Automata – Milhaven

There is something intuitive and natural about the music of Milhaven. It communicates that sense of effortless simplicity that few bands can really pull off, and which leaves listeners with the impression that one could just pick up a guitar, throw in some delay and write a Milhaven song. Of course, it’s not that easy by a long shot, and the consistency with which Milhaven has been delivering transcendentally emotive instrumental rock since 2005′s Bars Closing Down is testament to a powerful and deep aesthetic.

Clocking in at just over half an hour and available for free streaming or download from their Bandcamp site, Milhaven’s latest EP, Automata, is a mesmerizing set of melodic and hypnotically dark post rock. Kicking off with the epic DRZ, the band showcase their knack for crafting ear catching hooks as well as their willingness to stand aside and let the music speak for itself. Here, a melancholic melody evolves to its distortion heavy breaking point, which though expected is neither rushed nor too obvious. At 16 minutes and change, the tune develops with expert pacing while remaining continuously engaging throughout. Though only half as long, the companion pieces, Zombi and Automata, are still epic by pop standards and beautifully demonstrate that sense of pacing and thematic development that characterizes Milhaven’s songwriting. Zombi in particular builds to an evocative and touching climax that even after repeated listens continues to surprise and move me. All in all, this is an incisive and thought provoking release from a visionary band. Audiophiles may want to consider grabbing a copy of the limited vinyl edition.

Unless you live in Germany, Milhaven will not soon be on tour near you. That’s too bad, too, because I would enjoy seeing these songs and the band’s previous output interpreted in a live setting. However, as the netlabel scene evolves more and more towards commercial business models, Milhaven remain among the best of the bands who are still willing to make their music freely available. We can hope in the near future to see more of both their generosity and their genius.

The Immensity of Unstained Light – Language of Landscape

Last week I received a copy of this latest – and, sadly,  last – release from the Canadian duo Cory Zaradur and Chris Tenz, collectively known as Language of Landscape. I had previously reviewed their 2010 Phantom Channel release, Memories Fade Under a Shallow Autumn Snow, and was pleased to find that Immensity… contains all of the elements that made its predecessor so remarkable. This twenty minute longform piece is rich with delicate textures and plaintive piano phrases, with a notable undercurrent of emotional tension. Recorded as a live improvisation, Immensity…  is an extremely poignant and reflective piece of ambient minimalism that speaks to the deep talent and shared vision of its creators. I can only wish it were longer, and I especially hope that circumstances will find Cory and Chris producing music together again in the future.

I’ve tended in these reviews to try and say something about composition or craft or whatnot, but in the current case such observations just seem beside the point. Certainly there is ample craft here, yet as I’ve listened to the piece more and more over the past week what stands out most is the feeling of sublime entrancement conveyed by the music. It brings to mind those moments we’ve all experienced of watching some brief but beautiful event – sunsets, a storm in the desert, something you might have turned away from but didn’t. It sounds almost excessively sentimental or sappy when put into such terms, but this is exactly what makes this music so much more powerful than words. The Immensity of Unstained Light is poignant without being sappy, emotionally expansive without seeming forced. In short, this is a thoroughly satisfying piece of music that engages listeners on many levels while maintaining a sense of movement and attention to detail rarely encountered in improvised music.

Recently released through mini50Records and available for download from the label’s Bandcamp site, The Immensity of Unstained Light is an extremely rewarding listen, and one which I highly recommend to fans of light as well as dark ambient and post-rock.

New Release – Up From Here

I have a new darkish acoustic ambient release, out today on the Earth Mantra netlabel. The artwork is based on the image Clouds Over the Green Treetops, by flick artist cosmonautirussi, and has graciously been made available through the Creative Commons. Please visit cosmonautirussi’s flickr stream, and while you’re visiting Earth Mantra be sure to also check out the other recent releases. Earth Mantra has been putting out a lot of great stuff lately, and I am very glad to be counted among their roster of artists.

Please check it out, available for free download by following this link: Up From Here

Soy Dios – Dead Sea Apes

Soy Dios is a song-cycle EP released in December 2010 by Manchester, UK based trio Dead Sea Apes. Featuring Brett Savage on guitar, Nick Harris on bass and Chris Hardman on drums, Dead Sea Apes deliver a blend of psychedelic post rock that is both gritty and cerebral. The music on the EP is evocative – almost paranoia inducing – dropping straight away into a groove of pervasive tension that peaks at various points but which does not relent until the very end.

