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Tony D'Amico

About Tony D'Amico

https://psychotropicwonderland.com

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Rashad Becker, “The Incident” (Clunk, 2025)

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This is both the inaugural release for Becker’s Clunk label and his first new album in nearly a decade, but it stylistically picks up roughly where his brilliantly demented Traditional Music of Notional Species series left off (grotesquely gnarled and squirming synth hallucinations beamed in from an alien jungle). Intended as a “labyrinthine four-chapter pseudo-musical that reflects the flustering absurdity of the current era,” The Incident feels like the fruit of a Lovecraftian scenario in which Becker is plagued by recurring nightmares of an otherworldly city populated by slime-covered and tentacled horrors and wakes up each morning with a fresh batch of disturbing field recordings documenting those extradimensional travels. 

The primary allure is that Becker conjured up some truly ungodly sounds here, as it sounds like he circuit-bent a modular synth to make everything sound as viscerally slithering, gibbering, and gelatinous as possible. Notably, he also happens to be one of the greatest mastering engineers on the planet, which further helped shape this album into an immersive headphone mindfuck par excellence. That said, there have been some notable evolutions since Notional Species II as well, as Becker seems to play with spatial dynamics a bit more and also seems to have picked up a fresh gamelan influence. The more gamelan-inspired pieces all fall on the second half of the album (“stunde null,” “sāʿatu alṣṣufri,” and a “puttering purgation”) and every single one is a highlight evocative of a remote, ruined, and overgrown jungle temple where something ineffably ghastly and otherworldly has just been summoned. 

Of the three, “sāʿatu alṣṣufri” is the most strikingly novel, as the metallic percussion and vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding snatches of melody give it the feel of a ritualistic procession and Becker works some truly impressive magic in his gleeful distortion of the metal sounds. The closing epic “what really happened” is the album’s zenith, however, as it opens with a motif akin to a small jazz ensemble that is time-stopped and glitching out within the creaking timbers of a collapsing building, then builds into an incredibly dense, undulating, and all-engulfing maelstrom of smeared drones. Despite that, it still somehow feels weirdly meditative and thoughtfully composed, which is quite an impressive feat given the sheer derangement and alien nature of the sounds themselves. Notably, this album is billed as a precursor to a new series of works entitled “based on a true story,” so I am eagerly looking forward to an expansion of this world into further vistas that resemble an alien body horror soundtrack performed exclusively using disturbingly misused balloons. In the meantime, The Incident unquestionably keeps Becker’s unbroken streak of boldly unique and wildly creative sound art masterpieces fully intact.

Listen here.    

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Whatever The Weather, “Whatever The Weather II” (Ghostly International, 2025)

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This aptly named second album from Loraine James’ more ambient/impressionistic side is a bit warmer and less beat-driven than its predecessor, resembling an unearthed classic from the late ‘90s/early 2000s golden age of glitch-worshipping innovators like Oval and Jim O’Rourke and their more melody-centered peers like Telefon Tel Aviv. Fittingly, Josh Eustis was again involved on the mastering end, but there are also some interesting ironies as well, as these pieces are all named after rather chilly temperatures and James’ throwback to the early days of the laptop IDM era is actually deliberately hardware-focused.

More specifically, James tried to limit her gear to synths and pedals and kept overdubbing to a minimum. That spontaneous, in-the-moment approach composition, coupled with a fondness for using recorded sounds and voices from her surroundings, imbue the album with an endearing and tenderly diaristic feel. Some of the found sounds give these pieces an evocative sense of place, suggesting the echoing interior of a train station or the shouts of an epic snowball fight unfolding just outside James’ studio, but there are also some fun curveballs thrown into the mix, like the trippy collision of buzzes, James’ own pitch-shifted voice, and a stammering acoustic guitar motif at the end of “12°C” or the wonky, chopped-up arcade sounds in “15°C.” Unexpectedly, my favorite piece is the brief interlude “23°C (Intermittent Sunshine),” which is an absolutely sublime bliss-fest of gorgeously smeary overlapping melodies, but “18°C” is yet another improbably beautiful stunner that recalls the best bits of Oval’s lush, dreamily skipping chords and loscil’s blearily hazy dubscapes. That said, the real magic of this album transcends easily graspable elements like songcraft, cool arrangements, or well-chosen influences, as the most transfixing moments tend to be crafted from billowing, dreamlike chords so achingly beautiful that I want to live inside them forever.  

