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.
Balm by Ill Considered (New Soil)
There’s something about the gloomy procession of “Blue Dreams” as it patiently drifts into your living room. Proceeded by a carpet of fog, a sax-spittle sizzle of a light bulb befritzed: an encroaching shadow raked across the windows, trumping its arrival with the crack and buckle of floorboards flexing, wafting along the hot-nosed smell of grief. Light bends away, around the shape that slowly fills your vision. Haloed in dusk, a blindness. Accommodated away in negative space, the timpani-tweaking gut-wrench of Uncertainty. The thing itself—Uncertainty, pulled snuggly across the dwindling eternity of your life on earth. Tucked in.
This somber preamble, “Blue Dreams”, sets the temperature for the rest of the songs on Balm. It becomes instantly and totally clear that there is no room for something as light-hearted as the cough-and-gnod stoner joke that the song title could limply imply. The murky soundscape of Balm hangs much heavier over our collective consciousness than a bad bong rip. We are cut down a little more with each passing second in our two-minutes-to-midnight reality. It’s the music for the damned in the streets. The sounds made outside the palace walls, a collective bellow to blot out the orgiastic glee of the free-for-all there in. The wandering drip of a saxophone lost in the gutter, trudging onward. The horn work itself sounds tired, beleaguered—in the best way. The intonation is often so breathy that the notes sound like little more than an incidental occurrence.
You can look to “Lavender” for an example of this. The saxophone fades in and out of focus as steady puffs across the reed slowly tease out a note, then a phrase, coming into focus and lost again behind a blur. The percussion, the voice, and the deep thrum of strings twirl, rise into a dance, at the horn’s entreaty. The music extends itself and expands in all directions moving like a snake rising from a basket at the behest of a pungi. Again, this feeling of fear, the danger cast out by a furtive shade somewhere behind the musicians, animating them through the ether of a reality gone arhythmic.
Inland See by Bitchin Bajas (Drag City Records)
It’s been a busy year for these Bitchin Bajas. Hot on the heels of their fantastic collaboration with Natural Information Society, Totality, we find the trio drifting along the outer edges of jazz and ambient. This makes enough sense, given their work over the last several years. Sprinkle in a little of Switch On Ra’s cosmic grooves, the twinkling soundscapes of Bajascillators, and stir these elements with the simmering repetition of krautrock that so frequently animates their music and we’ve arrived at Inland See.
This recipe is not meant to suggest that the music is derivative or Bajas-by-numbers. Quite the opposite is true. The album is stamped like a passport, proudly displaying all the places this group is willing to take their sound.
Opening track “Skylarking” moves through the primary mechanism of accumulation through repetition. What begins as some slow strings, quarter notes shaken from bells, synth and voice playing ping-pong between ears, a crescendo builds by way of steady procession. A melodic line on a synth steps into center stage, and pulls the volume up on each return, drawing a saxophone into the mix, improvising atop these pieces until the horn dives in with the synth to bring the melody back into focus.
“Keiji Dreams” lands like a misplaced track from a Cluster session. Despite the warm bassy fuzz humming throughout accompanied by electric piano shining brightly, the song begins and ends with a full band pitch bend. Like someone leaning on a reel to reel or slowing the speed of their turntable, the instruments all lilt together. It may in fact be nothing more magical than slowing the playback speed of the track, but these bookended production tricks are mirrored by the instrumentation in the song. Specifically, the meandering glissando of the electric wind instrument brings the syrupy-slow yo-yo sound of fluctuating tape speed into the heart of the performance. Each improvisation is born from and returns to this motion, gliding from one note and departing upon a languorous search for the next.
Ok, so then lets go for the Full German. “Graut” moves with the motorik clockwork of NEU!: a simple drum beat; arpeggios so endless that you fail to notice the exact moment when they’ve shifted by a beat, and then later by one note; the fabric of the song folding over and over back into itself. Nothing more complicated here than repetition. It’s also nothing they haven’t done before (see the Krausend EP), but these are the well-honed tools of our Baja menh—hhhuuu—errr, of the Bitchin Bajas.
Live at the Broad Museum by Osees (DEATHGOD RECORDS)
I might be stepping just a little bit on Jon Stout’s toes in scooping this one up, but it’s, like, so krautrock I had to put a flag in it (he also didn’t text me back when I recommended it to him).
