Dust Volume 11, Number 3
Television Personalities
This month’s batch of short reviews spans free jazz and video-game inspired dungeon synths, field recordings, jangle pop, blackened noise, classical piano music and some long unavailable radio sessions from the late great Television Personalities — something for everyone, we hope. Contributors this time around included Bill Meyer, Ian Mathers, Tim Clarke, Jonathan Shaw, Alex Johnson, Jennifer Kelly and Andrew Forell.
C6Fe2KN6 — C6Fe2KN6 (Astral Spirits)
One virtue of small towns is that you get the neighbors. And while Marfa TX is not your average small town in many respects, its population is undeniably modest. This album is an outgrowth of a neighborly hang. Rob Mazurek has received his mail in Marfa for a decade now, and he has made it a point to get to know the painters, sculptors and polymaths who share his zip code. One of them is Nick Terry, who is the other half of the duo C6Fe2KN6. Mazurek plays trumpet and other instruments, most of which mix so harmoniously with Terry’s effects-laden guitar that they’re more felt than heard. The duo’s improvisations mix brass melody and stringed atmospherics in a manner similar to Loren Connors and Daniel Carter’s encounters. But where that New York duo’s music wears the weighty shroud of the city, you can feel the flatland breeze and emptiness in Terry and Mazurek’s.
Bill Meyer
Hollow Peasant — Siege of Tseldora (Self Released)
If you were going to make an album about the intriguingly excellent-but-flawed, cult favorite video game Dark Souls II (and not even the first one in recent years; see Sif’s solo doom metal effort in this Dust from last November), the wonderfully named “dungeon synth” leaps out as one of the more appropriate genres for it. Austin’s Hollow Peasant undergirds these drones and washes with both muted, stately drumbeats and “solidarity with the marginalized, the downtrodden, and all those who suffocate under the archaic laws and the oligarchs that write them.” The result is a 20 minute, mournful yet somehow optimistic processional, ending with the fittingly brighter “A new day in Brightstone Cove.” Siege of Tseldora absolutely feels appropriate to travelling through a dungeon, but (given the resolve on display here) not finding oneself trapped within one.
Ian Mathers
Daniela Huerta — Soplo (Elevator Bath)
Soplo is Spanish for breath. Daniela Huerta, a Mexican-born, Berlin-based sound artist, uses this modestly dimensioned (ten inches across, just shy of 27 minutes long) mini-album to blow perspective-adjusting intimations into the listener’s ear. It opens with the splash and burble of water, a sound that recurs on other tracks, before pulling back to let the insects buzz. A couple tracks in, Huerta’s own breath adds its rhythm to periodic rumbles that might be waves or passing elevated trains. Advance one more and churning electronics evoke a lightless vastness. Move on to side two and the sonic expanses get even more immense. Huerta’s sounds place evident humanity inside something much bigger and not necessarily mindful of human concerns at all, least of all whether that angle comforts you or makes you nervous.
Bill Meyer
Jonathan Personne — Nouveau Monde (Bonsound)
The fourth solo album by Corridor vocalist/guitarist Jonathan Robert comprises songs drawn from different eras in his career to date, brought together into an easy-flowing and addictive whole. The scuzzy centerpiece “Nuage Noir” is a dead-ringer for The Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for My Man,” but with a surprise chord change that launches the song into a transcendent realm. Before that highlight, the first half of this nine-song, 30-minute record is more upbeat and catchier— check out the organ-driven jangle-pop of “Les Jours Heureux,” and the beautiful title track, stripped back to organ and acoustic guitar until the wall-of-sound drum track kicks in. In the second half, “Le Cerf” features thunderous tom-tom work and clanging behind-the-bridge electric guitar tones reminiscent of Women, while “Vision” recalls the windscreen melancholy of The Moody Blues. Overall, Nouveau Monde is understated but rather brilliant.
