Boomkat – new SONIC YOUTH, LITTLE SKULL, JAMES BLAKE, etc

*Vinyl edition includes two tracks not on the CD version* James Blake’s eponymous debut is probably the most discussed album of the last 6 months, and set to be among the best of the next 12. It’s kinda hard to comprehend his metamorphosis from electro-acoustic dubstep outsider in 2009 to urban blues hero in 2011, but one thing has become clearly apparent: this is one artist with a consistently arresting musical vision. He’s been compared to Jamie Woon, but for our money Blake’s sound is light years ahead in so many respects. His awareness of ultra-modern R&B, dubstep and electronica production techniques, coupled with a sensitivity for stunning spatial detailing and a feel for purposefully, potently skewed melodies and jarring harmonics marks him out as a singular talent. We’d make a comparison between their vocals, but even that doesn’t stretch very far! And it’s really those vocals which elevate this album beyond his earlier 12″s, now fully revealed from the tenderised, jigsaw-like snippets which peppered the likes of ‘The Bells Sketch’ and some of Mount Kimbie’s best moments. He studied music at Goldsmith’s so man obviously knows his chops, but his openness to autotune and other vocal trickery on the melted blues of opener ‘Unluck’, the ultra subtle stereo fluctuations in ‘The Wilhelm Scream’ or heavily applied in ‘Lindisfarne I & II’ are so unconventional with a voice like his but deployed so deftly that we can see this becoming the standard for kids beyond the reaches of R&B/Dancehall very soon, if he’s not already set the change in motion. All of that said, the unadorned piano and vocals of ‘Give Me My Mouth’ stands out a mile, reiterating his talent in sharp relief.

*Initial copies come on super-limited transparent yellow vinyl – mastered by Lawrence English and cut at D&M in Berlin* Sanso-Xtro’s long awaited follow-up to her 2005 debut for Type finally arrives, and sees an amazing development of sound. It’s a gentle, fragile collection of songs and instrumentals that remind us at one moment of Talk Talk, at others of old Alan Lomax recordings, with Gamelan and Kosmische experiments dropped in-between the gaps. In the time that has passed since ‘Sentimentalist’ Melissa Agate removed herself from the UK to South Australia near Adelaide. Living in relative “hibernation” gives some explanation to the more intimate and sublime new sound she’s put together, revealing sugared and reduced glosolalia applied to an array of synths, accordion, melodion, kalimba, guitar and custom-made percussion contraptions which fold into her exquisite and fragile blend of Kosmische, electronica and avant-pop. With ‘Fountain Fountain Joyous Mountain’ she builds on the ideas of her first record with ornate detailing and a blissfully attuned sense of arrangement, making her multi-dimensional songs seem playfully effortless. After catching us by the hairs of the neck with hypnotic, alien gamelan tones in ‘Fountain Fountain’ her layered vocal unexpectedly closes the track with a blissful flourish. Following this, her background as a drummer soon becomes evident in the tingling percussion of ‘The Origin Of Birds’ coupled with daubs of dizzying melody, which, in its fragile balance of microcosmic chaos refracts into the natural world themes of ‘Wood Owl Wings A Rush, Rush’ and the album’s literal and figurative centrepoint ‘Hello Night Crow’ where her vocals make another poignant intimation. Like all good things, Agate uses her voice sparingly – they don’t return until the album’s closing strokes after the refracted Jazz tumble of ‘Goodnight Thylacine’ and the suspenseful acoustic guitar piece ‘Light Come, Light Go, Ghost’. When ‘Exit: Joyous Mountain’ arrives it feel like an old Alan Lomax gem dug up from a creek bed, wheezing melodica/harmonica in systolic synchronization with tantalising vox.

