Words by Sean Victory
Sean Victory is a lifelong artist, tinkerer, and musician. His current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
Before diving into the regular column, here are some of my favorite records that I wrote about in 2024:
Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos by Ka Baird (RVNG Intl.)
The Collective by Kim Gordon (Matador Records)
Amulet by Threshold Houseboys Choir (Infinite Fog Productions)
Excelsior Mill by Sun Ra (Modern Harmonic Records)
Butterfly In The Sky by The Octopus Project (Earth Libraries)
The Healer by Sumac (Thrill Jockey Records)
Absolute Elsewhere by Blood Incantation (Dark Descent)
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The Way Out of Easy – Jeff Parker and the ETA IVtet (International Anthem)
This album really is something truly special. Captured live at the now shuttered ETA in Los Angeles, this is the sound of a band that has honed in on its sound and solidified their improvisational communication skills. The music takes a minimalist approach, where simple elements repeating begin to yield hypnotic results, improvisation blooms not from flashy digressions, but with deliberate and subtle mutations. It’s like watching a cell divide under a microscope.
These four pieces average out at about 20 minutes per, which allows for plenty of time for the band to stir the cauldron. What continues to impress on these songs is the restraint, and the band’s awareness of each other. No one is honking about stepping on toes, or twirling their hat in the spotlight. The magic of this music comes from just this level of consideration and control, there is nothing out of place, nothing to break the spell. This understanding also extends to dynamics. The band tends to stay in the mezzo piano range, and only brushes with forte for a quick all-together-now moment in closing track “Chrome Dome”.
The quartet is made up of Jeff Parker on guitar, Anna Butterss on double bass, Josh Johnson on alto sax, and Jay Bellerose on drums. This group held down a Monday night residency at ETA for seven years and this record manages to put the band back in that space, with the occasional clink of a glass emerging from the background, or an appreciative hoot from someone. The final kudos goes to engineer, Bryce Gonzales. The sonic trademark of a good engineer is often one hewn from absence. With the right mics up, and each band member carved into their own niche, press record, get out of the way, and listen to the magic happen.
Music From The Merch Desk (2016-2023) by Aphex Twin (Warp Records)
Here we have a sprawling collection of songs that Richard D. James was shucking at his gigs over a seven year period. It’s nice to have them gathered together here for safe, low-cost perusal, instead of rolling the dice on Discogs. There’s a wide enough display of his varied skills and stylistic choices, from squelchy acid jams to glitched out techno bliss, fanned out across two and half hours of music. That said, it’s not the easiest to stay engaged with at this length. Plenty of songs just float unremarkably by, especially if you listen as I did: during two long drives to family holidays in different states. However, if you’re a fan of all things Aphex Twin, there’s plenty to dig into. The songs released at his 2019 London show are particularly solid. I’m a big Luke Vibert fan, and James remixes “Spiral Staircase” by Wagon Christ on this leg of the collection.
My biggest gripe with the album is that it is sequenced by virtue of show, and not by the natural flow of the music. This problem shows its face right out of the gate with the first two tracks just being alternate mixes of each other. Combine this with the songs that noodle pointlessly to nowhere, and the bloat really starts to show.
Squared Roots by Seefeel (Warp Records)
After a thirteen year break from the UK band, we got two new releases from Seefeel in 2024. Following August’s Everything Squared, and captured during the same recording session, Squared Roots drifts further into the realm of smeared atmospherics and recursive percussion. Though the constituent parts of these songs follow a minimalist rule set, it is the placement of the individual elements that reveals a greater depth just beyond the loops and drones. As a result, there is a dream-like quality to the music. The resulting mood and aesthetic is damn near something like a Boards of Canada album, but a little more subdued. Even when the drums hit hard on these songs, they are tempered in some way or another. Whether they’re choked by a filter, or swallowed by a pool of reverb, they keep everything connected to the rhythm without becoming the driving force. The end result in these songs is something like a dream trying to claw back into your consciousness, gently pulsating, glowing at the end of a long corridor.
Waves by Aleksi Perälä (self-released)
I can hardly keep up with this prolific Finnish musician. Last year alone he released seventeen albums, and I’ve only managed to skim through a small fraction of those. Waves is remarkable in that it immediately grabbed my attention by being a departure from his more rhythmically-focused CHILDREN OF LIGHT series. Still using the microtonal (science or snake-oil) Colundi scale, Waves feels much more aligned with the healing ethos purported by the tuning. The album’s title is also a descriptor, foretelling both the building blocks and the final shape of the songs here. It’s a relatively unadorned collection of tones, and they travel the stereo field—be it dynamics, harmonics, or panning—on slow moving functions. Placing all these sonic objects in a tank, or a pool if you must, they seem to suggest transmutation; from vibrations in the air to a more viscous medium, one could sit at the bottom for a while and reemerge, shed of some psychic weight or spiritual malady, cleansed.
At its core though, it’s a great listen. No one song is better than another, and together they return us to the endless elemental comfort of the drone, the call of mother ocean. I’ve used it for sleep, ketamine treatments, and I’ve put it on as background noise while I work on a computer. It is peaceful, simple, and extremely powerful. As far as the healing properties contained in the palette of tones, I am neither skeptic nor disciple. Music already has healing properties of its own, and those are somewhat aetherial and hard to define. Making additional claims—or demands, of it almost feels like trying to pimp out a blessing. However it manages to operate on this level is irrelevant to me. I’m content with the trick. I don’t need to see how it’s done.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Softie by Jogging House (Seil Records)
Triecade by Steven R. Smith (Worstward Recordings)
90 by Roedelius (Groenland Records)
Phantom Brickworks (LPII) by Bibio (Warp Records)