Rolling Stone's 20 Best Avant Albums of 2017

Benjamin Power’s third album as Blanck Mass is club music for an uninhabitable planet. Like Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin (or Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, for that matter), Power’s best moments twist pop shapes into dark new forms, alloying industrial music with R&B (“Please”), and Caribbean rhythms with Arctic atmospheres (“Silent Treatment”), creating a hybrid that hits like 100 pounds of fog.

As humans, we are aware of our inner beast and should therefore be able to control it. We understand our hard-wired primal urges and why they exist in an evolutional sense. We understand the relationship between mind and body. Highly evolved and intelligent, we should be able to recognize these genetic hangovers and control them as a means to act positively and move forward as a compassionate species. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Recent global events have proven this. The human race is consuming itself. World Eater, the new album by Benjamin John Power’s Blanck Mass project, is a reaction to this. There is an underlying violence and anger throughout the record, even though some of these tracks are the closest Power has ever come to writing, in his words, “actual love songs.” “Maybe subconsciously this was some kind of countermeasure to restore some personal balance,” Power explains. On World Eater, Power further perfects the propulsive, engrossing electronic music he has created throughout his impressive decade-plus career, both under the Blanck Mass moniker and as one-half of Fuck Buttons, as he elaborates upon the sound of 2015’s brilliant double album Dumb Flesh. As massive as the sonic world of the new record often feels, its greatest achievement is in its maximization of a limited set of tools, a restriction intentionally set by Power himself. “As an exercise in better understanding myself musically, I found myself using an increasingly restricted palette during the World Eater creative process. Evoking these intense emotions using minimal components really put me outside of my comfort zone and was unlike the process I am used to. Feeling exposed shone a new light on this particular snapshot. I feel enriched for doing so.”

SOMA025 Ideologic Organ is proud to present the brand-new recordings from The Necks, the legendary Australian trio who excel in bypassing musical cliche whilst exploring and extending the practices embedded within improvisation, jazz, post rock, ambient, minimal, and textural, ‘sound based’ music. The latest document from this long-running ensemble, Unfold, presents itself as a double LP, with four side-length tracks. A deliberate absence of numbered sides hands a substantial swatch of participation over to the listener, allowing her to navigate his own path through the soundscape at hand. The shorter length of the vinyl format, far from being a constraint upon the members of the ensemble, instead offers them a more compact horizon to contemplate, wherein the distance travelled is recalibrated to more immediate and dynamic textural concerns. The immediacy of Rise confirms this new path, as the mournful tones of Lloyd Swanton’s bass swirl around Chris Abrahams’ crystalline piano motif, with Tony Buck’s percussion steering proceedings into enlightening free-jazz territories. Blue Mountain cuts a swathe through the sonic undergrowth, with soul organ, rattling percussion, whistles, and loping sound-waves all vying for the foreground. Overheard retains a sublime melancholic aura as the percussion and keyboards simultaneously embrace and fall apart, whilst Timepiece skips along as a gentle gesture of further possibilities.  Exactly how The Necks conjure their particular magic - as deceptively simple as it seems - whilst always moving forward, is anyone’s guess, but Unfold proves yet again that rules and schools are to be broken and re-formed into patterns and frameworks unlike those we know.

“Rainbow Mirror”, the latest work from renowned noise-music artist PRURIENT, is a release exceeding three hours in length, consisting of new PRURIENT material that delves into the more glacial, meditative, and ambient side of Dominick Fernow’s cult within the realm of noise music creating an epic of pure 'Doom Electronics'. “Rainbow Mirror”, which will coincide with the 20 year anniversary of PRURIENT, is a project that is steeped in history and origins, and will be released as a 4xCD and digital through Profound Lore on Dec 1st, with the 7xLP vinyl edition to be released on Hospital Productions. The cover art for “Rainbow Mirror” is the first PRURIENT collage ever made. Like the first Prurient live performance 20 years earlier, the 'Rainbow Mirror' lineup consists of three members. For this ambitious work, Fernow called upon Matt Folden (Dual Action) and Jim Mroz (Lussuria) to form the trio. All of the material was recorded live in the studio and later meticulously mixed and produced at Shifted’s studio in Berlin with expert mastering by Paul Corley. “Rainbow Mirror” marks the second alliance between Profound Lore and PRURIENT and stands as another singular monument amongst the vast repertoire Fernow has amassed under the PRURIENT moniker. While familiar moments from the landmark “Frozen Niagara Falls” album can be found within the massive scope of “Rainbow Mirror”, through the three-plus hour duration of this rural ambient industrial creation, “Rainbow Mirror” is a monolithic crawling cinematic noise scape that brings in even more dynamics and structure through this expansive and introspective new observation. The intense, unforgiving, trance-inducing aura of “Rainbow Mirror” is presented through waves of time-stretching electronics, layered counterpoint feedback, machine loops and extended droning, pulsating synth passages. Like the infinite and distorted reflections produced by a hall of mirrors, "Rainbow Mirror" is a portrait in perpetual tension.

