Review Round-Up: January 2013

i've got a different crush every other week...

And we're off...  to a pretty good start there, lil' 2013!  even better, maybe, this has been a month of some pretty exciting developments vis-a-vis what's to come later in the year...among other things, i've got my eyes on Vampire Weekend, Neon Neon, Billy Bragg, Low, Phoenix and DJ Koze, but most of all, of course, The Knife – I've just experienced their new single/video, "Full of Fire," which...hm hm hm, first of all: huge, massive, uncompromising, wow, every bit as much as you'd expect from the dreijers...  expectations properly stoked.  can't say love is the first thing it inspires (fear might be closer), though i'm definitely excited to spend more time with it.

(the song at least... the video will probably require some more views as well, there's definitely a lot in there.  in some ways it feels almost too on-the-nose in terms of their distinctive if continually envelope-pushing aesthetic; unflinchingly arty and odd, punk and severe; intensely gender-political without a whole of actual specificity to anything that's happening.  the heavy (and possibly a little dated??) arty/feminist tone, emphasis on mundane domestic scenes intercut with unexpected violence, and the northern Euro setting all put me in mind of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which i still sometimes cite as one of my favorite movies even though i slept through some parts of the one time i saw it...should really watch that again sometime...)

as for January's musical harvest, we got plenty of slow, spacious, meditative tones and drones – highly suitable for this seasons' extremes of chilliness and coziness (and just the thing to accompany reading, massages, and long snowy walks) – from the likes of mountains, pantha du prince, nosaj thing, toro y moi (even if this is allegedly his "pop" record), four tet, faltydl (in spots at least), not to mention the umpteenth installment of kompakt's pop ambient series – and also, waiting in the wings, grouper, darkstar, tosca, ulrich schnauss, and the extremely nice-sounding úlfur.  (plus bee mask, a late '12 hold-out.)  and similarly gentle, sweetly retro-tinged indie stuff from amor de dias, yo la tengo, christopher owens and foxygen.  on the other hand, some enjoyably scrappy punkish guitar (etc) noise from buke and gase, FIDLAR and the neato parquet courts.

and then, having very little to do with any of that, there was the second album by long-haired philly underdogs free energy...which turned out to be surprisingly controversial (actually, i'm a little surprised nobody gave it better than 8/10.)  on january 2nd i announced that it was my favorite album of 2013, so far... and while i don't expect that to last i think it just might still be holding onto that title, a month later.  so, a good way to kick off my first round-up 2013.

(oh: here's a Spotify mixtape (mixlist?) that's a bit multipurpose, with some faves from January, some previews of what's up next, a couple straggling 2012 tracks that I've been getting into more heavily, and some sample tracks from upcoming concerts I'm planning to attend.  but it includes cuts from most of the albums reviewed below, so listen along!  starts out big and silly, gets a little sleepy by the end.

)


Free Energy
Love Sign

At first blush, Love Sign feels like a solid, dependable retread of Free Energy's fabulous 2010 effort, Stuck On Nothing – certainly, nothing to sniff at.  It's not until you spin them back to back that it's clear how much this album preserves, even perfects, the spirit of their delirious debut, while fashioning it into something even bigger: brighter, tighter, better, more.  The Philly fivesome's cowbell-smacking, riffs-blazing reclamation of bygone rock'n'roll glory days rages on, but it's like the scruffy, all-American small-town dreamers of the first record got their big major-label break (in fact, times being what they are, they've taken the self-release route this time) and teamed with some hotshot producer (ditching that has-been fogy James Murphy) to add some polish – a couple horns, even some of them new-fangled synthesizers – to their raggedly earnest anthems.  Every damn song sounds like a single.  But their hearts are truer than ever: the seventies-jocking swagger is matched pound for pound by a disarmingly cheery, transcendental softness that deflects any dint of untoward classic-rock machismo.  Per the blazing "Electric Fever," the album's self-evident statement of purpose, still ringing golden nearly a year after its initial release:  "Turn it on.  Turn it up.  Let the moment breathe."  Amen. [8.5]

originally published in Magnet Magazine

Yo La Tengo
Fade
[Indie Rock]

Scaling back the stylistic hopscotch of their recent outings, Yo La Tengo's thirteenth album is their softest and most unified work since 2003's Summer Sun (also, notably, their shortest in over two decades) and it shares that underdog's ineffably low-key charms.  Nothing on Fade (Matador) sounds like hall-of-fame material, but that's not the point – these ten tunes, as much mood pieces as songs, are as glowingly, cozily familiar as the sun on a bright winter day.  And if the title can't help recalling that chestnut about the fate of aging rockers, rest assured that Hoboken's finest won't be burning out any time soon.

