A robot dressed in an orange jacket and helmet stands against a neutral background.
A futuristic robot is adorned in an orange jacket with a high collar and black straps, featuring intricate mechanical details. Its helmet-like head is designed with a smooth, dark visor and a white casing with visible circuits and connectors. Cables extend from the head, adding to its complex appearance. The background is neutral and blurred, emphasizing the robot's advanced and sleek design.
One of the oddest, most disturbing developments in recent years is the devaluation of expertise. If a souped up auto complete program can write a screenplay, who needs writers? If scientific guidelines about how to stave off a plague make us angry or confused, who wants them? Anybody can be anything, given enough cash in their pockets, thought, evidence and fact be damned. So, it is somewhat unfashionable that Dusted continues to seek out artists who are good at what they do, whether they are conservatory trained or DIY, steeped in historical tradition or trying something new. Our monthly Dust highlights another batch of them. Bill Meyer, Andrew Forell, Tim Clarke, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Ian Mathers and Bryon Hayes contributed.
John Butcher / Florian Stoffner / Chris Corsano â The Glass Changes Shape (Relative Pitch)
This autumn, English saxophonist John Butcher celebrated his 70th birthday. For the occasion his fellow musicians donned t-shirts proclaiming, âYou can only trust yourself and the first â John Butcher albums.â Yes, he puts out quite a few, and no, Iâm not up to date. The completistâs task is even more daunting when one considers just how much music is packed into each of the nine improvisations on this concert recording, his second with guitarist Florian Stoffner and percussionist Chris Corsano. Timbres, volumes and modes of attack change from second to second, living up the albumâs title; not even the musicâs form I fixed. No oneâs resting on laurels here. Corsano plays with rare spaciousness, and Butcher often seems to be playing up the contrasts between his hornsâ tonal fluidity and the jagged edges of Stoffnerâs contribution. Pardon the paradox, but each track is a subdivision of â, and thereâs no end to the time you could spend getting profitably lost in one.
Bill Meyer
Cybotron â Parallel Shift (Tresor)
in 2019, legendary Detroit producer Juan Atkins rebooted his 1980s electro project Cybotron with Laurens van Oswald (nephew of Basic Channel founder Moritz) and Tameko Williams (Detroit In Effect). Atkins takes the technological matrices of his hometownâs now largely defunct manufacturing plants and Kraftwerkâs âAutobahnâ and twists them through an afro-futurist wormhole. The trioâs latest 12â single âParallel Shiftâ sets Atkinsâ robotic vocals and lockstep machine beats against melodic synths and warm bass tones. As Atkins insists on a âparallel shiftâ, smuggled elements of Clintonesque funk and drifting reverie suggest subversion of strictly linear time. The B-side âEarthâ is a more straightforward piece of electro with the emphasis on syncopation. The track flickers with sci-fi synths as Atkins posits human rhythms as a form of cosmic consciousness. Volume up and eyes closed, you will be transported.
Andrew Forell
Dean Drouillard â Mirrors and Ghosts (self-released)
This instrumental solo album by Canadian guitarist Dean Drouillard is a series of hazy noir scenes. At its brightest and most melodic, as in âPortlandâ and âGorgasuke,â itâs reminiscent of the vivid, playful miniatures of Opsvik & Jenningsâs A Dream I Used to Remember. Elsewhere, the album is decidedly more atmospheric and ambient, akin to the widescreen explorations of Daniel Lanoisâs Flesh and Machine. The albumâs largely introspective nature is no surprise when you learn Drouillard played and recorded all the instruments himself. His guitar playing in particular is evocative and tastefully restrained. At once intimate and widescreen, Mirrors and Ghosts feels both eerily melancholic and gently uplifting.
