2020 was definitely a year to upend all norms, as our new normal became the unexpected. Chaotic and contentious, this “post-everything” year has challenged bedrock principles across multiple areas of culture. In the US, this was felt most acutely in a political battle that pitted the fundamentals of Democracy against a reactionary descent into Authoritarianism. “I never thought I’d see that,” became an unsettling but mantric refrain.
Thus it is that 2020 also requires a “post-everything” sonic approach. More than ever, this year found us turning to those albums and artists that seemed to represent this liminal position and hybridized existence. Mostly, this is an ambient collection, pointing to the difficulties of verbal expression. Instead, it uses sound itself as its medium of expression. Often minimal in approach or singular in focus, even at its most abstract, this collection is emotive in those ways that only sound, untethered from the determination’s of language, can be.
Below is a collection of music that slips between the cracks as it straddles uncertain and changing times. “Post-everything” is that place where culture runs into the brick wall of its own thinking and expression. As such, a music that has come loose from its form constraints and into sound itself is the best way forward!
1. Evicshen Hair Birth (American Dreams Records)
Evicshen is the experimental noise musician, visual artist, and instrument maker Victoria Shen (Trim). She released her 2020 LP Hair Birth via American Dreams Records this past July, and it came with a handmade record jacket that doubled as a functioning speaker. “The art is the speaker, and the speaker is the art,” she said at the time, before going on to explain:
“The width of a continuous copper coil is modulated as it radiates across the surface of the jacket, rendering the image of my face mid-performance from a show last summer in Kumamoto, Japan. The coil, when connected to an audio amplifier and placed in front of a magnet, turns the material of the cover into an active speaker membrane. The whole thing dances and vibrates in your hands as you listen to the album, as it pushes the particles in the air back and forth to create invisible waves that we perceive to be sound.”
Hair Birth began with recordings Shen made throughout several weekends using Harvard Universities’ Buchla 100 and Serge modular systems. With hours of recording laid down on the analog synthesizers, the musician began the painstaking process of reassembling the stems into the album’s seven tracks. At times eviscerating and confrontational, Evicshen’s extreme textures of sound are always experienced physically as an act of somatic feeling, as much as they are also a powerful listening experience.
2. GRID Decomposing Force (NNA Tapes)
GRID, the Brooklyn, NY noise-jazz trio comprised of Matt Nelson (Tune-Yards, Battle Trance, Elder Ones), Tim Dahl (Child Abuse), and Nick Podgurski (New Firmament, Feast of Epiphany), released their Decomposing Force LP this past April on NNA Tapes. The album is their sophomore effort, and it finds the trio delving deeply into their Free Jazz, Noise, and Metal roots to create a record of fiercely uncompromising sonic force.
The group reports that the album’s four tracks were all recorded live in one room with no overdubs and then mixed to 1/2-inch tape. If Jazz is a musical form founded on players’ ability to improvise through mutual collaboration, GRID takes that to the next level with a novel recording method. Tim Dahl’s bass amp was turned to face directly into the microphone Matt Nelson used for his saxophone during the process. In turn, the band’s entire sound was then fed through Nelson’s pedals and monitor to create a constantly interacting loop of amalgamized sound.
3. Oneohtrix Point Never Magic Oneohtrix Point Never (Warp Records)
Oneohtrix Point Never returned this year with another intriguing foray into pop-culture on his Magic Oneohtrix Point Never LP out on Warp Records. Daniel Lopatin’s work on the label has always been marked by a dizzying and hybridized approach while orchestrating his way through high and low culture with a rabble-rouser’s eye for detail. This year’s effort continues that channel changing approach as Lopatin’s sonic imagination stretches into further surreal realms of disassociated pop.
4. Black Taffy Opal Wand (Leaving Records)
Black Taffy released his Opal Wand LP this past May via Leaving Records. Discussing the album’s title at that time, the Dallas-based producer Donovan Jones explained:
“Opal Wand felt really right because, first of all, opal is a semi-precious stone. It’s super soft. A wand that’s made of opal technically couldn’t really exist because it would break really easily. It’s kind of like this object that the concept exists, but the physical form can’t really exist, so it’s kind of like a nod to these vaporwave ideas where people are making soundtracks for a video game that doesn’t exist…the concept is there, but the physical form can’t really exist.“
Featuring twelve instrumental tracks recorded between Texas and Brazil, the producer says that Opal Wand‘s sound was influenced by listening to “music from the fifties and sixties like Ballroom,” as well as digging through the Easy Listening section of record stores on the hunt for “tuned percussion like vibraphone and celeste.”
The results are a mushroomy stumble through cascading strings and cloudy beats, leading to opiated fantasies that will have you hearing ghostly colors and seeing spectral sounds.
5. Thollem Thollem/Tatsuya Nakatani
This November, Thollem launched his 25 album series Astral Traveling Sessions on the Austin, Texas-based label Astral Spirits. A monumental achievement by anyone’s standards, the 12-month subscription series includes recordings the keyboard/pianist made with over 70 different musicians during his world-wide touring schedule in 2019. Here, Thollem teams up with the equally peripatetic Avant-percussionist and composer Tatsuya Nakatani. Like two curious clockmakers tinkering with the celestial spheres, together they take apart its cosmic inner-workings to imagine a new sonic universe.
6. Vlad Dobrovolski Natursymphony No.3-Vibrant Matter (Klammklang)
The Russian sound artist Vlad Dobrovolski’s Natursymphony No.3– Vibrant Matter LP came out this past June via Klammklang. The follow-up to the artist’s brilliant 2019 cassette for the label, Non-deterministic Polynomial Poems, a conceptually themed outing that brought poetry’s “unprovable truths” to bear on mathematics linear logic, Dobrovolski’s newest effort was an equally whimsical electro-acoustic adventure into the living, breathing world of sound.
