Jakob Battick - Slow Motion Summer (2023)

Artist: Jakob Battick

Album: Slow Motion Summer

Label: Lilien Hexen

Year: 2023

There's no album I listened to as often last year as Jakob Battick's "Slow Motion Summer." As its title suggests, it's like a temporal elixir, never failing to slow me down when so much of the rest of the world is conspiring to speed things up. The album is literally slowed down in post--you can hear it in the voice and drawn out tones. But like a musical microscope, Battick is revealing new depths and textures to the recorded sounds, and drawing out new meaning to the lyrics. This is cosmic psych folk with folkloric elements of black metal, but it's also equally indebted to biological, entomological and botanical concepts. With lyrics discussing spores and cicadas, I feel like this is the best science class I never had. 

While so much of society is obsessing over Instagram filters and algorithms, Battick is fascinated by the natural order of the world, always looking deeper and more closely time and space. Their compositions are filled with a sense of wonder and exploration, like getting lost in a Miyazaki landscape. Listening to "Unfolding Ghost / Distant Glimmering Star," I have to ask is this the sound of birth, of some exploding star, the last gasp of life, or the fist moments of the afterlife? 

Musically, I'm not even fully cognizant of what's going on--I'm sure there are synths and guitars and found sounds, but the album is so beyond the limitations of those descriptions. Slowing down the music decontextualizes the sounds, divorces them from their inception, and finds something more essential, more primal, within them. 

This album reminds me of the nature documentaries of Jean Painlevé, whose films on aquatic life often border on the surreal. That's what Jakob Battick's music is like to me--one foot in reality, one foot in the ether, both hyperreal and surreal at the same time. 

https://jakobbattick.bandcamp.com/album/slow-motion-summer

Hidden Gateways - Pineal Stargates (2024)

Artist: Hidden Gateways

Album: Pineal Stargates

Label: Heathen Fawn Recordings

Year: 2024

When I read in the album description "Acoustic Alchemy meets harsh noise" I thought it was a joke--but thankfully it's not. I didn't realize before, but I really need more albums that combine these aesthetics. But there's also a lot more to the album than just those two poles, like found sounds, collage, synths, and industrial. Lots going on here! Overall, "Pineal Stargates" is richly and densely varied in its sounds, textures, and styles--eclectic, but somehow sonically it all fits together as a singular, cohesive experience. A lot of the noise albums I'm hearing lately have a clear trajectory and they adhere closely to it, which can be great, but I really liked how Hidden Gateways was willing to dare to diverge from expected paths, bringing in unexpected elements that make each song a unique experience from other tracks on the album. 

The opener, "Slow-Burn," is a noise crescendo, very much like a prelude to establish the album's mood. "Gun-Demic" is sort of like a docu-industrial hybrid, starting with news broadcasts about contemporary gun violence before distorted vocals and electronic music kicks in. Where the album really took a left-turn and grabbed me was with "Eternal Departure," which blends fingerstyle acoustic folk/classical guitar with electric drum beat. "Kalilah" was another favorite, think Laurel Canyon 70s psych-folk meets dungeon-industrial. "Temples of Saturn," as the title suggests, is the most cosmic-psych on the album, featuring what sounds like an eBow on an electric guitar, reminding me of Michio Kurihara. "Biofeedback (Lesson 2)" is another distinct track, starting with a low bass pulse, alternating notes, before introduction atmospheric sounds of rain, thunder, a wolf howling, its among the more cinematic/atmospheric tracks. "Divine Empathy" new age synth glow with Godflesh-y distorted vocals in the background. The album concludes with "Buried Under the Altar of a False God," where the different stylistic strands of the album all come together in a dark, doomy, noise-guitar epic. 

https://heathenfawnrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/pineal-stargates

Jörg Zemmler - Piano Bar (2022)

Artist: Jörg Zemmler

Album: Piano Bar

Label: Self-released

Year: 2022

Ten electro-acoustic piano improvisations that create dialogues between its analogue and digital components, making this more like a duet between technologies than a solo performance by its creator, Viennese composer/performer Jörg Zemmler. On the whole the music sits at the nexus of minimalism, ambience, and impressionism, at times its atmosphere is wistful and others more uneasy. The album often exhibits the tense-delicacy of Arvo Pärt's "Für Alina," and the low-volume intensity of Morton Feldman's piano works. There's also a formal playfulness that reminds me of Ligeti--limitations are freeing for both composers, and one can sense the fun of finding new ways of tonal and formal liberation on the keyboard. 