Tim Clarke
Fievel Is Glauque â Rong Weicknes (Fat Possum)
Though Fievel Is Glauque are technically a duo â songwriters Zach Phillips (Blanche Blanche Blanche) and Ma Clements on keys and vocals, respectively â for new album Rong Weickes they assembled a crack team of six other players. Musicians on drums, bass, electric guitar, woodwinds and brass flesh out a dizzyingly complex and gratifyingly daft soundworld. Think 1970s prog-folk; think Napoleon Murphy Brockâera Frank Zappa; think Julia Holter spiraling down a jazz-fusion black hole. Rong Weicknes is a LOT. Tellingly, many of the albumâs most accessible songs, including singles âAs Above So Belowâ and âLove Weapon,â plus the beautiful and relatively calm âToute Suite,â arrive early in the track list. Opener âHoverâ is perhaps the best example of the bandâs bonkers âlive in triplicateâ working method, in which multiple takes are stacked one on top of another, then chiseled down to reach a final mix. Itâs chaotic, like multiple candy-colored Escher staircases spiraling off in different directions at once. In this realm of music-making, too much is never enough, and the line between virtuosic brilliance and over-the-top absurdity bends and blurs. Given the chaos is cumulative, listening to the album from front to back tends to result in ear fatigue during the second half, no matter how many brave attempts it takes to tackle it all in one go.
Tim Clarke
Helena Hauff â Multiplying My Absurdities (Tresor)
Hamburg DJ and producer Helena Hauffâs debut EP for Tresor is three tracks of full-on throwback acid trance. Expertly structured over 22 minutes of build, crescendo and release, Hauff combines thumping beats and bass tones with a detached darkwave cool and a healthy smear of analogue soot. Think Roland drum machines & 303 bass, squelching synths, arpeggio runs and all nature of odd grimy ghosts grumbling in the machines. Hauff reaches her apotheosis on âPunks in the Gymâ, named for an Australian rock climb known as the hardest in the world (and now closed as an Indigenous Heritage site). It starts hard, with the bass in the red zone and the drums not far behind, and arpeggiated synths screaming like a drill sergeant. The plateaus, when they come, are mere toeholds for the next ascent. Itâs a relentless, punishing piece. And when, near the end, Hauff drops everything but the kickdrum, itâs like watching the sun rise at an outdoor rave to, hearing nothing but your beating heart.
Andrew Forell
Rafael Anton Irisarri â Façadisms
Rafael Anton Irisarri creates music with the grandeur of a vast, wasted landscape. He brings his experience as a mastering engineer to bear on all his recordings, rendering them dense and immersive, stacked high with thick waves of guitar and synthesizer tone. Façadisms is no exception and features two highlights. âControl Your Soulâs Desire For Freedomâ features searing cello from Julia Kent and angelic vocals by Hannah Elizabeth Cox, and âForever Ago is Nowâ features string arrangements from T.R. Jordan, which carry the albumâs most anthemic chord progression. Façadismsâ blasted textures are never less than compelling, but these tracks are twin peaks within the recordâs glowering sonic geography.
Tim Clarke
Charlotte Jacobs â Atlas (New Amsterdam)
Charlotte Jacobsâs songs are a little shy. They lurk in corners and grow up from cracks. They venture fluidly out of empty space, eddying and cascading through echoing caverns, with just a little glitch beat or a surge of synth tones to ground them. Jacobs is a conservatory Belgian composer and singer here making her first solo album. Her voice comes in breathy flutters, a little like Mirah at her most acoustic and spare, but she hedges that fragile bloom in masses of digital sound. A devotee of Ableton, she makes the synth sound like all kinds of instruments, a quacking oboe in âCeleste,â a ghostly choir in CYTMH.â Records seldom sound simultaneously this bare and this layered. There are many elements in play, but all scrubbed clean and hemmed in by silence.
Jennifer Kelly
Alan Licht â Havens (VDSQ)
With Havens, Alan Licht flips the attack-decay-sustain-release envelope of the guitar on its head, folding notes and chords over each other in waves. He does this with a heft to his tone, so that chord progressions become waterfalls and melodies emerge like vine-like shoots, growing in many directions simultaneously. Lichtâs songs mesmerize with repetition, but the tones resonate such that they fold back on themselves, creating entirely new patterns for us to discern. The cover art reflects his steel string sorcery, as a dull-colored house surrounded by twilit swirling clouds emits beams of red, yellow, and orange light from its many orifices. A variety of energy levels and frequencies are represented here, and they reveal themselves in surprising ways. Throughout his career, Licht has straddled the worlds of indie rock and the avant-garde, and Havens tugs at both sides, creating a new universe entirely: one where resonance rules over everything else.
