Pitchfork's Best Experimental Albums of 2019

Our third long player (this time a double!) and second on Thin Wrist / Black Editions. From our label: 75 Dollar Bill is one of the essential groups at the heart of NYC's underground. Centered on the telepathic union of Che Chen's microtonal electric guitar and Rick Brown's odd metered percussion, their long-form sound is unmistakable and compelling. Their second album, 2016's Wood Metal Plastic Pattern Rhythm Rock (Thin Wrist), presented the essence of their sound with vivid clarity. Since then the group have travelled and performed extensively, bringing their music to a wider audience and performing everywhere from bustling sidewalks and intimate clubs to large concert halls and overseas festivals. The countless miles and performances of the last few years have resulted in their expansive new double album I WAS REAL. Over four sides the group expands in bold new directions, embracing brilliant fuller orchestrations, joyous rockers and entrancing new textures. The record is enhanced by the presence of eight additional players over its nine tracks while also showing off the duo's strength when stripped down to its core. Requiring a variety of approaches, the album was recorded over a four year period, in four different studios in a range of different ensemble configurations. The album also features several “studio as instrument” constructions that harken back to the collage-experiments of the band’s early cassette tapes, while at the same time pointing to new territories altogether. The players involved highlight the “social” aspect of the band and the eight guests that appear on the record are some of the band’s closest friends and collaborators. While Che Chen and Rick Brown are always at the core of 75 Dollar Bill, the band is much like an extended family, changing shape for different music and different situations. Some pieces were conceived in the band's very early days and others are much newer, but the music is unmistakably 75 Dollar Bill. As Steve Gunn has written on their work: “Strings come in underneath Che Chen's supreme guitar tone. Rick Brown's trance percussion offers a guiding support with bass, strings, and horns supporting the melody. They have gathered all the moving parts perfectly.” I WAS REAL is a monumental signature work capturing the group at the peak of their powers.

Angel-Ho's debut album for Hyperdub features her singing rapping and producing with help from fellow producers, Asmara, Gaika, Bon, Baby Caramelle and Nunu, and features Guest rappers K-$ and K-Rizz.

London-based composer Anna Meredith loves a corkscrew spiral, a manic grid, and key changes that lurch between nausea and pleasure. Few songs on her second album, *Fibs*, end where they start—“Sawbones” traverses precipitous bass, chiptune reverie, and a symphony in hyperdrive—yet her classical grounding ensures a keen eye on the dynamic sweep. An opening half of screaming crescendos (“Calion”) and regal pomp (“Killjoy”) begets a reprieve of power pop (“Limpet”) and girlish dreaminess (“Ribbons”)—only to end with a bang with “Paramour,” a song that makes “Sawbones” sound like Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”

The eagerly anticipated second studio album, FIBS, is out now via Moshi Moshi/Black Prince Fury. Arriving three and a half years on from the release of her Scottish Album of the Year Award-winning debut studio album Varmints, FIBS is 45 minutes of technicolour maximalism, almost perpetual rhythmic reinvention, and boasts a visceral richness and unparalleled accessibility. FIBS is no “Varmints Part 2” — the retreading of old ground, or even a smooth progression from one project to another, just isn’t Meredith’s style. Instead, if anything, it’s “Varmints 2.0”, an overhauled and updated version of the composer’s soundworld, involving, in places, a literal retooling that has seen Meredith chuck out her old MIDI patches and combine her unique compositional voice with brand-new instruments, both acoustic and electronic, and a writing process that’s more intense than she’s ever known. Despite Meredith’s background and skills these tracks are no academic exercise, the world of FIBS is at both overwhelming and intimate, a journey of intense energy and joyful irreverence. FIBS, says Meredith, are “lies — but nice friendly lies, little stories and constructions and daydreams and narratives that you make for yourself or you tell yourself”. Entirely internally generated and perfectly balanced, they can be a source of comfort and excitement, intrigue and endless entertainment. The eleven fibs contained on Anna Meredith’s second record will do all that, and more besides.

This is for the digital release. To order the LP or CD, go to bit.ly/31v14QN or bit.ly/2TeZdMJ "After two LPs and over half a decade spent toiling in the margins of the American Songbook, Bill Orcutt returns to original composition and the blues with his latest LP, Odds Against Tomorrow. Taking its title from Robert Wise’s 1959 film noir, Odds Against Tomorrow retrofits familiar folk/blues forms to the unique sound of Orcutt’s guitar and the result crackles with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver. Odds Against Tomorrow is more than an expansion of the territory charted by Bill Orcutt, his eponymous 2017 studio electric debut, although it’s certainly that. With its nods to existing musics, half- step fluctuations, and near-songwriterly manipulations of tension/release, Odds Against Tomorrow is a rock record — almost. Clearly and simply recorded through a clattering Fender Twin in Orcutt’s living room and lovingly mixed by Bay Area neighbor and pedal-steel savant Chuck Johnson, no one would mistake it for any era’s radio fodder, yet the precision of its technique and the swaying Child-ballad logic of its gentler improvisations comfortably seats it between John Mayall and Richard Thompson in your Ikea Kallax. Three songs (“Odds Against Tomorrow,” “The Writhing Jar,” “Already Old”) are multi-tracked, an innovation that, for guitar buffs familiar with Orcutt’s stripped-down vernacular, jumps out of the grooves like a Les Paul sound-on-sound excursion in 1948, or a Jandek blues rave-up in 1987. Specifically evoking John Lee Hooker’s double-track experiments on 1952’s “Walking the Boogie,” the steady chord vamps of “Odds Against Tomorrow” and “Already Old” form a harmonic turf on which Orcutt solos with lyrical abandon — and while his playing has always earned begrudging respect from any hardened shredders willing to pluck the foam out of their ear canals, even the most strident neck- strangler will steam over his lubricated runs. For the more “contemporary-minded,” “The Writhing Jar”’s crashing overdubs recall the brassy six-string voicings of This Heat or Illitch. With the exception of the unreconstructed Elmore James-isms of “Stray Dog” and the “Layla”-finale-like haze of “All Your Buried Corpses Begin To Speak,” the remaining non-overdubbed tracks dovetail snugly with Orcutt’s previous solo output, reeling gently in a Mazzacane-oid mode (“The Sun and its Horizon,” “The Conversion Experience,” “Judith Reconsidered,” “Man Dies”) or vibing up the standards (“Moon River”). On their own, these tracks would still be an important contribution to Orcutt’s canon. As part of Odds Against Tomorrow’s greater whole, they provide a through line, connecting the idiosyncrasies of Orcutt’s past explorations with the scrambled tropes of his present work. Odds Against Tomorrow challenges contemporary solo guitar practice in a way that simultaneously nullifies hazy dreams of folk purity and establishes a new high-water mark for blues-rock reconstruction. Put simply, in our current era of mannered revisionism, it is a joy to listen to." — TOM CARTER