Isolée albums only show up rarely, and Rajko Müller’s third set, ‘Well Spent Youth’ is an absolute peach. He’s been honing his silky-yet-abstract sound for over 15 years, delivering unquestionably definitive albums such as ‘Rest’ and ‘We Are Monster’ along the way whilst never straying from what makes his music so involving and subtly memorable – an otherworldly, organically soulful integrity and exceptional production values. These two factors have elevated his releases, especially the long players, above the dancefloor into the home listening quarters, sculpting tracks whose ambiguous shapes and richly nuanced colour takes on new forms according to set and setting. Of course, they’re all open to interpretation, but the cleverness of Isolée’s compositions infects any environment they’re deployed in with a queerly immersive joy which lends itself perfectly to cosy sofa sessions and heads-down dancefloors equally. There’s a genuine magic in the way he draws the listener into his hushed House grooves and then proceeds to envelope us in morphing patterns and wonderfully skewed melodies with that indescribable Isolée vibe. From initial listens the frayed chords of ‘Thirteen Times An Hour’, ‘Hold On’s padded acidic quirks, the rhythmic intricacies of ‘One Box’ and the jazz-taught ‘Celeste’ are all potential club killers in the right hands, whilst the loping dérive of ‘Going Nowhere’ and breathtaking closer ‘In Our Country’ provide pure aural catharsis for discerning electronic music lovers. Highly Recommended.

*Vinyl-only edition, comes with a bonus full length album/mix on CD* Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre’s Jazkamer troupe are among the most respected and prolific members of the infamous Norwegian noise/metal scene. They love making a f**king good racket. During 2010 they undertook an ambitious project to release an album of new material every month for 12 months via a subscription service. ‘Chestnut Thornback Tar’ was originally the May edition but the fiends at Type just had to own it on vinyl, hence this wax-only pressing including a bonus mix CD reducing the series to 75 minutes of absolutely deadly and mind-bending visceral noise collisions. The album is dominated by the 20-minute molten suffusion of ‘Sentimental Journey’, a wading-through-mollasses sprawl of sustained tones and howling-into-the-wind white noise bearing no small debt to Dylan Carlson’s Earth (it’s a bit of a giveaway that Lasse wears an ‘Earth 2’ t-shirt on the rear sleeve image!) and conducted with an almost Zen-like attention to detail. However, the rest of the LP takes a very different shape, joined by collaborators Nils Are Drønen and Jean-Phillipe Gross to crush out another side of overdriven avant-metal dementia with splattercore drums seething under banks of petrifying noise worthy of Whitehouse at their most fearsome. Yet, the most impressive thing here is probably the CD, forcing 12 months of multi-disciplinary noises to co-exist in dissonant harmony – making for one of the most visceral and exciting mixtapes you’ll hear this year. Ear-meltingly heavy sh*t, for the brave!

**Double gatefold, tip-on style jacket with sleeve notes** Sublime Frequencies peer through the brief window of Pakistani folk and pop produced between 1966-76 on their latest expedition. The album’s compiler, Stuart Ellis trawled the EMI Pakistan archives to pluck out 22 joyfully charming and unique fusions of “filmi”, folk and pop music with electrified instrumentation which was new to the region in 1966. To put this music in context we need to consider that prior to ’66 Pakistan was subject to a restrictive decade-long dictatorship under Field Marshal Ayub Khan, He was succeeded for ten years by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Socialist Pakistan Peoples Party during which time American and English pop covers became popular in the Karachi nightlife, spawning a generation of bands with names like The Mods, The Bugs, The Fore Thoughts and The Abstracts, all of whom appear here playing a mixture of Surf and psyche-tinged rock with predominant traces of traditional folk and popular film music. This revolution ended when Sharia law was imposed under Military Chief General Zia-ul-Haq in June 1977, and so with it the end of Pakistan’s “Swinging ’70s”. Thankfully we still have this record of the period which should be recommended to anyone who nabbed the Tafo Brothers or Sound of Wonder issues on Finder Keepers or with a passion for truly niche ’70s pop.

