Around the time of her big break with 2022’s *Preacher’s Daughter*, Ethel Cain was dubbed a pop star, though it was often hard to tell from her songs. Aside from “American Teenager,” a Springsteen-esque anthem that laundered sneakily unpatriotic sentiments through arena-ready melodies, that album’s songs were largely dirges (gorgeous ones, at that) preoccupied by ideas of doomed love, faith, and fate. Written and produced almost entirely by Cain (the stage name and alter ego of Hayden Anhedönia), the project’s lore was nearly as compelling as the music itself, launching Anhedönia into something like stardom. Since then, Anhedönia’s spoken freely about the pitfalls of popularity; she penned a Tumblr post last year identifying an irony epidemic within online fan culture: an aversion to approaching art with sincerity rather than memes. You could be tempted to view *Perverts*, Cain’s first release since *Preacher’s Daughter*, as a provocation—an often-challenging 90-minute work that seems designed to scare off a stan or two. Songs like “Pulldrone” and “Housofpsychoticwomn” are noise experiments that stretch well past the 10-minute mark, full of eerie drone, depersonalized spoken word, and terrifying imagery regarding sex and sin. The moments of hard-earned beauty feel all the more rewarding: the fuzzy, sultry “Vacillator,” or “Etienne” and “Thatorchia,” a pair of elegiac instrumentals that sound like beams of heavenly light piercing through the darkness.
British producer Jon Hopkins has long been interested in how music and other forms of art or meditation might assist a person in achieving altered states of consciousness. His last solo studio album was entitled *Music for Psychedelic Therapy*, its tracks bathed in hazy, dewlike static, bits of birdsong, and some spoken word from New Age guru Ram Dass. Not long after making it, Hopkins was commissioned to compose an audio piece for an art exhibit involving a Dreamachine—a stroboscopic light machine that, when experienced with eyes closed, had the potential to trigger a psychedelic response (or the occasional convulsion, but enough about that!) in its user. That soundtrack sowed the seeds for *RITUAL*, which serves as a partner of sorts to the gauzy, ethereal *Music for Psychedelic Therapy*. But while it keeps in a similar vein of music to facilitate forms of transcendence, *RITUAL* is decidedly more active. Produced with an icier sound palette, a slightly darker edge, and some percussive, rhythmic elements that were absent in the previous album, these connected pieces build and contract as they move over peaks and into valleys. Tracks such as “palace / illusion” and “transcend / lament,” both produced with musician and healing-arts practitioner Vylana, offer moments of sunny daybreak, but they’re always counterbalanced with almost sneaky, minor-key undercurrents. The latter suitably segues into “the veil”—a gothy, weighty piece that could alternately soundtrack a spiritual experience or a cinematic one—before moving toward the climactic “solar goddess return.” Electronic musicians often speak of their compositions or DJ mixes as sonic journeys. Without explicitly doing so himself, Hopkins’ albums actually are.
Australian minimalist-jazz trio The Necks' new studio album, Bleed explores a sublime language of stillness. With a single, 42-minute composition, The Necks masterfully express the unspeakable beauty of decay and space in yet another totally distinct entry in a vast and stunning body of work.
Thank you for taking the time to listen! More on the way soon, including material for Shearling and Big Brown Cow... -Alex Mastering by Cleo Henman
Commissioned to create a “sound environment” for the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Naala Badu building—a distinctly modern space named after the Gadigal term for “seeing waters”— Brisbane composer Lawrence English delves into the idea of sound that haunts architecture. Unfolding across eight linked parts, *Even the Horizon Knows its Bounds* certainly lingers as a spirit might, by turns invisible and ominous. To flesh out this flowing ambient work, English tapped many current leading lights in experimental music, including Jim O’Rourke, claire rousay, Dean Hurley, and Chuck Johnson. Working from a pair of long-form sound prompts, those collaborators support English’s gorgeous vision without threatening to steal the show. Swans guitarist Norman Westberg adds windblown whorls to two tracks, while The Necks’ Chris Abrahams contributes trickling piano notes across the album. Despite this all feeling subtle yet immersive by design, there’s also a clear sense of a proper journey—especially when the more discordant elements evaporate during “VI,” allowing gentle piano to lead the way again.
