Niv Bavarsky

Claire Taylor

Algernon Cadwallader - Parrot Flies

(Self released, 2011)

RIYL = Cap'n Jazz, Jenoah, early At the Drive-In

This isn’t a huge reveal, but I’m pretty obsessive about At the Drive-In. In particular, their first full length, Acrobatic Tenement. It’s a surefire top-ten-albums-of-all-time for me.

So when I first heard Algernon Cadwallader’s debut, Some Kind of Cadwallader, a couple years back, I was immediately smitten. It feels, aesthetically, to be strung together by the same Scotch tape, string, nimble guitar work and emotive screamability (read: 90’s emo) as Tenement. And, seeing as how I still heavily rotate Cap’n Jazz, Lync, The Nation of Ulysses and the like, Alegernon Cadwallader fits in snugly.

But beyond those nostalgic qualities, Cadwallader manages to be its own band (mostly), which is why they’ve the ability to smitten in the first place. Some Kind of Cadwallader is not Acrobatic Tenement and Parrot Flies is not…well it kind of is still a lot like Some Kind of Cadwallader. But, more goodness is a good thing, not bad.

Parrot Flies feels a little more comfortable with itself, a little less angsty, a little more polished. Still, the MO here is to iron down that sound they began with and Parrot Flies does that. This might be an indulgence, but I think it’s a worthy one. I need more worthy indulgences in my music listening life—seems they’re becoming fewer and farther between.

Algernon Cadwallader - "Parrot Flies" by ForestGospel

Scott Morrison

Some gorgeous video/sound installations from Scott M.

This Is A Transmission 2011 from Scott Morrison.

Adam Beckley - Revere

(Self Released, 2011)

RIYL = Stars of the Lid, Eluvium, Chihei Hatakeyama

For those in need of calming / beauty, this tendered my inbox this morning. The effort here is to passenger a warm ghost inside you and slowly to let the spectral weight of its body bleed out. I feel like I haven’t been listening to much of the dreamy stuff lately, so Revere seems a nice reminder. A brief but pleasant bundle of silken drones fit to placate the mind and pacify the spirit.  And freely downloadable.

Eric Copeland - Waco Taco Combo

(Escho, 2011)

We talk about Eric Copeland, about his band, Black Dice, and about the pop/noise marriage/dichotomy whenever we talk about Eric Copeland, about his band, Black Dice. And that’s useful to an extent, I suppose, but in reality, really, when I listen to Black Dice, when I listen to Eric Copeland, when I listen to Waco Taco Combo, I don’t think, even remotely, of it as noise, as noise music, as gravel, as spit, as mulch. And, on the same hand, the music isn’t really pop music of any kind, isn’t really Britney, isn’t really Tiffany, isn’t really pony in rainbow colors that’s not smeared, that’s not broken-boned, that’s not double-headed (as much that I/we might pretend that, to us, it is (can it not be?)). But, while it skirts electronics, beats, samples, skronking bursts, glitches, dances, intelligence, it’s kind of a realm all its own. Not that people haven’t jumped aboard since, not that people haven’t aped them since, not that people haven’t ripped them since. Still, they’re singular (Black Dice, Eric Copeland). They are Black Dice music. They are Eric Copeland music. Or I can call them collage punk. The important thing is that they are important. And the important thing about importance is that it’s always really really good. And the important thing about Waco Taco Combo is that it’s really really good. Really. Which is how we, by standard methods, talk about Eric Copeland, about his band, Black Dice.

Also, thank you Altered Zones for upping this to SoundCloud. I go looking for it today, this very day, and--BLAMO--there it is!

Eric Copeland: Waco Taco Combo by alteredzones

Jason Jagel

Greg Lamarche

Augustine Kofie

HYMNS: Hood - "You Are Worth The Whole World"

My apologies to Ryan Hall, good friend and author of this post, for the delay in uploading "You Are Worth The Whole World," the delay in posting this, the delay in saying how much we miss you now that you are in Africa, how much we hope that you and Addy are doing well, doing good (we know that you are).

“It’s a blank city, baby, where the buildings get stepped on.”

In an attempt to create something beautiful before my wife wakes up I have only managed to check my e-mail a couple of times. Do adult things like updating my linkedin corporate fascistbook account and looking up the last name of anyone who can service a Volkswagen in rural PA.