Listen here.

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Voice Actor & Squu, “Lust (1)” (Stroom, 2025)

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This second album from this enigmatic Noa Kurzweil project marks a somewhat surprising detour from Voice Actor’s sprawling and eclectic debut Sent From My Telephone, as Kurzweil’s previous creative foil (ana reme’s Levi Lanser) has been replaced by Welsh producer Ol Bryan. The result is a considerably leaner, more stylistically focused, and more experimentally minded release that inventively and sensuously blends deconstructed dub-techno, sound art, and ASMR. Notably, the familiar seductive purr of Kurzweil’s voice is also regularly chopped up, processed, decontextualized, and looped into rhythmic elements, melodic hooks, or textural layers.

That’s a boldly counterintuitive stylistic choice akin to Scanner’s shift away from intercepted phone conversations, as Kurzweil’s bewitching voice and charmingly diaristic (and oft-surreal) monologues previously seemed like the project’s very essence. I certainly miss those elements a bit, as well as Voice Actor’s tendency to regularly blindside me with curveballs like unsettling samples of 9/11 radio chatter and nods to ‘60s French pop, but Lust (1) is nevertheless an extremely cool & absorbing headphone album in its own right. The closing “Barbara” is probably the zenith, as Kurzweil languorously muses about Barbara Walters’ condescending treatment of Dolly Parton before the piece unexpectedly blossoms into a killer outsider/futuristic R&B motif of digitized loops and soul diva samples. The ghostly & seductive “Look Nice” offers still more pop-adjacent bliss, while “Fields” feels like the warmly beautiful dreams of an android with a soul. Like its predecessor, Lust (1) can occasionally come across as a bit sketchlike, but there is considerably more depth hidden beneath the surface this time around, as beauty and magic are almost always lurking in both the vividly realized details and the hallucinatory ways that Kurzweil’s voice subtly transforms and moves through space. 

Listen here.

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Monolake, “Gravity” (Imbalance/Field, 2001)

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Newly remastered and reissued (first time on vinyl), Monolake’s third album was largely a Robert Henke solo album, as co-founder Gerhard Behles had recently left the fold to focus on more software-related concerns. Notably, Behles & Henke were two-thirds of the team that created Ableton Live, which first became commercially available the same year that Gravity was released (2001). Given that Monolake’s debut Hongkong had already been an instant dub-techno classic on the iconic Chain Reaction label (metal box and all), Henke was essentially living at the cutting edge of both technology & electronic music at this stage of his career. Appropriately, he managed to effortlessly transcend most of the tropes of his dub-techno peers with this release, expertly steering the project into something that managed to be playful, exacting, futuristic, and deeply evocative all at once.

Notably, Henke’s studio at this time was on the 9th floor of a building overlooking Berlin, which definitely seems to have inspired the “rainswept city at night” impressionism, though Gravity’s sense of voyeuristic detachment feels more akin to a lonely train ride home at 3am through a shifting landscape of blurred neon lights and darkly looming buildings. Hallucinatory nocturnal vibes aside, Henke is a goddamn sorcerer at sound design and production, so the wonderfully vivid and vibrant sounds and textures here enhance his insomniac vision beautifully.