Comprised of three songs, or rather one song and two remixes, Soy Dios takes listeners on a minor drone trip overlaid with sparse guitar melodies and improvisation. The opening piece, Soy Dios I, builds with delicate timing upon gradually reworked guitar phrases. It plays like improv, but it’s hardly noodling free form. Here there’s a definite sense of direction and development – almost an imperative – driving the music forward before settling into an ear catching bass riff that propels the piece to its end. But “settling” may not be the best choice of words here, with the guitar work that follows providing one of the edgy highlights of the EP.

For me, the first remix, Soy Dios II, is the standout tune on the release. Having listened to the EP several times over the past few days, I’ve come to think of the whole as something of a delirium sequence. Hearing it this way, Soy Dios II comes across like the moment after you realize you took too much cough syrup, as objects in your immediate surroundings begin to loose definition and that linear sense of cause and effect is gone. The changes are similar but not the same as in part one, while frequent rhythm section “drop-outs” contribute to an overall loss of orientation. This is not to say there’s no sense to the music, as the drive and direction present in part one are still there. They just happen to be moving into a very dark place.

The final piece, Soy Dios III, is a drone. It’s a big drone, and it moves, building very nicely to another height of tension before tapering off to a satisfying ending that effectively caps off the tune as well as the EP itself. The loss of definition that began with part two is complete here, with bits and pieces of melody surfacing only occasionally to remind us of where this whole trip began.

All told, Soy Dios is a thoroughly rewarding release which not only holds up to repeated listens, but which in fact challenges listeners to come back for more. I read online that Dead Sea Apes are hard at work on their next EP – check out Soy Dios at Bandcamp and let’s hope that more music will be forthcoming soon.

Samhata – Lucette Bourdin and Darrell Burgan

Long before I was fortunate enough to release The Last Season through Earth Mantra, this excellent netlabel was one that I followed closely as a source of consistently inspiring ambient music. The output tends more toward light ambient, though other styles are well represented, and the roster includes many of the most prolific and talented artists that you will encounter in the contemporary ambient scene (mainstream or otherwise). Though I have never been a big consumer of light ambient music, the source of my aversion has typically been the musical inanity and shallow new age-ism adhering to those instrumental pop artists considered “ambient”  by commercial media. I never had any problem with the music in itself, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the day I first surfed the Earth Mantra web page was the day I rediscovered how uplifting and outright entertaining light ambient could be.

Allowing that you couldn’t go wrong with any Earth Mantra selection, some of the most outstanding releases overall are those created by Lucette Bourdin. Her compositions demonstrate true musical finesse and a genius for enveloping ear catching melodies within harmonically engaging, spacious and shifting ambiance. The prospect of her collaborating with Darrell Burgan (Palancar)  is a promising one – Darrell’s music has always been remarkable to me for it’s emotional range and an inviting sense of play that runs through even some of his darker pieces. Last week I discovered that some music they had co-produced would be featured in a StillStream podcast, and my hopes for a concurrent Earth Mantra release were high. Samhata, the first of what promises to be multiple releases by the duo, became available a few days later and more than exceeds my expectations.

Comprised of six pieces, the release flows without interruption between songs. Listening all the way through in one sitting, the effect is that of one exceptionally well conceived long form piece. Two passages, Neti Neti and Meru, add some rhythmic and melodic textures to the predominantly drone oriented release, while Sarga and Sanatana respectively bring listeners into and back out of the sonic space that Bourdin and Burgan have created. This is a work that could serve as the background for meditation or reading, or which might just as effectively be used for quiet entertainment or a concentration aid at work. By this I’m not implying a lack of consistency – the music is simply so good that it will suit any context. Let’s hope that Bourdin and Burgan release more of their collaborations – and soon.

Kontakt – Kamil Kowalczyk

As a Zenapolae artist, it’s a privilege to be aware of and have access to the great glitch and ambient music that the label puts out. Recently, I began work on a podcast for the label which would highlight Zenapolae releases along with other gems from the netlabel scene and was very excited when I first heard Kamil Kowalczyk’s Kontakt. The release consists of a series of untitled, minimalistic pieces that are immediately engaging and yet benefit from repeated listens.

The generic titling – Untitled I, Untitled II, etc. -  may seem uninspired on the surface, but ultimately does a lot of justice to the music. Here again, there is a strong sense of sound design and consistency between the pieces, yet each individual track has an internal continuity and some unique qualities that make it stand out from the others.  I’m very partial to Untitled I and Untitled V. V in particular features a great, buzzing drone that comes on like a distorted dial tone but gracefully evolves into a swirling and densely textured mass of sound. Overall, the music is intensely electronic but free of heavy synth pads or other standard ambient texturizers. It’s like noise with soul, and I love it.

