Adam Jarvis. He strengthens the sound, a back brace offering support for the occasional dead-ahead rumble like “Terminal Itch” and the thrash of “Mt. Skull.” And he supplies textural breadth for the high-treble attack, battling against Harrison’s ghastly noise during “Concrete Beast.”
More important, though, is his role as a musical pivot point, allowing the band to change directions in an instant and his cousin to stretch and compress time itself. The bass holds the center of “Dark Train,” for instance, while Adam occasionally leaps over the meter, only to splash back down in a blast beat, creating the continuous sensation of whiplash. It’s like watching Usain Bolt skip through the middle of a 100-meter dash before easily sprinting to the win. And in “The Adventures of Jason and J.R.,” Pig Destroyer slide steadily from a mid-tempo march to a breakneck onslaught around the time Dick Cheney arrives, the band translating the anxious spirit of the story into sound. A quintet now, Pig Destroyer are not only louder and bigger but also more dynamic and versatile, capable of bolder ideas and executions.
One of the year’s best and most urgent metal records, Head Cage is a fitting counterpart to another essential bit of 2018 heaviness, Thou’s Magus. Like Hayes, Thou’s Bryan Funck confronted our confounding times and walked away with complicated questions about what we’ve demanded from ourselves, our leaders, and our world. Both records place blame on responsible parties but also ask that we all try harder—or that we, as Hayes puts it, fight against our urge to be “kept down.” His and Funck’s respective bands respond in kind by using subgenre strictures as starting points, not finish lines. Like Magus, Head Cage attempts to wrestle ageless ideas from the specific stresses of our age without deigning to call them by name.


The lifelong Bohemian rubbed elbows with Salvador Dalí, Gertrude Stein, and the Rolling Stones. His 1985 avant-disco LP, featuring Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Don Cherry, finally gets reissued.

