Yuki Murata of Anoice and Films (Feelms if you’re Russian) fame strikes out on her own on Gift, her third solo effort, including guest musicians Jyunko Tabira, Utaka Fujiwara, and Saiko — not to mention mastering by Takahiro Kido, all of whom are a member of Anoice and/or Films (doubly not even mentioning the short-lived Cru or RiLF projects). What can I say, Ricco label is tightly-knit.
Rock music is dead? No one sent the memo to Adebisi Shank.
One half of Piano Interrupted, Franz Kirmann’s Meridians is noticeably low on piano. How much damage can he do by his lonesome?
Experimental artist (and trained opera singer) Ian William Craig has been busy with six releases in the past three years. A Turn of Breath, his latest, is his second this year, and it is long overdue that he enters the popular discourse between fans of the ambient genre.
Lawrence English returns with his first album since 2011’s The Peregrine and would like everyone to know that it is inspired by Swans and My Bloody Valentine, but maybe he was just pissed off when he created most of the album?
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Sleepmakeswaves is a band whose name suggests it excels in subtlety; for eight years running, that hasn’t been in the game plan.
Minot contains remnants of From Monument to Masses, sounds like early FMTM on occasion, but ultimately is much more interested in rocking out.
Let me preface by saying that FMTM was one of my favorite post-rock acts. When the band announced its split in 2010, I was pretty peeved. Normally, I’m not that fussed by such events, but FMTM had just released its best album, had never put out anything that wasn’t fantastic, and it wasn’t clear that we would be getting much in the way of spin-off projects. Luckily, Matthew Solberg quickly regrouped to form Minot.
Minot will probably be stuck with the FMTM reference until it can convince people that it is its own entity. Hopefully for most, that will be only a few minutes into Equal/Opposite and the stunning opener “Allostatic Load,” which doesn’t contain too much in the way of post-rock, but is really just a straight shot of instrumental rock. Compare it with something like this, for example, and it starts to look like apples and oranges. It doesn’t completely blow the FMTM reference to smithereens, but it’s at least a more direct musical form that the band shied away from in its latter years.
The rest of the album follows in the opener’s footsteps and steamrolls the listener with one rocking track after another. Minot has more in common with a rock-first band like Maserati or Turning Machine than it does the post-rock crowd. This is both a blessing and a curse; old FMTM fans may be disenchanted by the perceived lack of finesse and sophistication to some of Minot’s brute force offerings. However, those who enjoy a tasteful blast of instrumental rock and are easily bored by the masses of uninspired post-rock knock offs should find Equal Opposite a breath of fresh air.
In the year 2014, it certainly can’t be easy to be a rock band. What was once a popular and commanding genre has certainly seen better days. Equal/Opposite won’t change the world, but for the post-rock crowd it provides a nice reminder of days past when new bands played with a sense of passion.
website | The Mylene Sheath/Golden Antenna
James Blackshaw’s new release is not a tribute to Mike Patton’s experimental metal band; it’s actually a tribute to someone a lot more insane.
Fantômas is a popular villain in French culture, created by Marcel Allain in 1911 and appearing in no less than 43 books and 13 films. French silent film director Louis Feuillade also created five films involving Fantômas, which were released between 1913 and 1914. In 2013, Yann Tiersen organized an effort to score the five Feuillade films and play them live to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the films; in doing so, he invited James Blackshaw to tackle the fifth film, Le Faux Magistrat (Tiersen himself played at the event, as did Tim Hecker and Amiina). And so Blackshaw put together 75 minutes of music and invited Simon Scott, Duane Pitre, and Charlotte Glasson to help perform the score. No one was murdered during the construction or performance of the score, to my knowledge — you can never be too careful around Fantômas (also note that the performance was on Halloween, which is kind of spooky!).
What’s surprisingly absent from Fantômas, is Blackshaw’s signature twelve string guitar. Here, we’re limited to six strings and on occasion some piano work. Meanwhile Scott, Pitre, and Glasson contribute drums, electronics, synth, guitar, vibraphone, violin, saxophone, and several other instruments. In total, what could be a rather cacophonous adventure is actually pretty mellow and at times sinister. Having not seen Le Faux Magistrat myself (it’s on the agenda), it’s a bit presumptuous to claim it fits well with the film, but given the general feel of that era of silent film, Fantômas fits the bill on a superficial level. It’s engaging, yet not overpowering, but also accents with film with a variety of moods that likely highlight the anti-hero’s unforgivable deeds. Films were much tamer 100 years ago as well; Blackshaw’s rendition would probably not mesh so well if Fantômas was given a modern day re-imaging.