Retribution Gospel Choir
3
[Rock]

Low have an album due in March, but that won't keep axe-slinging main man Alan Sparhawk from a quickie on the side.  Retribution Gospel Choir, his other, decidedly louder band, follow last year's hooky lil Revolution EP with 3 (Chaperone), which comprises merely two monolithic, twenty-minute sides.  It's a definite yin-yang affair.  "Can't Walk Out" is the expected onslaught, all portentous sludge-riffage and scrawled, desperate skronk.  It's epic, and fairly interminable (also, it's in 9/4.)  "Seven" is the payoff:  bleary-eyed but surprisingly sweet, full of shimmering, Pinback-y layering and a veritable lullaby chorale, with sideman-to-the-stars Nels Cline joining in the inexorable six-string-wringing glory.

Petra Haden
Petra Goes To The Movies
[Vocal/Movie Music]

Following her tour de force all-acapella rendering of The Who Sell Out in 2005, LA music biz fixture/multi-instrumentalist Petra Haden gets back to the vocal multitracking reinterpretation game with Petra Goes To The Movies (Anti), featuring her one-woman choral renderings of film music both iconic (Psycho; Goldfinger; Superman – alone worth the price of admission) and otherwise.  The novelty factor is obviously high, but this is also carefully crafted, surprisingly affecting music; gorgeously lush, with a wide-ranging emotional potency, although a few rather sudsy "vocal" (i.e. lyrical) numbers diminish the effect slightly.

Pantha Du Prince & the Bell Laboratory
Elements of Light
[Electronic/Instrumental]

Bells, chimes, carillon, crotales...if it rings, pings, dings or dongs, Pantha du Prince wants it in his music.  In a logical apotheosis of that obsession, and a revelatory expansion of his working approach beyond his typical track-oriented, techno-based approach, the Hamburg-based producer teamed up with Norwegian ringing squad The Bell Laboratory to devise the highly immersive Elements of Light (Rough Trade), an album-length "symphony" of tintinnabulation which runs the gamut from glockenspiels to gamelan, sounding by turns gossamer and ominous, meditative and scintillating.  Edgar Allen Poe would be proud.

FaltyDL
Hardcourage
[Electronic]

An unpredictable, hard-to-quantify New Yorker with strong sonic ties to the UK bass scene, Drew Lustman's third LP as FaltyDL finds the producer downplaying his dubstep-derived tics in favor of more overtly jazzy, house-based smoothness.  Belying its title but befitting its cheerily colorful cover art, Hardcourage (Ninja Tune) is heavily melodic but light on its feet, sustaining a rosy, twinkling softness even while stepping up the syncopation for subtle twists on glitchy electro and vocal-flecked tech-soul, plus some deep, plush funk that could pass for prime late-'90s chillout.

Mountains
Centralia
[Ambient/Electroacoustic]

Vastly expansive yet far from remote or inaccessible, the long-form abstract ruminations of Brooklyn duo Mountains behave and function similarly to much ambient/drone, but with an unusual amount of personality and visceral presence for music so simultaneously placid and formalist.  That's never been more true than on Centralia (Thrill Jockey), their self-evident magnum opus, which follows the burbling, buzzily analog Air Museum with an even richer integration of synthetic and organic layers, interweaving electroacoustic swells with sweetly pastoral fingerpicking as if to conjure at once the geological and human-sized scale of their ever-evocative namesake landforms.

Nosaj Thing
Home
[Electronic]

The austere, chilly architectonics of LA beatscaper Nosaj Thing's debut LP, Drift, evoked pristine spaces starkly devoid of human presence – though still capable of poignant, near-spiritual resonance – but his return to the format on Home (Innovative Leisure), while feeling as tidily meticulous as ever, traverses terrain that's decidedly less rarefied and more, well, habitable.  The rather ghostly vocal presence of Kazu Makino (Blonde Redhead) and Chaz Bundick (Toro y Moi) plays a role there, but it's mostly an overall sense of warming and softening, plus the suggestion of more bodily forms of movement in gestures toward 2-step and fractured, skeletal funk.