Bryon Hayes
Longobardi + Cecchitelli â Maloviento (LINE)
Italian sound artists Ernesto Longobardi and Demetrio Cecchitelli create minimalist environmental works built from droning sub-oscillations that emerge from a haze of white noise. The four pieces on Maloviento, titled by duration, are arctic. Slow, evocative of shifting ice and wind swirling across bleak landscapes.. 14â24â is frigid amalgam of staticky cracks and sheets of white noise that rise and fall with increasing intensity. The duo intersperses these with sounds of dripping stalactites and pings of some distant beacon signaling into the abyss. It immerses the listener in an alien and alienating environment in which you find yourself clinging to these noises as the only way to get your bearing. 21â18â is slightly kinder. More recognizably human sounds emerge. Breath labored by cold, a trudge of footsteps and a muttering voice culminating in the introduction of a flute. Tentative at first, it gathers strength and warmth before being absorbed into the ice. Riveting stuff.
Andrew Forell
Man/Woman/Chainsaw â Eazy Peazy (Fat Possum)
Young London sextet Man/Woman/Chainsaw emerged from the scene that includes bands like Black Midi and Black Country, New Road with whom they share a similar omnivorous musical DNA. Vocalists, bassist Vera Leppanen and guitarist Billy Ward have been playing together since they were 14. Now approaching 20, and joined by contemporaries Emmie-Mae Avery on keys, violinist, Clio Harwood violin, Ben Holmes on guitar and drummer Lola Waterworth, M/W/C play punk infused theatrical rock, not quite as knotty as their near contemporaries, but fully embracing the chaotic energy of musicians pushing themselves to fit all their ideas into songs that dance delicate and furious. The acutely observed kitchen sink dramas of âThe Bossâ and âSports Dayâ burst from the speakers, withering in word, and balanced by Harwoodâs sawing violin and Averyâs delicate keys. Leppanen a powerhouse on the former, Ward all snarling self-deprecation on the latter. In contrast âGrow A Tongue In Timeâ is almost dainty with its curlicue of violin, bass, and keys tempered by Leppanenâs rasp that speaks of a desperate frustration echoed in the washes of cymbals that swarm towards the end. A band with space to grow and one to watch out for.
Andrew Forell
The Modern Folk â Primitive Future III (Practice)
This expansive collection spans 20 songs and nearly as many years for the folk centric but ambi-curious guitarist Joshua Moss (who, full disclosure, recently started writing for Dusted). His music here takes many forms, from the blues rock chug of âShiver Shaker,â which could pass for an alternate universe outtake from Jon Spencerâs Heavy Trash to the cosmic twang of âHippy Sandwich,â running closer to Ripley Johnsonâs Rose City Band or the Heavy Lidders or whatever Matt Valentine is doing this week. Thereâs room, too, for lucid, radiant blues-folk picking, twined with bowing in âBraided Channelsâ or abetted in shimmery gossamer by Jen Powers on dulcimer on âYouâll Have That,â or left to strike out unadorned on luminous (and aptly titled) âSubdued.â Some artists try something different to prove they can. Moss lets the change grow out of old roots, supple, green and lovely. One other item of note: all proceeds are earmarked for hurricane relief.
