Interview: Fish Prints

There are many incredibly passionate and talented people working in the underground music world these days, despite it paying dirt and being a labor of unrequited love more often than not. Still, men like Thor Malliet manage to uncover studio-quality demos recorded by Japanese highschoolers, esoteric crucibles of psycho-acoustic wonder from German singers, and digi-demon outbursts from avant-garde soul singers howling over home recordings in order to put them in the hands of musical gormandizers like yours truly. He has unearthed, shined, and delivered numerous irreplaceable gems under the moniker Fish Prints since 2018 and you'd probably have to bury him alive up to his neck in the Sonoran desert to keep him from doing it again. Now I'm a curious cat, and Thor is a generous fellow, and because of these compatible circumstances, he agreed to open the vault of his collection as well as the stored knowledge in his brain to answer a barrage of questions from me about the connections he's made through the label, the joys of releasing music on MiniDisc, the personal touch he gives every releases, and so much more. You can check out Fish Prints's full catalog at https://fishprintsinc.bandcamp.com/ while you listen to our conversation below. 

Interview: Joan of Arc

Image from the band.

I've dreamed about doing this interview since I started curating the CHIRP Radio podcast, many many moons ago. I dreamed of it but I never actually thought it would happen. I don't want to come across as too much of a swooning sap or a porridge-brained idealist, or one of those psychos who claims that The Secret "works," but I've somehow willed this into existence and you can now enjoy the fruits of my mental sweat equity and good fortune. It was an absolute pleasure to be able to interview Tim, Bobby, and Theo of Joan of Arc about their performance soundtracking Carl Dryer's classic film The Passion of the Joan of Arc as part of the 2023 Chicago Humanities Festival. You can listen on CHIRP's site here, or below: 

CHIRP Radio · Joan of Arc Interview

Album Review: NOT399093 - MALTA ORLATA

What I find fascinating and sadistically alluring about NOT399093's Malta Orlata is that it appears totally dismissive of its audience. Every piece of media has a presumed audience, someone who the author/creator/director intends to reach with their message and output. Someone the artist believes would be receptive to their dispatch. Judging from the crippled and crud-caked aesthetics of Malta Orlata, the Italian dance mix doesn't just appear to be directed at no one in particular, but no living person period- least of all someone looking to enjoy a night of dancing. Italian producers are all beneficiaries of a long tradition of making the abstract and idiosyncratic accessible to the masses, but what happens when one of them attempts to make the popular as alienating as possible? I think you'd get something like Malta Orlata. Here the rhythmic synchronizations that have become the circulatory and respiratory apparatus of UK clubs and high-end party spaced across the globe end up being flipped irreconcilably, tumbling like a terrarium full of tarantulas off a petshop shelf during an earthquake, spilling their contents into the hair, eyes, and nostrils of zombified revelers who have dispatched their senses and courted oblivion through the intoxicaton of unremitting motion and stupifying glare. The album's bleeding excoriations, flustered coughs, anguished curling brittles, foggy mangled retrievals, venomous enhancements, and half-cannibalized skeletal architecture offer a spectrum of sound with exaggerated radioactivity, capable of rearranging DNA without concern for the functionality or survival of the victimized organism. It mutilates the core sequencing of dance culture's motifs in a manner that entices orgastic fulfillment but never arrives at a climax, preserving such pleasures for itself. I could see a NOT399093 gig playing out like this: clubbers arrive at the venue ready for a good time, only to realize that all of the exits and bathrooms have been sealed. There is no DJ but the sound system switches on automatically and begins playing a percolating jungle beat which gets the room in motion despite the obvious danger raised by the attendee's inability to leave. After about half an hour, the stage opens below the mixer, speakers and subwoofers and they are plunged into a vat of acid like a wad of sugary dough into a deep fryer at a country fair- desperately sputtering out one final bassline before succumbing to corrosion. This kills the vibe permanently and people begin to panic. In the ensuing chaos, someone behind the bar discovers an envelope containing an assemblage of clues and ciphers and convinces everyone to temper their anxieties long enough to figure out what these codes could mean. Decoding the riddles leads the guests to discover a means of egress; unfortunately, it is a sewage line that runs under the dancefloor. In lifting up the checker pattern tiles in the center of the room they uncover a stinking portal to safety. After some hesitation, they enter one by one to crawl through the muck and refuse until they immerge on the other side, into a wheat field on the outskirts of town. NOT399093 has been in this field the whole time, his equipment hooked up to an old gas-powered generator, and playing to the mice, snakes, and other vermin that inhabit this agricultural refuge. By the time the revelers have begun extracting themselves from the waste line they used to escape the club, dawn has broke across the horizon, and NOT has taken to enjoying a cigarette in the early morning light, watching these wretched souls breathe their first breath of fresh air that evening as they wring filth out of their hair and clothes and scramble to reclaim their dignity. They've earned their freedom but no other reward. The show is long over. Time to go home. 

 Revise your collection with Riforma.