James Ferraro
Sushi
[Electronic]

James Ferraro, absurdly productive producer/absurdist, doesn't exactly do serious, but it's neat to hear how he sounds minus the conceptual scaffolding of elaborately appointed conversation pieces like last year's consumer electronics-inspired Far Side Virtual.  Sushi (Hippos in Tanks) offers, as advertised, eleven individually-wrapped morsels of raw, squishy IDM: cartoon glitch; chipmunk-bounce; smirking revamps of 2012-style machine-soul R&B, all doused in Ferraro's typical hyper-sheeny digital glop.  These could (and should) be scene-stealing springboards for any of your more outré cloud-rappers, but they're also plenty tasty a la carte.

Memory Tapes
[Electronic/Indie Pop]
concert preview

Maybe it's because he's a local boy – a rural New Jerseyan who spent the mid-'00s fronting Philly dance-punk faves Hail Social – or the endearingly modest, almost painfully insular homebody persona he presents in his disarmingly candid interviews – but it's been particularly gratifying to follow Davye Hawk's musical development and progression in his work as Memory Tapes.  Following a shimmering, revelatory 2009 debut (Seek Magic) and 2011's more overtly song-oriented but less surefooted and somewhat anemic Player Piano, Hawk returned in December with Grace/Confusion (Carpark), an aptly titled set of six serenely sprawling, shapeshifting tracks that stretch and reconfigure his familiar array of soft-focus sonics (drawn from indie rock, dream-pop, gently fluid electronic dance music and all manner of warmly gleaming synths) into richly detailed miniature suites.

Purity Ring/Young Magic
[Electronic/Indie Pop]
concert preview

It's been an unthinkable seven years since The Knife – whose impending return to the active column is one of 2013's most exciting musical developments to date – last graced us with an album.  But there've been no shortage of artists since then exploring the haunted, vocal-warping electro-pop otherworlds they thrust open, and perhaps none more intriguingly and satisfyingly than Canadian twosome Purity Ring, whose slinky, surreally intoxicating confections draw equally on glitch, R&B and hip-hop (q.v. their recent collaborations with Danny Brown.)  One wrinkle among many on their wondrous 4AD bow, Shrines, was a nodding, quasi-rapped interjection (on "Grandloves") from Australia-via-NYC-via-everywhere vagabonds Young Magic, whose own 2012 debut, Melt (Carpark), proffered warmly woozy world-indie vibes, like a soft-focus Yeasayer; their pleasantly sloppy, vaguely stoned tribalism nicely complementing Purity Ring's more meticulous, witchy mystique.

Parquet Courts
[Rock]
concert preview

Light Up Gold, the debut LP proper from these Texas-via-NYC punk goofs, is a jittery burst of non-stop slacker-pop thrills, sharp enough to stand among the finest albums of both 2012 (when it was first issued, on bandcamp and vinyl, via Dull Tools) and 2013 (a repress and broader release on What's Your Rupture is due next week.)  It's garnered deserved comparisons to myriad post-punk/DIY icons, from The Modern Lovers to The Fall to The Dead Milkmen – perhaps most pointedly, it recalls the gonzo glee of Camper Van Beethoven and pithy efficiency of classic Guided by Voices – but while the band's wiry riffs and the wrily detached vocals of Andrew Savage (also of the similarly perverse-minded Fergus & Geronimo) certainly have their forbears, there's enough invention here to cast Parquet Courts as true American originals, whether they're recounting a nostalgic North Dakota travelogue (via a gorgeous, Silver Jews-like country ballad), making sardonic commentary on the fast-shrinking American dream ("Careers in Combat"), or getting the munchies in Queens ("Stoned and Starving.")

Buke & Gase
[Indie Rock]
concert preview

Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez play the sui generis home-built instruments which give their two-person band its name: respectively, a modified six-string baritone ukelele and a hybrid guitar/bass made of scrap metal – along with a battery of comparably crafty foot-triggered percussion.  That may sound like so much gimmicky novelty, and it does engender some rather specific aesthetic parameters, but it's really just a starting point for the inventiveness and nonconformist self-sufficiency that permeates the duo's work – particularly their sparse, sparky songwriting, which was impressive on their earlier outings and comes into fuller flower on the riveting new General Dome (Brassland.)  Making potent use of repetition and polyrhythmic overlay, pitting Dyer's forceful but heartily melodic vocals against a barrage of ritualistic stomping and gritty, gut-plucky riffage, maintaining a punkish intensity that manages to feel celebratory rather than off-putting, they project a fierce, arty exuberance that evokes Deerhoof and St. Vincent and, especially, like-minded DIY-ers tUnE-yArDs in attitude, although they almost can't help sounding like nobody but themselves.