Blacks' Myths is a duo from Washington, DC comprised of Luke Stewart on bass and Warren G. "Trae" Crudup III on drums. The group's latest, 'Blacks' Myths II' collects thirteen tracks from a marathon recording session in the summer of 2019. Two of DC's most active and versatile musicians, Stewart and Crudup build symbiotic rhythmic pieces by locking into something both hypnotic and free. Their collaboration is redefining the rhythm section by dismantling its tropes and injecting unpredictability as well as a sense of vibrancy and freedom. The group's debut, Blacks' Myths (Atlantic Rhythms, 2018), established a space for ambience and eruption, building hypnotic rhythmic structures and exploratory soundscapes. "On Black Myths, Stewart and Crudup craft evocative, Afro-futuristic grooves, frequently disrupted by eruptions of feedback dissonance or languid soundscapes." -- Down Beat Magazine

I have always been searching for a way to articulate the intangible area between the recognizable and the unfathomable, a feeling perhaps informed by some long-abandoned experiments with psychedelics. This has been a continued pursuit starting with my tape experiments in the 1970’s until the present, with technological evolution driving new ways of expression. With the exception of Xé May, which is performed on an Elektron Octatrack, these pieces were constructed for live performance using a laptop computer running programs I have built in the MAX programming language. Okajouki and Xé May were composed in 2011, all the rest are from 2018. The pieces use a technique of time slicing that I first started doing back in the 90's, notably with my piece MOM's, wherein sound files are metaphorically shattered in time like glass and then reorganized into mosaic patterns. The technique used to require laborious preparation outside of real-time before the files could be brought onstage. Now not only can it be done spontaneously while performing, but also with a degree of flexibility that I find quite liberating. They are a lot of fun to play and hopefully to listen. - Carl Stone

**First pressing is sold out at source.** **Second pressing expected to ship early October.** Clarice Jensen is a composer and cellist based in Brooklyn, NYC. As a versatile collaborator, Jensen has recorded and performed with Jóhann Jóhannsson, Stars of the Lid, Owen Pallett, Max Richter and numerous others. As the artistic director of ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), brought to life some of the most cherished works of modern classical music, including pieces by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, Dustin O’Halloran, and more. Jensen now follows her debut album 'For This From That Will Be Filled' with 'Drone Studies,' highlighting Jensen’s improvisational prowess, venturing even deeper into the meditative mire but with more organic, naturally expressive air. “The Organ that Made You Bleed” presents a succinctly striking suite that opens in medias res, awakening in a howling chorus of disembodied tones. This tragic ocean of estranged sound ebbs and flows, almost unnoticeable growing in a swell of hymnal hysteria. The calmly chaotic frenzy soon gives way into a layered composite of deep drones and tidal textures. Hopeful harmonies clash with eerie dissonance, suggesting the deeply human balance between darkness and lightness. It’s a magnum opus told in a sequence sketches, and each new turn is a cavern of radiant resonance. 'One Bee' perfectly foils the A-side with an insomniatic interplay of pure tones and richly repetitive cello phrases. The piece begins as a blank canvas, simultaneously empty and brimming with potential. One by one, solitary tones reveal themselves in the foreground until forming a small choir of complementary combinations. This beautifully odd ritual plays out in slow motion as Jensen’s cello performs a tight loop of emotionally expressive notes. Taken as a whole, 'Drone Studies' a harrowing set of deep listening that uncovers new gifts with each repeated listen.

the second album by default genders

With ‘CHORDS’, the Stockholm-based musician and composer Ellen Arkbro returns to Subtext, following her acclaimed debut album ‘For Organ and Brass’. This new longplayer sees Arkbro adopt a more minimalist approach, focusing on the immediate qualities of sound and elegantly expanding the tonal capacities of acoustic instruments using precise, subtle synthesis. Composed of a carefully selected combination of tones, ‘CHORDS’ stretches, extends and obscures the timbral character of the instruments it is performed on. Across both tracks, Arkbro examines the sonic materiality and harmonic quality of chords. She considers how the compositions occupy space rather than time – transposing theoretical possibilities into the phenomenal realm. As a part of Arkbro’s systematic investigation of harmonic sound, ‘CHORDS’ proffers a divergence from conventional ways of listening. This work allows for a form of listening which goes beyond the mere reception of outer stimuli in letting the listener experience their role as active, and as embodying the sound itself. Space rather than time becomes the primary locus of listening as subtle movement of head and body reveals the inner complexities of ‘CHORDS’.