Anyone who hasn’t seen Osees live could be forgiven for assuming they primarily perform their tidy little 3 minute cudgels that have comprised so much of their output in the last several years. Live at the Broad Museum arrives as a reminder that this band loves to get weird and loves to stretch out the jams. They’ve released plenty of live records over the years, and there’s usually at least one song that stretches beyond the ten minute mark. Here, we have 6 tracks totaling an hour and twelve minutes, and I’d only be tempted to call one concise (“Dark Weald”).
As the minutes roll by under a steady bass line, and stamped out rhythms, there is ample opportunity for digression, reinterpretation, and return. Dwyer not only sends his guitar around the song and back, but he pulls his little suitcase of effects and sound toys into the mix. He makes room to squawk nonsense through a ring modulator. Is that tremolo effect or is he strumming his lips to make that bubbly burble-burble speak? From breathy whispers, to the Castlemania classic creep-voice, and his usual rowdy-times hoot, these embellishments are daringly mangled right along with his Gibson. So into the woodchipper with the lot of it and out the discharge chute he fires these splintered sound shards back into the pump and tumult of the rhythm section. If it wasn’t already clear enough: John Dwyer learned a lot of tricks from one of his favorite bands, CAN.
Bend an ear to this live version of “I Got A Lot”. Launched across the many crests and slamming roughshod through the troughs, the song sounds damn near breaking after each rise and subsequent fall. Every full-throated crescendo must be beaten back by a hammer until everything is just barely writhing beneath a sheet. Inevitably, a guitar’s tooth-shattering squeal tears through these trappings and they’re spiraling upward back into deep space. Like the uncertain wobble sneaking into the trucks of a skateboard on a blistering downhill, a fiery blood-soaked collapse seems foresworn. The song’s hull can’t sustain such punishments! Somehow the group manages to negotiate a tah-dah! from these uncertain heights, descending softly, drifting on a feedback-choked breeze into the hushed and melting mantra: IGotAlotonmymind. ggGotallottamuhmind. GottalotGottalot. Gottalott. etc. Here, on the other side of the twenty-two minute absolute freak out to which we bore witness, we are left with this whispered recursive confession. He really did have quite a few things on his mind.
Sysivalo by Ø (Sahko Recordings)
There is a specific aesthetic that seems to run through music by Finnish electronic musicians. Maybe it’s the landscape or the weather asserting itself in these forms of expression. In the same way, this aesthetic lives in the sense of space that the artist painstakingly creates before bouncing the songs off the room’s architecture. There’s a lot of width and depth to the sounds trapped here, but the reflections sound flat and dark. Sounds with greater harmonic richness, harsher frequencies, move prominently into the foreground by virtue of their contrast with the broad rumble of an overdriven plate reverb. Put on any early Vladislav Delay record, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s that dull-edged headache of an overcast day where the light of the sun finds you, not as a reprieve, but as a white hot after image that slices deeper toward migraine.
Unlike Vladislav Delay, Mika Vainio’s (under the Ø moniker) Sysivalo very seldom relies on rhythm to propel the music forward. In fact, the opposite seems to be the point. The music creates a sense of stasis. The listener is trapped in a spider’s web, held in a spell of sleep paralysis, as events announce themselves and vibrations shake the web, the imagination is left to describe the forms threatening to arrive from somewhere beyond the periphery.
The name Sysivalo was created by combining the Finnish words for sinister (sysi) and light (valo). The album feels especially prescient, given that the darkness that is evoked here casts itself forward from its creation in 2014. Released posthumously, Sahko Records has assembled the final form of the album Vainio was so near completing when he died in 2017. The loneliness, the chill air that shivers around each tone, sounds informed by a global pandemic, the rewiring of reality, and souls lost to the notional space of our machines. This music lives beyond that rift, across the chasm that was the year that broke time. Nothing felt like this before 2020, but here is this tiny bit of sonic prophecy. Each song is a terrarium of frozen emotion. Indicative of our current reality where we are wired awake, forced to watch the imminent boiling over of doom and tragedy.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Environments by Rafiq Bhatia (Anti- Records)
41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s by Kieran Hebden & William Tyler (Temporary Residence Ltd.)
Michelangelo Dying by Cate Le Bon (Mexican Summer)
Duvet by Ida Urd & Ingri Høyland (Balmat)
Odu: Vibration II by Chris Williams (AKP Recordings)
Joshua/Same Day Walking by Mason Lindahl (Mt Brings Death)
Mulatu Plays Multatu by Mulatu Astatke (Strut)
Listen Ship by Henry Threadgill (Pi Recordings)
Dance Called Memory by Nation of Language (Sub Pop Records)
Cicero Nights by Blue Earth Sound (DeepMatter Records)