Junk

By 1985, Brion Gysin had been around. Born in 1916, he ditched his native Britain for Paris in the 1930s to make it as an artist. He hung out with Dalí and the Surrealist set, whose quasi-leader André Breton kicked him out of a major group show for being friends with the likes of queer hero Gertrude Stein; as the story goes, it was Gysin who developed the marijuana fudge Stein popularized as the Alice B. Toklas Brownie in her notorious cookbook. By the 1950s, he was in Tangier with good friend William S. Burroughs. There, as another story goes, he booked the Master Musicians of Joujouka to play at his café, the 1001 Nights, and introduced them to the Rolling Stones, kickstarting pop psychedelia. Later, back in Paris with Burroughs at the notorious Beat Hotel, he systematized a new randomizing literary technique, the cut-up, and with it made sound poetry recordings that used turns of phrases like samples, a tool Bowie would utilize in his Berlin trilogy. Gysin also invented, with some help from math wiz Ian Sommerville, a device called the Dreamachine, whose patterns of flickering, stroboscopic light—produced by a perforated shade spinning around a light source—are designed, when viewed through closed eyes, to stimulate the brain’s alpha waves. It casts shadows across lighting and set designs (and stoned student dorm rooms) to this day. By the early 1980s, Gysin had traveled the world, performing and recording his hypnotic poetry on stage and on record, making paintings based on studies of Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, and generally living the cult hero life. What else could he do?
Make a disco record! Gysin had taken as an assistant a high school student named Ramuntcho Matta, whose brother was the influential New York artist Gordon Matta-Clark; when Gordon died suddenly in 1978, Ramuntcho returned and spent time working in Laurie Anderson’s studio. Back in Paris by 1980, Matta culled from the city’s famed club Le Palace a who’s-who of underground disco-not-disco luminaries, including Ze records chanteuse Lizzy Mercier Descloux, along with global figures like Senegalese drummer Abdoulaye Prosper Niang and jazz legend Don Cherry. Meanwhile, years of performing his demanding, loopy poetry had turned Gysin into a kind of ideal frontperson for this kind of jittery rhythm. They all got together and made Junk, first released in 1985 on the French label Mosquito, put out on CD in 1991 by Crammed, and now reissued in all its freaky, funky glory by Wewantsounds.
Opener “Kick (Disco Mix)” was recorded in 1980, the same year as Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, and the mood is similar: Matta’s guitar is as percussive as Niang’s supple beat and Jean-Pierre Coco’s talking drums. Gysin and Cherry inject the groove with various permutations of the phrase, “Kick that habit, man,” while Cherry sprays and squiggles with his pocket trumpet. It’s intoxicating. The reissue appends two very welcome versions, a “7" Alternative Mix” that’s essentially an edited vamp, and an instrumental dub; those jonesing for more should score “Kick That Habit Man,” a kind of cover made the same year by San Francisco industrial innovator Monte Cazazza for a 7" released by Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records.
With its bassy hook and chicken-scratch guitar, “Sham Pain” could be Chic, if their legendary fury at being turned away from Studio 54 soured instead of soared. “Insane, insane! Why am I always to blame?” Gysin screeches. Guitars make sounds of scrunched-up faces, the bass rolls its eyes. “Complain, complain!” he caterwauls. “I seem to recall we had some kind of ball/But for the life of me, darling/I can’t seem to remember your name/It was a long noble name….” The sneering tumbles out of him, bravura and effete. The title track punctures the druggie slumbers his demimonde too often mistook for a muse with literal alarm bells and a bassline that stumbles around like it’s trying to find the floor. “Junk is no good, baby,” Gysin proclaims, and backup singer Yann Le Ker, of French post-punkers Modern Guy, concurs with a catchy, “no good, no good, no good.” Gysin ponders various permutations of the sentiment, but the answer stays the same.
Two tracks explore the joys of queer sex. Whatever you think of primitivism as a fetish—and, given Gysin’s extensive academic work, including writing a history of slavery in Europe, as one of the very first recipients of a Fullbright, the racial politics can’t have been lost on him—the bounce of “Baboon” is undeniable, and his delivery outrageously winning, somewhere between the knowing flamboyance of Quentin Crisp and the louche menace of Grace Jones. “V.V.V.”, meanwhile, is a Sapphic celebration so insouciantly sexy that it seems impossible to believe that it slunk around for some forty years without attaining at least the underground anthem status of, say, Gina X’s “No G.D.M.” Let’s rectify that.
All parties end, of course. Junk concludes with a golden-hour meditation on nostalgia, with Matta voicing Gysin’s words. “Sometimes I’m close to tears,” he sings, guitars welling up behind him. Metronomic percussion counts down the hours. “All those years, for really nothing,” he sighs, “unless your face appears.” Gysin does appear; he sings himself off the stage in the album’s most astonishing moment, “Stop Smoking.” The lungs of the track are its circling rhythm, an Afropop-ish bop; above the beat, conch shells wheeze. “Isn’t the cough that carries you off,” Elli Medeiros of Stinky Toys sings, her clear voice a nag, a nursery rhyme. “It’s the coffin they carry you off in.” Gysin battled cancer for much of his life, and his vocals here are constantly interrupted, or perhaps punctuated, by wet, racking hacks. “Stop smoking? Ha ha ha you gotta be [coughs] joking,” he announces in a voice that makes Mark E. Smith’s ravaged larynx sound like Ariana Grande. “Nicotine is mean,” he manages to get out, a little awed. It’s like he’s playing the phlegm. A year after Junk released, he’d be dead of lung cancer, ashes floating on the breeze over the Caves of Hercules in Morocco like a conga drum finding its rhythm. The man who was everywhere was finally nowhere—but remembered forever on this wild, fabulous record.


L.A. art-rock quartet's debut LP is a nine-song seance of an album that's as subtle as it is disquieting.

