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. His new dark electronic band A Tomb Full of Stars will release their debut album in September 2026.
Set of All Sets by Parts & Labor (Ernest Jenning Record Co.)
What a pleasant surprise! Parts & Labor reignite with a sprawling and ambitious collection of songs. Fourteen years have passed since they last broadcast Constant Future but their sound is still here, alive and well. We’re just further along the continuum. It’s recognizably Parts & Labor, but the drums hit harder and the production feels bigger. These extra levels of polish sit in glorious juxtaposition to the glitched out synths and their usual bombast. Alternatingly sharp-edged and lush, the band delivers a sermon on collapse and rebirth, an infinite spirit constrained by binary expressions.
At an hour and nineteen minutes, it’s a proper gulp of music. It feels like the release of ideas that were sitting on simmer for fourteen years. I thought it was a little bit bloated at first but upon each return I’ve gradually changed my mind. These are dense songs, and it takes time to hear the complexity of the individual parts that are responsible for the greater wholloping. Even with this saturated mix, there are beautiful subtleties folded into the crunch.
The album features a four part exploration of “Endless Cycles”: “Pt. 1: Repetition Nil”, “Pt. 2: Edges of Forgetting”, “Pt. 3: Better Run”, and “Pt 4: Working in Storm”. These function as jumping off points, grouping Pts. 1 & 2 at the album’s start, and Pts. 3 & 4 as Side C openers. It seems to me that all of their years of writing about paranoia, destruction and the disillusion of technology has left the band surprised. Shouldn’t it all have ended by now? The universe rolls on eternally while humans insist they live outside the bounds of the natural world. Always in a desperate search for novel ways to further that illusion.
“Parallel Tracks” visualizes a wave across the divide between the world we’ve created and the world of could-have-been. From our smokey vantage we observe this Other Earth that looks forward and adapts, reverses course on bad ideas, learns from mistakes, and grows by transcending their circumstances.
No matter the cost, this wishful itch for an altered reality is all over the album. On “Haunted Limbs” the lyrics reflect on our desire to do the impossible, even if the results are a net negative. “What if we built a house no one could live in? What if we wrote a song no one could play?” Further, “It haunts us like a limb we haven’t grown yet. Lurking like tomorrow’s yesterday”. We will seek out a bright new future, and it will bring ruin, “But that work is long.”
The album continues to operate around these Endless Cycles. Whether describing a place in time or the snares that hold more than our minds, the band builds a world of brutal, beautiful architecture. Filligreed with hard-truths in oscillation, sampling and holding through frames of self-destruction, stacking brick on brick, describing an approach to the pixelated palisades at the end of humanity. These walls grow larger, defying prayer and comprehension as they rise before us. Dashing our bodies on the escarpment, our spirits alight in languorous departure, a last and long look at what we’ve failed to love adequately, but finally allowing ourselves to move beyond the zero and blend with the infinite we banished from the earth long ago.
Tesoros by Lumtz (We All Speak In Poems)
I guess I just need a lot of gentle music in my life right now, and this new Lumtz record is a fine salve for the aches of the persevering heart. The artist started this record under the premise of “things inside my backpack”. Meditating about notebooks, cameras, trinkets, keys naturally gave way to remembering people, places, moments—these intangible items we carry on our journey, accumulating mass and shining the other-hued light of personal experience upon our forward motion. Imbuing our momentum with a glow reflecting from facets gouged in souls along their path. No two alike, and yet we are the One of interdependence. We know the peace of the ocean, the sorrow of a Sunday sun, the reptilian-fizz prickling the body as the forest swallows us, the heat of two minds falling into step with one another, a missed kiss shining speculation on a path not taken, the grief of an apartment you’ve emptied, the lives left behind.
These are the items in our backpack, Tesoros, treasures. Lumtz polishes these moments further through a deliberate use of the natural world as an instrument. There are plenty of field recordings on records of this type—and indeed there are many here as well, but among the instruments listed on the record we have “drum racks of stones, branches and other natural elements” which, to my ear, you can hear on opening track “pequeñas formas en la orilla”. The effect of this little drum rack is much more powerful than words can convey. It feels like an assemblage of instances harvested from countless hikes, pared down and rearranged into music. A stone slipping beneath your foot or in the distance, the tranquil clatter of branches in the wind, and these are the bars of a xylophone. As we remember, we create and slake the thirst of fictions we errantly planted with our recollections. The thumb rubs the stone, and the stone is forever changed.