Album Review: D.A. Stern - People Named Ben

I first encountered DA Stern through his cover of Weird Al's "Since You've Been Gone," which caused me to feel an immediate affinity for his work, not purely on a subject matter basis (a bit of an Al aficionado, I'll cop to it), but mostly due to his aptitude for embellishing the sturdy pop qualities of the song while still delivering on its long wind up and quick payoff. It really demonstrated to me that he has a knack for identifying melodies while uniquely curating their presentation with his own gifted imprint. When I checked out his 2021 EP People Named Ben, I was glad to see that his sense of humor was not restrained to covers and that his original material exhibited an even greater level of refinement than his covers. The title track has this kind of sleepy, prattle to it where a hobnobbing of keys and woodwinds, and a few patchy bars of flighty xylophones, comingle to capture the essence of a cross-continental autumn breeze, a cooling felicitous calm that also manages to pay tribute to the Bens of the world (I'm sure DA also likes Davids, Mikes, and Clems, but I have to agree, Bens can be pretty great and deserve our respect). It's, of course, surprising to witness someone embracing mid-century tropes in pop, folk and jazz in this day and age, but what's delightful is how effortlessly he carries them off, especially on the generous but intermittently ominous sweep and staggered tropical deluge of "Jacket On My Birthday" and the gradual salt-laced roll and the nectarine afterglow of "Campfire." It feels like DA could really step into just about any genre or established style and manage to amp up its quirks and harmonious potential, like a star apprentice of Todd Rundgren who also moonlights in an after-hours work-study program with Thundercat. Now if only he could think of something nice to say about all us Micks (or at least this one) he'd have a fan for life. 

Album Review: Earth Room - Earth Room

Earth Room's self-titled debut has been described to me as alternatively "ambient" and "drone." Maybe I'm just ignorant (the most likely explanation) but they sound like a straight-up jazz band to me. A jazz band with some transcendental and kosmische-y qualities, but still a jazz band. The album units the talents and insights of players Robbie Lee, John Thaye, and Ezra Feinberg, whose respective exhalant phrasing, pummel, string-tugging, and electronic conjuring solidify and forcibly channel a plangently tranquil slipstream of distinctively physical and reassuringly fictile sound. Completely improvised, the performances evocatively succeed in anchoring your sense of being in the present tactile stratum of your surroundings while towing your consciousness through peculiarly meta-sensational ferments and a mirror-tension tempest, introducing you to cogent and idyllic organisms, who function as conversational interlocutors, omni-dimensional guides, and cosmic confidants. I'm dead sober while listening to this album and yet, I'm experiencing a sensation as if my skull had a zipper attached to the back and someone was carefully drawing down the tab and unsheathing my brain like it was a ripe piece of fruit. The phenomenon is just as chilling and delicious as such a description would imply. Not too shabby for an act whose formative raison d'etre was to provide ambiance for a beanbag lounge in Bushwick. 

Album Review: Foamboy - My Sober Daydream

Foamboy. It's an extremely amusing name for a band. It brings to mind some kind of gross Garbage Pail Kid-inspired children's toy from the '80s that dissolves in the tub and produces a bloom of green suds, or the nickname a teenage otaku would give to her Aki Hayakawa print, body-length pillowcase that she is presently using to sheathe a slab of memory foam. The Portland band have no relation in actuality to either of these overly specific byproducts of my overly active bio-neuro-mesh, and are, instead, simply an indie-pop duo consisting of producer Wil Bakula and vocalist Katy Ohsiek. My Sober Daydream is their second LP, released in 2021, and it's pretty good. Good enough to write home about, at least. Although, I'm not sure anyone from my hometown reads this blog (and that's for the best). On this LP, Foamboy are reminiscent of what Cat Power might emerge from the studio sounding like if she handed the reigns of her next album over to Flying Lotus. Maybe not quite that experimental, but within the margin of error. Soft, purring vocals batting at and winding around fluttery synths and gut-puckering bass lines. Percolating sonic recoils that leap through blazing, halo-shaped harmonics like a leopard chasing a springbok made of starlight. Slices of life, juiced, pulped, cooled, and served like a frothy midafternoon treat that conquers the summer swelter as soon as it encounters your pursed lips. Rivulets of neon fusion funk extending through a midnight calm and over an invisible slope to intertwine in a barber's pole-like motion of leisurely, seductive, cyclonic bliss. A respite of clean, cotton-soft vibes that you can sprawl over in absolute indulgence as if you've landed ass-first on an edible couch made of perfectly-puffed marshmallows that light up like LEDs at your touch. Sober Daydreams have rarely been more intoxicating than this. 