The Fool

When singer-guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman sing, "now I've got you in the undertow," on Warpaint's debut LP, the line comes off like a threat. It's not dramatic, though. The words come out serenely-- perhaps too serenely. "What's the matter?/ You hurt yourself?/ Open your eyes and there was someone else," they coo dreamily, shape-shifting underneath a fine mist of guitars and bass. True to its name, "Undertow" sinks in without hurry. Its ambient horror is in the realm of Rosemary's Baby or Heavenly Creatures or the first half of The Shining. Their thrills are far from cheap. And the same sense of ghostliness runs throughout The Fool, a nine-song seance of an album that's as subtle as it is disquieting.
In these days of solitary laptop acts and quick-fizzle pop-up bands, Warpaint's free-floating sound is largely dependent on the uncanny bond between principals and long-time friends Kokal, Wayman, and bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg. Live, each one is in her own zone, often with eyes shut and head loose. It's almost like watching them make up songs in real-time at every show, the tangling highs and darting lows frothing to a natural climax only to dissipate just as easily. Their chemistry is inexplicable and fascinating to behold. With Kokal and Wayman often singing on either side of a central Lindberg-- who commands attention with her spaced-out sway-- the live attack is engrossing. Together with drummer Stella Mozgawa, Warpaint speak a sultry, desert-rock language that no one else is privy to, but you can't help but want to crack it nonetheless.
And while The Fool doesn't fully capture their brain-melded performances, it's a worthy simulacrum. The songs on which Kokal takes lead duties tend to be a bit more sinister (when she sings, "Don't you call anybody else baby cause I'm your baby still" on spare ballad "Baby", the 10-mile-stare delivery is spooky), while Wayman's verses are more vulnerable. Off-kilter highlight "Shadows" has Wayman stumbling through tinted sidewalks: "I know I'm afraid/ I'm drunk and I'm tired/ And the city I walk in feels like it swallows." The song's unique, snare-based beat and lonely string plucks aptly re-create her confusion. Elsewhere, flashes of Stevie Nicks (at her most diffuse) and Jeff Buckley (at his most daydreamy) meander through. And while sonic comparisons to early Cat Power have been abundant, Warpaint's live prowess and band-oriented sound offer distinct differences, too.
In the middle of "Baby", a small bit of George Harrison's White Album favorite "Long, Long, Long" sneaks in. "How I love you," sings Kokal, and then the nod is dropped just as quickly. The group pulled a similar trick on "Billie Holiday", from their Exquisite Corpse EP, on which they worked some of "My Guy" into the track's fabric. Like the effortlessness that surrounds Warpaint, both references feel totally instinctive; it's as if they just happened upon them, took what they needed, and moved on.


This new compilation assembled by Numero Group functions as a highlight reel of Greek-born, San Francisco-dwelling composer Iasos' 30-year-plus career in new age ambient music, which emanated from a similar psychedelic discipline to Terry Riley.