There’s a pristine quality to these songs. They don’t feel embellished or elaborate constructions of a palace of misremembering. The pure tones of the synthesizer, the whisper of an empty room, the wilderness music box, and the deliberate re-exploration of the everyday texture of life, so that the hum-drum may be split along the hyphen and hum to kindle a heart and drum to count our steps.
Candles in the Dark by Spirituals (self-released)
The name Spirituals seems the perfect designation to the music created by Tyler Tadlock, but it may also be the name of his guiding star. This nommiker holds his music within a set of bounds, coloring his sonic language. Make no mistake, there is no homogenized aesthetic running as a throughline across his catalog. Tadlock’s musical interests allow each Spirituals record to occupy a fully realized space, willing to find edges of his own playing and composition in the process. The constant, the through-line, from record to record lies somewhere beyond the instruments. Tucked up in the aether, the source of his channeling swirls down to minister to the listener, flowing through the loneliest halls of our souls, drawing us nearer one another. Awed by beauty, we captives of the miracle can hold a small light against this world’s unyielding darkness.
In the album’s liner notes Tadlock explains that the title is referring to this process. In creating this music, as much as the listener invites it into their life, we find a flicker of hope, or peace, or a maybe path through the woods where we can get lost for a bit. These aren’t songs it says, “I can’t explain why exactly but candle feels like a better word for it than tune or song. This is a collection of candles that have been accompanying me through the demon-haunted world in which we find ourselves lately.” It is a beautiful reminder that the creative act is not the result of immense sorrow and hardship, but the product of the resilience that sees us through. We create and persevere despite the dark cloud, the iron fist, the virus, the machine. Candles in the Dark floats comfortably in the middle distance. Treat it as an ambient album if that suits your need, or treat it as a labyrinth, a quiet pedway through consolation and memory.
In “Demon-Haunted World”, repetitious melodies lull us into a neutral headspace while individual instruments crescendo / decrescendo together and in a round. The song grows beautifully from singularly plucked strings to an ensemble of swirling percussion, wind, and yet more strings. The individual instruments build through the song and develop a pulse of their own, complimentary to the melody of the guitar as it guides them along toward diminuendo and dust.
Despite these meticulously arranged pieces and the beautiful solace they provide, the heat from the world’s inferno can still be felt lapping at your back. Creating a space to mourn, where we can poke among the ashes for our newfound deficits.
Sitting with “Perpetual Mornings” I think about the moment when I wake each day and over a cup of coffee I decide to consult a screen so I can see what was lost while I slept. I get to feel responsible for sabotaging my own peace. Even though I don’t own the events or their outcomes, I am beholden to them. To feel the anguish of people torn away from home and loved ones, what we previously considered ‘rights’ now plunged into the darkness, and I feast on bitterness: there is always room in the budget for pain and death, but to aid those beleaguered by hardship, one is meant to feel duped. The nefarious poor with their staff of scientists seeking to end the need for sustenance. Their Rolodex of lawyers and lobbyists hard at work deregulating food stamps so, once hunger is rendered extinct, EBT and SNAP benefits can be traded like stocks and spent like carnival tickets.
During COVID life dangled from a thread; thin, frayed, and hanging perilously. As days lost their shape, and reality began its divergence, virus mutates from pathogen to plot, shattering the fleeting vision of a world that looks out for one another, each night I laid my head down with For Those Are Tormented or In Pain, Pt. II and Sounds of Healing in Isolation. I found solace in these loops. Something on repeat that wasn’t just tragedy, death, blasphemy. So we’re here, further down the spiral and into the pit, trapped in a world that is collapsing in on itself. Though the truest evil may be running wild in this world, Spirituals provides music that reminds us that we are human. We are flawed and scared, but we are resilient and we are never alone.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Renascent by The Durutti Column (London Records)
Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun by Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri (Black Knoll Editions)
Backyard Variations by Jogging House (Seil Records)
Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Sun Ra (Strut Records)
Paradise Mountain by Katatonic Silentio (Maloca)
Slo-mo Neon Luminate Hoverings by Ambrose Akinmusire & Mary Halvorson (Nonesuch Records)
Bivabippabualukka by Sofie Birch (Stroom)
Sean,
I am going to have to dig into these.
Thanks, Jackal