★Kranky
Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline
2023 Re-press. Triple LP. Painstakingly recorded, processed and assembled over the last five years, Stars Of The Lid once again deliver a massive work filling two compact discs and three vinyl albums, clocking in at over two hours. While most albums of this length would be considered tedious at best, SOTL are arguably the only contemporary composers who can seemingly alter the time-space continuum simply through the playback of their organized sound. They take time itself and stretch, compress a…
Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid
2023 repress on triple-vinyl. "Are there other earthling-conjured soundworks rivaling the majesty of Henry Flynt's minimalist hillbilly fiddle fantasias or the heavens-rending power of Olivier Messiaen's works for organ? Undoubtedly, else why bother listening. But the only thing speaking at us right now from these charmed regions are the celestial airs of these Stars of the Lid. Alternately lulling and wielding a potency that wholly escapes 'experimental' musics, Stars of The Lid bring big, whom…
No Highs
The latest by Canadian composer Tim Hecker serves as a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers – this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined.
Morse code pulse programming flickers like distress signals while a gathering storm of strings, noise, and low-end looms in the distance. Processed electroni…
No. 5
LP version. "While on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea for a film festival performance, Christina Vantzou experienced what she characterized as 'a moment of focus' -- a specific vision for the sprawl of raw recordings she'd been amassing for her fifth album. Upon relocating to the Cycladic island of Ano Koufonisi, she situated herself outside at a patio table with a laptop and headphones, taking brief breaks to swim, and began the 'reductive process' of shaving and shaping the source materi…
The Patience Fader
The glacial distillation of Pan American aka Mark Nelson’s “romantic minimalism” achieves unique fruition on his latest Kranky collection, The Patience Fader. A suite of solo guitar instrumentals accented with lap steel, harmonica, and twilit atmospherics, the strings smear and sparkle in elegant, windswept swells, a guitar mode once described by Brian Eno as “Duane Eddy playing Erik Satie.” These are elegies as much as songs, lulling and lilting in private currents of beauty and bereavement. Ne…
Equivalents
Canadian composer Scott Morgan’s 12th long-player as Loscil takes its title from an influential series of early 20th century photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, abstracting clouds into miasmic, painterly canvases of smoke and shadowplay. It’s a deeply fitting analog for Morgan’s own musical process across the past two decades, fraying forms and tones into widescreen mirages of opaque texture and negative space. The name Equivalents referred to Stieglitz’s notion of the photographs as being equivale…
Physicalist
Double LP version. Gatefold sleeve. "Physicalist is the third album from New York City synthesis trio Forma. Since their acclaimed self-titled debut in 2011, Forma have been perfecting a distinctive style of improvised kosmische and minimalism that blends swirling arpeggios, ambient soundscapes, and driving motorik beats. Physicalist is a sprawling, double LP journey featuring new member and multi-instrumentalist John Also Bennett. The first Forma album to include acoustic instrumentation,…
Exile
A Charalambides album is always an event in our book, and this new one on Kranky is superb stuff, arguably taking their fizzy, fuzzy psychedelic pop and drone-folk sound to a whole new level. It's mad to think that Tom and Christina Carter have been making music together for 20 years now, but it shows in the coherence of Exile, their first LP since 2007's Likeness. It begins cautiously, with the uber-minimal twanger 'Autumn Leaves', like Richard Chartier scoring a spaghetti western, but things o…
The Dream House / Dedications To Flea
The Dream House is the first album of new material from Windy & Carl in five years. Recorded at their home studio in Dearborn, MI it consists of two tracks. The Dream House is in many ways the duo's simplest and most straight-forward release, concentrated as it is on two evolving pieces. It is also Windy & Carl's most ambitious recording, with the duo deliberating on longer forms. Windy & Carl are capable of sustaining melodic ideas and patiently apply attention to singular musical gestures. Win…
Mutually Arising
Davis' second album for Kranky following 2004's Somnia. Features two tracks over 51 minutes, "Cosmic Mundra" is a subtle & slowly changing circle, a sun, the sun, the moon. Not the Arpeggio Minimalists, rather: the quiet time stretchers of long tones & long tones sustained & hyper-sustained until buzz value outweighs pitch, sounds seeming to fly around the screen, hyper-spiritual with hardly a word. "Hall of Pure Bliss" is a chord and all sorts of wonderful sounds which live to its left and righ…