The heart of the album is unquestionably the murderers’ row of “Ice,” “Frost, and “Static.” In “Ice,” Henke sensuously combines uneasy ambient drift, panning whispered voices, the stilted funkiness of an Afrobeat lick, and a wonderfully hissing, popping, and rolling beat to evoke the sensation of a dreamlike night drive through an empty city. “Static,” on the other hand, is a bit closer to classic Chain Reaction terrain, but Henke enhances the formula with a muscular, lurching beat and dynamically varying chord washes that feel like slow-motion waves crashing on a rocky shore. That said, “Frost” is the album’s clear masterpiece for me, as Henke unleashes a rolling and propulsive industrial rhythm that mesmerizingly bounces, tumbles, rolls, and pans around spatially in a bleary haze of eerie ambiance. This album is pure headphone nirvana.

Listen here.

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Dead Bandit (Quindi, 2025)

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This third album from the duo of James Schimpl and Ellis Swan features some of their most sublime work to date, as it feels like the soundtrack to a desolate & dreamlike roadtrip across an America where it is eternally 3am. Stylistically, it sounds like Dead Bandit have distilled the best bits of cinematic post-rock, noir jazz, dub, shoegaze, and surf guitar into an elegantly bleary and oft-gorgeous series of late-night mood pieces. In keeping with that theme, the album’s arc mirrors that of an overnight drive, as the vibe gradually moves from haunted and impressionistic evocations of lonely highways and lurid neon lights towards the faint light of a bruised & beautiful sunrise.

Characteristically, I tend to find the darker pieces more alluring, but even the lesser pieces meander along in a pleasant fashion before unleashing some kind of wonderfully hallucinatory guitar trick or other inspired motif (i.e. the wounded, blearily howling solo in “Up To Your Waist” or the heaving & shuddering flanged ambiance of “Amer Picon”). The strongest piece is arguably “Glass,” as its slow, sensuous bass throb and vibrato-soaked guitar make it a lock as my go-to choice if I ever find myself DJing a strip club in Twin Peaks. Elsewhere, the bass-driven “Pink” features both a killer hollow-sounding guitar motif and a propulsive groove that feels like a depressive take on “Billie Jean.” On the more ambient side, the rippling, feedback-soaked dreamscape of “Milk” is yet another sublime stunner. If the album has a weakness, it is only that it sometimes feels more like a collection of great moments than a collection of great songs, but it is damn near impossible to imagine any room for improvement when Dead Bandit strike a perfect balance of dubby, bass-heavy grooves and shoegaze-damaged guitar wizardry. 

Listen here.

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FACS, “Wish Defense” (Trouble In Mind, 2025)

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This sixth album from Chicago’s finest Factory Records-inspired post-punk trio features a significantly altered line-up, as founding member Jonathan van Herik is back in the fold once again (replacing long-time bassist Alianna Kalaba). On paper, that means that FACS now shares exactly the same line-up as the late, great Disappears, but with a bit of a fresh twist, as van Herik has now switched to guitar and frontman Brian Case has switched to bass. Notably, Wish Defense was also Steve Albini’s engineering swan song, which is fitting given that this album absolutely rules.

The same could be said of several other FACS/Disappears releases, of course, but the new guitar/bass configuration brings more melodic bass-driven riffage than previous albums and van Herik’s arty, minimalist guitarwork is every bit as inspired as Case’s own. The result is an album that seems to seamlessly blend the sexed-up deadpan cool of prime Girls Against Boys with the taut muscularity of Fugazi’s rhythm section and the seasick, tremolo-warped guitars of My Bloody Valentine. Choice influences aside, however, FACS embrace an aggressively, pared-to-the-bone style of minimalism that is uniquely their own, which gives van Herik’s alternately smeared, chiming, creaking, percussive, and slashing guitar sounds plenty of room to breathe.

For me, “Sometimes Only” captures the trio at the peak of their powers, as the dragging throb of Case’s thick, distorted bass buzz provides a perfect counterweight for a couple of forays into proggier/spacier terrain, but the title piece’s explosive chorus makes it a lock for the album’s strongest single. While not every piece hits the mark quite as convincingly as those two, the entire album is packed with passages in which every single member of the band is doing something so extremely cool that it makes FACS seem like the best goddamn rock band on the planet regardless of whether or not they actually manage to stick the landing.

Listen here.