Celestial Soul Portrait

When it comes to soothing tones and ethereal zone-outs, ambient and new age music often overlap. They are not the same game, though. If you read the back cover of Brian Eno’s 1975 album, Discreet Music, you’ll find a set of diagrams and instructions meant to explain the processes that the producer/composer/guru employed in creating the music. The record, which is often cited as one of the formative works of the ambient genre, contains a series of slowly evolving compositions that rely on slight variations (measure length, echo, equalization) of simple repeating melodic phrases to create a sense of movement amid static components.
That same year also saw the debut release by the San Francisco, California-based composer Iasos, who would become heavily identified with the then emerging new age genre. Though his compositions are shorter and draw heavy inspiration from spiritual jazz, there are plenty of similarities to Eno’s ambient music, particularly in the gauzy tones and glacial pace. The LP did not come with a score and even if Iasos had wanted to include one, the process might have been tough to explain to an outsider. According to the composer, his music was not written, but communicated to him by a trans-dimensional being called Vista.
The purpose of Discreet Music is to fade into the background, to become aural wallpaper that teeters at the edge of comprehension, hence the title. Iasos’ record, Interdimensional Music, requires direct attention. The sounds are not meant to drift on the edge of perception, but expand consciousness-- to transcend Earthly anxiety and envelop the listener in bliss. Like many new age musicians, Iasos was not shy about embracing hokey imagery-- rainbows, crystals, crystalline rainbows-- to get his point accross, and not every track that he cut can transcend the goofiness of his genre. Celestial Soul Portrait, a new compilation assembled by Numero Group, functions as a highlight reel, grabbing some of the sturdiest swatches from the composer’s 30-year-plus career.
Born in Greece and raised in upstate New York, by the late 1960s Iasos had moved to California to devote himself to music, eventually settling in Marin County, near San Francisco. He tried playing in a number of rock bands but found his peers a little too Earth-bound in their tastes. After purchasing a four-track recorder, he started experimenting with tape effects, treated sounds and, eventually, synthesizers, which helped him hone the celestial sound he had been reaching for. On “Rainbow Canyon”, which was taken from Interdimensional Music, Iasos improvises on a lap steel guitar, using an echo unit to smear his notes across the stereo field. Were you to dry it out from the effects, his riffing might just sound like a series of Eastern-tinged goofs, but the constantly sliding tones and delay trails give the music an unearthly quality-- soothing, but also seasick. “Cloud Prayer” congeals from a series of drones that the guitarist created using guitar feedback and a wah-wah pedal. It’s an ominous piece, building tension with the muted buzz of low tones.
The root of Iasos’ music is in late 1960s composers like Terry Riley, who came from a more formal university background, but who also temporarily embraced the current psychedelic moment, experimenting with drones, tape loops, and the structures of Indian music. The compositions on Celestial Soul Portrait carried those ideas forward, but from a folkier, less academic perspective. Still, the stakes were high for Iasos and his inter-dimensional writing partner. “Imagine creating symphonies by tuning up planets [to] create beautiful chords that echo through the galaxy,” explains Iasos in the compilation's liner notes. “That’s the game Vista is playing.”


The Three Lobed label celebrates 10 years in business with a comp including unreleased material from Sonic Youth, Sun City Girls, Comets on Fire, and more.