Album Review: Conducive - Global Makeshift Wounds

A couple of years back I was talking with Doug and Max of Hausu Mountain and the example of an hours long recording of a fan kept coming up. We returned to it many times as a negative instance of what they were attempting to accomplish with the label, an overly ponderous and simply indulgent illustration of concept overriding aesthetics as contempt for the listen. I thought it was a funny and fairly poignant measure of how experimental music can lose its way and alienate rather than engage an audience. Conducive's Global Makeshift Wounds has, of course, thrown a wrench in this perfect parallel for artistic decisions bereft of forethought, as it's an album that I'm almost entirely certain is made up of the sounds of many, many fans (or at least the sound of air moving in huge currents around an open space). Its ambient hum is the byproduct of an enormous, bewilderingly and imposing inverted spectrum of duct mazes and spinning citadels that make up the air-circulating apparatuses of most airports. Their howling bowels are the kind of feedback that your mind means to filter out, but Global Makeshift Wounds doesn't leave you with an ejection point or an alcove to escape this blizzard of white noise, so you are stuck with their whirling incessant, imposing and formerly benign presence- confronted with the madness of a background feature promoted to the focal point of your perception. It's an inspired choice to ground the dizzying murmur of an effectively innocuous and constantly moving element of design and interior infrastructure as a locus for the psychological pressure that is magnified by a place that is designed for departures and arrivals but metaphysically manifests as an interminable purgatory- you're always leaving but you're never leaving, you need to go but you have to stay, the exit is eternal and ingress is incalculable. The only thing that is constant is that you are forced to fixate on the cacophonous heave of a prodigiously oversized set of metallic lungs inhaling and exhaling simultaneously above you, an infinite exchange that sucks you up its gills, and once there, turns you inside out like a windsock, evacuating its contents. Now you are like the hollowed bodies anchored in the sky. You have become another open exhaust chamber in a liminal plot of intransigence. Another installation in the guts of a gaseous homunculus. A temporary membrane that mediates a potential reconning with the dormant probabilities of an unfulfilled reality. 

Album Review: The Paranoyds - Talk Talk Talk

Stop! Hold on! Stay in control... I'd like to tell you about something I heard. Something I shouldn't have noticed but did by fate or folly. I want to tell you but I'm afraid they'll hear. You know who. There is a microphone circling my head like a buzzard stalking a sun-stroked armadillo. A nest of copper vipers is nesting in the walls of my apartment. There is a small red light in the smoke detector above me... watching with the burning intensity of a lit cigarette, it drinks me in and regurgitates my flat, fuzzy digested image on a monitor somewhere underground. I wonder if the man they pay to watch that screen smokes. I wonder if he has a family who worry about his health. I wonder if his kids care what Daddy does for a living, and what keeps the gravy flowing and puts braces on their teeth. I could invoke the name of the thing I heard, but exposing that I know the proper nomenclature might cause the watchers to stop drying their eyeballs before the flickering image of my sweat-stained face and get active. I have too much to live for, I'm not ready to be swarmed. But I have to get this knowledge out of me; even as the hiss of a hundred camera lenses adjust their focus and act to jam my signals with a sense of self-preservation and just plain fear, I have to say what I've heard. I have to relay the message. Offer for consideration a thing observed. There is a group out of LA that I am in contact with. They delivered a package early last fall under a derivative and noxious code name. They hide the truth under so much blather. It's all just Talk Talk Talk until you seam of the crystal ball. Then you can crack it like an egg. Fry it and serve it with hash. I can read the white spaces and not just the hotty words that hem them in. I pierced the veil and found eleven ciphers inside. The first was a little space-dusted wavelength that I was able to tune into only to get tangled in its stretchy, tickling grooves and spiking gradients that heat up the blood like condensed gas station coffee. They call this the first cipher "BWP" to confuse those who don't know how to see with their god damned eyes open; it pretends to be about a shitty Spotify playlist, but it's actually a dare, a shot of courage to accept a skeleton key pressed to the palm, it's begging me to proceed and I obey. The next message is wrapped in a thumpy, throbbing, bassy throttle that clings to its brail-like bristles like mercury frosting to a hamburger birthday cake and treats the sense like they were the sequence of a combination lock, twisting and tapping out its missive with diligent momentum like it was a countdown to the last rocket off an exploding space planet. They call this one "Lizzie," a name that sends a chill down my spine (have they also been tracking the reptilian men in our midst? What else do they know?). "Lizzie" is not their final briefing- not by a long shot. Did you know that we're all slowly being replacing us with plastic? Not all at once, of course, but bit by bit, particle by particle, they're making us all docile Barbie and Ken dolls. You can feel it right? Little polyurethane pebbles rolling around under your skin, your mind becoming flat like a magnetic strip, the culture transforming you into a plaything in a process of commodification through commodities. It's all there in the half-lidded waver, midday martini-fueled Nissan cruise and sandtrap sliding stupor of the cipher "Single Origin Experience." The scales have fallen. Don't you see?!? Your ocular receptors can be as unclouded as mine. Listen to the reckless bobblehead funk of "Freak Out" and the pointillated patterns that make up the steel-framed ramble path that trips towards an antithetical, detonating crescendo of "6th Street Bridge" and tell me that you are not suddenly awake! Can you hear the music? It's getting louder all the time! It's sticking to everything and drifting through the walls like radiation. Chemically altering the enclosure, splitting its atoms and prying open the gate. I feel it! The weight is lifted and the path is clear. I'm finally free and it's all thanks to [REDACTED]! 

***

There is a gunshot heard in the distance. And then everything near becomes still. A cigarette-smoking man near a street lamp drops his coffin nail and snuffs it with his shoe. He then recedes into the dark. The stillness persists and will forever. 

Avoid being the odd man on the outside with Third Man Records.