Christopher Owens
[Folk/Rock]
concert preview

On the slight, winsome Lysandre (Fat Possum), San Fran flower child Christopher Owens emerges from the dissolution of his beloved Girls last year – an otherwise unfortunate break-up that was, however, well-timed to avoid any Lena Dunham-related confusion – with a fresh start echoing the slightly daffy, adventurous spirit of many a classic-rock-era solo debut.  Recasting the sixties-indebted stylistic diversity of Girls' great Father, Son, Holy Ghost on a more intimate scale, and slathering on the paisley-dappled flutes and saxophones, Owens doesn't stray far from his typical palette of heart-tugging acoustic ballads and bouncy rockers, and while the songs do form a loosely narrative cycle (just your typical wide-eyed rock'n'roll coming-of-age love story) complete with recurring musical motifs, the bigger aesthetic risks are less conceptual than tonal – particularly on overtly precious fare like the self-directed pep-talk "Love is in the Ear of the Listener," the irrepressibly smiley "New York City" and cornball lite-reggae interlude "Riviera Rock."

The Walkmen
[Rock]
concert preview

Ten years into a surprisingly sturdy career, The Walkmen have gotten awfully soft in the middle.  Last year's Heaven (Fat Possum/Bella Union), the ever-more-anachronistically named New York City outfit's sixth full-length, feels breezily, blissfully inconsequential compared to the blistering broadsides of their earlier days – but it's hard to complain when they make it all sound so gosh-darn pleasant; tinting their clean-lined jangle with faint, nostalgic shadings of surf and doo-wop, and finding plenty of content in their collective contentment.  Incidentally, by way of atonement for their cancelled Electric Factory date in October, the band will reportedly be serving homemade spaghetti and meatballs before tomorrow's show (fittingly enough, given the venue's previous incarnation) while sound-checking "half-assed" Coldplay covers.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow
[Dream-Pop/Experimental]
concert preview

Deconstructive haze-pop darlings A Sunny Day in Glasgow may dream of their misdirective moniker's twee-mecca Scotland, but they actually live right here in always-sunny Philly.  That doesn't mean we get to see too much of them, sadly – tonight's highly intriguing lineup at I-house, curiously billed as a "Spring Arts Preview!", will be their first performance since 2010.  At least they'll be returning in style; playing against the backdrop of microcinematographic science films by Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), and providing accompaniment to one of the three Kenneth Anger films on the program.  Entrancingly lovely as they are, ASDiG's recordings tend to drift by in a memory-muddling, consciousness-clouding mist of sleepy siren-song, amorphous jangle, melodic vapor trails and detuned drum machines, but maybe they'll clue us in to which fragments are among those destined for their in-the-works fourth full-length.

Jessie Ware
[Soul/Pop]
concert preview

Jessie Ware – elegantly understated smooth-soul songstress, good Jewish girl, and one seriously classy lady – is a charmer.  First she won over the UK electronic/bass music community – like Lisa Stansfield, Tracey Thorn and Beth Orton before her; lending her dulcet pipes to collaborations with Joker, SBTRKT and, most recently, fellow dubstep diva Katy B, and inspiring the most inordinate glut of remixes since Lana Del Rey.  Next, the international indie blogosphere – no mean feat for music so unerringly polite and polished – and the British record-buying public – her sterling debut LP, Devotion, went top five in August.  Now comes her assault on the US.  Her label here, Cherrytree, are evidently plotting a (fittingly) restrained, time-biding campaign, leading with an album-sampling EP with "If You're Never Gonna Move" – a song re-titled (from "110%") and re-recorded due to, of all things, a sample-clearing scuffle with Big Pun – as the featured/title cut, which means they're holding the real firepower (pure-pop miracle "Wildest Moments," among other choice cuts) in abeyance for the chart domination hopefully soon to follow.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

AMG review round-up, volume IV

got enough of a backlog now that i can put these up in semi-thematic installments; this volume comprises much of my output from april, but also some pieces from march and may, covering wispy, dreamy, mellow ambientish music, plus a little bit wispy dreamy punk rock. mostly new(ish) releases [incl. several featured on my friendsoffriends mux, and my best-of-08-to-date lists] but also a couple of overlooked classics:

