Outside the Honky Tonk Dream House Syndicate, Vol. 5

featuring music from Gastr Del Sol, Sunik Kim and Valentina Magaletti

Greetings everyone! It’s been another crazy month, but I actually managed to get this done on time for once! I’m really happy with this mix I put together for Beloved - it covers a lot of bases, the tracks flow together great and it includes a lot of newer stuff I’ve been listening to. What more could you want! 

Ensemble Nist-Nah - Overtime

This is a short piece from Ensemble Nist-Nah, an all-percussion group led by Australian percussionist Will Guthrie. I played a track from one of Guthrie’s solo albums on one of my very first shows, and he’s absolutely one of my favorite artists working today. I just love the texture of his playing and the way he presents all of these different influences on his music - from gamelan to contemporary composition, noise to hip-hop, free jazz to musique concrete - as synergetic. 

The most obvious point of reference for Ensemble Nist-Nah is Javanese Gamelan, but I think of the music less as “gamelan-inspired” and more something taking in the history of gamelan and its influence on experimental music and responding to it organically. “Overtime” is a pure blast of propulsive energy, but even in that context it finds space to subtly shift between different hypnotic tones. Cool shit.

Gastr Del Sol - Our Exquisite Replica of "Eternity"

Gastr Del Sol were only around for a few years, but as a band they represent a crucial development in the careers of two hugely important figures of experimental music - and thus, a crucial development in experimental music as a whole. Gastr represents the first time Jim O’Rourke was really in a “rock band” (at least on record) and paradoxically also marks David Grubbs (previously in post-hardcore bands like Bastro, Bitch Magnet and Squirrel Bait) moving towards experimental music. 

Interestingly enough, this first track from their 1996 album Upgrade & Afterlife doesn’t really sound like anything else either musician ever did. It starts as a slow ominous organ-driven crawl that descends into noise chaos before crescendoing with a 20th Century Fox-esque sample, and then it ends. It certainly does a great job of setting the tone for the album; even as someone who’s wired their brain around experimental music, the noise/glitch elements of this album can feel genuinely challenging at times, in a rewarding way of course. I can’t even begin to imagine how it must have sounded to people at the time.

Great album cover too, by the way. Definitely captures how I feel listening to this album.

Trapist - Time Axis Manipulation, pt. 2

This is an underrated group, one reminiscent of The Necks if they leaned more into improvisation and less into minimalism and repetition. Trapist is a trio of improvisers, with Martin Siewert on guitar and electronics, Martin Brandylmayr on percussion and electronics, and the odd non-Martin non-electronics one out, Joe Williamson (frequent collaborator of Tony Buck from The Necks) on bass. This is improvised music, but there’s moments where the trio locks into a groove that wouldn’t be entirely out of place on Tortoise record; of course, those moments inevitably fade into noise and abstraction. Dig it.

Sunik Kim - Lament X

This is from Sunik Kim’s album Zero Chime, which might be one of the most successful free jazz / noise hybrids I’ve ever heard. There are a few albums that put saxophone skronkery over harsh noise soundscapes, but on Zero Chime it feels as though every sonic element, including the saxophone playing, is on an equilibrium of chaos, all violently thrashing about the soundscape on the same level. On “Lament X,” the most intense sonic aspect is not the noise or the saxophone torture, but rather the cluttered, monotone spoken word vocals that are obscured amidst all the chaos. The vocals become louder and more tense as the track goes on, and the effect is genuinely pretty terrifying! Kim described Zero Chime as “a sound-weapon aimed at the West, made of and embodying han in as true a sense as possible, a shamanic Korean colony-music exorcizing the ghosts of historical subjugation—and a brand new start.” I can’t imagine anything better representing and realizing this vision than Zero Chime.

The Cortet- RH

The Cortet is a one-off project consisting of John Butcher on saxophone, Rhodri Davies on harp, Thomas Lehn on synthesizer, and namesake Cor Fuhler on piano. In other words, this is an A-Team of improvising musicians, and their one album on Unsounds doesn’t disappoint. It’s impressive how hard it is to make out which instrument is which, given the range here. This is a pretty short one so I don’t have too much to say about it, but it’s an arresting timbral/textural display.

Kit Downes - Rings of Saturn

This is obviously far from the first time I’ve included some ECM on this show, but I certainly don’t think I’ve ever included something this recent for them. ECM’s obvious peak period is the 70s, and I’m less knowledgeable about their more contemporary roster, but Kit Downes’ Obsidian album from 2018 is a true stunner. Downes plays piano and organ, and I learned of him through his collaborations with other musicians, such as Lucy Railton, Petter Eldh and Alexander Hawkins. I didn’t have much of a frame of reference for his music prior to listening to Obsidian, which is a (mostly) solo pipe organ album, but it totally blew me away. “Rings of Saturn” is a very hypnotic and meditative piece. If I were to refer to it without fear of being pretentious, I’d describe it as like a ray of light creeping into a dark, spacious, and empty place, one where you can hear your heart beating and the sound of your breath.