Album Review: Small Opera - Sashiko

Sashiko is an embroidery style with a long history in Japan. Translating to English as "little stabs," the style originated in the Edo period as a way of mending and fortifying clothing to make them warmer and more durable, but is better recognized today as a distinctive decorative pattern with a running stitch and an unsevered connection to that nation's past. I don't have a statement from Small Opera's band leader Jason Bienia as to why this was the right title for the Vancouver group's latest LP, but I might as well take a stab at it (*rim-shot*). Small Opera perform a highly resonant, calming, and reflective variety of indie pop that could easily be described as a trimmed, spruced and enduringly wholesome variation on The War on Drugs. Extolling a socially cordial but uncommonly relaxed adaptation of North American folk, dusted with country charisma, and shaped and shaved into angular patterns from encounters with '80s new wave such as Talk Talk and (and I mean this without any attempt towards humor) Japan, Small Opera open an intimate but abiding space for deliberation on life's priorities and the blessings that bind our layed odds together like a bushel of burgeoning wildflowers. Pinning concepts and tenors of thought into harmonious patterns is a large part of the interplay of Jason's voice and lyrics and the pervasively rhythmic grooves that undergird his phrasing as the band darns concurrent seams in the air to mend together a channel through which a restorative jetstream of sound may flow. An inviting ephemeral brook descending from a cavern on high, whose lip you can swing your legs over and allow them to dangle in the pitted black of its origin point, etching the dark with your eyes like chalk on slate, wanding in thought but not wanting for direction. I suppose the stitching metaphor comes into play here, where Small Opera prompts us each to see in their lyrics and performance, a patchwork of ourselves, begging to be reassembled and reconfigured into a durable and modest whole personage that we can confidently bare to the world. We each must at some point make a small effort to understand our path to the here and now, following the strands of our lives backward across its winding patterns to the start and then relaying back to our current moment of decision- our next footprint in the sand, a seed to sow, a stitch to be sewn- realizing that the longer we peirce and pull and try, the more chances we will have to make something beautiful of our lives. 

Album Review: Eli Winter - Self-Titled

I really love the cover of Eli Winter's self-titled album. It's an unconventional vantage point of the iconic Chicago skyline, captured in a clearing along the shore in one of the many wooded preserves that dot the city's metro area. The image elicits a sense of exploration that hasn't lost sight of its place of origin or the purpose for which it has embarked. On the record itself, Eli collaborates with a rich roster of prodigious talents, such as Cameron Knowler, Yasmin Williams, David Grubbs, Ryley Walker, Tyler Damon, as well as the late jaimie branch, to blend wistful ruminations on American bluegrass and folk in a manner that dynamically revises their structural predispositions to invoke musing veneers of jazz, dream pop, and even noise rock. Suitably rugged but with an inborn tenderness, Eli's self-titled album finds direction and purpose through the alchemy of cooperation and the uncommon beauty that can be unveiled when you take an uncharted path back to a familiar place. 

Find more fantastic tunes over at Three Lobed Recordings.

Album Review: Coral Grief - Daydrops

I'm intrigued by the title of Seattle band Coral Grief's EP, Daydrops. It evokes for me the transformation of the incorporeal into the substantial. Here condensing the idea of a "day" into a fluid- converting its associated phenomena, such as light and warmth, as well as its conceptual characteristics, like renewal and truth, into a vital reduction that descends in cleansing waves. It wouldn't be worth unpacking all of this unless it revealed to us some aspect of the music Coral Grief have recorded, and I assure you that this has not been a false start. The band has a delightful capacity to weave the strands of a daydream into the texture of their sound, manifesting within each track, from the calming rustle and upward drifting electric waterfall progressions of "Copycat," to the glistening jangle and tangy starlight burst of "Wow Signal," to the final pensive stillness of the title track, an emergence of the disembodied into the realm of the body-effective sound. Their music is the result of a transubstantiation process that they involve the listener in fully, as if they were plucking the materials for these songs from your very own mind, like you had a hank of yarn dangling off your should from your inner ear, and they got ahold of it, pulled out a length, wrapped it around a pair of needles and knit you a quilt for you to lie under while the gentleness of their music lulled you into a state of repose. Daydrops is a spyglass telescoping into the world of the imaginary, focusing and defining the previously notional aspects of this realm with lovely, smooth, and bold curvatures.   

Duck into Den Tapes for more chill vibes.