The fact that Natursymphony’s 1 and 2 do not yet exist shouldn’t provide a hurdle in enjoying this journey backward and forwards into a time when ceremony, hand-forged instruments, and acoustic detail yield(ed) an organic microcosm of sound capable of transporting a listener to the far reaches of the imagination. Having spent formative creative time in Japan during the aughts, Dobrovolski’s improvised, electro-acoustic approach is influenced by traditional Okinawa island music. Additionally, it looks back to when the rhythms of nature prevailed over the deadening drone of commerce. The artist explains:
“Mentally impotent, like indolent bubbles of protein inflated with information we wander in between football stars, face-polished social media simulacra and status-dependent robots of everydayness. I look back to the world we lost with regret and melancholy. It was the world where farms were full of life and their barns weren’t empty; where the forests were still here, not destroyed. Of course the social situation wasn’t the best, our ancestors were no angels wearing human clothes. But there were things we keep forgetting: nearness between people, the joy of small things and incidents, a common knowledge that human being is a ‘dust thou art,’ and so shall it remain no matter how much we shout and rummage into the planet surface. While working on this album, I wanted to grasp and bring some of these special things I remember since I was a kid.“
7. Electric Indigo Ferrum (Editions Mego)
Electric Indigo released her sophomore LP Ferrum on March 13th via Editions Mego. The project of electronic musician, composer, and Female:Pressure founder Susanne Kirchmayr, she is a longstanding veteran of the European electronic music scene, having worked as a DJ since 1990 in famed clubs like Tresor (Berlin), E-Werk (Berlin), and Flex (Vienna). In 1998, she formed Female:Pressure as a platform for an international network of female, transgender, and non-binary artists working in electronic music and the digital arts.
While Electric Indigo has released several EPs and split-12″s since the early 90s, Ferrum is only her second full-length. Following up on 2018’s 5 1 1 5 9 3 on Imbalance Computer Music, the artist’s 2020 effort was an exploration of the “spectral richness of iron and other metals.” Using processed recordings of said material, Kirchmayr’s brilliantly minimal arrangements explore her sound source’s micro-tonal intricacies. The results are incredibly intimate and sensual as she lets percussive barrages of sound slowly melt into sub-atomic oscillations and the hum of negative space.
8. Samuel Rohrer Continual Decentering (Arjunamusic Records)
Samuel Rohrer released his solo LP Continual Decentering in February via the Swiss drummer’s Arjunamusic label. Known for his improvisational approach and work in free jazz circles, Rohrer has collaborated with a host of jazz-oriented musicians like Daniel Erdmann, Vincent Courtois, Frank Möbus, Claudio Puntin, and Achim Kaufmann, to name a few.
Additionally, Rohrer is known for a genre-defying approach to the drum kit, using it to trigger various modular synthesizer processes to create music that combines jazz stylings with various electronic tropes. Continual Decentering was recorded between November 2017-June 2019, and it finds Rohrer exploring his unique drum set-up with “mostly real-time (live) performed explorations.”
9. Kris Force Cascade (Silent Records)
Kris Force (Amber Asylum) is an electroacoustic composer, performer, and visual artist working out of the San Francisco Bay area. This April, she released an amazing set of long-form drone compositions dedicated to the mountains of the Pacific Northwest entitled Cascade (Silent Records). Recorded in 2019, the album’s six tracks were composed using custom software synthesis.
While the instrumentalist/vocalist has followed various experimental approaches to music and sound-making through her career, Cascade chooses a minimalist approach of focused tone to create this hushed but monumental effort. Like the album’s Three Sisters, a trio of volcanic peaks in Oregon, Force’s “devotional drones” have the power to stop the mind in its tracks.
Cascade is sound essentialized to its most potent and primal form. If music stokes and vibrates our most profound emotions as a way of bringing them to our attention for potential release, Force’s tonal approach demonstrates the power of sound to integrate being at the highest levels. Like standing on a mountain peak in the crystalline atmosphere above the passing clouds below, listening to Cascade, the everyday drama of life seems to drop away as the deep abiding power of the mountain and rarified air tune one’s Awareness to its Infinite Source.
10. Sylvain Chauveau Life Without Machines (flau)
French post-classical composer Sylvain Chauveau is readying his Life Without Machines LP for release on April 17th via the Japanese label flau. Using Barnett Newman’s masterwork painting series Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani as a visual score, Chauveau echos that stark collection of fourteen black and white paintings with an equal number of essentialized compositions for piano and electronics.
Newman’s Station paintings are so large in scale that they cannot be viewed all at once. Similarly, the composer takes inspiration from the stone garden of Ryoanji in Kyoto, where there are fifteen rock formations, but from any point of view, one can only see a maximum of fourteen at the same time. Likewise, Life Without Machines is comprised of fifteen pieces, but one track is “hidden” and unlisted.
Chauveau’s compositions are performed by the French pianist Melaine Dalibert. Emphasizing the moment and act of listening through a slowed approach, each short piece on the record shines with a stunningly emotive clarity–even as the collection’s title points to a more ominous imperative. Life Without Machines asks us to consider just that. There is no aspect of our material lives not touched by technology, and our reliance on machines has become total. But Chauveau ponders what if, out of economic or ecological necessity, whether it be our chosen path or the result of a catastrophe, humans had to exist without them…