The opening track, "Vor Glück," begins with acoustic octaves before slowly introducing loops and electronic elements, establishing the musical elements that will form the rest of the album to come. It's a beautiful song, contemplative and melancholic. "Behustam" is impressive with its expressive use of sustain, lingering overtones build into a dense wall of exponential harmonies, forever on the precipice between cordant and discordant. "Ein Tanz" is a noteworthy departure from the more atmospheric songs, this time Zemmler explores more staccato rhythms. On "Blinzeln," the repeated loops take on a percussive role. My favorite track is the finale, "Genug," whose lush, looped sustain have the solemnity of a church and the body of a choir. 

https://joergzemmler.bandcamp.com/album/piano-bar

Apocalypstick and Tab In/Tab Out - Split (2024)

Artists: Apocalypstick and Tab In/Tab Out

Album: Split ("Take Me Apart" and "Her Heart In My Hand")

Label: Bent Window Records

Year: 2024

Even when I cranked the volume on my headphones, there was still something very relaxing about both tracks on the split, 25-minute side-spanning harsh noise walls that offer serenity and a sense of rebirth, reticence, and control. 

My experience with the album is influenced by the cover art by Kyndra Lee, of a disembodied, bloodied heart held between two hands, which juxtaposes two potentially conflicting emotions--violence and love. Despite the macabre nature, the gesture depicted exudes affection and tenderness. Perhaps because of this, I also heard in the two pieces here a binary between potentially conflicting poles, between construction and destruction. The duality of the art suggests reinterpreting the titles of the works: Apocalypstick's "Take Me Apart" and Tab In/Tab Out's "Her Heart In My Hand." Rather than acts of violence and destruction, perhaps these are songs of reconstruction, of completion, of compassion. 

"Take Me Apart" sounds like digital rain, or eggs cracking, reinforcing a sense of nature and (re)birth. On "Her Heart In My Hand" I was really struck by the left-right mixing balance and the interior architecture of the piece that Tab-In/Tab-Out achieved, so much that I took out my earbuds and listened to the tonal differences one side at a time before putting them both in together and letting the 360-sense sink back in.

Overall, I admired the overarching sense of equilibrium and calm, and the focused sets of tones and frequencies, on both tracks.

https://bentwindowrecords.bandcamp.com/album/tab-in-tab-out-apocalypstick

Slovak Misanthrope - Ja proti Sebe (2024)

Artist:  Slovak Misanthrope

Album: Ja proti Sebe

Label: Imploding Sounds

Year: 2024

This is like some harsh noise disco, and I like it! The pieces are short and to-the-point, focused studies on rhythm, pulse, and deterioration. The first two songs are more abstract, but the album really clicked for me when the third track, "Naivita dobrého zajtrajška," kicked in. The opening synth line pulls the album into electro-industrial territory before it rots away into noise territory. The noise-rave maelstrom continues with the final track, "Cyklické narušenie," which begins with an insistent four-to-the-floor beat and quickly descends into noise agitation, like a dentist going to town on the cavity-decayed beat, drilling away, but with the song never losing track of its pulse.

https://implodingsounds.bandcamp.com/album/ja-proti-sebe

https://slovakmisanthrope.bandcamp.com/album/ja-proti-sebe

redoute - espoir et seulement (2023)

Artist: redoute

Album: espoir et seulement

Label: Imploding Sounds

Year: 2023

A sense of abandonment permeates redoute's album "espoir et seulement," and it begins with the cover. I'm struck by the image's superficial serenity. A mug of tea on a table, next to it some cookies (one half-eaten), and behind it an open window, bordered by polka-dot curtains, and in the distance trees and a mountain. But on the mug is a quote, "revenge is a human right" G. Noé (Gaspar Noé, a line from his movie Irreversible). Inside the beverage is some floating debris--it almost looks like moss? And the cookies, abandoned by Santa Claus? Or perhaps nibbled on by a mouse after its owners left? What at first appeared to be serene now looks deserted, uninhabited, detritus, post-human. This ambiguity between natural and unnatural, between ease and unease, quiet and disquiet, underscores the entire album, three songs ambient in nature but with hint of narrativity. Is the revenge that nature has survived now that humanity has been eradicated? 