Keith Fullerton Whitman: bio, Playthroughs review

"The entire album consists of nothing but processed guitar tone, though since the guitar is all but imperceptible as a point of origin for this music, the emphasis is squarely on "process" and "tone." The process, which involves running a guitar-generated signal (not the actual guitar sound) through a carefully arranged sequence of programmed Max/MSP modules, effects pedals, and other signal processors, is described in loving detail by Whitman, at heart a true academic, on his website. For the vast majority of potential listeners, of course, the explanation is just that -- academic -- but, unlikely though it may seem, this is an album that richly deserves many listeners, because the tones it contains are nothing short of breathtaking in their beauty and simplicity.

It's difficult to qualitatively distinguish Playthroughs from much of the ambient, drone-based music that's out there, although it does have a conspicuously unpretentious and inviting quality -- a sense of openness that must be ascribed to the unabashed consonance it retains (there are strikingly few instances of true dissonance to be found here) in spite of its constantly shifting harmonic content, which creates the sense of a continual unfolding or blossoming. It's equally hard to comprehend the evocative and emotional effect of this music, and harder still to describe it: it seems to function on a fundamentally different, precognitive level. But simply put: this is some of the most soothing, stimulating, and spellbinding sound that has ever been put to plastic. Without doubt, a masterpiece of modern minimalism. Emphatically recommended."

The Mountain Goats: Get Lonely review

"Thematically at least, Get Lonely is the sparest, bleakest record in the Mountain Goats' discography. Much was made of the unprecedentedly autobiographical content of The Sunset Tree and We Shall All Be Healed, and it is true that they conveyed a sustained emotional potency that was largely new to Darnielle's repertory, but both contained so many lyrical loose ends, disjointed perspectives, and ambiguous imagery that it was difficult if not impossible to glean any consistent context in them, let alone a coherent through-line. Get Lonely, on the other hand, is practically monotonous in its lyrical focus. Every one of its songs features a first-person narrator in a state of desolation, near-desperation, solitude (always), and grappling, more or less explicitly, with the psychic effects of recent loss: extreme listlessness, emotional paralysis, intermittent attempts at deterministic redirection; nightmarish delirium. In most of them, almost nothing happens; the plot of "Wild Sage" consists of its protagonist leaving the house, walking outside, falling down by the side of the highway, and lying there. Sometimes he can't even leave the house. It's a break-up album -- an almost uncharacteristically straightforward conceit for Darnielle -- the chronicle of a person dealing (or attempting to deal, at least on his best days) with loneliness, grief, and the pangs of memory. Whether or not it's a literal chronicle of a period in Darnielle's life (he had, at the time of its release, been married for many years) is irrelevant; forgiving a slight turn for the phantasmagoric towards the end of the album, it's hard to deny the fundamental, emotional truth contained in these songs, especially as conveyed by his uninflected, almost painfully restrained delivery. "

Retribution Gospel Choir: bio and Retribution Gospel Choir review

"Less a side project than a sort of alternate reality version of Low, Retribution Gospel Choir allow Alan Sparhawk, guitarist and songwriter of that legendarily quiet, minimal slowcore outfit (along with bassist Matt Livingston, a recent addition to Low's lineup) the chance to play music that, while still pretty minimalist, conceptually anyway, and often fairly slow, is definitely not quiet. Make no mistake, this is capital-R Rock music through and through, of the gruff and gloriously hazy variety typically associated with the stoner '70s and alternative nation '90s -- dense and thorny, with pummeling drums and grungy guitars galore. But at heart it's not particularly far removed from Sparhawk's primary concern: Low are a quintessentially '90s band after all, initially conceived as a nonconformist response to the grunge explosion but certainly not a wholly contrarian one, and the Low of the 2000s have amply demonstrated their propensity for rocking out in a flannel-flavored vein, at first on 2001's Trust but most notably on 2005's The Great Destroyer, which would have blended right in had it appeared ten years earlier. (Meanwhile, Sparhawk's status as a closet guitar god was well established on 2006's free-form one-man band turn Solo Guitar.) So fans of Low will find plenty to embrace here, especially those who have relished those recent developments; by the same token, Retribution Gospel Choir could well still try the patience of nonbelievers, as turning up certainly hasn't purged Sparhawk of his searing intensity or his elemental, no-frills songwriting style."