🦚 🍄 🌿 🌊 🌒 🌩 🏔 💭 Album description by Max Allison: Fire-Toolz is the flagship musical project of a consciousness that has taken the physical form of a transfemme non-binary human named Angel Marcloid. While her orbiting projects like Nonlocal Forecast and MindSpring Memories find Marcloid pursuing discrete, genre-specific composition in styles like jazz fusion or sample collage respectively, Fire-Toolz compresses tropes and ideas from virtually every style of music in her vast toolbox into combinatory pieces overloaded with novel juxtapositions and intricate structural decisions. Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) marks Fire-Toolz’s first release with Orange Milk Records, following two full-lengths on Hausu Mountain (2017’s Drip Mental and 2018’s Skinless X-1) and an album with Bedlam Tapes (2017's Interbeing). While Marcloid maintains the level of compositional density and multi-aesthetic overload she pursued on her previous releases, Field Whispers finds her working within a palette of modern sound design presented at a greater depth of resolution and detail than ever before. While at times splintering her tracks into her typically momentary fragments, she also explores the possibilities of longer, more focused passages of sustained tension within the territory of the Fire-Toolz project while upholding a long-held commitment to never tread the same ground twice. Field Whispers draws inspiration from a wide array of non-musical concepts that Marcloid explores in her extensive reading regimen in subjects like quantum physics, nondual spirituality, and philosophy. While her complex conceptions of fields of study like the holographic principle of reality, Advaita Vedanta, and Epicurianism serve as oblique backdrops for her production decisions and the fractal structural layouts of her tracks, she also channels pure emotion from the mundanities of her daily life: her memories of suburban life growing up, the pure beauty of the natural world around her, and the joy derived from her relationships with her loved ones and cherished pets. While these concepts offer a jumping point for her music, in practice the tropes of innumerable styles and genres pop up in each of her varied compositions. The baroque harmonic structures and intricate lead lines of jazz fusion and prog crash directly into passages of ambient amorphousness or hyper-detailed noise production marked by rushes of static texture and delicately spatialized alien sound sources. While Field Whispers slightly deviates from her previous focus on the tactics of black metal and death metal, including harsh vocal shrieks and rushes of warp speed drum programming, these elements still surface from time to time as striking complements to her more abstract compositional strategies, grounding her pieces in a more technical practice in keeping with the presentation of a full band metal performance. Passages of searing guitar playing, be it two-hand tapped lead lines or towering power metal solos, pop into view for a few moments before getting subsumed back into the bedrock of electronic sound sources that lay beneath each track. Marcloid has a contentious relationship with the international diaspora of vaporware and its many offshoots. She actively produces within the genre’s tenets with projects like MindSpring Memories (see: recontextualization of pre-exisitng muzak and fusion compositions, variations in tempo, heavy effects processing) and has explored the scene through the prolific output of her labels Swamp Circle and Rainbow Bridge. Fire-Toolz, on the other hand, represents a near-complete break with vaporwave by way of the project’s focus on completely original productions, harmonic progressions, and live instrumental input. While Field Whispers might seem allied to vaporware in its post-digital, internet-fueled collage aesthetic and its occasional utilization of chintzy or MIDI-tone timbres, in truth Marcloid carefully programs and painstakingly performs each of the elements she threads through her tracks, pushing the project closer to the realms of combinatory prog and experimental sound design. With Field Whispers, Fire-Toolz once again proves her mettle as a nuanced composer who funnels a vast reservoir of lived and learned experience into complex compositions weighted with enough contrasting emotions and sound sources to match the overwhelming density of her lived experience.

It takes a village to raise a child; Holly Herndon’s third proper studio LP, *PROTO*, holds that the same is true for an artificial intelligence, or AI. The Berlin-based electronic musician’s 2015 album *Platform* explored the intersection of community and technological utopia, and so does its follow-up—only this time, one of her collaborators is a programmed entity, a virtual being named Spawn. Arguing that technology should be embraced, not feared, Herndon and her human collaborators, including a choral ensemble and hundreds of volunteer vocal coaches, set about “teaching” their AI via call-and-response singing sessions inspired by Herndon’s religious upbringing in East Tennessee. The results harness *Platform*’s richly synthetic palette and jagged percussive force and join them with choral music of almost overwhelming beauty. The massed voices of “Frontier” suggest a combination of Appalachian revival meetings and Bulgarian folk that’s been cut up over Hollywood-blockbuster drums; in “Godmother,” a collaboration with the experimental footwork producer Jlin, Spawn “sings” a dense, hyperkinetic fugue based on Jlin’s polyrhythmic signature. The crux of the whole album might be “Extreme Love,” in which a narrator recounts the story of a future post-human generation: “We are not a collection of individuals but a macro-organism living as an ecosystem. We are completely outside ourselves and the world is completely inside us.” A loosely synchronized choir chirps in the background as she asks, in a voice full of childlike wonder, “Is this how it feels to become the mother of the next species—to love them more than we love ourselves?” It’s a moving encapsulation of the album’s radical optimism.