Various Artists: Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them

Quick: How many record labels can you name? Unless you work inside certain sects of the music industry, the answer, at most, is likely a couple dozen. Yet the number of working imprints in the world-- from the biggest corporate conglomerates to the upstarts young bands craft only so they can have a logo to put on the back of whatever they issue-- is incalculable because it's ever-changing. That is, running a record label is a risky business plan, where one mistake about the number of units you might move can torpedo the entire operation, where technological sea changes can wash the need for you and your product away. Labels, then, tend to memorialize every few years, commemorating every anniversary with a limited-edition box set, a spree of concerts, or an appreciative giveaway. However deserved it may be, this is self-congratulations of the purest sort, a proud proclamation that the brand has yet again made it to some arbitrary finish line.
To that end, Three Lobed Recordings' Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them is a different kind of birthday set. Meant to mark the 10th anniversary of the tiny North Carolina outsider music label, the collection subverts the usual order of such pieces, serving more as a celebration of the participating bands than the presenting brand. The packaging-- a hard paper box containing four LPs and liner notes, all designed by the instantly recognizable Portland, Ore., poster artist Casey Burns-- hardly mentions the anniversary. In fact, the label's name takes a smaller font than not only the bands included, like Sonic Youth and Sun City Girls, but also Burns himself. Inside, during an interview with Pitchfork contributor Marc Masters, label owner Cory Rayborn doesn't talk much about his happenstance journey into owning a label (he started it to release one Bardo Pond 10") or the stylistic confines of Three Lobed (from broken folk to pan-everything psychedelic explorations, there have been none). Rather, he spills his words about the acts involved, calling Steve Gunn "transformational," suggesting Johnny Cash would have covered Wooden Wand, and labeling Mouthus as "true auteurs." At least half of Rayborn's own short essay is spent thanking friends and expressing dismay that this is happening. Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them is less a Three Lobed trademark proclamation than an earnest and excellent offering from one of America's best little labels.
Most commemorative compilations like this simply stack a bunch of tracks from catalog artists side-by-side, reprising both the accomplishments of the label in question and offering a few selected gems that either never made it onto a release or have long been out-of-print. But Spaces smartly gives full LP sides to seven bands, essentially affording each act the opportunity to create an EP that's simply part of something bigger. None of this material has ever been released. Considered on its own terms, each contribution from each band is stunning, most often as a summary of what they've done best. Mouthus' two sprawls, for instance, are violent churns of sound, splitting the unexpected distance between industrial music, power electronics, IDM and singer-songwriter fare. A 21-minute, relatively seamless collage of Comets on Fire rehearsals reminds that they’re one of the most ferocious bands of last decade’s psych revival. "The Invisible Fire" is one of Bardo Pond's customarily immersive zones, with guitar riffs, electronic whirs, and the alternating flute and contorted moans of Isobel Sollenberger forming a sheet of sound as thick as smoke from a woodland wildfire. And the three live cuts from Sun City Girls, recorded in 2004 at the band's last American show, vividly capture the group's range-- their guitar bravado and brilliance; their mix of country, jazz, rock and Middle Eastern music; their almost-alien intercommunication; their humor; their interesting songs; their interest in exploring those songs' edges through improvisation.
But these are all reaffirmations by bands with status to spare: Not the Spaces is, at its best, about future heroes. In the liner notes, Rayborn says that guitarist Gunn doesn't realize "how ridiculously talented he is." His "The Lurker Extended" is a testament to ambition and narrative, plus a validation of the brilliance Rayborn suggest. Spiraling from slow, graceful licks to variations so fast and frenetic they seem to kick up sparks, Gunn's piece is the kind of statement that should make the unaware place him alongside the best acoustic masters, past and present. The young Pacific Northwest collective Eternal Tapestry has never sounded more forceful and convincing than they do on this alternate take of "Doing Your Own Being". With saxophone, bass, and guitars clinched in tidal unison, the band suggests the most triumphant soul-jazz of the 1970s, aggressively recreated by some stoned kids in a basement.
D. Charles Speer & the Helix actually split the last side of the third record with Wooden Wand, but their sets are different sides of the same sermon. Led by Dave Shuford of the No-Neck Blues Band, the Helix handles two country classics with a tight grip, giving Gene Clark's end-of-innocence tale "Shooting Star" a heartrending, Skynyrd-sized coda. Wooden Wand's three originals are ramshackle country laments, strummed and sighed with threadbare despair. His tunes are written with the same deep-seated gravitas that those Helix covers sport, showing that the blues don't necessarily depend on how they're offered. In his most polished country affectation, Shuford sings, "It's all very clear/ It's near and then gone." Wand later slurs an answer, unaware: "If this is a destination, call it No Survival Drive."
Surprising as it may seem, Sonic Youth supplies this set's most positive, apt metaphor. Lee Ranaldo has released a record through Three Lobed, as has Thurston Moore's side project, Bark Haze. Sonic Youth never has, but Moore's own label, Ecstatic Peace, trades in many of the same circles as Three Lobed. Playfully titled "In & Out" and "Out & In", Sonic Youth's dual contributions were recorded a decade apart from one another, so Jim O'Rourke-- who plays bass on one song but not the other-- had left the band and so that, after September 11th, they had moved their Echo Canyon studio from New York City to New Jersey. Together, these songs show the band's consistent excellence as patient textural explorers. "In & Out" is Sonic Youth at their most tempered; "Out & In", the earlier of the pieces, is one of the most ferocious Sonic Youth jams ever put to tape. What begins as a winding, discordant instrumental suddenly finds this three-guitar, five-piece configuration surging with a hardcore-punk intensity. Noise claws at the edges of the relentless beat. They sound scary.
The interval between these tracks roughly coincides with Three Lobed's lifespan. Given that Sonic Youth's career was really just starting at the 10-year mark, it serves as a promise of Three Lobed's continued vitality well past this landmark release. And considering the label's mostly spotless résumé and the incredible substance of this commemoration, it's difficult not to hope that suggestion holds true in this often anonymous, unstable industry.