Album Review: Twen - One Stop Shop

It's a crazy feeling when a song makes your world stop on its axis. Like a spinning globe that someone had put the brakes on by gouging their thumb into it. This will happen to me sometimes. The general muddle of thoughts that have been swirling around my head is given cause to coalesce around a single phrase in a song, or even just a riff, or even a drum pattern. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how flat the world has seemed as of late. How there are so many explanations for the whys and hows of the present state of the world, and the effect of each dispensation de jure is to transform all of history, geography, and culture into some kind of cardboard Kabuki sideshow that serves to justify the narrator of each unified theory in their current, self-aggrandized course of action. And while these glaring, hot iron theses do a fair job of smoothing over objections and vindicating the moment, they also form a rationale for a lack of action, seemingly motivated by an attempt to run down the clock until there is no chance that any action, once elected, could achieve its desired effect. Like a needle in the groove of a record, everyone is just in their lane until the music stops. The catalyst and lightening attracting object of this point of clarity is a line from Boston group Twen's latest album and its title track, One Stop Shop. It goes, "Feeling like there's one short shot / For a fading revolution / There's always time" ... until there isn't. That's how the song ends. The last line is, "There isn't always time." The song has this sad kind of marry-go-round quality to it... it rotates too quickly and you can sense it straining against its own weight to continue each cycle, but somehow completing another and the next without collapse, although you know it is coming... that great shadow of dread looming in the corner of your eye warns as much as the harmonies lift and lower and you feel a tingling in your stomach and chest as your guts get draped around your lungs and thumping heart as you ride the wave of vocalist Jane Fitzsimmons melancholy warble. And then the music stops and the curtain drops and that's it. One Stop Shop is a little like Twen's tribute to the last forty years of rock history and culture, but even then, the title implies that you don't need to reference another collection of work to get up to speed, or appreciate what came before this record rolled off the presses. It's the final, full compendium of Western musical craft, with no prologue or epilogue. It is wholly contained, and its grooves are infante... until they're not. The assution of the title is of course farcical. There is no way that any one work could be so all-encompassing, consuming, and dominant that you'd never have to go outside of it to make sense of it or the conditions of the world that begot it. Although, the Nashville by way of Liverpool psychedelic dip of "HaHaHome," the thorn-lined Brit-pop wilt and dazzling Lynott guitar light-ups of "Dignitary Life," the bawdy blues pop of the fleshy kick-back curb-tapping soul of "Automation" with its funk-filled ballast buoyant energy, and the dusky green glance swept, crawl until you fall, escalatingly and hungry pop-soul knife-twist of "Fortune 500," taken all together, make a solid aesthetic case for staying put and wallowing in their neo-nostalgic near-sublimity until you sink and dissolve in their welcoming harmonic murk. Nothing can satisfy all of your human needs though, whether it be the demand for love, meaning, or belonging; there is no one idea, place, or person who can be the source of all the things that will sustain you. The funny little farce lurking within and buried beneath the floorboards of One Stop Shop, but whose righteous heart you can still hear beating in the well of your ears, is the revelation that the more any one thing tries to sell you on its absolute and undeniable necessity, the more bankrupt and empty it will clearly be shown to be. That's not to say that, one thing, even an album, even a great album, can't give you a lot... but it can't give you everything. One stop shopping is the myth that prolongs a dying world. 

Album Review: 3xBlast - Babe, You Look Poggers Tonight!

It's an odd sensation coming across a word that once felt fully integrated into the lexicon, but now you can't manage to recall the context for its use. It's like finding a grey hair in the morning after you swear you went to bed with a full head of luscious technicolor strands sprouting from your scalp- a sign of one's advancing age and growing irrelevance I suppose. It's even freakier when the word is only two or three years old! This is all to say that I can't recall the correct application of the term "Poggers" but I'm pretty sure 3xBlast's deployment is more or less within the margin of error (maybe they used it differently in the UK?). 2021's Babe, You Look Poggers Tonight! was a surprising contender in the fastly expanding field of chip-punk that the peak isolation of the pandemic sired. They're not as well recognized as say, Hey, Ily, but this isn't for a lack of effort or imagination- as far as I'm concerned 3xBlast does a better job of integrating their influences into a single vision and bringing it to life in full 32-bit fidelity then just about anyone in the game. The title track comes on like a dopamine spike, hitting all the right notes with the enthusiasm of a younger button-mashing sibling and the concentration and confidence of a seasoned arcade shark hustling a Donkey Kong cabinet- smashing powerchords like they were powerups and coasting on the crunch of plastic-cast, sound-card generated grooves in a pop-punk serenade and tribute to youthful trouble-making, and lots of it. The following track is almost a sequel, traveling with the same lightfooted fervor, only with a dreamer sense of reverential levity, primarily concentrated in the sun-up/sun-set, elliptical swing of the bridge. It honestly, doesn't seem like it could get more exciting until 3xBlast rolls up on you with a warm and bodacious sax wail courtesy of DonutShoes on "Now This Is A Waterpark!," and then all of a sudden, you feel like you're in a crowded room at a house party, keeping the beat with the band by the skipping pace of your collective pogo hops. It's difficult to place the vocals, but they're definitely fed through some kind of augmentation that deepens the band's commitment to their retro-electro aesthetic while elevating it with perky personality and whimsical harmonies, eliciting comparisons to the high-energy belt and feint of The Swellers in equal measure to spastic Devo-wave of Polysics. Babe, You look Poggers Tonight! is not a single-player campaign for quiet nights in; it's the summoning siren of a reality-warping DDR derby waiting to throw down in your parent's basement. Let the Capri Sun flow like tangy wine from Baccus's chalice, for tonight belongs to the youth, to the dungeon-crawling adventurers, the all-night revilers, and the motley JRPG fanatics... and anyone who still remembers what the hell poggers means without having to look it up in Urban Dictionary.   

Album Review: Maral - Ground Groove

LA producer Maral's third album Ground Groove received a fair amount of critical praise last year. I'm not ashamed to admit that this praise is the root cause of why this review exists. While it's true that I hold my independence in high regard, there is nothing wrong with peering over the hedge once in a while to see what my neighbors have cooking.* But enough about my "peers,"** what's Maral's deal? We'll her deal is that she's taken up residence in my head. More or less literally! She's absolutely filled in the cracks in the foundation of my mind in the strangest kind of way. I know this album is called Ground Groove, but I did not anticipate that its tones and textures would be quite so inceptive. Like the album has rumbled forth from the iron disco ball that churns in the Earth's core, with vibrations issuing vertically into the spinning layers of this sphere's mantle, and then quickening through the soles of my feet, leaping like lightening from my tibias, to my hips, to my spine, and then slithering like a snake up a drainage pipe into my brain. What's more, the mixing makes these sounds feel eerily and completely localized, like I'm the only one who can hear them,*** as if I'm receiving them via microwave transmission in some kind of DARPA-funded direct sound experiment. It's very exciting stuff... even if it's permanently warped my filling. 