Jennifer Kelly
Paprika â S/T (Iron Lung)
Paprika had already released the excellent, caustic Letâs Kill Punk LP this year, so this new EP is an unexpected November surprise. Are you thankful? Itâs pungent and nasty stuff â Paprika sounds like the grittiest elements of NYC punk rawk, c 1976, partying with the hepped-up hardcore of Government Issue or Dirty Rotten EP-period DRI. If that sounds like fun, it sort of is, if you can listen past the nihilistic sentiments expressed in tunes like âCatatonic Pisserâ and âWasting Time.â This reviewer especially likes the self-lacerating qualities of âSupply Chain Wallet,â which explores the ways in which even filthy, greasy punks have a variety of fashion sense, implicating them in capitalâs machinery. The band is more direct: âIâm chained to my wallet / Donât you fuckers know? / Money is dirt.â Word.
Jonathan Shaw
Rock Candy â Swimming In (Carbon)
Rock Candy is Krysi Battalene (Mountain Movers, Headroom) and Emily Robb. Both are guitarists of just renown who, if they decided to open up an optical shop, would specialize in third-eyewear. Together, they refrain from six-string calisthenics in order to focus on nuanced expressions of motion. âSwimming Inâ is all about drift, albeit with enough surface tension for a stuttering guitar figure to loom over the undulating organ-scape. âAcross A Mirageâ sets slide vs. reverb, each fighting for footage on a mechanical Clydesdale beat. The cost of vinyl being what it is, some folks might question the point of picking up singles. This year, Rock Candy is the angle that dispels such faithless notions.
Bill Meyer
Sif â Aegis of the Hollowed King (self released)
If you were going to make solo instrumental doom metal about video games, Dark Souls is certainly one of the few that feels like it actually fits. What makes the second LP from New Orleans-based Sif work as well as it does, though, is how much Aegis of the Hollowed King engages with whatâs actually compelling about the FromSoftware series beyond any surface level trappings of swords, monsters and boss fights. Here focusing on what even they admit is an âunderstandably maligned masterpiece,â Dark Souls II, these four tracks donât try to overwrite the gameâs fantastic actual soundtrack (by Motoi Sakuraba and Yuka Kitamura). Instead they invoke how much of the experience of painstakingly making your way across Drangleic is suffused with melancholy horror (yes, occasionally leavened with moments of brutally-won success). That atmosphere has been translated into a doom metal idiom, but that just means even the most elegiac elements here continue to crush.
Ian Mathers
Sulida â Utos (Clean Feed)
The phrase âgood old-fashioned free jazzâ could be applied to this Norwegian trioâs album, no disrespect intended and none dealt. Marthe Leaâs gruff tenor sax balances the unbridled emotion and considered poise of Ayler and Tchicai, and Jon Rune StrĂžm and Dag Erik Knedal Anderson negotiate points of structure vs. flow in ways that would do Hopkins and McCall proud. There are also moments that bring to mind Don Cherry if he had given full allegiance to the Swedish woods instead of the world. And yet, the character of each musician shines through, so that this music feels alive rather than merely reanimated. Ready to rumble by unfailingly lyrical, Utos is a friend in unfriendly times.
Sob o pseudĂŽnimo Model 500, Atkins lançou seu primeiro single em 1985, âNo UFOâsâ. A faixa, com suas batidas eletrĂŽnicas afiadas, baixos profundos e sintetizadores espaciais, tornou-se um marco instantĂąneo. Ela definiu a essĂȘncia do Techno de Detroit: um som cru, industrial, mas carregado de emoção e alma.
Antes disso, Atkins jĂĄ havia experimentado o sucesso com o projeto Cybotron, ao lado de Richard Davis. Em 1982, a dupla lançou âClearâ, uma mistura de electro e funk com um toque de ficção cientĂfica que preparou o terreno para o Techno. ApĂłs a separação de Davis, Atkins fundou a gravadora Metroplex, consolidando sua influĂȘncia no gĂȘnero.
Junto com Derrick May e Kevin Saunderson â o famoso "Belleville Three" â, Atkins transformou o Techno de Detroit em um fenĂŽmeno global. Nascido em um contexto de crise econĂŽmica e racial, o gĂȘnero tornou-se uma expressĂŁo poderosa da comunidade negra de Detroit. Ele misturou a frieza das mĂĄquinas com a humanidade das emoçÔes, influenciando geraçÔes de artistas.
