Texas-based composer and sound designer Mike Vernusky has been collecting sounds and field recordings from all around the world for decades and, when inspiration strikes, he collages, composes, and re-composes those found sounds and intertwines them with his pen and whatever electronic devices he happens to be using. The results are often erring on the side of experimental-ambient, and sometimes contemporary classical even, but his latest release assumes a much darker, more ritualistic, meditative, zen-like, and somber aura, in part thanks to the combination of eerie choir voices that organically counterpoint the coldness of the analog synths he uses. Specifically, Vernusky used an array of rare vintage synthesizers (Buchla, EMS Synthi AKS, Macbeth, Moog, and the even more rare Suiko) as well as the processed voices of the Early Music Project of Texas choir and his own, plus some hard-to-identify auxiliary percussion by Vernusky's wife Carolyn Trowbridge.
Inspired and empowered by his visits to Japan (where he was awarded the Grand Prize in Music at the Digital Art Awards by Keio University), his latest release "Colorwave" comes out on the Japanese label NEUS-318 (whose owner/founder Ishigami Kazuya is credited as executive producer) and is available as a streaming/download and as a limited edition cassette, both of which you can buy directly from Bandcamp. The release is only comprised of two tracks but they span a total length of 25+ minutes and will take you through a thoroughly enjoyable dimly lit voyage into the darker side of Vernusky's production.

Mike Vernusky is an Austin-based composer and electronic musician who, in addition to residencies all around the world, has released almost a dozen albums (mostly on his label Quiet Design). His latest one is the "Aatma" vinyl, out on the Paris-based label Ferns Recordings. Also subtitled "Textures of Mumbai", "Aatma" is the result of a trip the composer took to the Indian megalopolis of Mumbai, where he collected hours of field recordings with a Nagra SD recorder, he searched through scores of records in local boutique vinyl shops, he listened to and researched Bollywood soundtracks and then collaged and intersected all of the above in these 44 minutes of atmospheric soundscapes. What is most striking to me, is that even though Mumbai is said to be one of the loudest cities in the world (with sound levels in excess of 100dBs), "Aatma" is actually a very calm and eerie voyage of sounds. There are the occasional traffic noises, car honking, and engine revving that anyone who's ever been to India knows well, and there are Bollywood sound bits, the ambiance chatter of the streets, the prayer chants in the distance, but there are also distant fog horns and sounds of water that reminded me of my own trip through river-banked Indian cities like Varanasi and ethereal shimmery textures that make you feel like you are in a Buddhist temple in the Himalayas... The chaotic frenzy is swiftly absorbed by the near-placid forward motion of time and of and the ebb and flows of space, imbued with the visions of peace and infused with the smells of incense. Anyone who's ever been to India knows that it's the land of stark contrasts: unfathomable poverty next to unimaginable wealth, and yet everyone seems to be happy and at peace and this album, in a way, portrays that sense of inner peace to pay tribute to the wonderful people of India. The whole record is sort of an Indian harmonium: it breathes in the surrounding air and gifts you a sense of calmness through the sound of India, in a slow wave-like motion, to remind you of the tide of life and the essence of happiness.

Italian composer/producer Teho Teardo (founder of Meathead and the composing half of the Teho Teardo / Blixa Bargeld duo that has gifted us 4 beautiful records so far) just released his latest solo album "Ellipses Dans L'Harmonie", which is a homage to the 1751 Enlightenment Manifesto "L’Encyclopédie" by Diderot & D’Alembert. The story goes that Teho discovered the many volumes of this encyclopedia at the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan (Feltrinelli is known mostly in Italy as one of the biggest book publishers, but its Foundation also hosts an impressive catalogue of antique books dating back centuries) and that he randomly picked up one of the volumes which included a number of scores that exemplify how to work with musical elements such as counterpoint, cadence, harmony and so on and so forth. This long forgotten book served as the inspiration to write new music around the audible archive of lost memories that Teardo recorded at the Villa Manin Passariano (near Udine) and the Fondazione Pietá de Turchini in Naples in 2018 with a slew of talented classically trained musicians from Italy plus a special appearance by cellist Erik Friedlander (with whom Teardo made an album in 2006 inspired by poet Pasolini).

The music in the 10 tracks that make up this beautiful album is dense with subtle arrangments that weave the memory of the unknown and reference the holism of those books that most of us have never seen. If you know Teho's albums with Einsurzende Neubauten's singer Blixa Bargeld you'll recognize his style in writing great string arrangements (like the slow and voluptuous glissandos of "Chant Primitif" or the imposing staggered harmonized pizzicatos of "Systehme de Mr Kirnberger" with its ambiguously looped harpsichord), but this album goes way beyond that and strides along post middle ages classical music, ensemble chamber music as well as a certain "new music" aesthetics (listen to the flute lines in "Césures Rélatives" with its beautiful billowing bass clarinet tones).