Holly Herndon operates at the nexus of technological evolution and musical euphoria. Holly’s third full-length album 'PROTO' isn’t about A.I., but much of it was created in collaboration with her own A.I. ‘baby’, Spawn. For the album, she assembled a contemporary ensemble of vocalists, developers, guest contributors (Jenna Sutela, Jlin, Lily Anna Haynes, Martine Syms) and an inhuman intelligence housed in a DIY souped-up gaming PC to create a record that encompasses live vocal processing and timeless folk singing, and places an emphasis on alien song craft and new forms of communion. 'PROTO' makes reference to what Holly refers to as the protocol era, where rapidly surfacing ideological battles over the future of A.I. protocols, centralised and decentralised internet protocols, and personal and political protocols compel us to ask ourselves who are we, what are we, what do we stand for, and what are we heading towards? You can hear traces of Spawn throughout the album, developed in partnership with long time collaborator Mathew Dryhurst and ensemble developer Jules LaPlace, and even eavesdrop on the live training ceremonies conducted in Berlin, in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach Spawn how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions; a contemporary update on the religious gathering Holly was raised amongst in her upbringing in East Tennessee. “There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing,” says Holly. “We stand in contrast to that. It’s not like we want to run away; we’re very much running towards it, but on our terms. Choosing to work with an ensemble of humans is part of our protocol. I don’t want to live in a world in which humans are automated off stage. I want an A.I. to be raised to appreciate and interact with that beauty.” Since her arrival in 2012, Holly has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own, all while studying for her soon-to-be-completed PhD at Stanford University, researching machine learning and music. Just as Holly’s previous album 'Platform' forewarned of the manipulative personal and political impacts of prying social media platforms long before popular acceptance, 'PROTO' is a euphoric and principled statement setting the shape of things to come.

Respires, the second solo album by Ka Baird, blurs the line between word and action, definition and possibility. Spirited yet restrained, bearing its wildly thrummed heart strings and inner calm alike, Respires ventures toward the unknown, charting the shifting ground of experimental music and the rewards born of risk. Tapping the ecstatic energy and cathartic experience of Baird’s live sets, pushing the extremes of psychological and physical release, Respires represents an unquestionable leap for an artist already out on a limb. Largely written and recorded across the length of 2018, the eight pieces align as a series of visceral actions, captured, culled, and intricately shaped by Baird, then expanded with contributions from Zach Rowden (bass), Max Eilbacher and Andrew Fitzpatrick (synths), and Greg Fox (drums). Respires was born from the intertwined etymologies of spirit and breath, the results of Baird’s singular approach to extended vocal technique and radical notions of “body music” which push her performances to uncompromising extremes. Channeling a raw energy from an internal depth, the genetics of Respires construct new bridges of communication, reaching across the perceptual boundaries of spiritual and physical.

Slow, methodical organ recordings on this major new work from Kali Malone; a quietly subversive double album featuring almost two hours of concentrated, creeping organ pieces governed by a strict acoustic and compositional code with ultimately profound emotional resonance. ‘The Sacrificial Code’ takes a more surgical approach to the methods first explored on last year’s ‘Organ Dirges 2016 - 2017’. Over the course of three parts performed on three different organs, Malone’s minimalist process captures a jarring precision of closeness, both on the level of the materiality of the sounds and on the level of composition.The recordings here involved careful close miking of the pipe organ in such a way as to eliminate environmental identifiers as far as possible - essentially removing the large hall reverb so inextricably linked to the instrument. The pieces were then further compositionally stripped of gestural adornments and spontaneous expressive impulse - an approach that flows against the grain of the prevailing musical hegemony, where sound is so often manipulated, and composition often steeped in self indulgence. It echoes Steve Reich’s sentiment “..by voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind, we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind.” With its slow, purified and seemingly austere qualities ‘The Sacrificial Code’ guides us through an almost trance-inducing process where we become vulnerable receptors for every slight movement, where every miniature shift in sound becomes magnified through stillness. As such, it’s a uniquely satisfying exercise in transcendence through self restraint - a stunning realisation of ideas borne out of academic and conceptual rigour which gradually reveals startling personal dimensions. It has a perception-altering quality that encourages self exploration free of signposts and without a preordained endpoint - the antithesis to the language of colourless musical platitudes we've become so accustomed to. REPRESS AVAILABLE VIA BOOMKAT: boomkat.com/products/the-sacrificial-code

Loraine James was enticed into the world of music making through her mother, who would go from playing the steel pans to blaring out music from Metallica to Calypso. Having grown up in Enfield, London, she credits the multiculturalism in the city for “broadening my mind and ears”, having listened to jazz, electronica, uk drill and grime, and the results of this exposure can be heard on the mix-up of For You And I. Part of For You and I explores the complexities of being in a queer relationship in London, and the ups and downs that come with that. “I’m in love and wanted to share that in some way. I wanted to make songs that reflect layers of my relationship. Reflected in the song titles and mood of songs like So Scared and Hand Drops she says "A lot of the time I’m really scared in displaying any kind of affection in public…This album is more about feeling than about using certain production skills.” Of her process, James says she aimed to make something that wasn’t overthought. For You and I is rhythmically free flowing and sprawling, with melodies that evolve into rippling keys. It feels like a live jam session with a jazz mentality, contrasting the delicate and abrasive. She also says “The other half of the album is about me, and I wanted it to be about only me.” On three tracks, guest vocals from rapper Le3 bLACK and singer Theo brilliantly articulate Loraine's emotional feelings. The artwork, which features a photo of James holding a photo of her estate from ten years ago is a tribute to her upbringing. “I started making music in those flats, news of my Dad and Uncle passing away happened in that flat, I came out to my mum crying in that flat. Most of my life has been there and in so many years time this area will no longer exist.” This album is a deeply intimate and personal offering, expressing happiness, anxiety, joy, sensuality and fear through a vivid sound palette and an experimental sense of rhythm.

Written, produced, recorded between 2017 & 2019 in France and the United Kingdom. Special thanks to Julianna, Oliver, Florian, Seb & Josh. And all the little mice that helped me make this record, you know who you are ♡

Martina Lussi’s second album fuses together disparate sound sources with a disorienting quality that reflects the modern climate of dispersion and distraction. The Lucerne, Switzerland-based sound artist released her debut album ‘Selected Ambient’ on Hallow Ground in 2017, and now comes to Latency with a bold new set of themes and processes. The range of tools at her disposal spans field recordings, processed instrumentation, synthesised elements and snatches of human expression. The guitar is a recurring figure, subjected to a variety of treatments from heavy, sustained distortion to clean, pealing notes. Elsewhere the sound of sports crowds and choral singing merge, and patient beds of drones and noise melt into the sounds of industry and mechanics. The track titles manifest as a compositional game of deception complete with innuendos, empty phrases and claims – flirtations with perfume names and ironic assertions. From the volatile geopolitical climate to the changing nature of music consumption in the face of streaming and digital access, ‘Diffusion is a Force’ is a reflection on fractured times where familiar modes and models change their meaning with the ever-quickening pace of communication.