Dräp en Hund: bio and Be Yourself review

The two Swedish girls who make up Dräp En Hund were thirteen when they released Be Yourself, although playing dress-up in frilly ruffled blouses and cloche hats on the cover they could have passed for half that age. You might contend that they're playing dress-up here musically as well, precociously imitating their punk-rock heros - PJ Harvey, The White Stripes, Sonic Youth - with utterly rudimentary musicianship and songwriting - but that's selling the duo short. What have the great classic punks been if not a bunch of kids playing at being in a rock band? (Most of them just weren't quite this young.) Make no mistake, Alva (bass) and Gabbi (drums) own the attitude - they chug and clatter their way through the choruses of the aptly-named "God Damned Destroyed" with uncompromising abandon, there's a blank-eyed disaffection in the vocals on "Hate You" that's downright chilling, though otherwise the whole record splutters with sloppy enthusiasm. They do show their youth somewhat in the lyrics, with a certain wide-eyed positivity in the title track and "We Are We" ("we are going to be friends forever/the whole life/a very long life") that is nevertheless infectiousness, and references to sex and drinking that (thankfully) don't quite carry the ring of true experience (though the pummeling, stone-faced "Don't Drink" could be a vintage straight-edge anthem: "you destroy your life/ you destroy your dreams/ and all you want is more.") But while they may at times (inevitably) come off as cute - they are thirteen-year-old girls, after all - they're hardly cutesy. Even so, Be Yourself might not have much value beyond its undeniable novelty, if it weren't for the considerable amount of melody in their slow, simple, rough-hewn songs, all of which were composed by the duo save for a typically bled-raw thrash through "Seven Nation Army" that makes the White Stripes' raucous original sound prissy by comparison. As it is, it makes for surprisingly listenable sludge, performed and recorded with an almost adorable crudeness that fits its unabashed, youthful energy.

Hanne Hukkelberg: bio and Rykestraße 68 review

"Recorded after six months spent living in Berlin (and named for a street address there), the second album by Norwegian songstress Hanne Hukkelberg may be moodier and more mature than her endearingly light-hearted debut, but it's nearly as sweet and, in its way, just as playfully inventive. The occasional electronic elements of Little Things are absent, and the "noise" quotient is relatively subdued, but there's still plenty of atmospheric clutter and clatter: clinking bottles and kitchenware; a bouncing ball; "tea-strainer guitar"; an excellently played typewriter on "The Northwind"; Obelix the cat purring on his own ode (which can't help but recall likeminded noise imps -- and Hanne's former Leaf labelmates -- Psapp); and the Rykestraße itself providing urban ambience on the languorous opener, "Berlin." This bevy of found-sound sources commingles seamlessly and invitingly with the array of "real" instruments -- piano, accordion, prominent double bass (both bowed and plucked), glockenspiel, bass clarinet, and so forth -- to create an impressionistic, Old World Continental vibe with echoes of cabaret jazz, sea shanties, and the fusty, haunted soundscapes of Tom Waits. The effect, though evocative, is kept understated, never overshadowing Hukkelberg's resonant voice, a magnificently versatile instrument that evokes the high lonesome clarity and playful warble of Jolie Holland or Regina Spektor as well as the intoxicating swoops of Billie Holiday, and contributes as much as anything to the richly imbued charm of this album. (Her voice itself creates some of its most memorably personable moments, including the layered speaking and self-harmonizing on the creaky, slightly spooky "Fourteen" and extemporized-sounding passages of wordless a cappella noodling on "Berlin.") Rykestraße 68 is occasionally reminiscent of those artists musically and compositionally as well, blending as it does strands of folk, pop, and jazz, but a closer point of reference would be Fiona Apple's work with Jon Brion, particularly the defiantly idiosyncratic art pop of Extraordinary Machine -- it's equally visionary and emotionally flush, though if anything more accessible."