*Beautiful clear vinyl edition, limited to 280 copies and individually numbered* The ninth release from Giuseppe Ielasi’s Senufo Editions features Gregg Kowalsky’s captivating performance consisting of 10 cassette players positioned inside the bunker of Battery Townsley, a World War II coastal fortification in Marin County, California. Ielasi also contributes a ‘Studio Mix’ afterthought on the other side, but the real star of this LP is Kowalsky’s séance-like drones and spatial disturbances, beautifully recorded by Marielle Jakobsons. Using the natural (well, man-made) resonance of the bunker we get a real sense of swirling space as Raga-like drones mingle in the ether and glance off cold concrete whilst shuffling, scuttling rodent sounds emerge from the peripheries, drawing the ear in any one of ten directions at once. In stark comparison, Giuseppe Ielasi’s studio mix tempers the psychedelic mass of sound into one long viscous drone, pulsing and radiating waves of slow moving energy which explore the full parameters of their sphere, like some dreamy reminiscence of the original event. This is a beautiful album, especially when coupled with the sleeve artwork from Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Clear vinyl, limited edition of 280.

*Sublime fold-out diorama packaging with pop-up ballerina, limited to 150 copies* This eponymous entry of haunted ballroom folk from Little Skull on the acclaimed Elica label is the first that’s crossed our radar. From the little info we can glean, Little Skull (sometimes known as L’il Skull) has released a handful of privately pressed lathe cut vinyl with similarly sublime packaging and a couple CD’s for Students Of Decay, which we’re quite sure you’ll be rabidly tracking down after experiencing this one. There’s absolutely no external reference points other than the label info, which really ratchets up the mystery behind their evocative aesthetic, making us wonder what instrumentation and methods lies behind the veil of secrecy. It’s possible to discern guitars, possibly a violin, hand-percussion and some beautiful organ drones, but the rest is anyone’s guess, really. Most importantly the arrangements are singular yet paint a wide spectrum of emotions and atmospheres touching upon Barn Owl-like doom drone, dilapidated midnight ballroom ambience worthy of The Caretaker and creaking folk from the backwaters of the imagination. A truly endearing release, act fast if you’d like one.

My word, where to start with this total head-f*ck of a record? Well, first off, it’s another mind-expanding, previously unpublished jaw-dropper dug out by alga marghen, presenting ‘Granny Awards’ from the archives of the acclaimed French sound artist, Ghédalia Tazartès. The label are really spoiling us with their releases of late, this in particular being one of our very favourites. Verging on out-and-out craziness, but reigned-in with a masterfully steady head, these six tracks were created some time in the early ’80s “in his anhydridic Paris”, largely based on materials pre-dating his debut LP ‘Diasporas’ before he re-appropriated them for this lost work of art. We’re instantly mesmerized by the opening track ‘Ferme ta gueule, zarathustra’, Ghédalia freely connecting the garbled “voix d’enfant” of Raphaël Glucksmann with intoxicating, slow moving and sustained synth chords, before jump-cutting into bird calls, dissonant arabesque strings and eccentric vocalisations with a blinding sense of freedom. The second side opens to a comedic, exuberant vocal set to crackly 78 backing on ‘Whatever’ and turns blind corners into ethno-noise trance-outs on ‘Singing’, hyper-rhythmic experiments on ‘Wild’ and a jarring hardcore punk-out in ‘My Rock Ghedalia’. The freedom of expression and taste for exotic, arabesque tonalities is a mighty revelation and we assure you we’ll be digging much deeper into Ghédalia’s catalogue at the nearest opportunity. Exceptional sounds, massively recommended!!!