Matana Roberts returns with the fourth chapter of her extraordinary Coin Coin series — a project that has deservedly garnered the highest praise and widespread critical acclaim for its fierce aesthetic originality and unflinching narrative power. The first three Coin Coin albums, issued from 2011-2015, charted diverse pathways of modern/avant composition — Roberts calls it “panoramic sound quilting”—and ranged sequentially from large band to sextet to solo, unified by Roberts’ archival and often deeply personal research into legacies of the American slave trade and ancestries of American identity/experience. Roberts also emphasizes non-male subjects and thematizes these other-gendered stories with a range of vocal and verbal techniques: singspeak, submerged glossolalic recitation, guttural cathartic howl, operatic voice, gentle lullaby, group chant, and the recuperation of various American folk traditionals and spirituals, whether surfacing in fragmentary fashion or as unabridged set-pieces. The root of this vocality comes from her dedication to the legacy of her main chosen instrument, the alto saxophone. On Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis, Roberts convened a new band, with New Yorkers Hannah Marcus (guitars, fiddle, accordion) and percussionist Ryan Sawyer (Thurston Moore, Nate Wooley, Cass McCombs) joined by Montréal bassist Nicolas Caloia (Ratchet Orchestra) and Montréal-Cairo composer/improviser Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush, Dwarfs Of East Agouza) on guitar and oud, along with prolific trombonist Steve Swell and vibraphonist Ryan White as special guests. Memphis unspools as a continuous work of 21st century liberation music, oscillating between meditative incantatory explorations, raucous melodic themes, and unbridled free-improv suites, quoting archly and ecstatically from various folk traditions along the way. Led by Roberts’ conduction and unique graphic score practice, her consummate saxophone and clarinet playing, and punctuated by her singing and speaking various texts generated from her own historical research and diaristic writings, Coin Coin Chapter Four is a glorious and spellbinding new instalment in this projected twelve-part Gesamtkunstwerk. Says Roberts: “As an arts adventurer dealing w/ the medium of sound and its many contradictions I am most interested in endurance, perseverance, migration, liberation, libation, improvisation and the many layers of cognitive dissonance therein as it relates to my birth country’s history. I speak memory, I sing an american survival through horn, song, sadness, a sometimes gladness. I stand on the backs of many people, from so many different walks of life and difference, that never had a chance to express themselves as expressively as I have been given the privilege. In these sonic renderings, I celebrate the me, I celebrate the we, in all that it is now, and all that is yet to come or will be... Thanks for listening.” Matana Roberts: alto sax, clarinet, wordspeak, voice Hannah Marcus: electric guitar, nylon string guitar, fiddle, accordion, voice Sam Shalabi: electric guitar, oud, voice Nicolas Caloia: double bass, voice Ryan Sawyer: drumset, vibraphone, jaw harp, bells, voice GUESTS: Steve Swell: trombone, voice Ryan White: vibraphone Thierry Amar: voice Nadia Moss: voice Jessica Moss: voice Recorded at Break Glass studios in Montréal, Québec by Jace Lasek, assisted by Dave Smith Mixed at Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango in Montréal, Québec by Radwan Moumneh Mastered at Greymarket in Montréal, Québec by Harris Newman

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi is a virtuoso percussionist known for playing traditional Persian instruments such as the tombak and daf. After developing more than thirty new striking techniques and progressing to be one of the most prominent players in Iran, Mortazavi travelled to Germany, eventually settling in Berlin to record and perform regular concerts the world over. His acclaimed performances have taken in venues such as Berlin Philharmonie and Sydney Opera House. In recent years, he has been embraced by the experimental electronic music community, collaborating with Burnt Friedman, Fis and Mark Fell. Ritme Jaavdanegi is Mortazavi’s sixth LP, and his first one available on vinyl. The album came together from recordings made in Berlin in June 2019, inspired by Mortazavi’s vivid reminiscence about profound experiences he had listening to music as a child. As he drifted in this time slipping reverie, the phrase ‘ritme jaavdanegi’ or ‘rhythm of eternity’ came to mind, and he found the phrase itself to match the 11/8 metre he was striving for. As such, all eight pieces on this album adhere to this time signature, which in itself harks back to the Aksak, a rhythmic pattern based on the alteration of binary and ternary quantities executed in a fast tempo, intrinsic to traditional music from Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and the Balkans. In the same way these non-standard folk rhythms started to impact on Western music in the early 20th Century, so now you can hear an ever-increasing embrace of polyrhythms and metres that break away from the dominant 4/4 ideology. What’s most striking about Ritme Jaavdanegi, perceived through a lens of modern Western experimental music, is how Mortazavi’s virtuosic playing rivals the intensely programmed dynamics of electronica. His rapid, needlepoint drum hits bend their tonality in incredibly musical ways, but there is still an underlying focus on cyclical repetition that encourages the same ancient transcendental quality that so many contemporary artists strive for.