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Tim Hecker, “Shards” (Kranky, 2025)

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This compilation is mostly one for serious Tim Hecker heads and completists only, as it collects an array of unreleased pieces and alternate versions from his recent soundtrack work for television and film (La Tour, Luzifer, The North Water, and Brandon Cronenberg’s killer Infinity Pool). Since Infinity Pool already got its own album, it only appears here for a sibilant and synthy extended variation of “Joyride,” but Shards also packs a trio of solidly upper-tier pieces unavailable elsewhere and an array of intriguingly uncharacteristic stylistic elements. Some stylistic departures work better than others, but the most damning thing I can say about the weaker pieces is that they either sound like lost interludes from a previous album or the beginnings of a future masterpiece that has not yet been shaped into its final, ideal form.  

The album opens strong, as the haunting and hallucinatory “Heaven Will Come“ feels like an elegiac blurring together of Hecker’s Virgins and Anoyo eras: glassy, darkly angelic synths smear, dissolve, and strain heavenward over groaning chord swells. The album’s biggest surprise comes next, as “Morning (Piano Version)” resembles a wistful Harold Budd-led jazz trio before a swell of haunting strings slowly morphs into a buzzing, gnarly crescendo that sounds like an incoming fax from a demon who does not really keep up with modern technological advances. 

The album’s aforementioned would-be masterpiece follows, as “Monotone 3” cycles through several different motifs like a medley held together only by a fitfully fluttering woodwind motif. I am not a fan, but if Hecker had stuck with the gorgeously rippling zither/harp-like opening theme and swapped out the woodwinds for snarling saxophone flamethrowing, I would probably be writing about how that song blew me out of my goddamn chair right now instead. Elsewhere, the closing “Sunset Key Melt” is the album’s zenith, as its gently and blearily tumbling hiss-veiled melody sounds like the flickering mirage of a delicate Andrew Chalk piece being slowly enveloped by a gnawing swell of roiling distortion. When it fully blossoms, it evokes nothing less than a feedback-streaked sky of shimmering hallucinatory birds slowly fluttering above a burning city. 

Listen here.

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Jules Reidy, “Ghost/Spirit” (Thrill Jockey, 2025)

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This first Thrill Jockey opus from shapeshifting Aussie guitar visionary Jules Reidy is a mindblowing creative leap forward, as otherworldly tunings, American Primitive-style steel string guitar, autotuned pop, futuristic psychedelia, and spasmodic electronics all collide in a one-of-a-kind headphone album supernova. While Reidy’s more vocal- and pop-minded impulses have previously surfaced fleetingly on World in World and elsewhere, melodic vocal hooks are the beating heart of Ghost/Spirit (albeit in a series of unpredictably kaleidoscopic contexts). Normally, the artificiality of autotuned vocals rubs me the wrong way, but the digital soul of these fractal reveries is perfectly counterbalanced by the alien harmonies and twanging, cathartic physicality of Reidy’s guitar playing. I am favorably reminded of how Joanna Newsom’s masterpiece Ys was radically transformed by Van Dyke Park’s bold orchestral arrangements, but Reidy is improbably behind every side of the wild stylistic clashes here (with some help from cellist Judith Hamann, Emptyset’s James Ginzburg, and others). When everything comes together just right, as it does on pieces like “Satellite” and “Maybe,” it feels like Reidy’s dissolving and dreamlike postmodern blues are an indestructible island of zen within a delirious mindfuck of unpredictably collapsing and accelerating electronics and convulsive broken beats.   

Listen here.    