Don't go without checking out Leaving Records.  

*To be fair, I haven't actually read other reviews for this album. I'm only admitting that I know that they exist, and the mere knowledge of the existence of these other reviews is the reason that I checked out this album. 

**People on Twitter who I spy on. 

***And NOT just because I'm wearing headphones... although that does help. 

Interview: The Bollweevils

Image by Paul Catani

I got to be a huge punk nerd this week and chat up Daryl from Chicago legends The Bollweevils for CHIRP Radio's Artist Interview Series. The first time I saw the Bollweevils was in Chicago at Riot Fest in 2006(?), and all I knew about them then was that they were a big deal and had just gotten back together for the Fest. Sweaty, dumb little me with footprints on the back of his NOFX shirt from when some dude who had 60 pounds on me steamrolled my ass in the pit during Fear City's set, had no idea that he'd someday get to chat with one of these dudes about their legacy and continuing to love music while striving to do your best regardless of where you find yourself in life... It's a weird feeling looking back. A good feeling, but weird and hard to explain. I'm going to stop writing before I get too mushy here and blow what little punk cred I have left. You can check out my interview with Daryl here, or below:  

CHIRP Radio · The Bollweevils Interview

The Bollweevils latest album, and first in fourteen years, Essential, is out on Red Scare. You can listen to it below: 

Album Review: Mong Tong 夢東 - Mystery 秘神

Taiwanese funk and psychedelic project Mong Tong 夢東 is one of the many musical undertakings of brothers Hom Yu and Jiun Chi. Their latest album Mystery 秘神 combines their love for vintage transcendental rock sounds with an obsession over local occult mythology in what is a strangely transportive and well-rounded record. I have no means of measuring the distance between the possible points of triangulation of the secret sources of knowledge they employ and the specific sounds I am hearing, but the shifts in mood and overall pacing of the record still manage to craft a compelling narrative; even though there is not a single original word spoken during the entire trip. That's ok; sometimes the mind sees what the eyes can't and hears what the ears ignore. You don't have to gaze into the enigma of the album to appreciate it as it's more than pleasing on a purely aesthetic level as a foggy amalgam of the guitar styles and personality of Takeshi Terauchi and Iron Butterfly. Although, imagining yourself descending the steps of an ancient temple to do battle with disembodied horrors in order to retrieve a magic iron box that can be used to trap a usurper sorcerer who is terrorizing a kingdom can certainly add a layer of intrigue to the experience of the album... if you're open to that sort of thing, that is.

Go deeper with Guruguru Brain.

Album Review: Sepehr - Survivalism

Survivalism is a 2021 album from New York, New York producer Sepehr. It's a mini-LP (his description) that showcases the enterprise of making and moving to music as an act of perseverance. I've never made music, but as a music fan, and I can say from experience that music has given me something to hold on to during dark times when nothing else has. I have to hazard that this is what Sepehr is getting at here with this trim and evocative compilation of subterranean-sounding drum 'n base. That said, the release's tone is on the gothic and foreboding side of the genre, and if you were to hear it emanating through the hall of your apartment building late at night, you might be tempted to call an exorcist. Don't be so hasty! Survivalism is for the living more than the dead, and if you ring up the spirit cops on it, then you might just find yourself with one less refuge from the other, more maligned, things that go bump in the night (like actual cops!).*

Summon more sounds via Shaytoon Records.

*Disclaimer: I can not say for certain if Survivalism is an effective police repellent. However, you are welcome to conduct your own test and report back to me with your results. 