With singular grace and flair, Yaya Bey deepens her connection to homespun funk and R&B while transforming grief, insecurities, and depletion into a full embrace of life.

Ten Fold

Losing someone close to you can feel like a rupture in time. How can the sun continue to rise? How can the world keep moving? The disorientation of being fundamentally altered in grief motivates Yaya Bey’s transcendent new album, Ten Fold. “My nigga left the world and the world ain’t stop,” she quietly raps on “yvette’s cooking show.” The Queens-raised artist recorded the album in the year following the death of her father, Ayub Bey—the emcee and producer Grand Daddy I.U., who was a member of the pioneering hip-hop collective Juice Crew and a towering figure in Bey’s life. Funeral costs compelled her to keep working and over the course of a year, she made music without any firm plans. The results, whittled down to 16 tracks, are snapshots of an artist moving through loss as she navigates financial and emotional precarity and the vicissitudes of romance. It’s a finely detailed portrait of grief that also celebrates the fullness of life.
The ripples of Yaya Bey’s day-to-day are small, but in her delicate hands, they are strikingly resonant. Ten Fold rarely dwells on the past, choosing instead to mark the passage of time by cataloging the feelings that sprouted along the way—sadness, defiance, joy, frustration, pride, love. Masterful sequencing and economical writing (most songs are under three minutes) allow Bey to be as nimble as ever. After announcing the grief that “weighs heavy” on her, she briskly wipes her tears to celebrate her blooming potential on the pocket-disco song “chrysanthemums.” She finds “fly shit” at the thrift store on “east coast mami” to project the confidence needed to make power moves. Relationships fizzle and grow; rent remains too damn high. Collectively, the album sounds like a Black woman just trying to get by.
In keeping with her 2022 breakout album, Remember Your North Star, Bey pulls from the warmer colors of a Black musical palette—Soulquarians-style neo-soul, upbeat funk, house, and boom bap. The production, assisted by Corey Fonville of the genre-melding jazz-hop band Butcher Brown, feels cozy and self-soothing. She taps into familiarity, yet resists complacency. The album opens with the simmering melancholy of “crying through my teeth,” which like its spiritual ancestor “Didn’t Cha Know,” carries a world of feeling in the simplest of phrases. Where songs like “nobody knows” on North Star described vivid characters and scenes, Ten Fold’s stories are abstract, unfolding like an extended inner monologue. The spare house beat of “sir princess bad bitch” is demo-like, and its circular refrain (“The beautiful thing about me/Is every little beautiful thing/Is on its way to me”) sounds like the kind of made-up song you sing to keep yourself afloat. Directing the affirmations inward allows Bey to skillfully sidestep platitudes: feelings arise spontaneously and inconstantly from all across the emotional spectrum. Even the songs explicitly about other people feel insular, like the blooming romance of “slow dancing in the kitchen.” The sunny reggae cut has the gossamer quality of a daydream or a gaze directed toward a lover.
Self-love is a prominent lyrical theme, but its greatest manifestation is how Bey handles her voice. In her idiosyncratic tone, there are glimmers of the open-throated soul-jazz of Anita Baker, yet what sets her apart from her peers and foremothers in R&B is her quieter, more intimate approach. What she lacks in vocal pageantry, she makes up for in her stylistic range—singing, rapping, scatting, and humming. On the modern blues of “the evidence,” she reaches for the lowest notes of her range to scrape up the courage to “hold on,” communicating the enormous effort with just a gravelly hum. On the lighter love songs, like the wah-wah funk of “all around los angeles,” high notes abound, soft as cotton candy.
Her father Ayub’s voice is laced throughout the album, appearing via voice notes and samples. But it’s only in the final minutes, on “yvette’s cooking show,” that she addresses him directly. Over a simple piano loop, she speaks to her father in present tense, wishing him absolution and catching him up on the latest year of her life. She finally shines a light on the father-shaped hole at the center of the album, the one she’s been sketching around with all the quotidian details. Suddenly, everything we’ve heard prior has a different ring to it. Still, this revelation doesn’t feel like avoidance: It illuminates the transitory nature of grief, how it can come and go like everything else. Embracing that impermanence, which Ten Fold shows really means embracing all of life, points a way out of the pain. By the time she reaches the last song, “let go,” the question is no longer if the pain can be let go, but when. The question remains unanswered: Only time will tell.