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Bill Orcutt, “How To Rescue Things” (Palilalia, 2024)

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This latest opus from San Francisco avant-guitar visionary Bill Orcutt is a charming and improbable outlier in his strange and wonderful discography, as it feels like a remarkably sincere homage to easy listening, the golden age of Hollywood, and schmaltz in general. As Tom Carter observes in the album’s description, the pervasive orchestral sweetening of the mid-20th century is far from beloved to most contemporary ears (particularly among jazz fans), but the title’s provocative Ornette Coleman-style statement of intent is largely an irony-free one, as Orcutt gamely improvises along with a shifting fantasia of angelic choirs, rippling harps, and swooning string swells. While all of the usual hallmarks of Orcutt’s distinctive playing (scrabbling flurries of notes, cathartic bends, viscerally abused strings) are present and remain as delightful as ever, most of the melodic heavy lifting is done by the looped samples. Freed from the burden of carrying the central melody with his guitar, Orcutt’s playing feels uniquely loose, tender, and spacious, resulting in an unexpectedly heartwarming and endearingly soulful major key blues album that is every bit as strong as the more explosive and idiosyncratic work that he is usually known for.

It is tempting to view this album as Orcutt’s inversion of the softening and sweetening “jazz-strings virus,” as Carter’s analysis focuses primarily on that element (though he does also mention “the oily underbelly of the American songbook”). The reality of How To Rescue Things is a bit more complex, however, as the first third of the album sounds a hell of a lot more like Orcutt is jamming along to a pre-irony (and pre-bebop) Christmas movie from the 1930s or 1940s and none of the appropriated loops are particularly recognizable from the The Great American Songbook (though I am hardly an expert on that subject). There is definitely an inversion happening, of course, but it feels like a sincere and tender one: Orcutt is essentially taking toothlessly sentimental melodic motifs and “fixing” them with a healthy injection of soul, slicing intensity, and vibrant spontaneity. In fact, this album amusingly reminds me of Prince’s performances on Muppets Tonight: an iconic and innovative artist improbably dropped into a family-friendly and ostensibly ridiculous situation and somehow emerging looking as cool as ever. In this case, however, the Muppets are swapped out for choirs of angels and harp-wielding cherubs, but Orcutt proves to be equally game at embracing his environment in good faith and making the crazy collision of aesthetics work beautifully. Moreover, he manages to make it feel both easy and natural, which makes a lot of sense in hindsight: if you are not jaded to an absolutely joyless degree, there is plenty of legitimate heartstring-tugging beauty and magic to be gleaned from a beatific celestial chorus if you know how to do it right. 

While I would not have predicted that the guy from Harry Pussy would be the first one to make such a leap, Orcutt has always been an artist who tirelessly searches for new ways to escape familiar patterns and he has long been one with a fondness for inventively revisiting well-worn, sentimental melodies as well. As such, it is not a huge leap to go from covering “When You Wish Upon A Star” or “Over The Rainbow” to How To Rescue Things. That said, Orcutt’s approach is definitely quite different this time around, as I would not have predicted how sympathetically he would treat his source material. While I am certain that a noise-guitar firestorm or a thorny freeform excursion into the outer limits of improv would have been a perfectly fine (and more expected) enhancement of these loops, Orcutt instead seamlessly embraces the tone of his appropriated melodies and simply embellishes the central themes with some more vibrant melodic tendrils of his own. 

Given that, How To Rescue Things is not exactly an album of fresh Bill Orcutt pieces so much as it is a snapshot of a great guitarist endearingly indulging himself in fond memories and breathing new life into them with his improvised accompaniments. As such, my enjoyment of any particular piece is largely determined by how much I enjoy the central loop, as Orcutt’s playing is invariably loose, organic, and intuitive in a way that few other guitarists can match. There is no point at all in which it feels like he is cycling through familiar scales or trotting out pre-meditated riffs: he is simply living in the moment, nimbly riding waves of old-timey sentimentality with casual effortlessness and transforming them into something newly relevant and emotionally resonant. 

I do have some favorites, however, as I connected most deeply with the bittersweetly lovely “Old Hamlet” and the closing “The Wild Psalms,” which has the feel of an absolutely rapturous Hollywood ending. I cannot say that I felt particularly optimistic about the state of the world at the end of 2024, but that piece in particular made me feel like everything was absolutely wonderful and would presumably stay that way forever (for five glorious minutes, at least). I can safely say that no other album in recent memory has made me feel that way, so How To Rescue Things is a legitimately great detour in my book.