Album Review: R.J.F. - Going Strange

It's difficult to know what to expect from this record from its visuals. That said, the only thing hardcore about it is the cover. I know it will probably not make Ross Farrar particularly happy to read a review of his new album Going Strange that starts out this way, but he's Ceremony's singer, and Ceremony's sound is still 2006's Violence Violence to me, and while it may be a sign of some deeply rooted character flaw, this fact will likely never change. Also, he doesn't have to like what I have to say; no one does. As interesting as Ceremony's evolution has been since their early releases- going from adrenalized hardcore, to semi-abstract post-punk, to... modish post-punk(?)- I've gleaned a slight frustration with the limitations of form on Ross's part throughout these iterations. His mannerisms and the way he projects himself into the performances with his other band Spice feels quite a bit more relaxed in comparison, but his solo project RFJ is like listening to a different guy altogether. Going Strange has all the qualities of a first record, but not just the first for a project, a first record (period). It sounds like it was all captured by a single mic, in a living room while sitting on the stained floral print couch, and compiled from only a hand full of takes in a marathon Garageband session by someone who is discovering through the course of recording and editing a record that they harbor within themselves a fluid aptitude for songwriting. Cautious, but not nervous, trusting, but not blindly certain, the album seems to arise out of a place of self-knowledge that is grounded in something other than the process that is unfolding before your ears. The quality of the recordings makes up a large part of Going Strange's aesthetical appeal as well, as you can hear the way that the notes emanating from the instruments cut through the air, absorbing into fabrics and bodies of their surroundings while springing in the background like a grasshopper off the corners and moldings of the room, atmospheric aspects that energize the entire undertaking as if the setting of the recording was meant to be part of the plot of the record. It also has a certain beatnik quality to it that reminds me of Velvet Underground's bitter stabs at art that is intelligible to the sunken parts of the soul, or even Scott Walker's many plaintive odes to the dispossessed, or really any other musical attempts to make sense of the splintering dissensus of post-modernity from the mid-20th century. While most of the reference points I could pull down for favorable comparison would be of artists who had mastered their craft and were in complete control of their output, I think I've already made clear that such firm proficiencies are not at all what makes Going Strange an absorbing listen. Instead, Going Strange offers the opportunity to witness Ross's process working its way out in real-time, like he's writing the song as you hear them; factory fresh impressions from his mind forge; drizzled on the senses like a vincotto made from a particularly well-aged wine; the product of an uncommon variety of foresight that anticipates mistakes, irregularities, and the unbridled peculiarity of the mind in an almost aleatoric philosophy of outcome. I'm never sure quite where the next track will lead from its prologue, only that the nose and tail of each overlap in one sustained procession of related but divergent contemplative modes, with Ross remaining as the only constant, personified in its steam, sinking out of sight when he needs to, breast stroking and stirring the tempest when it suits him, but always thriving in the drift of the moment. Going Strange is rough, it's messy, and at points difficult and irreverent, but to the extent Ross exerted the force of his conscious intention upon any portion, it is clearly something that he is extremely satisfied with, and for what it's worth, that makes two of us.   

Album Review: aMute - Days of Light & Let Go

As an American, it is a rare treat when you come across a project like aMute; a seamless amalgamation of genre and inspiration that possesses an effortless experimental potential while remaining lavishly contemplative. I feel like Europeans get to enjoy stuff like this all the time. Here in the States, the closest we get to grandiose electronic-folk hybrids is tUnE-yArDs, which, if we're being honest, just feels like the musical equivalent of David's Bridal or cable TV at this point- overly expensive and mid-market Boomer luxuries that most of us can do without. Who aMute reminds me most of though, is THOT; even if they don't share that much in common sonically, they have the same preference for building a dense and brooding atmosphere in which their chimeric music can sprawl out and make the most of its ill-tempered ways. While I think you could spend an awful lot of time breaking down the aMute's specific influences, and if you wrote the project's architect Jérôme Deuson, I'm sure he'd be happy to unpack each song for you at length in terms of what he was attempting to accomplish and why... I feel such efforts are misdirected. The real value of an album like Days of Light & Let Go (the group's eighth) is only intelligible from your subjective experience of it as a secluded sonic antechamber of reverie. It's really not party music. It's something that you have to make sense of on your own and in your own way. Days of Light opens its channels to you with a poem about lost souls trapped in dissonant wondering while reaching for illusory glory, a scene that plays out over exceedingly overdriven waves of feedback and windswept textures, sounding like Randy Warthog of the Residents returning with a message from beyond the grave and confronting you while you're attempting to take shelter from an incoming tornado. The following track, "Let Go," resembles a drum machine programmed by a sentient clump of moss attempting to interpret some ancient text to a deaf animist spirit imprisoned in the side of a cliff that resembles the stoic profile of some long-forgotten chieftain. The resonating orchestral oscillations of "Every Little Sad Moments We Had" pleasantly goss and ostentatiously ordain a series of transitions with an obscure spiritual force like the indigenous music of a band of techno-future scavengers who live in and maintain a server farm out in the Arizona desert centuries after the world outside has gone dark and backslid into a period of medievalist regression. Even though I said that attempting to unpack aMute's influences is likely against the grain of best practices in appreciating the album, I have to say that the half-whispered and lamenting intonations, as well as the volatile architecture and openly hostile hip-hop elements of "These Crazy Crazy Dreams" really come across as the best possible expression of a potential Radiohead and clipping. collaboration, if such a thing were ever possible. While much of the monumental ambient tones and futuristic folk of Days of Light have a distinctly depressive vibe to them, I get the impression from the esteemable calm and sure-sighted approach of the closing acoustic track "Aurevoir L'Orage," that Jérôme believes that, despite whatever dark passageways you might run down while wandering the labyrinth of the mind, it is possible, and even necessary, to find yourself under the spotlight-like gaze of epiphany, a mental miracle luminescent enough to light your way back to a point of clarity. At least that's my reading. Results may vary, but the likelihood of Days of Light & Let Go making some kind of an impact on you is a near certainty. 

Great tunes spring eternal over at Hopedrive Editions.

Metal Monday: Deludium Skies, IER, Mothflesh & Royal Thunder

I don't listen to as much metal as I'd like to. It's a curse of having broad interests and only so many hours in the day. It's one of the reasons why I keep these Metal Monday threads alive. It forces me back into the forge, back into the genre that first helped me come to terms with my critical style and learn to enjoy analyzing and writing about music in the first place. They're a good reminder as to why I try to do this every night, examining the strange and underappreciated and trying to make sense of it the best I can. It continues to be a worthy exercise for me and one I don't see myself giving up any time soon. But you're not here to see me write about myself, right? You're here for the mayhem, the macabre, the mutagenic... you're here to read about some ugly, ass music, and friend, have I got you covered... Welcome to another Metal Monday.  