In the depths of winter in 2017, Liz Harris—better known as the ambient folk musician Grouper—traveled to Murmansk, a post-industrial city in the Russian Arctic, for an artistic residency. *After its own death* is based on recordings created there and in another stint in the Azores, Portugal, and it’s the Arctic atmospheres that prevail. In these slow, lonely tracks—12, 16, even 21 minutes long—Harris’ multitracked vocal harmonies dissipate like foggy breath over drones so minimalist they evoke whiteout conditions. Gone are the acoustic guitar and piano of Grouper albums like *Ruins*; instead, overdriven synths buzz like flickering fluorescent bulbs at an abandoned border crossing. “After its own death: Side A” presents the core themes that will recur again and again—ethereal bell tones, growling bass, sounds of nature, and echoing footsteps—and the remainder of the album proceeds like a succession of half-forgotten memories, elements jumbling together and peeling away until all that’s left is a fuzzy outline of the deepest melancholy imaginable.

After its own death 0 - 7:48:544 Cloudmouth 7:48:544 - 8:19:489 blue room 8:17:503 - 11:27:011 Night-walking 11:27:011 -16:41:254 Funeral song 16:41:254 - 26:00:991 Thirteen (version) 26:00:991 - 28:39:125 Crying jar 28:39:125 - 29:29:394 Entry 29:29:394 - 37:33:056 Walking in a spiral towards the house 37:30:846 - end Weightless Walking in a spiral towards the house 0 - 3:14:509 Night-walking 3:14:509 - 8:37:153 Funeral song 8:37:153 - 12:59:510 Thirteen 12:59:510 - end Walking in a spiral towards the house “Crying Jar” features Michael Morley, Gabie Strong, and Christopher Reid Martin. Thanks to Matt, Marcel, Sergio, Fridaymilk, Jefre, and to Kassian. Organizational support from ZDB/Tremor, Unsound, Barbican, and the Goethe institute. For Aihna.

After a trilogy of spectacular explorations of relentlessly driving rhythms – Sagittarian Domain (2012), Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016) – Simian Angel finds Oren Ambarchi renewing his focus on his singular approach to the electric guitar, returning in part to the spacious canvases of classic releases like Grapes from the Estate while also following his muse down previously unexplored byways. Reflecting Ambarchi’s profound love of Brazilian music – an aspect of his omnivorous musical appetite not immediately apparent in his own work until now – Simian Angel features the remarkable percussive talents of the legendary Cyro Baptista, a key part of the Downtown scene who has collaborated with everyone from John Zorn and Derek Bailey to Robert Palmer and Herbie Hancock. Like the music of Nana Vasconcelos and Airto Moreira, Simian Angel places Baptista’s dexterous and rhythmically nuanced handling of traditional Brazilian percussion instruments into an unexpected musical context. On the first side, ‘Palm Sugar Candy’, Baptista’s spare and halting rhythms wind their way through a landscape of gliding electronic tones, gently rising up and momentarily subsiding until the piece’s final minutes leave Ambarchi’s guitar unaccompanied. While the rich, swirling harmonics of Ambarchi’s guitar performance are familiar to listeners from his previous recordings, the subtly wavering, synthetic guitar tone we hear is quite new, coming across at times like an abstracted, splayed-out take on the 80s guitar-synth work of Pat Metheny or Bill Frisell. Equally new is the harmonic complexity of Ambarchi’s playing, which leaves behind the minimalist simplicity of much of his previous work for a constantly-shifting play between lush consonance and uneasy dissonance. Beginning with a beautiful passage of unaccompanied percussion dominated by the berimbau, the side-long title piece carries on the first side’s exploration of subtle, non-linear dynamic arcs, taking the form of a gently episodic suite, in which distinctive moments, like a lyrical passage of guitar-triggered piano, unexpectedly arise from intervals of drifting tones like dream images suddenly cohering. In the piece’s second half, the piano tones becomes increasingly more clipped and synthetic, scattering themselves into aleatoric melodies that call to mind an imaginary collaboration between Albert Marcoeur and David Behrman, grounded all the while by the pulse of Baptista’s percussion. Subtle yet complex, fleeting yet emotionally affecting, Simian Angel is an essential chapter in Ambarchi’s restlessly exploratory oeuvre.