**Includes free MP3 download card and bonus track download redeemable from the label** It’s always cause for excitement when a new SYR record hits the shelves. Admittedly I’m a paid-up member of the Sonic Youth can do no wrong club, but I do appreciate that historically the SYR series is where we find the band at their most arresting. ‘Simon Werner A Disparu’ is the ninth in the series and finds the band again tackling a soundtrack, with the instrumental shimmer that blessed their ‘Made In USA’ OST recording (and the lesser known ‘Demon Lover’ OST) haunting proceedings. This is, from the first few notes, the Sonic Youth we know and love, all distant, expertly pieced together and as hazy as the summer you spent eating ice creams with that girl down the road when you were both nine years old. The band certainly aren’t doing anything new here, but for those of you unimpressed by the near sing-along charms of ‘The Eternal’ they should find more than enough wonky off-centre business here to keep them happy until the next SYR instalment. ‘Simon Werner A Disparu’ is soundtrack music as produced by a band who are totally comfortable both with their sound and with the subject matter. What more can I say? Unmissable stuff.

Stephan Mathieu presents his long awaited new album, this time for 12k. Accompanying the ‘Remain’ album for Line, also out this week, ‘A Static Place’ more or less defines the phrase “travelling without moving” in sublime style, placing the listener at the epicentre of a deeply affecting electro-acoustic soundscape. To paint this vivid imagery Stephan plays ancient 78rpm recordings of music fromt he late Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque era through two mechanical acoustic HMV Model 102 gramophones and records their output with a pair of customized mics. These sounds are then transformed into the blissed aural catharsis you hear through spectral analysis and convolution processes. To the untrained ear the academic stuff is just that, while the music is simply of the most arresting, awe-inspiring nature, similar in some respects to the work of Philip Jeck or the Caretaker but with an intensely detailed adroitness that’s unmistakably Mathieu. Essentially we’re listening to the resonance of archaic instruments played long time ago, structured into esoteric shapes and gaseous forms the likes of which their original creators could barely fathom, but would still recognise as the beautifully alien sounds they are. Highly Recommended.

*Packaged in a 26cm x 40cm, gold-foil numbered limited edition of 1000 copies, full colour fold out poster portraying the musician, the work of local artist Hatem Imam, with liner notes in both Arabic and English* “The Bishop brothers continue to dig into the Girls’ archives from before Charles Gocher’s tragic disappearance in 2007. In this new offering they revisit North African songs from Morocco to the Mid-East and beyond, interpreting them with their own distinctive style. All tracks on this CD are cover songs from Sun City Girl’s repertoire, several frequently performed by the group live for more than 20 years. Several cuts were inspired by found unmarked cassettes and radio recordings made in Egypt and Morocco by Alan Bishop in the early 1980’s. The original song titles and composers of the radio-inspired arrangements are unknown. SCG created their own song titles and rearranged the music, at times radically, to fit their vision. The rest of the tracks are by various artists from the Middle East and North Africa. One track, “Wild World of Animals” is an African piece written for the theme of an American television show by the same name from the 1970s.”

Following their sumptuous Eliane Radigue edition last month, Alga Marghen presents a remarkable artifact of the French 1970s avant-garde, available on vinyl (or any other format) for the first time! ‘Occupé’ is an effective analog to Jac Berrocal’s cult ‘Paralleles’ LP of free jazz from the same year, 1977, but was mysteriously shelved making this a genuine lost jewel of the French underground. In close collaboration with Potage, the label have conceived a new layout for the LP with original photos of the recording session and and eight-page booklet with further photos and lyrics (in French, naturally), bringing to life an indescribably unique and fascinating session of musique concrète and free jazz, or simply experimental avant-garde, covering exhilarating vocal techniques, calamitous, exotic, screeching instrumentation, passages recorded in a car (Matthew Herbert, you’ve been sprung) and consistent, urgent narrative from multiple voices. Under the command of Potage’s cryptic, magic vision, the illustrious ten-person line-up includes the pioneering Jac Berrocal (trumpet, valve trombone, Tibetan oboe, percussions), Pierre Bastian (bass, Tibetan reed instruments, trumpet, voice), the father of French free jazz Bernard Vitet (bugle, trumpet, reed instruments, violin, voice), Roger Ferlet (trumpet, slide trombone, voice), Claude Parle (accordion, reed instruments, voice), Françoise Achard (voice, chant, Lao mouth organ, balano, rainstick), the legendary producer and sound engineer Daniel Deshays (voice), poet Jean-Marie Gibbal (voice) and notably a Ford Break (engine, speed, brakes, light etc.) “Michel Potage was co-founder with Berrocal of the d’Advantage label in 1976, he played in the first Catalogue band (with Jac Berrocal and Jean-Françoise Pauvros), a performer close to Julian Beck’s Living Theatre on one side and to James Chance’s no-wave Contortions on the other, musique concrète avant-gardist and poet of destroyed lyricism… The sound was restored from the original masters by Daniel Deshays. Edition limited to 385 copies…” Highly recommended!