Silje Nes: bio and Ames Room review

"Even though many of the pieces on Silje Nes' debut album feature prominent melodies, delivered in her wispy, winsome sing-song voice, it seems somehow imprecise to think to them as 'songs' in the conventional sense. Uncomplicated, but not overly simplistic; fragmentary though not unfinished; individually distinct but clearly kindred, they're more like exploratory meditations on texture, ambience and deregulated musicality, some of which occasionally happen to take song form. By Nes' own description, the process of recording is central to - in fact, inseparable from - her compositional method, and [all but one of] the selections here are solo bedroom creations spanning from over a period of four years, presented, with rough edges intact, as an remarkably fluid whole. Incorporating a wide array of instruments and sounds, from delicately plucked and strummed guitars, cello, glockenspiel, melodica, and trumpet to warm keyboards, toy-like sound effects and all manner of drips, clicks, burbles and chimes, with Nes' breathy, muted vocals often serving as just another layer (or several) of sonic texture, Ames Room often recalls the gentle, whimsical folk-electronic hybrids of Psapp, Múm, Juana Molina, and even Four Tet in his calmer moments. The dreamy art-pop of fellow Scandinavians Stina Nordenstam, Anja Garbarek and, in particular, Hanne Hukkelberg is another relevant point of comparison, as is classicist lo-fi indie rock, a la the quirkier aspects of early Liz Phair, Mirah, or Lisa Germano. But while this barrage of comparisons hopefully conveys some sense of what Ames Room sounds like, it risks overcomplicating the album's endearing idiosyncrasies and overshadowing its artless sweetness and intimacy, the rare, ineffable qualities which make this a truly singular release - one that's all the more precious considering that Nes originally created much of this music without necessarily intending to share it with a wider audience."

Theodore: A Summer She Has Never Been, A Winter She Fears review

On his cryptically-titled Lo Records debut, Greek-born sound-impressionist Theodore weaves together sampled morsels of organic instrumentation and natural sounds with subtle electronic inflections to create hazily sweet, gently somnolent music reminiscent of Iceland's Múm, Japan's Lullatone, Britain's Plone, Norway's Silje Nes, and perhaps especially France's Colleen, with whom he shares a fascination with music boxes and antique-sounding instrumentation. To a great extent, Theodore forgoes the more straightforward folk and pop tropes of most of these artists, though there are subtle hints of Eastern European folk harmony, and decent amounts of acoustic guitar and other plucked string instruments here and there - including what sounds like a bouzouki on "Madam Ortance" - as well as a lusty sea-chanty accordion waltz underpinning the seedy-sounding "Montmarte." On the other hand, he's just as likely to evoke Western classical music as familiar ambient electronic forms; the album is rife with lush, lugubrious orchestral strings, and (recalling all of the artists mentioned above) all manner of bells and chimes. Overall though, the effect of the album is too diffuse and rarefied to sum up with any set of specific stylistic reference points, despite a constant, almost cheeky tendency for allusive arrangements and melodic borrowings. "Every Garden Has A Corner For Children" loops a polyphonic music-box snippet of "Auld Lang Syne" atop a bed of gently static white noise; "Mia Bella Fiorentina" distills the famous aria from Bizet's Carmen into a supremely languourous, murky wash of sound; "After Silence" sneaks in an arhythmic fragment of "Edelweiss" alongside its solemn, oddly chromatic, strummed folk dirge, and perhaps most unexpectedly, opener "I Dreamt I Was Throwing Stones At The Sea" treats Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Music of the Night" (from Phantom of the Opera) with a stately, almost classical reverence, as a sweetly chiming lullaby over lapping digital waves. Curiously, while these assorted, practically canonical melodies aren't extensively disguised, the settings they're presented in are sufficiently tweaked and removed from their original contexts as to make them nearly unrecognizable on a conscious level, at least at first listen, making them appear instead as haunting but unobtrusive shards of memory within a mysterious, transporting dream. Very much like a dream, A Summer She Has Never Been... can be whimsical and sweetly nostalgic, but it's too strange and otherworldly ever to become cloying - and at times it grows downright unsettling, even without rising above a serenely submerged whisper.

Rothko: bio and A Place Between review

"A thoroughly ambient work, not unrelated to but notably more placid than Rothko's early output as a three-pronged bass guitar post-rock group, and sparser too than Mark Beazley's "solo" work under the moniker, if only by virtue of the fact that he collaborates here with just one other musician, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Caroline Ross, instead of all of the members of her group Delicate AWOL. Ross contributes vocals, either hushedly sung or spoken in a near-whisper, on many tracks, as well as diaphanous flute clusters, occasional (or extremely unintrusive) guitar work, and pen scratching sounds on "Divided Lines." Apart from several instances of sweetly simple, Satie-esque piano, the rest of the luxuriously uncluttered sound field consists of Beazley's bass, whether engaged in deep, extended, gradually shifting tones or lithe, melodic upper-fret filigree or distant, unhurried overlapping parts; often it's a multi-layered combination. Even at its densest and most richly textured, the album never rises above a whisper. Though underpinned by adept musicianship, careful compositional structure, and inventive arrangement and recording choices, A Place Between is utterly unfussy, warm and inviting, content to drift blissfully subsumed in a humble glorious haze."