Reviews of ‘Weigh the Word’ "The mesmerizing, overlapping chatter on Seth Cooke’s Weigh the Word comes from tape-recorded sermons. The Bristol-based sound artist fed the text of these sermons into a text-to-speech program and surrounded these bits of babble with sounds both disturbingly organic (bee-swarm hums) and sterile (air-craft hangar room tones). Some of the voices poke through the antiseptic surface unmodified, like mad people stranded in outer space. By sapping their devotional heat and leaving only a chilling monotone. Cooke shows how brittle our words of faith are; test them, even a little, and they snap." Pitchfork (Jayson Greene) - Best Experimental Music 2019 pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/best-experimental-albums-2019 “Whispered prophetics, skull-vibrating bass feedback, stop-start static. The uncanny sonority of halted words, syllables once pregnant with meaning reduced to synthetic blips and glitches. The captivating gibberish that dominates Seth Cooke’s stark collages on Weigh the Word is sourced from spoken ministry cassettes recorded between 1996 and 1999, the devotional sermons digitized and chopped up beyond recognition to form something entirely new. Both sides of the C26 cassette contain elusive mixtures of sounds as jittery and unpredictable as the cut-up text that serves as the cover art, the synthesized speech sharing space with granular electronics and disarming dynamic changes. The largely indeterminate and computer-based method of composition used here might imply that Weigh the Word is too far removed from anything recognizably emotional or even organic, but the music itself tells a different story. Especially on side B, the random diatribes adopt something resembling lucidity; the male text-to-speech stating “They were the issue of slavery, you will model something for them yeah okay okay okay okay” while a whirlwind of aggressive static that sounds like an angry cloud of bees threatens to take over is one of the most harrowing things I’ve heard in recent memory. Weigh the Word is another fascinating and singular work from Seth Cooke.” Noise Not Music noisenotmusic.com/2019/02/10/review-seth-cooke-weigh-the-word-self-released-jan-27 “Recent cassette from Seth Cooke is Weigh The Word (SETHCOOKE.EU SC001), another conundrum and conceptual piece which does not surrender its meaning very easily. We had to exert a certain amount of intellectual effort on the last work we heard, Triangular Trade, a very layered and oblique statement which was informed by a strong sense of indignation, as it attacked what he perceived to be institutionalised, historic racism in the City of Bristol. In the case of Weigh The Word, my first thought was that this time the “target” is organised religion, but it may not be as simple as that at all. It’s a bewildering mix of collaged elements – noise, spoken word, and computer generated materials. The latter seems to have been a big part of the experiment; Cooke refers, in his terse manner, to “sounds derived from prophetic ministry cassettes” and “their inscription onto digital formats”; there’s also a process he calls “transcription of the spoken ministry via IBM Bluemix”. Even the cover artworks have gone through the computer; texts originated in MS Word have been passed through a Word-to-PDF conversion tool, and this has resulted in scrambled words, characters, numbers, and odd fonts scattered about the page. I assume we’re hearing an aural equivalent of this process, or something akin to it, on parts of this cassette. By way of further clues, there are two quotes from scripture (one from Psalms, one from 2 Peter) provided with the release; and one further quote from the lyrics of Pete Townsend. Both the scripture pieces refer directly to speech and to writing, while the song by The Who – ‘Substitute’ – is all about looking for alternatives. There’s probably enough conceptual mileage in that riddle alone; is our culture now at such a point of moral and intellectual decay that none of us can deal with the truth, and are settling for more palatable substitutions? I’d go along with a line of thought like that, except that the actual content of the tape is far from clear. A female voice has been passed through a text-to-speech device; the words are not clear, the meaning is scrambled, and the robotic tone is horrifying. A more recognisable voice – this time a man speaking – sounds more reassuring and convincing, but he too is speaking the most awful nonsense, some of it probably quite subversive. For these parts of Weigh The Word, I’m reminded of People Like Us and her determined efforts to scramble cosy BBC radio speech into something dark and nightmarish, but whereas Vicki Bennett creates satirical barbs that are both mordant and amusing, I somehow sense that Seth Cooke is going for the jugular here. Then there are the passages of noise and static, strategically placed to alarm and distress the listener, underscoring key points in the text. On side two we apparently have real-life conversations from Christian believers speaking of their experiences with God, but these segments are not necessarily presented in a sympathetic light through Cooke’s juxtapositions and editing. So far, it’s all very problematic; sense that I’m placed in a metaphysical quandary, which might be one of the desired results. If I am right about Cooke’s agenda, he would be interested in activating the mind of the listener towards decoding the difficult surfaces of his work, regardless of whether a “solution” is ever found. That might be a hallmark of strong art, or at any rate art which struggles against its easy assimilation into the culture. It’s a kind of resistance to the mainstream, something you don’t find in the work of many artists today, a lot of whom can’t wait to be absorbed into it, and look forward to being welcomed everywhere as “celebrities” (with the attendant financial gains as a bonus). Getting back to the “substitution” theme, it’s possible that computer technology is – according to Cooke – implicated in this process of confusion, since we have here ample evidence of the way that computers can distort meaning to the point of unintelligibility – very often without us even noticing it happening. If that’s half-right, it’s another line of thought I can go along with. As a second P.S., it might be worth comparing this record with the work of Professor John Harvey, especially The Bible In Translation. From 24th January 2019.” The Sound Projector www.thesoundprojector.com/2019/08/11/corrupt-communication “In his late teens and early 20s, Seth Cooke was the willing subject of students in his father’s evangelical School of Prophecy. In their ministry sessions, these religious delegates from around the world recorded themselves talking about Cooke—as he puts it, “essentially a room full of people who barely know me telling me what God thinks of me.” Twenty years later, Cooke took some of those tapes and ran them through an AI program, using the results to craft a compelling audio work that mixes real human voices, computerized speech, and abstract sound art. Weigh the Word resembles an impressionistic juggling of personal and religious history, with voices and noises blending into a mesmerizing, conflictory stream of subconsciousness. For me, each listen has revealed new words and moods while burying others, which sometimes re-emerge when I return. Cook traverses time to reflect the complexity of an experience that clearly still resonates with him.” Marc Masters Bandcamp Best Experimental Music of February 2019 daily.bandcamp.com/best-experimental/best-experimental-music-bandcamp-february-2019 "On Weigh the Word, Seth Cooke dives into the depths of a uniquely personal story, revisiting his teen years when he was the willing subject of prophesying evangelical students invited to lecture on, according to him, “what God thinks of me.” Cook runs recordings of those sessions through an AI program, forging a collage of real human voices, computerized speech, and abstract sound art. The result is oddly compelling: when the voices are legible, you can glean some sense of Cooke’s lived experience, and when the sounds become blurred, you feel the complex emotions that resonate in Cooke’s own history." Marc Masters Bandcamp Best Experimental Music of 2019 daily.bandcamp.com/best-of-2019/the-best-experimental-albums-of-2019 “Seth Cooke’s father is a bit of a celebrity in the Charismatic Christian world. Those who follow the leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation are likely to stumble upon one of his books or teachings if wanting to learn about prophesying in the contemporary age. Most notably, he has a famous School of Prophecy that draws in people from around the world. Many years ago, Seth allowed graduates from this school to speak words over his life that were said to be communicated from God. It’s been two decades since then, and Seth has held onto cassettes containing audio from these private moments. Excerpts from these intimate sessions are included in the 26-minute Weigh the World. In addition to these audio clips are IBM AI text-to-speech readings of said prophecies and intermittent bouts of monochrome, speckled noise. With this oblique presentation of the material is a disruption of its sacrosanct nature. For many Charismatic Evangelical Christians, prophecies (and signs and wonders) are the primary foundation for their faith. While followers are asked to “weigh the word” against biblical text, there are an unsurprisingly large number of leaders (be it pastors or regular church members who are attuned to their “spiritual gifts”) who are casually elevated in status due to their superior spirituality. In hearing Weigh the Word, I’m reminded of how the Bible’s authors often edited the holy text to ensure a propagation of their specific beliefs. For example, details from oral traditions about Moses’s birth were withheld from the Pentateuch in order to prevent any sort of mythologizing of the Israelite leader. His death was something that authors wanted to include for similar reasons. Cooke provides a similar service: this album prevents people (Christians included, maybe) from seeing these prophecies as something that’s imparted from the divine. In the A side’s second half, Cooke makes sure that a woman’s words are constantly cut off, every plosive an opportunity to end her speech. Despite all this, Weigh the Word doesn’t primarily read as a polemic. While Cooke is no longer religious, he understands that there’s a certain curiosity to these bizarre practices. After a series of disorienting, white noise drones on the B side, we hear an uninterrupted stretch of audio where a South American woman speaks. While bits of it are odd, there are generic word of encouragement sprinkled throughout (“You are one of a kind”). It makes for a fascinating listen that ranges from ominous to interesting to calming. It’s undeniably unique, and Cooke invites people to understand its complexities. In this way, it’s more robust and participatory than watching something like Holy Ghost People. And in a sense, Cooke has become like his father: he channels his thoughts and experiences about spiritual matters to those who are willing to listen.” Tone Glow – First Quarter Report 2019: Experimental Music www.toneglow.net/features/q1-2019-experimental-music