**Includes fold-out poster** Killer and diverse four-tracker from Señor Bashmore, the first for new London label, PMR Records. Most notably Julio diverts his energies into two new areas with the cannily dubbed-out disco triplets of ‘Everyone Needs A Theme Tune’ and even a slouchy future boogie cruise on ‘The Horn That Time Forgot’. Back in more familiar terrain, ‘Battle For Middle You’ infuses a DirtyBird style deep burner with a sweetly filtered Detroit drop and ‘Ask Yourself’ floats off on a bed of 808 bass hits and breezy tropical synth pads. Very nice indeed.

Tin Man releases are seriously prized possessions around these parts. His first release since the ace ‘Scared’ LP on White Denim features a pair of superb instrumental acid numbers backed with an outstanding remix by Donato Dozzy. ‘Nonneo’ is very much in the vein of his earlier releases for Global A and Keys Of Life, masterfully enveloping exotic House drums with rubbed and teased acid melodies in distinguished fashion. ‘Accumulated Acid’ is perhaps closer to his more recent experiments, a slow and craftily half-stepped acid progression with clinical production values. the master of Italian sleep-techno, Donato Dozzy, gives an anaesthetised remix of ‘Nonneo’ on the flip, numbing the drums for a more reserved, hypnotic and druggy effect. Hand-stenciled sleeve includes free download code redeemable from the label. Killer.

Jacked-off acid secretions from Ital aka Sex Worker – the 2nd release from NNF’s new 100% Silk label! Like some more frazzled cousin to the whole IDIB sound, Ital’s theme tune models itself on that misty mid-’80s period when disco was becoming House and everyone had massive, acid-fuelled gangbangs in clouds of amyl nitrate. Or so they said. Only, like those memories this tune has been warped to suit the makers own make-believe world and sounds all the better for it. The hypnotic ‘Queens’ is our joint, a glassy-eyed marimba and conga copulation with increasingly darker dub FX, and then there’s the soundtrack to Steve Reich’s kinky night out that he thought nobody knew about in ‘One Hit’. Awesome.

100% Silk is the brand new, hugely promising sister label to underground heroes Not Not Fun. Adopting a cooler, sexier stance than its older brother, the label looks intent on making you dance to deliciously psyched beats – the first coming from Tornoto’s The Deeep. ‘Muddy Tracks’ is taken from their recent ‘Life Light’ cassette and features lead singer Isla Craig drifting like a barefoot Beth Gibbons over crumpled machines rhythms straight from the LA Vampires handbook. Over the course of these ten minutes it’s not quite clear whether to sit crosslegged and meditate, or levitate in the middle of the dancefloor, but either way it’s a good feeling. Fellow Toronto resident Brandon Hocura’s Grand Am Version dubs the vocals into a simmering silicon soup full of chirruping, glistening synths and a killer cowbell line right out of a Southport weekender circa 1987, kinda like Greg Wilson on mescaline, not ecstacy, while Guy Dallas does some trippy but tongue-in-cheek ethno acid rub from the deeepest recesses of the chill out room. Killer.