Fathoms

I released a new tune via the Prosthetic Frequencies podcast this evening. Please go to the podcast page and check it out.

How It’s Done In Italy – My Bubba & Mi

I got turned on to the label Beep Beep Back Up the Truck back when they released “Reverence for Fallen Trees,” by The Black Atlantic. Having not browsed their collection for some time, I checked them out again last week and was very pleased to discover the release,  “How It’s Done In Italy,” by Danish trio My Bubba & Mi. This is not ambient music, and doesn’t fit with the other releases reviewed here any better than Juanitos do. Similar to Juanitos, however, My Bubba & Mi do what they do with such verve and feeling that anyone who appreciates soul in music will have to check them out.

It’s tempting to call this old time music, and indeed the songs contain all the qualities that people love about old time; lyrics and melodies that evoke nostalgia and lost romance, acoustic instrumentation, two and maybe three part harmonies. The band know this well and capitalize on it – the hard copy design and image files are all candy-stripes and brown paper wrapping, along with grainy photos of the group that recall summers between the wars. But at heart this is contemporary pop music, and I mean that in the best sense. The opening track, “Gone,” is really a blues rocker that hits as hard as it does because the band aren’t afraid to slow down and put the power in the vocals.  “After You” swaggers and “I Will Never Love a Young Boy Again” lilts and you could call either of them folk music, but there’s an alt-country and cabaret edge here that even the best of today’s string bands wouldn’t touch. This is neither a criticism of string bands nor My Bubba & Mi – it’s simply an observation that making music with heart is about doing what you do well and not getting hung up on what might pass for “authentic.” And these ladies have heart. It’s all over every track on this highly recommended release.

The band has a website at http://mybubbaandmi.com/ but I have linked the cover photo to their release site on Bandcamp. This is because Bandcamp allows users to download music in a variety of lossless formats, and may really be the best starting point for getting to know new bands and labels.

Bow Echoes – Damian Valles

Bow Echoes is a sublime collection of droning guitar and ambient minimalism from Canadian musician Damian Valles. Released through the excellent Resting Bell netlabel back in March, I was made aware of it yesterday when the track Ground Truth played on StillStream. The guitar textures really made the piece stand out, prompting me to immediately download the full release.

Regardless of how many musical styles an artist may work in, any single ambient release requires a certain amount of tonal and compositional consistency in order to hold up to repeated listens. Of course this is a matter of taste, but from my own listening experience, ambient works are invariably concept-oriented. Accordingly, each project requires the expression and exploration of melodic and/or textural themes and an approach to sound design that is consistent across each of the pieces that comprise a release. In this respect, Bow Echoes is a tremendous achievement – the individual songs are remarkable in their pacing and composition, while the release as a whole exists completely within a sonic space that is utterly alluring. There’s an attention to detail here that, without seeming contrived or too rigid, engages listeners and allows our appreciation to evolve over repeated listens.

Overall, this is a truly inspiring and enjoyable work which encourages me, as a musician, to challenge my own concepts of pacing and the limits of minimalism. Favorite tracks are Ground Truth, Derechos, and A Wake Pattern.

Hermelin

Hermelin’s self-titled, full length debut on 12rec is about two years old now. For some time it had fallen out of rotation on my playlists. But as I was streaming random selections the other day, I Felt Xetrov kicked in and sent me back to this gem of a release. In fact, you won’t find this one on 12rec’s current site – since it was released, the label has moved to a Bandcamp affiliated site. So you’ll have to go to the Internet Archive for this one: http://www.archive.org/details/12rec.049

12rec releases music in a variety of styles, and depending on the style I don’t always share their enthusiasm for particular artists. However, when it comes to post-rock, I think they’re dead on. Both Hermelin and Milhaven,  12rec’s featured post-rock outfits, have a fresh sound and an energy that comes across powerfully in their recordings. The songwriting from both bands is very strong, combining sparse guitar melodies and noise textures with minimalist bass and drum beats. Of the two, however, I strongly prefer Hermelin. Their songs have a bit more structure and movement, and they take a broader approach stylistically. Melodies and themes may evolve slowly, or they may come crashing towards you with spastic distortion. It’s a varied approach that really works for instrumental rock.

Standout tunes on the release are Nova Police, Pliant Fur, and …Sharp Teeth. If you like this one, the band also contributed to half of an earlier 12rec release which they shared with the band Junique Fois Pi.