Conceived in the Mushroom Hour Half Hour lab, SPAZA is a band with no permanent personnel, with each lineup assembled for the express purpose of recording once-off improvised or workshopped material. For this, the initial salvo, SPAZA was put together from a group of musicians with individual and collective links to Johannesburg’s jazz, afro funk and experimental electro scenes. In the context of this completely improvised album, the term “spaza” not only refers to the gallery in Troyeville, Johannesburg where this project was recorded live (and in one take) in the autumn of 2015, but to South Africa’s thousands of informal neighbourhood stores. In South Africa, “spaza” has come to signify an entrepreneurial spirit, especially in the country’s black townships where economic barriers to business ownership mean that only a few can attain the status of formal business ownership. In the country’s socio-political context, spazas, usually operating out of converted garages, shacks or repurposed shipping containers, are also contested territories. They are sites of often fatal bloodshed where financially disenfranchised South Africans routinely mete out their frustrations on those they consider “foreigners” and “outsiders”. It is these outsiders who have come to dominate the spaza economy. However, spazas are also colourful, with their facades branded, styled and designed by each owner. They can become the nerve centres of social activity in the communities they occupy and are often stocked with an array of iconic South African brands and products, many of which are referenced in the track names of this album. Perhaps obliquely, there are musical sensibilities to be grasped at the mention of the term. “Spaza,” the recording, the location, the revolving ensemble - all evoke a spirit of independence, a D.I.Y aesthetic, a propensity for spontaneity, and, literally, a coming together of minds at the corner to shoot the breeze or let off a seriously considered prognosis. True to this, there is a heightened and sustained sense of intuition running through this recording whose sonic palette is so wide it captures - through soundscaping, invocation, lament, impressionistic vocal weaving - not only the transient and hybridised nature of life in Johannesburg, but also the heaviness of the air at the time of its recording. More ambient, controlled swirl of rhythm and experimental mixing than incessant groove, the album is an outpouring of a range of expressions that exist between the supposed binaries of indigenous forms of music and the electronic experimentation Johannesburg is known globally for. Between percussionist Gontse Makhene on the bottom end of the scale, and sound sculptor Joao Orrechia on the nebulous end of it, vocalists Nosisi Ngakane and Siya Makuzeni (who also plays trombone) marshal a vocal experiment that is as tense as it is playful. From their respective posts, bass player Ariel Zarmonsky and string wizard Waldo Alexander stitch, stretch and add body to the various strands of sound being created. There is an intelligence to the vocal sculpting that gives structure and coherence to the music, creating a sonic monolith that honours various aspects of South African life, including divination, burial rites, as well as the precariousness of a simple trip to the cornerstone. The interlude Tigerbalm noBuhlebakho, for instance, relays the sometimes charged atmosphere of a trip to the spaza, one laced with catcalling indicative of the war over womens' bodies. While this can end in violence and, in some cases, death, ultimately this album seems to point to the liberating feeling of levitating above it all. At times opaque, and at others direct, SPAZA is always unyielding and propulsive. This could be the sound of the city turned inside out, ruminating on its troubled history and ever morphing present. There are pensive and celebratory streaks crisscrossing the album, not to mention a vulnerability that is in keeping with the spontaneous ethos of Mushroom Hour Half Hour. The results, shaped in the Pan African milieu that is Johannesburg, is a freewheeling representation of continental astral travel.

HAUSMO87 - CS / CD / DIG

Ulla’s productions reveal a discerning process of stripping tracks to their essence, letting space, silence, simplicity and repetition be her guide. They lend a magic touch to a difficult and minimal style of music, creating an album that is comforting and tranquil, yet hypnotizing and transportive. Most evidently, UIla’s music is inspired, by emotions and experiences unknown to us, but perhaps best represented in her own words: “keeping pictures on a wall left there by someone else. day dreaming about something not real. hearing a friend walk through the front door. letting a plant die. the silence of a room when the box fan is turned off."