The opener "Cadence Féminine" quickly develops from a treated percussive piano and strings dance that almost reminded me Anthony Pateras' Tetema project (with Patton) into a full blown electro-industrial thumper that immediately sets the tone for the album and at once reminds you of who Teardo is, what he does, and the entire sonic palette he's capable to conjure.
But, after the first i'm-here-and-i-mean-business opening track, the album takes a quieter turn, a much more chamber-like dimension that feels very organic and acoustic, and at times is even almost completely devoid of electronic-sounding timbres (except for sonic treatments applied in post). It's almost as if throughout the album Teho slowly peels away more layers to reveal a more minimalistic nature, maybe in an attempt to get to the very core of the writings of this book, focusing more and more on its true essence, letting the juicy marbling fat that we all love slowly drip away to reveal the bones that symbolize the historical and political age of this publication, all the way to the final melancholic reveal...

The orchestral closing title track's somber crescendo/decrescendo swells remind of a similarly moving "Kol Nidre" composition by John Zorn and of some apocalyptic Jóhann Jóhannsson film scores... It almost acts as a reminder of how the inspiration for this album was conjured out of dust and darkness and in doing so is returned to the fog of historical memory, almost with a sense of abandonment and resignation, maybe as to remind ourselves of the age of darkness and obscurantism that the book in question tried to fight, but that three centuries later, we are still grappling with...

Tetema is the cross-continental duo project by American composer/singer extraordinaire Mike Patton and Australian composer/pianist Anthony Pateras.
Patton needs no introduction, he's simply the the most amazing, transformational, eclectic and creative singer alive. Anthony Pateras is a composer and ground breaking pianist whose interest in analog synthesis and tape loops have sparked this collaboration into life.
Their last album "Geocidal" came out 5 years ago and this time they are actually joined by violinist Erkki Veltheim and drummer WIll Guthrie, effectively turning the project into a quartet.
The 13 tracks present their most stretched out visionary sonic voyeurism yet, a true kaleidoscope of influences, ideas and cross-cultural collision. Where on their previous record the piano (and all the sounds generated with/by it) where the fabric upon which Mike could weave his vocal acrobatics, on "Necroscape" the harmonic content gets a lot more intangible, like a bubbling magma of organic soundscapes ("Invertebrate", "Sun Undone", and the Morricone tribute "Funerale di un Contadino"), while the physicality comes in the form of a greater rhythmical dexterity and more defined pulse ("Wait Till Mornin", the Neubauten-ish "All Signs Uncensored", "Dead Still", "We'll Talk Inside A Dream") and aggression ("Cutlass Eye", the Geocidal-ish "Haunted On The Uptake", "Soliloquy" with its micrtonal buchla).
This broadness of approaches offers Patton an even greater field of action, so much so that you can hear him sing, scream, beat box, throat-sing, whisper and creepily lullaby you just like he starts off with in the opening title track.
Anything Patton touches is pretty much gold, so the question here is not whether it's good or whether it's gold, but what is built around the gold and with all that gold when 3 other creative people add fuel to an already highly combustible fire! I think you know the answer!

Randall Dunn is a fantastic producer, best known for his work with Sunn O))), Anna Von Hausswolf, Tim Hecker and many others. This is his debut as a solo artist and, as you can imagine, it comes loaded with years of his experience as a producer and as a connoisseur of all things analog and all things synth. Reading the credits of the album is like reading the history of analog synthesis (PPG Wave, Minimoog, Elka, Arp QUadra, Juno 60, Ems Synthi 100, OB8, OBX, Buchla, Roland system 700 etc), something Randall went looking for, exploring and recording all over the world, like in the South Tirol area of Italy bordering with Austria, in El Paso Texas and Brooklyn New York, where Randall lives and where his record label Figure Eight has the Figure8 recording studio owned and operated by label founder Shahzad Ismaily (who also played some bass on this record).

The seven cuts on the vinyl are dark and atmospheric, droney and melodic, melancholic and anguished, perfect for fans of Vangelis and Johann Johannsson. I can't help to think that it also reminds me (especially tracks like "Mexico City") of the latest BladeRunner soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch (which coincidentally was initially going to be done by Johannsson, and that Dunn was working on himself).

Some of my favorite cuts are the ones where organic old school synths are joined in by acoustic instruments, such as cello and bass clarinet (like in the fantastic "Lava Rock & Amber", where Jeremiah Cymerman plays the reeds and Will Smith plays the cello), although such pairings of instruments happen on almost every one of the songs on the record. There are almost no beats in the whole record, except for a subtle electronic heart beat in "Something About That Night" (which also features vocals by Frank Fisher of Algiers) and a pulsating EMU Emulator pattern in "A True Home" (featuring guests vocalist Zola Jesus). Other notable players are Eyvind Kang on viola, John McCowen on contrabass clarinet, Justin Morris on flanger boss, Ulfur Hansson on guitar and Buchla and Timm Mason on various synths.

Although you can listen to this record on Bandcamp, I would highly recommend getting the 180 gram vinyl album, which, other than obviously sounding better than digital, also features photography by Lauren Rodriguez and Una Blue, cover art work design by Stephen O'Malley of Sunn O))) and a zen poem by Gesshu Soko which he wrote close to death and became the lyrics that Frank Fisher sings.