Although Twin Peaks: The Return has hosted an array of Roadhouse performers and spotlighted music throughout its new season, a large part of the show’s sonic identity has been defined by the space between sound effects and music. Sound and music supervisor Dean Hurley’s first installment of the library-style Anthology Resource series showcases his original ambient music contributions featured in the show’s very distinctive-sounding third season. (You might also remember Hurley as the drummer from the fictitious band Trouble, alongside Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches, and David Lynch’s son Riley, who performed at the Roadhouse in "Part 5" of The Return.) Sound and music supervisor Dean Hurley has operated David Lynch’s Asymmetrical Studio for the past 12 years, collaborating extensively with Lynch on a myriad of his film, commercial and music-based projects. In addition to his sound and music supervision for both Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return, Hurley co-wrote and produced four full-length LPs with Lynch: The Air is on Fire (2007), This Train (2011), Crazy Clown Time (2011), and The Big Dream (2013). Hurley’s music production has also extended to artists like Lykke Li, Dirty Beaches, Zola Jesus, and The Veils.

All the Way is a collection of radical re-workings of traditional and jazz standards such as “All the Way”, “You Don't Know What Love Is”, and “The Thrill Is Gone” (made famous by Chet Baker). It also includes a solo piano interpretation of Thelonious Monk's “Round Midnight”, and live voice and piano interpretations of the American traditional “O Death” and the country song, “Pardon Me I've Got Someone to Kill”. The album includes both electric live performances (recorded in Paris, Copenhagen, and East Sussex) and studio recordings made in San Diego, CA.

The release date of Contact marks the ten-year anniversary of Margaret Chardiet’s project, Pharmakon. While working on her newest release, she began to evaluate the project as a whole. Though the content of each record has been very different and specific, the pervading question, which has underlined them all, is what is means to be human. Her last album, Bestial Burden, focused on the disconnect between mind and body, looking at the human as an isolated consciousness stuck inside of a rotting vessel. For Contact, she wanted to look at the other side of the spectrum – the moments when our mind can come outside of and transcend our bodies. Because an album is itself an object, she struggled with how to convey the transcendence of the physical, through a physical medium. She started to study trance states and equate her live performances to them. In trance states, music and the body are used to transcend the physical form and make contact with some outside force. In the live setting, she used sound and her body to create an exchange of energy and make contact with outside forces - humanity, empathy, the audience. This energy/empathy exchange has always been at the heart of a Pharmakon performance, but she felt that on records, it wasn’t translating. They were one-sided and flat – declarations rather than conversations. She decided to structure the compositions of each side of Contact after the four stages of trance: preparation, onset, climax, and resolution. By using these stages as a biorhythm for the album, she animates it, and instills the intention of communion into the music. ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Man is a rabid dog, straining at its leash of mortality with bared teeth. Snarling and clawing over each other, we aim to reach a higher ground to claim as our own. There are those who will attempt to exert power over others to attain it. They will sniff you out; lay claim over your body, your actions, your thoughts, your time. (How starkly human, so desperate for the sense of vantage over all versions of its own reflection!) Their aims are empty, because their power is a construct they created and gave back to themselves. They too are small and inconsequential. All people are only human and humans are only animals. The nature of existence and our sentience is chance, owing nothing to anything. Humankind is of no special significance to the universe. (Despite all our scrambling rejections, we cannot transcend all of our instincts — just animals, lost in a confused dream, where mankind is real and at the center of everything). We are each nothing but a single, short-lived cell in a vast organism which itself will one day die. If we accept that the only true claim sentience gives us is our tiny sliver of time, it opens us to revel in it, to make CONTACT. When we pick up on transmissions between the private rooms inside our heads and the flesh of our vessels, when thought escapes its isolation and is seen, heard and understood. When our mind uses the body in order to transcend and escape it! The moments of connection/communion/CONTACT, when the veil is for a brief but glorious moment lifted, and we are free. Empathy! EMPATHY, NOW!