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.
Birthing by Swans (Young God Records)
In recent interviews, Michael Gira has claimed not to have much gas left in the tank with regard to his musical output. However, after seeing Swans live this past year and as evidenced by Birthing he doesn’t appear to have eased up on the throttle at all. This is Swans doing what they do best: droning, hypnotizing, and yowling unease. Sure, it’s nothing unexpected, but at the same time the power of Swans is being pulled in by a narcotizing haze of repetition and then being dope slapped with the big reveal, like a sock full of quarters smashing down on your skull.
The method of tension and release is tried and true. Swirling around a bit of atmosphere until it reaches the breaking point, and new progressions arrive, a doldrum to be pulled into until the next swell ushers you thunderously onward.
Perhaps the most dynamic song on the record is “Guardian Spirit.” It feels like an epic journey unfurling over ten minutes. A nimbus of haunting vocals and wind instruments tease out a three note guitar dirge with a bass drum lashing out a cadence of methodical exertion. It sounds like a thousand bodies pulling a slab through knee-deep mud. Somehow, and inevitably, the band manages to find further tension and drama as the song progresses. Just when it can’t rain any harder, the wind can’t howl any louder, the clouds part. Silence. Then a familiar dark shadow swallows the sun, but clouds they are not. Riding on a steady hum, rushing to fill the negative space, a dense wall of bugs blot out the light, stopping the breath and strangling the screams. Despite this claustrophobia, there is a level of ecstasy, a religious abandon to these supplicants of the swarm.
It’s good stuff. It’s cathartic. It’s Swans.
xAj3z by SoiSong (Dais Records)
A short lived but captivating project from Ivan Pavlov of COH and Peter Cristopherson of Coil. For three brief years, from 2007 until Cristopherson’s unexpected passing in 2010, the duo used Thailand as their home and a kind of conduit for their music. The songs swing between eerie ambience, fragments of popular music from years gone, and bursts of interference from an undetermined future reality. With all the lines crossed—temporal, spiritual, geographic, and technological, the duo’s output maintains a sound that is all their own, indefinable and aetherial.
The album is full of vocalizations, but they’re not vocals in the expected sense. An androgynous computer utters a bouquet of digitally manufactured glottal, susurrant, and nasal sounds to construct a false language from artifacts. As I recall, this is one thing—the prominence of voice, that differentiates xAj3z from qxn948s—a collection of some of their earliest recordings. Christopherson would also use this digital lead singer in his solo endeavor as Threshold Houseboys Choir.
Taken en toto, these elements make their creations inscrutable. The music isn’t the same song to song, let alone minute to minute. Listening to SoiSong is like tapping into an array of antennas, satellite dishes, crystal balls, ouija boards, wax cylinders, routers, dot-matrix printers, ultrasounds, sepia tone photographs, and a box of haunted jewelry all playing at the same time.
Grzyby by Błoto (Astigmatic Records)
It’s always great to hear an album that bears the marks of the artist’s hungry ear. These Polish jammers reach out and pull together multiple genres into one cohesive sound that is informed by a melding of many genres. The mission statement for this record suggests just this level of heterogeneous interconnectivity. The name, Grzyby, means ‘mushroom’ in Polish, and the band points to mycelium as an inspiration for connection between the band, and of course, wishfully, society as a whole. Striving for something beyond egoism and the elevation of the individual, the group places hope on a thoughtful and intuitively connected system of cooperation and interconnectedness. The year is 2025 and we’re all pretty well parched for a sup of this stuff.
Obviously, these are the pipe dreams of the underclass. The wishful Leary-indebted thinking of changing the world through a coordinated dosing of those that clog up the halls of power. If entire systems can be toppled in months, isn’t a watercooler of Orange Sunshine the least we can do? With the band leading by example, the music takes on the context of a protest album of sorts. Bereft of lyrical content, but bursting with the vibrant spirit of the musicians. Firmly rooted in groove, leading with funky bass lines and syncopated percussion, the band swaggers along, weaving woodwinds and synth lines through these wicked curves. Each musician would be a standout on their own, but they opt to bolster each other’s strengths rather than ham and tapdance in the spotlight. Truly the only thing that could ruin these songs is a guitar solo.
Take “Makużnik,” with its burbling Moog percolating over an electronic kick drum, a live kit, and a background synth line that see-saws up, and hollers wheeee in its fall. It has the same jazzy funk jus of a song by The Comet is Coming. It’s got cool moves, and the band is conscious enough of their sound that they revel in that freshness just long enough. They let these concise and mighty songs speak for themselves in precisely measured amounts. Sure, any one of these songs could be stretched out into a twenty-plus minute vamp. These are wiser folks for sure. They’re not serving up Bonnaroo-encore vibes.
The Bandcamp page (and vinyl pressing) only has four songs, but if you seek out the album on other streaming services there are eight songs of this ilk to whet your whistle.
Honorable Mentions
Morpho by Donato Dozzy (Gang of Ducks)
I was a huge fan of Donato Dozzy’s release from last year, Magda. With its spaciousness and slowly shifting repetitions it was a frequent and well matched companion for my ketamine assisted therapy sessions. Morpho leaves behind much of the reverberant atmosphere that defined Magda, and opts instead for a dialed-in, up front rhythmic presence. Otherwise, Dozzy’s minimalist toolset remains the same, and to great effect.
At only four tracks running around twenty minutes, there’s less energy spent on creating a sense of time loss. With a handful of tones peppered over solid drum beats Dozzy still manages to make it feel like the floor is shifting beneath you. Individual drum hits won’t turn up in the same spot every time around. The music shuffles and leans, drawing attention to a new focal point, and tucks in a different sound while you’re not looking.
It’s subtle. As is all his work, but working in a comparatively compact set it’s an excellent show of Dozzy’s versatility. However, the album left me wanting more. I often have this problem with EPs. Right when the music starts to cement its presence, it’s gone. These songs are strong on their own, but given the stripped down nature of the music there’s plenty of room to stretch things a bit further out into cross-eyed territory.
Stray Voltage by Sun Ra (Sundazed Music)
What could be more human than making promises that we can’t keep. I knew this record was coming out, and I told myself that there was no reason to write about Sun Ra two months in a row. So, let’s just call this a recommendation, and not a write up.
Another example of Ra right at home in a new era of creativity. New instruments bring fresh inspiration. The 1970s saw electric keyboards and commercially available synthesizers becoming popular additions for the touring musician. They were also perfect for further expanding the language of cosmic jazz. Collected across two decades (70s/80s) there’s plenty of analog bliss and electrically-crisp digital bells on display (I’m looking at you Dx-7!). Sonny plops on down and makes himself comfortable in front of these strange new controls. These are not half-assed doodles at the keyboard. His skills and his knowledge transfer intuitively to these instruments, conjuring soundtracks for silent cinema, and the bombast of collapsing stars.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
As Time Draws Near by Daniel Bachman (Self-Released)
Dissever by Emptyset (Thrill Jockey Records)
My Brutal Life 2 by The Black Dog (Dust Science)
Metallic Life Review by Matmos (Thrill Jockey Record)
Instruments by Water Damage (12XU)
Quilted lament by claire rousay and Gretchen Korsmo (Mappa Editions)
Nuits sans nuits by Pierre Bastien and Michel Banabila (Pingipung)
About Ghosts by Mary Halvorson (Nonesuch Records)