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.
At Source by Caterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske (light-years)
Collaboration doesn’t always mean that the space between each individual will be traversed in seeking out a new language. Sometimes the opposite is true, that these two souls were already in alignment, and that the shared act of creativity is one of remembering—not the see-saw push into the unknown.
My favorite work by Caterina Barbieri is still Patterns of Consciousness. It’s not that her later works aren’t beautiful and engaging in their own way, but those subsequent albums—though still minimalist at their core, stray further from the pared down palette of sounds on her earliest works. It became more likely that she would embrace moments of bombast that nulled the hypnosis induced by her recursive melodies. It felt like a loss of patience. On At Source she reconnects with these useful constraints. Whether this is to leave room for Bendik Giske’s saxophone, or if this is indeed the source of the musical language that they already shared is irrelevant. The result is staggeringly beautiful.
For Giske’s part in all this, there is an unreal amount of skill at work in his playing. He swings wildly from incantatory trills, alternating between breathy whispers and barks, and matches pace with the motorik gallop of Barbieri’s sequences. He even provides his own percussive accompaniment by breathlessly tapping out rhythms on the keys of the saxophone on “Alignment, Orbits”. Every aspect of his instrument is fully utilized.
It’s not that there aren’t plenty of other albums featuring the interplay between saxophone and synthesizer, but the compositional techniques here meld the distinctive sounds of these instruments into a singular force. The endless arpeggiated call and response between the two voices, gives way to seeking the deeper waves of timbral undulations, where the saw wave’s harmonics buzz congruently with the reedy snarl of the saxophone. It’s hard not to marvel at these moments, largely because that is the whole occasion. When sequences run by at a trot or notes hang frozen in air like an Acme Anvil, there is a thick swell building ponderously in the distance, somewhere. Whether it’s a literal crescendo, or a mild mutation in a scroll of arpeggios, we are frozen at the center of so much happening. This creates the impenetrable wall of sound capable of elastically encasing the listener in the snug confines of a coffin or sprawling outward into an endlessly expanding vault of undulating forms.
Prove the Mountains Move by Exek (DFA Records)
Whenever there is a new Exek record, I am always shocked at how good Albert Wolski is at making the studio another instrument in the ensemble. These bits of polish shine brightly but quickly, and half-assed listening will not find them. Return to the record a few times, and you’ll find yourself eagerly anticipating some of these little treats. Whether it’s the word “G-Banger” underscored by bong bubbles in “Visiting Dust Bunnies”, or any of a handful of quarter-note rests placed tastefully to poke a hole in the skin congealing on a song’s form, keeping them from drifting into static.
The last few records (Advertise Here and The Map and the Territory) have gestured in this direction, but Prove the Mountains Move is the perfect execution of the sound they’ve been reaching for. There’s enough concern about melody and structure that I would almost call these pop songs, but there’s an uncanny haze hanging over Exek’s music. Behind all the beautiful arrangements there is a drone buried almost subconsciously in the mix. This low hum serves as a backbone to lyrics spiraling between the banality of daily life and the peripheral static of the anxious organism ever-connected to a world in total chaos where terror and boredom appear to be interchangeable feelings. In this way, the music has a post-modern bent to it. Beyond self-awareness, lost in the abyss of information where knowledge lies dead, all this pathologizing won’t heal a single dysfunction.
I wouldn’t say that the group fully wears their musical influences on their sleeve, but under enough scrutiny it’s easy to hear their own spin on some recognizable sounds. I’m reminded a lot of Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets. For one, it’s the studio-as-instrument stuff I mentioned earlier, but they’ve got that fuzzy Fripp guitar tone dialed in. At times the vocals seem to have Eno’s own timbre and delivery wound around them as well. There’s a bit of John Cale performing a spoken word verse. There’s even a touch of Robyn Hitchcock in the form of irreverent lyrics (“In a past life, I believe you were a bathmat”) and performative delivery. I’m not attempting to dress down the group by naming these commonalities. I’m just overjoyed to hear the unique outcome created by connecting the dots of these influences forming a sound that is truly unique.
Honorable Mentions
Autechre Guitar by Shane Parish (Palilalia Records)
The album title says it all. Although it’s certainly not something I would’ve ever imagined existing, these reimaginings work out far better than I could’ve guessed.
Shane Parish takes the early works of the “IDM” (a designation the band dislikes) pioneers and trades dense electronic sound worlds for ten fingers hard at work on an acoustic guitar. Overall, Autechre lean toward compositions so overstuffed that even with repeated listens there is a good bit that may evade comprehension. The success of Parish’s outing is partly based on choice. These songs are almost entirely from their first three LPs, the white bread of a 3 decade career that contains mostly whatever exists beyond pumpernickel on the gluten spectrum. Parish shaves away some of the sonic digressions inherent in their music, and beautifully performs the melodic core of their songs. My hope in hearing this record is that it will serve the same function for Parish as Incunabula, Amber, and Tri-Repetae serve for Autechre fans: a gateway drug. Fingers crossed that he can try his hand at some of their later work, where traditional structures and melody are less obvious, forcing him to mine the songs for rhythms and notes that can find fresh expression along a fretboard.
Hellbent Daydream by Brandon Seabrook (Pyroclastic Records)
Revelling equally in free form improvisation and meticulously arranged movements, the musicians on Hellbent Daydream transcend the rigid structures of songwriting in favor of seeking out complex tonal relationships, volleying runs and ditties between instruments. A call goes out, and returns a Pig Latin response, then French, then Portuguese—not literally of course, but lean an ear to “I’m a Nightmare and You Know It” and you’ll get the idea.
True to the album’s title, these songs often start simply enough, but quickly accelerate into a confusion of mutations, scarcely retaining a hold of the thread along darkening peregrinations. Before the first track (“Name Dropping is the Lowest Form of Conversation”) is halfway through the tone is set. That is to say that the music has prepared us for rocky seas ahead. Even the most playful of these songs comes equipped with its own black wing of tumult and bother.
“The Arkansas Tattler” pirouettes gleefully across several minutes until the piano’s lid slams fast across the fingers in its final moments. The notes land felicitously upon our heads so used to the shadow ever hanging over the vacant space of future events: a piece of key lime pie glistening and tart with promise but visited ahead of the tongue by the downward thrust of a spent cigarette. Hellbent Daydream invites us to take a bite anyway. Even the safety of the current moment is uncertain, the errant pluck of a note, or a bow drawing across a string pulling in the foretaste of uncertainty, planning for a wedding in a landscape of genocide and plague. It’s all here, without words, coiled in a rat king of magnetic tape where pulling at a thread only furthers the knotty work of understanding.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Evaporator by Nathan Fake (Infiné)
Discombobulated by Hen Ogledd (Domino Recording Co.)
The Patterns Lost to Air by Marielle V Jakobsons (Thrill Jockey)
Six Beginnings EP by Space Dimension Controller (Test Pressing)
Seeing Is Forgetting by Elori Saxl & Henry Solomon (True Panther)
Grotto by Joe Westerlund & Trever Hagen (Totally Gross National Product)
Canada by John Beltran as Placid Angles (Oath Creations)
Kin by KMRU (Editions Mego)
In My Dreams by Bill Frisell (Blue Note)
Shadow Language by Brendon Moeller (Samurai Music)
Deface the Currency by James Brandon Lewis & The Messthetics (Impulse Records)