Deludium Skies - Ichor (Trepanation Recordings)

I've encountered more than a few malevolent combinations of jazz and metal since starting this blog, but Karl Pelzmann's Deludium Skies is the most malefic. The projects (6th?) LP titled Ichor is the spiritual inculcation of the shadow side of folk and jazz, a ritualized janus turning, beseeched from the earth by bewitching, plangent guitar chords that sound like they are echoing up from the chimney-like hallow of a scorched and blackened tree. In some ways, the rhythmic textures of the album have an unassumingness about them, like they are wondering off into the depths of a thorny grove out of curiosity and naivety rather than a lust for mischief, but the combination of wailing flutes and saxes carry too much of a sour air about them, and in peering through the fog of disorder they muster one will be inevitably be met with the red-ringed stare of a maere clinging to the back of these tracks, inciting them forward into the wicked woodland to do its malign bidding. There are no happy endings to be found here, only a twisted fable of folly. Ichor springs to the ear like a fairy tale read to you by the monster slithering beneath your bed.  

IER - 物​の​怪 (Self-Released)

Argentinian black metal artist IER is known for his complex, ambitious, and impenetrable albums. He made one about Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan a few years back that was nearly half the run time of the film that inspired it (an hour and twenty minutes vs three hours, in case you were wondering). His latest, 物​の​怪 ("Monster"), does not appear to have nearly as precise of a thematic origin as some of its predecessors, but it is certainly as, if not more, daunting in its enterprise. Beginning with the twelve-minute "日本の都市伝説 Vol.1" we are feted with a full course of arresting and confrontational forms, starting with a viciously primal tear of DSMB, which loosens its twisting, noose-like grooves enough to liberate a messenger's arrow of hope from its binding contortions, a shot that hurdles through a dashing thrash solo only to stumble facefirst into the submerged tomb of some swamp lurching death metal, a murk-steeped trudge which is then rinsed clean by a shower of firey feedback and sonorous power chords, a necessary cleanse that frees the track from its decaying manicules so that it can once again break into a sprint, this time accompanied by a skittering peel of progressive-funk riffs. It sounds wild, and it is. And what's more, none of it is out of place. Not when IER starts scatting like Jonathan Davis on later tracks, or when he combines Converge style post-hardcore with Spanish folk guitars, or even when he does his best interpretation of what Incubus might sound like in corpse paint. It all works as a single, wholly realized, thoroughly integrated, and bewildering lusus naturae. Monster is the right title for this album, in more ways than one might think possible. 

Mothflesh - Machine Eater (Self-Released)

If there was a combination of styles that could represent humankind's enduring resistance to being reduced to the level of mere, mechanical instruments and extensions of the machines of their masters, it would be melodic death, old-school metalcore, and groove metal. As it stands, this untrammeled trifecta of muscularly, defiant antagonism to domination all cohere in the sound of Mothflesh and their future shock dispeller Machine Eater. It's pretty much At the Gates driving down the throat of Poison the Well in order to detonate a massive djent-triggered Car Bomb. That last sentence may have been tortured, but this music isn't. The barrage of massive, propellent grooves and the formidable combination of clean singing and guttural death howls are as awe-inspiring as a volcanic eruption and just as likely to shake your world to its foundations. Every riff sounds like another ground-to-air missile shot up the exhaust port of a Skynet satellite. With Mothflesh on our side, the future of humanity is looking brighter than ever. 

Royal Thunder - Wick (Spinefarm Records)

Nothing like a little hard rock out bubbling up from the South. The certifiably fiery and appropriately titled Wick is Royal Thunder’s third full-length LP, and their first since leaving metal mogul Relapse for Finnish label Spinefarm. It's hard to understate the power and charisma of front-woman and bassist Miny Parsonz's vocal performance, or how well her imploring and vengeful cries are complimented by the group's boozy psychedelic and doom metal-infused roots rock. Think Alabama Shakes with some mid-career Mastodon riffs swapped in. Both Miny and lead guitarist Josh Weaver escaped from cults in their youths, which is a fact that you can read into if you want, but I'm inclined to believe Miny when she insists that their songs are actually about building new relationships and forging your own path in life. Their current mantra is, “The Past is Over,” a saying they adopted after finding it scrawled above the entrance to a hotel on a European tour, and I think it's a good coda for us all to meditate on whenever we've felt like we may have lost our way in life. You can't go back, but you can soldier on. If nothing else, its a bit of intellectual cud to chew on while you sway to the swaggering rhythms of the ponderously claustrophobic "We Slipped" whose pounding beat and slapping grooves will help you break out of whatever mental prison you find yourself holding up in these days. Then there is the magnificent Joplin-esc crooning on dark gospel confessional "Plans," the somber piano balladry and elegantly blighted dalliance of "Push", and lastly, the morbid tension building brood of the shadowboxer with razor laced inlines that is "Turnaround." Sadly, this is the last full LP that Royal Thunder has released, but they still tour quite regularly and even released a single earlier this year, which gives me a great deal of hope that their return to the recording studio for another LP will be forthcoming, if not inevitable.