Alan Tomlinson / Steve Beresford / Steve Noble - Don’t Know

Alan Tomlinson, the brilliant and totally overlooked British trombone improviser, sadly passed away last month, which inspired me to take a deeper look at his back catalog. A major source of discovery for me recently has been the Scatter Archive on Bandcamp. I first learned of them through their release of Derek Bailey’s Domestic Jungle album - which I’ve played on this show before - and they’re an amazing resource, especially for musicians who, like Tomlinson, often fly under the radar in spite of their importance to improvised music. Also, all of the music is name your price on Bandcamp, which is an insane bargain. As tempting as free stuff can be, please chip in what you can, because this is incredible music that they’re selflessly providing us.

Scatter has recently released several of Tomlinson’s live albums, all of which are great, but this one with Steve Beresford and Steve Noble. Beresford is an endlessly fascinating figure, whose list of collaborators spans Thurston Moore, John Zorn and comedian Stewart Lee to Prince Far I, The Slits and Vivien Goldman. Beresford’s a piano player, but he’s known for incorporating a bunch of small electronics and knick-knacks into his performances, and here that’s exclusively what he’s working with. Tomlinson and Beresford have perfect interplay, creating a plethora of playful sounds that come and go with ease. Tying everything together is Steve Noble, one of the best drummers in British free music. Noble’s free jazz pyrotechnics hit with unbelievable precision, and always pushes the music forward even at its most chaotic and entangled. Highly, highly recommended.

Richard Youngs - Advent part II

Richard Youngs may very well be the most all-over-the-map musician who has ever lived. For one, the dude is insanely prolific, and probably makes whatever musicians you think of as being prolific look like Frank Ocean. Considering the amount of collaborations and side projects Youngs has, I can’t give an exact number of how many albums he has – frankly, I’m not sure if he could do so himself - but it’s clearly well over 150, which is insane. To say Youngs has many different sides to his music would be an understatement; much of it could be described as droning psychedelia, some of it could be described as free improv, some of it is more folk-y and singer-songwriter-y, some of it is straight up synthpop, and he even has a few albums that are just him singing with no accompaniment. However, all of his music has a DIY spirit that’s both playful and truly adventurous, and he often records using a bevy of non-traditional instruments.

One would think it would take ages to hit that kind of groove with your music, but Advent is one of Youngs’ finest albums, and it’s also his very first. It’s a minimalistic piano piece in three parts; the first is mostly just piano with some vocals, the second features oboe, and on the third part the piece is overtaken by guitar noise. The second is the keeper for me, as I’m a sucker for high pitched reed instruments in any nonconventional context. It makes a great companion to The Deontic Miracle’s Selections From 100 Models of Hegikan Roku album, as well as La Monte Young and Terry Riley’s respective soprano sax pieces.

Lisa Cameron / Sandy Ewen - Giant Kid

Lisa Cameron and Sandy Ewen are both veteran improvisers, and See Creatures Too, the album this track is taken from, is one of those albums that really opened up a whole world for me. I was already familiar with the formative free improv records from people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Stevens, but it took me a minute to get into the more contemporary free improv people. Listening to this album for the first time, I’m not sure I was aware you could get such an array of intricate sounds from these instruments, and it totally thrilled me. On this particular track, Sandy Ewen’s guitar sounds like clinking glasses, and Lisa Cameron’s percussion sounds like amplifier feedback (there’s definitely plenty of actual feedback in there too).Maybe I’m just projecting based off of the title but the music definitely brings to mind images of freaky deep sea creatures. This is some anglerfish music.

Valentina Magaletti - Tutti Al Circo

A lot of the most exciting new music I’ve been hearing recently has been coming from percussionists experimenting with electronics. The aforementioned Will Guthrie is just one example with this, and Valentina Magaletti is someone who has been doing a lot of incredible stuff exploring the sonic possibilities of percussion. This is a short track from her aptly titled album A Queer Anthology of Drums, and it’s a light shuffle layered to the brim with delightful percussive textures. It sort of reminds me of some of her work with the psych pop group Vanishing Twin - there’s a harpsichord-sounding instrument that gives this sort of library music vibe. Cool stuff.

Ben Vida w/ Nina Dante & Yarn/Wire - Still Point

Here’s a really interesting cut from one of my favorite albums of last year. Ben Vida was a member of Town & Country, a sort of post-everything group somewhere at the interaction of contemporary folk, experimental composition and post-rock (they’ll almost certainly be featured on this show at some point). As a solo artist he’s collaborated with artists such as Marina Rosenfeld, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Lea Bertucci. The Beat My Head Hit is a collaboration with vocalist Nina Dante and the new music chamber group Yarn/Wire. The music is a very lush and hypnotic concoction of hushed vocals, abstract poetry and minimal music. This particular track has some very beautiful vocal harmonies. I’d describe it as pulse music at its most tender and existential.