Mi Cosa de Resistance, Home Diaries 001 (Whitelabrecs)
May has been an overwhelming month. With each passing day, I become more and more convinced of the end of the world. Oh, and there’s way more music coming out than I can keep up with. I haven’t explored many quarantine-incubated releases, though. For one, their scope often intimidates me. There’s Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington’s Bulbils project, under which they’ve released a whopping 39 albums (at the time of writing) over the past two months; and UK label Whitelabrecs has so far put out 15 volumes of a series entitled Home Diaries, each comprising a different musician’s lockdown reflections.
Of course, individual artists and groups have each contributed a small piece to the polylithic mass of new music, COVID-inspired and more. LPs, EPs, singles, and comps of material both familiar and unheard have flooded our sphere. Bandcamp waived its revenue share on March 20 and May 1, leading to record sales, and will do so again in June and July; thanks to this, we’ve already been hit with two massive waves of independent releases in the recent months.
On top of all that… it’s May. Lots of stuff comin’ out, anyway.
Much of the music made in quarantine that’s come my way is improvisatory, in some capacity or another. That’s to be expected, I suppose: artists are variously trying to capture and/or exorcise the present moment, and what is improvisation born of if not the moment? As I slowly field this bottomless ocean of extemporaneous ritual, I’ve been thinking about music as product vs. process. It’s an old distinction, and while it’s not quite a thing, it’s a decent point to jump off from. Why such emphasis these days on the act, ritual, process, etc. of creating, rather than a polished end product?
While listening to Ashley Paul’s Window Flower, a short release recorded impromptu at home with her partner and young daughter, I felt that I was listening to something both utterly life-affirming and readily disposable. I’ve only recently realized that the latter, instead of belying the former, actually informs it. Improvised music calls attention to its own transience, reminds us that things begin, exist, then end. Procedure invokes music’s intrinsic temporal dimension: this, too, shall pass. When we improvise, we act out the passage of time, the ultimate temporariness of quarantine, rather than submit ourselves to it passively. Good improv lets you experience this vicariously, enables you to realize (as in “make real”) sounds as they unfold.
In my blurb on Yungster Jack & David Shawty’s “GREEN,” I talked about how art in conventional media often has a difficult time representing the digital landscape, given that doing so usually involves using some self-standing object to reflect the Internet, which isn’t thingly or contained so much as experiential and context-dependent. I think this illuminates how quarantine music, like so many other facets of life under COVID-19’s shadow, concretizes our digital infrastructure. Coronavirus affects us in countless small and huge ways, and they’re not all felt by everyone; to universalize Americans’ experiences is to ignore the virus’ varying presence as well as deep-rooted socioeconomic disparities. But even though people’s relationships with coronavirus can greatly differ, it’s nonetheless widely recognized as something that surrounds us, whose effects are delocalized and numerous. In other words, it’s not just a thing you can point to—it’s an experience, a contextual filter. Like Zoom calls, online shopping, livestreams, social distancing, interpersonal frictions, and day-to-day uncertainty, music made in self-isolation ends up a part of the experience of living right now, not just a reflection. Its omnipresent yet diverse manifestations belong to as well as portray the landscape; no single song or album achieves this on its own.
Now… where was I? Oh, right: it’s been a long month. It’s not quite over, though. In this issue, I’ll talk briefly about some releases from earlier in the year. The following aren’t all top favorites, but they’re all rather good and possibly worth others’ time. In the future, I hope to make a list like this every few weeks, except (a) it’ll cover more recent music, (b) there won’t be an essay preceding it (no promises, though).
more eaze & claire rousay, if I don’t let myself be happy now then when? (Mondoj)
If asked to succinctly describe the music Claire Rousay makes, I might record myself while sputtering onomatopoeic babble or write down a string of consonant clusters. Her approach toward percussive sound strongly suggests language. It evokes the intimacy of speech by way of its residual noises, made in the liminal passage between elocution and silence. I’m reminded of how guitar feedback captures the instrument’s soul in a way its pitch content alone never could.
Mari Maurice (a.k.a. More Eaze) isolates digital articulations and uses them to both translate and complement Rousay’s acoustic soundscaping. Sharp synths and faint auto-tuned vocals weave in and out of the mix, at times melding in, at others standing out. I don’t want to spoil too much, though—the title alone is an invitation from Maurice and Rousay to narrativize their compositions. You should give yourself a chance to do so, whether or not you take their paratext into account first.