Listen here.

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Big Blood, “Electric Voyeur” (Don’t Trust The Ruin, 2024)

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This delightful end-of-year surprise is the culmination of a decade-long project in which Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin devoted themselves to building (and learning to play) their own homemade electronic instruments. In keeping with the homespun/primitive electronics nature of the project, the duo largely avoided using the internet as a resource and instead consulted books and other instrument builders for guidance and inspiration (though some exceptions were admittedly made). That purist approach extends to the recordings as well, as the duo constrained themselves to only Kinsella’s voice and their self-built instruments for every song except for one very catchy exception (“For Real,” which features some synth from guest Chris Livengood). Unsurprisingly, the end result of that approach is a bit of a significant stylistic detour for the band, blurring together the wonky, eclectic charm of Silver Apples with an impressionist strain of siren song psychedelia.

There is a video on Big Blood’s Youtube channel of Mulkerin performing an early version of “Came To Life” that provides a lot of insight into the scope and tone of this project, as it shows him patiently manipulating a wall of lights, dials, and wires to shape the piece’s insistently driving mutant motorik groove. Then, he briefly disappears from the frame and returns wearing some kind of repurposed marching band helmet fitted with dials that trigger streaking, spacey bloops as he moves around the room. The video conveys two very important things: 1) technology-wise, the duo’s self-built instruments have probably shot them back in time to the late ’60s, and 2) there was definitely an element of kitschy fun to the project.

Yet another key bit of information is that the electronics definitely take center stage for the most part, as Colleen Kinsella’s vocals often feel like a disconnected, dreamlike element that floats, dissolves, and lingers like a psychotropic haze. In fact, it frequently sounds like she is singing a hymn-like a capella piece in one room while clanking, blurting, and primitive electronic grooves bleed in from another. There are exceptions, however, such as the layered and swooping vocal harmonies of “Who Lives?” or the bubbly electro-pop fun of would-be single “For Real.” I bring that up primarily because Big Blood also released a companion instrumental version of this album that is every bit as good as the vocal version.  Notably, the instrumentals are not dubbed-out remixes, but instead fill the void of the missing vocals with different electronic elements. Since most of the songs are not exactly songs in the first place, it genuinely does not feel like anything crucial is missing.

On the poppier end of the spectrum, the aforementioned “For Real” is an obvious highlight, as it features both an endearingly bouncy groove and Livengood’s warmly New Romantic synth hook, but the Magazine-esque goth-pop of “Color of The Moment” is a gem as well. The deceptively titled “Middle of a Party” could arguably be considered poppy as well, but only if the party in question was thrown by ghosts, robots, and robot ghosts. There are also a number of cool songs that feel like a left-field nod to ’60s exotica albums, such as the simmering and haunted nocturnal tropical ambiance of “Night Walk.” Beyond that, there is a third category of pieces that I would loosely describe as “lurching nightmarish mindfuckery.” That side is best embodied by “Floating from Xanthi II (giant fir),” which resembles a heaving Silver Apples-style groove mingled with a seance gone very wrong (eerie Theremin-like howls, chopped and distorted vocals). Elsewhere, “Night Stalk” offers a much kitschier-sounding nightmare that approximates Throbbing Gristle trying their hand at a clunkily groovy giallo score.

Notably, all of the pieces tend to be quite brief, as the inherent limitations of the gear mean that every song is essentially built from a single shifting groove, but Mulkerin and Kinsella do a fine job of never overstaying their welcome and the songs flow into one another quite nicely. More importantly, Electric Voyeur is one hell of a unique, eclectic, and charming album. In fact, I think I even prefer the more purist instrumental versions of these pieces to their vocal versions. Of course, given the extreme constraints involved, neither of the Electric Voyeur options would be a representative or ideal entry point into Big Blood’s oft-wonderful discography, but this labor-of-love curveball is quite a divergent and welcome treat for already devoted fans like myself.

Listen here.

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