Tim Clarke
Labyrinthine Heirs — S/T (I, Voidhanger)
Is blackened noise rock a thing? It’s easy to hear this new LP from Labyrinthine Heirs as straight-up Am Rep worship, pining for the prime years of Surgery, Halo of Flies and King Snake Roost. But vocalist Evan Sadler has a throaty growl that shifts the proceedings toward colder, kvlty sonic territory, and the themes of tunes like “Satan’s Domain Is the Liver” (say what?) and “Yaldabaoth Gored to Blindness” suggest more than a passing interest in the occult. Your humble reviewer digs “The Conceited Determination of Nimrod” best, which features lyric disquisitions like the following: “Language and thought as disorder / Language is driving you / Language is using you.” Word. Of course, the same song envisions “drowning in a sea of phlegm” at least three times, which is a pretty specific thing for language to drive at.
Jonathan Shaw
Osgraef — Reveries of the Arcane Eye (Amor Fati)
This first LP from black/death band Osgraef is seriously grim stuff. Osgraef combines the whirling chaos of Teitanblood with the lacerating toughness of the mighty Black Fucking Cancer — but those comparisons are less informative than they might be. The band does its own thing. “Nox Luciferi, Liber Koth,” the longest song on the record, presents a thrilling, compelling variety of black/death, deeply unpleasant and grueling. There’s not a large audience for this sort of thing, which intentionally alienates even as it works its supernatural charms. We might invoke the older, harder sense of the word “spellbinding” to describe Osgraef’s effects: listening to these sounds feels like it may bind you to some arcane compact, involving blood, thunder and the condition of your immortal soul. Yikes.
Jonathan Shaw
Ingrid Schmoliner — I Am Animal (Idyllic Noise)
Ingrid Scholiner is a pianist, vocalist, composer and academic from Vienna, Austria. She has crossed over from classical to more improvisational and experimental modes, but that doesn’t mean she’s forgotten her roots, which come in handy on this album’s two accessibly tuneful and sonically overwhelming pieces. They were recorded at the Dekanatspfarrkirche during festival artacts ’24. Performing in a church means having access to its organ, and church organ and surrounding space are her instruments on this remorselessly onrushing wall of sound. Throughout Schmoliner takes full advantage of the organ’s potential for polyphony, ”Achna” evolves slowly, stretching like a dragon waking from a hundred-year nap, but things really kick into motion on side two. On “Ascella” Schmoliner casts rhythmic cells that roll down the center of the piece like strike-bound bowling balls while massive chords rush overhead like a looming thunderhead. The music’s melodic progress is more patient, but unwavering, contributing another layer of inevitability.
Bill Meyer
Television Personalities — Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Radio Sessions 1980-1993 (Fire)
Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – Radio Sessions 1980-1993, is a gratifying demonstration of Television Personalities’ consistently great songwriting and offers an intimate experience of the music. Whatever the shifting qualities of the band’s formal output, recordings like these present a group excelling at core, in sticky, bratty, grandiose and heartbroken pop. Even accounting for the fuzzy, cover-heavy 1993 WFMU session — see “Why Can’t I Touch It?” for a shaky desperation The Buzzcocks couldn’t muster — the pared clarity of this collection benefits the listener’s ability to focus on the songs. “Look Back in Anger,” recorded in 1980 for John Peel, is tighter, cleaner and, as a result, more impactful than the version that closed the band’s debut, …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It, a year later. The playing is punchier and does more to carry Dan Treacy’s vocals, which sound, for their relative tidiness, angrier and more stirringly resentful. From another angle, “Salvador Dali’s Garden Party,” recorded for the BBC in 1986, lacks the studio effects that crowd the version released on 1989’s Privilege. Out are the wobbling, warbling synthesizers, samples and vocal filters; emergent is the song’s bouncy, demented tunefulness. “Paradise Is for the Blessed” offers an interesting comparison in that the album version (again, Privilege), even with the requisite-to-era splashy drums, lightly rumbling bass and sky-grazing guitar jingle, doesn’t lack for emotional payoff. There, Treacy sounds starry-eyed, sad but at ease, a bit contemplative. Here, the guitar’s jingle is a crinkled jangle, the drums are blunter and the vocal wearier, more wrung out and raw. It’s sympathetic and human, an outpouring from a friend you’re glad you picked up the phone for.