Elysia Crampton, Selected Demos & DJ Edits [2007-2019] (self-released)
This compilation of drafts and edits defines the strengths of Elysia Crampton's work thus far. Her distinctive methodology, with its colorful discontinuities, collaborative spirit, and plunderphonically omnivorous appropriations, is the closest anyone's ever come to a folk practice of electronic music. Here, she takes that practice outside any and all bounds others have placed it in, letting it flow freely in all directions. By being one of her hardest records to define, it defines her better than any other. AOTY, as of now. Well, her new new album is just as good… if I’m ever drunk enough, I might even review it.
Shit Creek, The Land of the Remember (Crow Versus Crow)
The Bandcamp blurb for this album conceives it as “an attempt to forge an alternative” to the “debilitating [sociopolitical] structures of the contemporary UK.” Um, I guess? All I know is that when I listen to The Land of the Remember, I experience pure sonic bliss. It convinces me emotively of acousmatic ideology: Shit Creek (or Lewis Duffy, behind the mask) plays “violin, guitar, B.Toys Woofer, voice, cymbals, Yamaha PSS-190, tape loops & various pedals” here—i.e. all sorts of shit. But I don’t care what’s making these sounds; individual noises and tracks blend into each other like pastel colors smeared across the wall on a child’s whim. If I were to really lean into paratext, I could say that this aesthetic signifies a political ideal under which the harmony of the whole supersedes any concern with the origins of its constituents… That’s a bit sentimental, perhaps. But there might not be a better way to pierce the historical fantasies of those who inhabit the land of the remember.
hojascirculares, void of course (Aural Canyon)
Void. No matter how far you fall or how deep you go in, there’s no end—down or above, left or right. Of course… such a realm is no stranger; it surrounds us, follows us at all times. When you remove all the layers, it’s there: the primordial foundation on top of which everything rests. You, floating in the dark, immersed in the sublime density of nothing.
Animal Hospital, Fatigue (Whited Sepulchre)
It was a sunny afternoon; my bedroom window was open. I’d just put on Fatigue, and my thoughts began to wander. Suddenly, I was hit with a searing blast of guitar. Jolted out of my stupor, I looked at my speakers, then out the window. The raw resonance of that fading guitar chord mingled with birdsong from outside. For the next three minutes, everything felt right.
All four tracks on the LP are structurally minimal, changing only gradually over their duration. Each takes a different sound (pure tones, overdriven guitar, electroacoustic glitch, chugging feedback loops) as its sole seed of developmental material. But all are surprisingly moving—this is one of the most beautiful records I’ve heard all year.
Cloud Diameter, Cloud Diameter 2 (Submarine Broadcasting Company)
A lot of the beeps, boops, and other bits of digital synthesis on Cloud Diameter 2 seem to get cut short, or else restart as if to correct an error. It reminds me of those apps that translate real-time ambient data into psychedelic whorls of color or ripples overlapping in water. Rendering fluid phenomena like local vibrations or weather as data and then using that to generate similarly fluid simulacra is bound to be a process ridden with jank. But even so, the results can attain a beauty of their own, pristine and independent from the accuracy with which they reflect the natural world.
Ervin Omsk, Peilen (Orange Milk)
It appears that this LP on Orange Milk has been overlooked—perhaps because its sound lands so squarely within the OM vernacular, bearing a close likeness with the work of label co-founder Keith Rankin (a.k.a. Giant Claw). But while Ervin Omsk’s balance of pointillistic barrage and rhythmic stability evokes Giant Claw, Peilen isn’t as dramatic or impressionistic; its overall sonic palette also leans more heavily on the synthetic than the electroacoustic. However, its construction is just as thorough: each track here takes a single idea and comes at it from every possible angle, until it finishes back where it started.
BERU, Forgiveness Is Supernatural (self-released)
I keep coming back to this, and I’m not sure why. Listening to this is like reading a diary—not the kind, stumbled upon in fiction, that articulates the owner’s thoughts and feelings with literary acuity, but the real deal: unfiltered, disproportionate, and a total mess. Dreams half-transcribed are followed by lines scratched out; unbearably stark moments of tearful confession dissolve into muffled nebulae. Aphorisms and ramblings, ethereal lucidity and unintelligible noise… the only thing that ties it all together is a vast ambience, the celestial dream space in which everything takes place.
BERU recorded Forgiveness Is Supernatural six years ago, and has only now put it out in the world. I guess that explains why it sounds like something she found in the attic. I’ve tried to suss out what’s going on here a few times, but I feel like I’ve already held it for too long—it’s beginning to melt through my fingers.