With contributions from Santigold, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, and members of TV on the Radio, the Malian duo clearly have genre fusion in mind on their latest.

Folila

Amadou & Mariam are at this point firmly established international stars. They don't need people to explain their back story for half a review anymore, and they've become truly intertwined with a huge network of African and Western artists whom they've toured and recorded with, a list that ranges all over the place from Manu Chao to David Gilmour, K'naan, Damon Albarn, Bassekou Kouyaté and Santigold. With that fame comes a potential snag, though: it's much, much harder for them to surprise us now that they've defined themselves around a seamless synthesis of the music of their homeland and the music of the rest of the world.
They're trying to work around that. For Folila (which means "music" in Bambara), they took an unusual approach to making a record, essentially making the same album three times. They recorded it once in New York with a host of indie rock musicians helping out, and again in Mali with a group of musicians from Mali's popular and traditional music communities. And then they took it to Paris, where they took the two recordings, which were made with matched keys and tempos, and mixed them together into a very literal genre hybrid. Honestly-- and this is really my bias here-- I would've loved to hear them use their newfound fame to strip things back a little and reveal the sounds of their homeland to a newly invested audience, but the hybrid works pretty well for the most part, and I'm not going to hold it against them that they're doubling down on their established fusion.
That fusion pays off beautifully on several tracks. Opener and lead single "Dougou Badia", featuring a guest vocal from Santigold and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner mixing it up on guitar with Amadou, is about as good a result as you could hope for from the oblique recording process. Zinner and Amadou in particular have great chemistry, Amadou's staccato, tangled rhythm playing playing foil to Zinner's long, sustained tones. The chemistry is similarly strong with UK singer Ebony Bones, whose vocal turn on "C'est Pas Facile Pour Les Aigles" injects a huge burst of energy right into the heart of the album. Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears and TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe also contribute vocals, but stay in the background for the most part. Malone and Adebimpe fit so organically into the slinking funk of "Wily Kataso" that it makes me wonderful what a full album collaboration between the two bands might sound like, and Shears' addition of just a hint of disco camp to "Metemya" is about perfect.
The most prominent collaborator is French singer-songwriter Bertrand Cantat, who contributes vocals, harmonica and guitar on a few songs. Cantat was the longtime leader of Noir Désir, one of France's most prominent rock bands, and his contributions are fine here (well, he's definitely outshone vocally by the headliners, but he's not bad), but I can't help feeling a little weirded out by his presence. This isn't well-known in the States, but in 2003, Cantat beat his girlfriend, actress Marie Trintignant, in a jealous, drunken rage and put her in a coma-- she died days later. If he'd served all of his eight-year prison sentence, he wouldn't even have been available to record his parts for this record (he was part of the sessions that took place in Mali). As I said, his musical contributions are fine, but given that he's frankly someone the album could been made without, I rather wish they'd brought in someone else.
As off-putting as Cantat's personal history is, though, Folila is still a highly successful merger of the Malian duo's vision with the input of collaborators. There's nothing as immediately stunning as Welcome To Mali's "Sabali" or Dimanche à Bamako's "Coulibaly", but hearing Kouyaté's ngoni bubbling up through the guitars and Amadou's roiling guitar lines bump up against Zinner's textures is definitely enjoyable. Likewise, Mariam's vocal duets with Ebony Bones and Santigold are spirited-- they really feed off each other's energy. And when they do strip things back to favor the sparser Mali recordings on "Sans Toi", it becomes very clear very quickly just how strong the identity of Amadou & Mariam remains even amidst all the high-powered guests. Even if Folila is less surprising than the two albums that came before it, it still makes me look forward to seeing where they'll take this fusion next.