I like the ambience on "etheree," blending natural and unnatural worlds. It begins with a keyboard melody before veering into sounds resembling an approaching storm, and later into a more electronically-filtered environment before the keyboard makes a surprise return at the end, concluding the piece with unexpected (but welcome) tonality. The title refers to a 10-line poetic form in which the first line has one syllable, the second two, and so on (or, in reverse, 10, 9, 8, etc.). I'm not sure if the song is a direct interpretation of the formal elements of the etheree so much it is an invocation of its French meaning, "ethereal." 

"echos surnaturels," translated into English as "supernatural echoes," is a spectral wave, ambiguous as to whether its sounds are nature or electronic in origin. Lulling in its repetition, there's a sense of unease in its subtle but persistent crescendo. 

The album concludes with my favorite track, "jaune," translated as "yellow," it's the shortest (5:48), and unlike the other two songs this one is primarily synth, striking a balance between beautiful and creepy.

According to Google, "espoir et seulement" means "hope and only." Once again I'm struck by the contrast of words, the first of which offers potential relief, and the last which signals despair. 

https://implodingsounds.bandcamp.com/album/espoir-et-seulement

Daniel Bachman - When the Roses Come Again (2023)

Artist: Daniel Bachman

Album: When the Roses Come Again

Year: 2023

Label: Three Lobed Recordings

A lovely acoustic-electro dialog--American primitive meets minimalist modernism. Bachman embraces musical contradictions--"When the Roses Come Again" is born of improvisation and spontaneity, culled from day-long recording explorations, and mixed afterwards to excavate haunting ambient soundscapes. As the title indicates, this is an album about cycles, of death and eventual rebirth, fittingly indebted to folk traditions while exploring the sounds in exciting new ways. Acoustic guitars, banjos, fiddles, and mouthbows co-exist along electronic manipulations, shimmering reverbs, and other echoing noises.

The album opener, "Neath The Shadow, Down The Meadow," blips and beeps and hidden underneath, a guitar. Introduces the counterpoint of technologies that will form the discourse of the album. It abruptly cuts to the next track, "Leaves Lying On Each Side." Bells resound like a call across the hills for an impending ceremony; a drone rises in the background, like a noise-choir, while above that is the recitation of pizzicato plucked strings. 

Perhaps because of the electro/acoustic duality, I seemed to listen to interpret much of the album as binaries and conversations, not only in terms of the sounds but also in terms of the song sequence. The midpoint of the album was more than just the middle, but pair of meditative centerpieces that re-articulated the album's journey, where it had been and where it was going. "Till the Roses Come Again" is a beautiful duet for banjo and manipulated ambience, honors the acoustic instrument. Next, on "As I Wander, I Will Ponder (On A Happy By And By)," the mouthbow is taken into otherworldly directions, veering into surreal, almost noise territory, before returning to the solitary echo of the instrument's natural sound.

The album concludes with a pair of songs that bring a nice sense of closure. "All Their Sadness Turned to Gladness" embodies the tonal extremes of the album, beginning with acoustic sounds, evolves into electronic sounds, and ultimately merge into harmonious union. It flows seamlessly into the final song, "Now the Roses Come Again," which starts with an acoustic guitar over a drone and an almost industrial percussion beat in the background. The album is very much structured like a journey, and this feels like the perfect concluding note--not the end of a journey, but like the album has reached a new starting point for future sounds, the growth alluded to in the album's title.

https://threelobed.bandcamp.com/album/when-the-roses-come-again