Much like fellow 12 string guitar-slinger Alexander Turnquist, Blackshaw has been branching out from his solo efforts over the past few years and flexing his muscles as a composer. In Fantômas he completely abandons his normal crutch, and there is a tangible sense that his world is now completely unrestricted. Sure, we’ll likely see him revert back to the stable 12 string in future works, but for now, the possibilities are endless.
China’s Wang Wen has been in existence for the past 15 years. As a musical force it has always struggled with its identity and carving out a unique sound, but the music on Eight Horses may just be good enough that we won’t care anymore.
Let’s start things off by stating the obvious: “Welcome to Utopia” is a fantastic post-rock track. It is crafted with the utmost care, progresses through the staples of the genre, and delivers a satisfying conclusion to the album. The track also resides in that nice niche where tracks are long but don’t berate the audience with an onslaught of guitar buffoonery. “Utopia” develops slowly and is opened up mainly through a single insistent trumpet. Slow and steady wins the race.
Elsewhere, Eight Horses does a excellent job of pacing itself. “Northern North” opens in a similarly deliberate manner but climaxes with a more menacing, almost post-metal fury. “Sky of Dalian” piques our interest with a vibraphone before the guitars crush the frail percussive work and open the door for a agitated trumpet climax. “Ten Thousand Buddhas” is mostly about guitar rock and unleashes an interesting wave of hybrid math/post-rock compositions. As you may notice, the trend here is that Wang Wen love rocking out, and post-rock aficionados will find no shortage of crescendos on offer during Eight Horses.
When all is said and done, it’s certainly not difficult to trace the influences of Eight Horses back to their source. Earlier Wang Wen albums either seemed overly concerned with this and attempted to fashion something unique yet modern or were much too happy to genre-bate and copy whichever band was trendiest at the time. These efforts generally proved unsuccessful; Eight Horses, by contrast, walks a middle line where Wang Wen knows what it excels at, sticks to it, and doesn’t appear to worry too much about where on the spectrum this album will land. As usual, this is a winning combination that allows the band to play to its strengths an finally give us a rewarding album, through and through.
Canada’s Kyle Bobby Dunn is younger than me, but he’s a whole lot better at making music. I may be a happier person, however.
Music for Medication was released on CDR when Dunn was 16; three years later he released Agoniser Ecrire with James Hill while a student at UNC. The project was short-lived, and seeing how it has been tucked into the far corners of the Internet and I may be one of the few journalistic bodies that knows of its existence — it may be safe to say that Dunn would rather forget the experience. Which I, as a former fan of Subtract by Two, simply cannot do. In fact, Agoniser Ecrire‘s existence has likely dampened my enjoyment of Dunn’s solo work up until now.
Agoniser Ecrire, particularly the stellar “Transgression Suite,” preempted the indie classical revival of the late ’00s by a few years and ended up near the top of The Silent Ballet’s top of the year list. Always trying to be ahead of the curve, TSB saw SB2’s blend of experimental and classical music done through indie lenses as a signal that others were on the way (surely enough, years later saw the emergence of Arnalds, Frahm, etc), and clearly Dunn & Hill would be at the forefront. Dunn had other things in mind, split ways with Hill, and started churning out ambient drone albums. In retrospect, this was rather unfortunate, as there were not a lot of guys banging on a piano a decade ago, but we’re never at a loss for people trying to be the next Brian Eno. Nonetheless, Dunn has produced music at a clip of more than one release a year over the past 8 years, and although initial efforts were lacking, he has steadily been increasing the quality of his work and gaining notoriety for it. His most recent ventures, Bring Me the Head of Kyle Bobby Dunn (2012) and Ways of Meaning (2011) were on the cusp of greatness, and now And the Infinite Sadness sees Dunn fully realizing that potential on display a full decade ago.
Infinite Sadness is a noticeably more fluid and more compositionally rich than its predecessors. Drones still form the basis of just about every track, so the drone enthusiasts won’t miss a beat here, but there’s much appeal in the auxiliary sounds Dunn includes that should bring in many crossover listeners. Although drone music is just fine by itself, it’s produced so abundantly today that I consistently find those distancing themselves from the pack by giving the music a bit more trust to be much more enjoyable on the whole. It can become difficult to argue the merits of one drone over another, but throw in some tastefully arranged piano, strings, or horns, and suddenly that drone takes on a whole new life. Dunn gets it — maybe he always did, but he’s now finally embracing it — and Infinite Sadness is now something that shelling out $60 for a triple LP doesn’t seem like a splurge, but rather a responsible purchase.
As Dunn’s career to date has proven that his best material still lies ahead of him, the strength of Infinite Sadness is a sign that hid is a name we won’t be forgetting any time soon.