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.
Perverts by Ethel Cain (Daughters of Cain)
The album’s opening track perfectly captures the jarring, disjointed feeling between a congregation in the ecstasy of song, comforted and close to the light of the lord, and the isolated youth with a body budding, burning and curious in all the ways that pain our Christ. The song begins with a solo voice singing the hymn “Nearer, my God, to Thee” until the final refrain brings in a chorus of voices, warbling in distortion as if it were being etched on to a wax cylinder. When the final note falls away, a long dull highway hum fills the empty space. A muffled and distant voice intones: “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator.” The voice sparsely repeats “Masturbator/masturbator,” stamping a label and a sin into the child’s mind. The voice grows more distorted and more distant, as a cold soundscape pumps into the foreground like blood humming in the ears, or grief choking the sinuses. When silence swallows the sound of this rumination, the voice returns “It’s happening to everybody.” Adding to the confusion, we don’t know which voice speaks these words. Is it the child trying to understand puberty, is it the voice of authority certain that each generation brings further decay to our world, or—worst of all, has the child taken the voice from the pulpit into their own heart?
Cain was raised in a devoutly Southern Baptist family, and though she is older now and estranged from her family, the tumult of her childhood is the lens through which her music is conjured. On Perverts, the focus of the music is how love is used to control, to justify manipulation, and how claims of love can’t absolve the damage done in its name. These are the tenants of the church, afterall. I too was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, and I think often of how the preacher would close his sermons, calling forth the sinful to kneel at the altar and receive the gift of total surrender (to Christ of course, but also to your wretchedness, the shame that brought you there), “You might be sitting there saying to yourself, ‘Pastor, you really stepped on my toes today,’ and I’ll tell you that I missed. Because I was aiming for your heart.”
The song “Punish” is maybe the most beautiful and direct on this record. Cain’s voice rises beautifully out of the dark ambient murk of the previous track, singing “Only God knows, only God would believe / That I was an angel, but they made me leave”. The album overall captures just this juxtaposition between the Lynchian horrorscape, and these gorgeous compositions that elevate both hard-learned truths and cognitive distortions on equal footing. In search of one’s person, hewn from the negative spaces carved away by others, and the heart that has been there all along, ours, before we are taught to poison it against our understanding and our fellow man.
In Awe of Nature by Yanaco (P-Vine Records)
Since its release in the mid 1980s, the record Green by Hiroshi Yoshimura has been the standard-bearer for a very specific type of ambient music. Certainly, the name alone conjures to mind a certain lushness, but there is also a defining edge to the sound, a crispness, articulate in a way that isn’t always found in the reverb-washed delay-scapes of other music in the ambient genre. It more closely mimics a contemplation of individual objects in nature than the psychedelic crush of being stoned in tall trees. In Awe of Nature finds a way to turn a leaf into an intricately veined canopy, a single drop of moisture into a kaleidoscopic wishing well.
It’s a continuation of the sounds that make Japanese ambient music its own, something that is slightly more delicate, and intimate than even the most restrained Brian Eno compositions. Even though the songs can sound open and crisp, it is not due to a simplicity or lack of instrumentation. In what seems like a bit of cultural idiosyncrasy, each element seems aware of the others surrounding it, and as such politely quiets down when it’s time for someone else to speak. If you’re an American taking a ride on a Tokyo subway, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This deference and awareness of others. There’s no elbowing or jostling for space, each sound knows it is part of a greater whole, and greater still in the reserve at work, mimicking the harmonious cycles of nature itself.
True to RAVEN’s usual modus operandi, GNOSIS departs significantly from the work that came before it. This in itself is refreshing, to see an artist dabble in certain sounds, do so masterfully, and then seek out new territory. GNOSIS, however, possesses a deeper quality, an atmosphere that firmly presses in from the edges of the music. There’s a hi-mid fizz present in all these songs, sort of like you’re coming up on a DMT trip, getting ready to receive taunts from the elves and shake hands with the lizard overlords. This fizz is more than a little background noise. It undulates, swept discreetly by a filter, panned, or tickled by a phaser. It has a narcotizing effect, a sort of air conditioner hum that can go unnoticed until the music drops out around it, standing naked and unattenuated, or swallowed by the silence between tracks. Then there’s a steady rhythmic element, a looping arpeggio, or the subterranean throb of a bass drum, your pulse in your ears, keeping you anchored to your being as the mind melts toward the All Soul. If Wolfgang Voight’s GAS albums are about exploring the psycho-spiritual gulp of the Black Forest, RAVEN has spun an album that allows us to trace the tangles of our own minds.
Where Things Are Hollow: No Tomorrow by Pye Corner Audio (Lapsus Records)
While not exactly a new release, in that this collects several EPs worth of material in one place, it does add a few extra tracks that were previously unreleased, as well as a disc of remixes from other artists. For those unfamiliar with the artist, this may be a great entry point for new listeners in that it provides a top down view of Martin Jenkins’ work over the last few years. While not nearly as comprehensive as the fantastic Black Mill Tapes, this is a more easily digestible chunk of content.
The music itself has a futuristic edge to it, and as the title suggests, it could even be described as dystopian. This is not electronic music that pretends connection to our natural world, but presents the menacing edge of our synthetic appetites, the ghosts programmed into our relentless pursuit of progress. The songs are deeply cinematic in their movement. Building an environment with ethereal pads, knotty bass lines ride the space between percussive hits, while slight variations in rhythmic repetition evoke the feeling of traversing an Escher-esque hallway.
New Dawn by Marshall Allen (Mexican Summer)
Obviously none of us are going to live to be 100, but let’s say you manage to make it that far. Do you imagine doing much more than leaving behind a snail trail of bodily fluids, eagerly awaiting an appropriate time to go to bed in hopes that you might finally hitch a ride to the hereafter? That’s so cynical of you. You should celebrate your 100th birthday by releasing your first solo record! This is exactly what Marshall Allen did. He’s a longtime member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra—leading the band since 1995, and here he takes the driving philosophy of the group and extends it to his own compositions and arrangements.
The record leans toward the tamer side, eschewing some of Ra’s dissonant and atonal approaches for crystal clear compositions, lushly arranged instrumentation, and the occasional avant excursion of Allen’s sax. There’s a beautifully done reinterpretation of “Angels and Demons at Play” that wraps up the record, leaving only the original melody untouched, the band twists the song into new directions. Allen doesn’t push any new boundaries here, but instead offers a different entry point to the musical family he’s been a part of for the better part of his life. It’s inspiring to see someone live such a long life dedicated to their art, knowing that creativity doesn’t seem to have an expiration date.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
6 by Krokofant (Is It Jazz? Records)
Relativita by Wet Basement (Detroit Underground)
Northstar and Speedway by Andrew Douglas Rothbard (self-released)
Savage Modern Structures by Ian Hawgood (Home Normal)
Further Vexations (Re-Mastered) by The Black Dog (Dust Science)
Bird at Sunrise by I Am Robot and Proud (self-released)