Alex Johnson
Tremosphere — saturated solace
Tremosphere works from a very nocturnal space, its shadowy sonic caverns constructed out of splayed guitar strums, looming synths and a chilled murmur of singing. The singer, Sylvia Solanas, who also plays bass, piano and synths has worked with Michael Serafin-Wells for four albums now, concocting restless, agitated beauty out of unease. These songs slither and creep, insinuating themselves by osmosis. They might remind you, a little, of Elisa Ambrogio’s soft but extreme dream pop or of Dora Blue’s elusive art song or even Leya’s heat-mirage operas dissolving as you hear them. Echo-shrouded “Along the Way” slips by like silk, frictionless and cool, but it comes from mindset of anxiety and alienation; the artists dedicated this track to the trans community, now more than ever under siege.
Jennifer Kelly
Tu M’ — Monochromes Vol. 3 (LINE)
Italian multimedia artists Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli were active as Tu M’ between 1998 and 2011, producing site specific audio-visual installations for gallery and museum spaces across Europe. On volume 3 of the Monochromes series, LINE brings together nine previously unreleased tracks recorded in 2008 and 2009. Tu M’s music hangs gently, dispersing in the air like vapor trails. In the interplay of light and shadow and the duo’s painterly attention to detail, there is sense of the ears’ focus altering as the music undulates around them. Tu M’ make aural and spatial environments in which meaning is less important than impression. There’s an eternal presence here, a timeless landscape, an endless sky. Onto that permanence, Polidoro and Romanelli project the evanescent beauty of human creation. Admirers of Eno, Basinski and Biosphere will find much comfort here.
Andrew Forell
Various Artists — Across the Horizon, Volume 1 (Northern Spy)
The first three “drops” from the Across the Horizon series showcase shimmering drones and aching arcs of melody in the instrumental cosmic country genre favored by creator Bob Holmes of SUSS. Each edition is, itself, curated by an established artist, who then selects two other artists they admire (though the compilation doesn’t specify who’s who). In any case, there are some lovely, lingering atmospheres at play in these tracks, whether the hovering auras and sandpaper rhythms of MJ Guider’s “To the Hour” or Pan American’s lucid, liquid “Point Harbor,” an Impressionist painting played on slide guitar. Drop 2 features Nashville pedal steel-ist Luke Schneider, once by himself and once with kindred spirit Marisa Anderson, both waking dreams of soft textures and billowing tone; fellow Nashvillian Kurt Hammett contributes the other cut, letting the twang glide over intricate webs of picking. Drop 3 veers towards the electronic in Dave Harrington’s Kingston-haunted “Cafecito Dub,” then tilts towards jazz in alto saxophonist Nicole McCabe’s evocative “Fixtures.” Eucademix, apparently a Yuka Honda project, closes out this edition of Across the Horizon, in shivering layers of electric keyboard, synths, guitars and jingling percussion.
Jennifer Kelly
Yves De Mey — Force Over Area (Totalism)
Force over area equals pressure. Belgian producer Yves De Mey exerts his in a series of knotty miniatures that push and probe with deliberate claustrophobic insistence. Irregular beats rain down, odd niggling squiggles gnaw and scrape, nothing quite settles. This is music as virus, replicating and mutating within his machines. The title track weighs heavy upon febrile cells which seek to squirm from beneath the enveloping swell. De Mey delights in queasy juxtapositions, insectoid buzzing, creaking rust ridden metal, the pops and blips of deterioration. He conjures a sense of vegetal rot, of infection and decay, of mortality. Force Over Area could well serve as the soundtrack for dank atmospheres of his fellow Belgian, painter James Ensor, perhaps played on the remains of the harmonium that obsessed Ensor in his later years.
Andrew Forell