Doing something more than sitting on my hands (5 days and we leave the states for a very long time), I recall the first time I ever heard “You’re Worth the Whole World” by British post-IDM/slowcore band Hood blessed with the vocal presence of Yoni Wolf of Why? and Adam Drucker (Doseone). The genealogies of both bands would preoccupy most of my twenties and would eventually culminate in a mixtape, a marriage and a blood-pact to name our first-born Yoni. But, that’s not where it started.

In fact, I don’t really recall where it started. I am extremely fuzzy on the details of how this album even came into my possession. I can’t remember if this was before or after I rescued cLOUDEAD’s self-titled debut from a used CD rack in Salt Lake City. I vaguely recall Skyler Hitchcox saying something about this album…I don’t know. All I remember was a prevailing sense of sadness of Hood’s muted acoustic-electronic compositions. Beats that snap like brittle twigs, acoustic guitar lines plucked faintly through the thin walls of your neighbor’s post-WWII house. Bass rumbling through floorboards of basement practice spaces.

The sadness and sparseness of an acoustic guitar lick, a floor tom, gently plucked piano and a three-note synth horn line is exacerbated by Drucker and Wolf’s ping-ponging of Doseone’s half-sung/half-rapped, chopped and processed polyphonic delivery and Yoni Wolf’s deadpan spoken word beneath the surface. It is impossible to make out more than the occasional snippet and phrase and only then with very liberal interpretation, but still this song cuts to the quick. It is a sad and beautiful strangeness that soars above any sort of genre classifications.

I think it was this inability to place this unknowable, impregnable last track of Cold House into anything I had experienced that has set me on a search to figure it out and has had such a palpable impact on my life. Forest Gospel, starting the Tome, my friendship with Nick, Erin and Atlas, hurriedly typing this before I start a day with a wife who stopped me in mid-sentence when she heard “Crushed Bones”, all stem from hearing this song and wanting to relive it over and over through analysis and experience.

Will Sheff said something true when he said that musicians and writers who write about music are cut from the same cloth. They hear a song that made them feel something and want to recreate the experience again and again. Musicians want to reinterpret that feeling to others, while writers want to explain why it made them feel a certain way.

Five years later and I still can’t figure out if I can separate depression and exaltation in this song or reconcile the ubiquitous sadness of this song and the incredible direction my life has taken because of it. I guess I never will.

Hood feat. Doseone & Why? - "You're Worth The Whole World" by ForestGospel

Matana Roberts - COIN COIN Chapter One: Gens de couleur libres

(Constellation Records, 2011)

A brief list of reasons why I'm so enthralled with Matana Roberts and her album, COIN COIN—

1. She plays my favourite instrument: saxophone.
2. COIN COIN Chapter One: Gens de couleur libres, her debut on Constellation, is a dynamic, seam-bursting composition of collapsible jazz with copious spills of wide-eyed irrationality.
3. Yes, COIN COIN is the second saxophone-helmed album from Constellation in 2011; however (and I’m in no way dismissing Colin Steton’s record), Roberts is much crazier, spastic, open in terms of orchestration and deviation, maddening. (#2 and #3 are the same thing.)
4. The Avant Garde should always be so dynamic as COIN COIN is. While large portions of the “experimental” community are drifting, migrating into more staid, dull-bladed and monotonous territory, COIN COIN exhibits the finest aspects of hungry innovation. Swelling with a dangerous undercurrent, Roberts offers thrilling moments at every turn and a more complete listening experience as a whole.
5. The canyon in the middle of “Song For Eulalie.”
6. The penultimate freakout: “I Am.”
7. COIN COIN is enthralling because it sounds feel removed from the immediate imaginations available to this world. Not unfathomably so, but just enough to tint the album with a coat of genuine, wakeful, alien curiosity.
8. COIN COIN delivers on that curiosity with brazen force.
9. “How Much Would You Cost?” X10.


Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres - MATANA ROBERTS by Constellation Records

The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World

(History Always Favours the Winners, 2011)

Leyland James Kirby is of course a genius. We already know this. And prolific. Yes, we know this too. This though, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, could be for Mr. Kirby, The Caretaker, what The Disintegration Loops is to William Basinski, what The Sinking of the Titanic is to Gavin Bryars. It fits in thematically and aesthetically with those records as well: the beauty in disintegration and age, the regal quiet and soft magnitude of eras passed. On An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, Kirby is as much a curator as he is an artist, compiling the ghostly, romantic, beautiful sounds of old 78s and subtly smearing them, truncating them, but mostly just allowing them a new life with surface noise bubbling up from their crumbling format. A grandiose document of irresistible allure and surprising weight.


The Caretaker - "All You're Going To Want To Do Is Get Back There" by ForestGospel