Susumu Yokota: 1998, Symbol, Distant Sounds of Summer, Wonder Waltz, Love or Die, and Skintone Collection reviews

"Possibly the most unique item within Susumu Yokota's highly idiosyncratic oeuvre, Symbol finds the multifaceted Japanese electronica master defying and muddying genre distinctions to create sui generis compositions of considerable beauty and strangeness. That's not exactly new territory for Yokota, but this time there's a gimmick: the album is consists primarily of fragments taken from classical pieces, many of them highly familiar, if not always readily identifiable, by the likes of Debussy, Rachmaninov, and Beethoven -- with a particular reliance on Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" and Saint-Saëns' "Carnival of the Animals" -- as well as bits of more recent works by John Cage and Meredith Monk, whose unearthly voice becomes a focal point for several of these tracks. But while Yokota cuts, pastes, and plunders the world of art music with a palpable exuberance akin to the mash-up artists, his contemporaries, who were doing similar things with pop, the results are more nuanced than merely novel. Nor is it entirely out of step with his previous work -- it's not as serenely ambient as the beloved Sakura (though it is generally quite soothing), and it certainly has little to do with his various dance-oriented releases, but it retains the meticulous, multilayered compositional approach of albums like Grinning Cat and The Boy & the Tree. And although the presence of electronics is kept relatively understated, the elements with which Yokota weaves together his mad grab-bag of orchestral motifs, frolicsome fragments of flute and piano, and stately string passages (there are sometimes as many as seven classical samples in a single four-minute piece) will be immediately familiar to his listeners: subtly burbling beats, wordless ethereal vocals, vaguely Asian-sounding percussion loops (as well as a marimba ostinato that could pass for a Steve Reich sample). Indeed, without the obviously recognizable nature of his sample sources (which, depending on your perspective, could be a source of distraction or a point of engagement), it would be difficult to distinguish many of these pieces from "standard" Yokota compositions -- a feat which is in itself quite an accomplishment. That it's also a fascinating and rewarding listen, and an undeniably gorgeous bit of craftsmanship, arguably elevates Symbol to near the level of its inspirations, or at least positions it as a curious bridge between too-often estranged musical worlds."

"Without relying on an obvious gimmick, like 2005's Western art music pastiche Symbol, or an overtly conceptual approach, like its immediate predecessor, Wonder Waltz, Love or Die simply offers another reshuffling of Yokota's familiar assortment of musical fascinations, and the result may be the clearest encapsulation yet of his unique, multifarious vision. Love continues Waltz's conceit of using exclusively triple-meter time signatures, but while that album was a fussy, stylistically sprawled collection that sounded like it was trying desperately to explore as many rhythmic iterations and textural juxtapositions as possible, these tracks are far more fluid and cohesive, and somehow less rhythmically overbearing even though they have possibly the most prominent beats of any of his ostensibly "ambient" albums. Eschewing vocals (and collaborators of any sort, for the first time in a while), and generally limiting percussive content to a single looped phrase per track (be it a jungle-esque breakbeat, a stately, minimal jazz groove, or a straightforward three-legged disco glide), he hones in instead on lush, consonant sonorities and lyrical melodic structures not unlike the classical music he vivisected to create Symbol. While attending closely to musical and textural nuance, Yokota allows his compositions ample room to breathe, making for a record that feels more relaxed, and is easier to relax to, than anything he's done in years, even if it has little in common with the minimalism of his earlier ambient work. For that matter, it has little to do with most of what is typically thought of as "electronica," even though it features as many synthetic instruments as "real" ones (pianos, most notably) -- you might find parallels in the more melodious end of Aphex Twin's output, or Boards of Canada's pastoral reveries, but it's closer in effect to a sort of futuristic chamber music, one unabashedly fixated on sweetness, purity, and beauty. The ponderous track names may be rather ridiculously bombastic (if appropriately flowery and evocative), but the music itself is appealingly unassuming and gentle, making Love or Die less of an emphatic declaration than a strong understatement."

[also of note - Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique review]