I like to think that sound haunts architecture. It’s one of the truly magical interactions afforded by sound’s immateriality. It’s also something that has captivated us from the earliest times. It’s not difficult to imagine the exhilaration of our early ancestors calling to one another in the dark cathedral like caves which held wonder, and security, for them. Today the ways in which sound occupies space, the so-called liquid architecture, holds just as much wonder, albeit one that is often dominated by functionality and form. Beyond those constraints however, how sound operates in the material world is something that exists at the fundament of our understanding of music, and moreover within the broad church we know as the canon of sound arts. Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds is a record born out of these relations. In a direct sense, the record is the product of an invitation by curator Jonathan Wilson to create a sound environment, reflecting on the Naala Badu building at the Art Gallery Of NSW. The building’s name, which translates from the Gadigal language to ‘seeing water’, was opened in 2022 and this piece was offered as an atmospheric tint to visitors walking through the building throughout the year following its opening. It’s also a record born out of a recognition for the porousness sound affords, especially as a device for collaborative endeavour. This composition is one born out of generosity and acoustic solidarity. Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds is comprised not just of my sounds, but also that of an incredible array of artists who have also operated in the orbit of the Art Gallery Of NSW. The players include Amby Downs, Chris Abrahams, Chuck Johnson, Claire Rousay, Dean Hurley, Jim O’Rourke, JW Paton, Madeleine Cocolas, Norman Westberg, Stephen Vitiello and Vanessa Tomlinson. The piece was constructed around two long form sound prompts that each musician responded and contributed to. These materials there when digested into the final piece you hear. The work could not exist without the substantial offerings these artists made, and I am immensely grateful to each of them. I’ll finish with a little note that appears on the LP itself. Place is an evolving, subjective experience of space. Spaces hold the opportunity for place, which we create moment to moment, shaped by our ways of sense-making. Whilst the architectural and material features of space might remain somewhat constant, the people, objects, atmospheres, and encounters that fill them are forever collapsing into memory. -- Lawrence English
There are abundant signs of Max Richter’s love of minimalism on *In a Landscape*. The album features 19 short musical episodes written for stripped-back forces—string quintet, grand piano, Hammond organ, and MiniMoog, plus tape delays, vocoders, and reverbs. Its 10 compositions are interlocked with “Life Studies,” ambient interludes featuring snippets of recordings from everyday life to create snapshots of Richter’s world. “The title ‘In a Landscape’ can be heard in two ways: as it’s written, or as ‘in-ner landscape,’ as it sounds,” he explains to Apple Music Classical. “These are the kind of polarities that I’m exploring: between the external and the internal, electronic and instrumental, the technological world against the natural world.” The album’s title is taken from maverick avant-gardist John Cage’s 1948 work for solo harp or piano, itself inspired by Erik Satie, and throughout Richter pays homage to the composers who have influenced him over the years. Along with the language of American minimalist composers such as Terry Riley and Philip Glass, who have made repetition an organizing feature of their work, and the beauty of everyday sounds that Cage himself explored, you’ll hear the influence of Baroque music—shades of Bach in the harmonies of “And Some Will Fall,” for example, and Purcellian sighs in “Late and Soon.” In “Love Song,” the references are more explicit: its violin melody is borrowed directly from an opera by English 17th-century composer John Eccles, given added emotional resonance by Richter’s somber piano accompaniment. Elsewhere, most noticeably in “Andante,” it’s the light and dark of Schubert that Richter draws on, “just because I love his music and can’t leave him alone,” he says. Richter’s love of poetry—by Keats, Anne Carson, and Peter Redgrove, among others—is also drawn into the mix. “Late and Soon,” for example, takes its title from an 1802 sonnet in which Wordsworth laments the growing materialism of the Industrial Revolution, writing: “The world is too much with us; late and soon / Getting and spending, we lay waste to our powers; / Little we see in Nature that is ours.” “I was thinking, ‘Wow, he’s talking about Twitter basically, and the sort of distractedness of our lives,’” Richter says. “There isn’t any overarching poetic scheme; these are just jumping-off points and things that I have a kind of affection for. It’s a bit like you see something and you sort of love it. Then you want to explore it or elevate it in some way. And that’s really the way that these texts work in the piece.” The same can be said of the way Richter appropriates found sounds to bring texture, atmosphere, and glimpses of autobiographical narrative to his interpolating “Life Studies.” Ranging from field recordings sourced in the woodland surrounding his studio to the noise of cities he travels through, they provide evocative “polaroid shots” of Richter’s life. “I love exploring places on foot,” he says. “So there’s lots of walking in nature. There’s downtown New York, Sydney, Berlin, bits of Paris, various airports. There’s stuff in our house. People jamming on the piano, while someone else is cooking, while someone else is whatever, feeding a dog or something—just domestic life.” In many ways these interludes, both transient and ambient, bring us back to the playful ephemerality of Satie. But they are also a reminder of Richter’s love of using recorded material, first heard on his socio-politically aware breakthrough albums, 2002’s *Memoryhouse*, dealing in part with the Kosovo conflict in the Balkans, and 2004’s *The Blue Notebooks*, a protest album about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While it makes no overt political statements, says Richter, *In a Landscape* is born out of his recognition of our need to reconcile differences. “We live in a very polarized world, and particularly, the online space is dominated by very shrill monologues. People who have a difference of opinion can’t talk to one another anymore. So I guess this principle of trying to put disparate elements together in one space creatively is a kind of political storytelling. It’s kind of a beautiful narrative.”
