After a tight five posts on equipment, let’s get up-to-date with records releasing this month.

SickElixir (XL Recordings #XL1560LP)

It’s important to keep a toe in different lanes & subcultures these days. I scan r/TheOverload sporadically; its a headerless stab at a sound that its own parishioners can’t seem to come to a consensus over, hinging on a general embrace of larger, left-of-center (generally more in the sound-design & stylistic/production lanes than anything formal: many brains there would melt over the first 5 seconds of Mark’s entry below… incidentally it’s a 20 minute drive down the M1 from Jamie’s hometown of Barnsley to Rotherham, switching to the Wortley Rd at Thorpe Hesley) approaches to contemporary Electronic Music & I’ve genuinely been taken aback by a few records that have been propped up there (Barker’s “Stochastic Drift” LP for example caught me offguard & is wonderful).

This one’s great; hard to judge it en toto from the two “Free” songs on BC (although it’s always great to see virtually anything with a few hundred owners there; that this is even possible) but the rest of the record is far more concerned with a kind of shouted-megaphone-American-Industrial-lineage mutant-munchkin vocal thing over fairly straightforward rhythms. To paraphrase Zim, there’s sound all over this thing; every element was seemingly, haphazardly run through an endless signal chain of processing. I do question whether the attention paid to these details in particular would have been better placed in the structure/arrangements as they tend to loop on or stick to a single chord/tonality until the next, but that’s just so much of Ableton-typ USB-C Gerät/Gerausch these days; a flattening of the myriad components of song into a mere branch of automations.

Nite Closures EP (National Centre For Mark Fell Studies #fell01)

This has been something of a banger-year for Mark, riding high on the essentially simultaneously-released (yet still forthcoming?) “Psychic Resynthesis” for Ian Fenton’s Double Reeds (the poster label for a sort of extremely vetted anti-prolificity; only the 8th release in 13 years & when something gets announced your ears certainly perk up given the 100% fill rate of hits) & the understated “Remarks on Process” double-tape set with Studio Dan from over the summer (which presents an unedited rehearsal marathon of conceptual acoustic works that rivals the scope & pause-pregnancy of Wandelweiser, entirely bereft of ornament).

While (assuredly Conor’s, god) marketing materials would seem to hinge on the relationship between the inauguration of this new (impeccably titled) series to the Sensate Focus project, in fact this breaks cleanly from the penciled-in computer-house squares & resumes the stutter-effect explorations of easily my favorite of his formative work, the Multistability suite. The feel here is entirely algorithmic, with the composer’s invisible puppet-master strings subtly influencing the outcome of a software solution.

When I sing, I slip into the microphone. Into that void, I bring comrade “prayers”, then, turning to face the outside, together we explode. (Black Truffle #BT135)

“Era Of Sad Wings” was always the go-to street-facing-speaker music on Halloween, which makes the timing of this issue of further recorded, yet hitherto unreleased material extremely prescient.

Many were turned onto this obscure Haino Keiji project (which also involved, in fits & starts, Nanjo from Psychedelic Speed Freaks / High Rise / Toho Sara, a long pre-“Boogie” Tetuzi Akiyama, & Shizuo Uchida from Hasegawa-Shizuo & Kito Mizukumi Rouber) by their disc in the 1997 “Driftworks” box (which also featured a great Thomas Köner set captured at Paul Panhuysen’s Apollohuis, Paul Schütze of the underrated early Australian tape-music group Laughing Hands, & of course Pauline Oliveros with Randy Raine-Reusch).

Working a year after “Era” as a trio of Haino, Akiyama, and Takashi Matsuoka (who plays on “Wind Synthesizer” on Catalyst Night’s Deep Being tape from 1986 & piano on the original 1990 “With or without blurring” session, which is either conceptually/logisitically a solo Haino or solo Matsuoka session depending on which lore you take as sacred) the three-part suite “When I sing, I slip into the microphone. Into that void, I bring comrade “prayers”, then, turning to face the outside, together we explode.” makes up the majority of the record, augmented by an astonishingly great early 70s noise recording, “The kotodama that attempts to take back all energy into itself” that harkens back to Haino’s “1973 Live = Milky Way”