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Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal, “Snakeskin” (Beacon Sound/Ruptured, 2022)

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This is the first full-length collaboration between Sabra and Tabbal, but it is apparently also the sixth collaborative release between Portland’s Beacon Sound and Lebanon’s Ruptured Records (which was co-founded by Tabbal). While Tabbal’s solo work has been a very enjoyable recent discovery for me, this is my first encounter with Julia Sabra, who is normally one-third of the excellent Beirut-based dreampop trio Postcards. The pair do have a history of working together, as Tabbal has co-produced several Postcards releases, but their creative union only began to take shape in the aftermath of Beirut’s massive 2020 port explosion (which destroyed Sabra’s home, badly injured her partner/bandmate Pascal Semerdjian, and displaced a whopping 300,000 people).

Unsurprisingly, one of the primary themes of Snakeskin is the precarious concept of “home” and the “the disappearance of life as we know it” in a volatile and oft-violent world. Those are admittedly more urgent themes in Tabbal and Sabra’s neck of the woods than some others (the album was also inspired by the 2021 Palestinian and the invasion of Armenia), but loss and uncertainty eventually come for us all and they make a universally poignant emotional core for an album. And, of course, great art can sometimes emerge from deeply felt tragedies and Tabbal and Sabra are a match made in heaven for that challenge, as Julia’s sensuous, floating vocals are the perfect complement to Tabbal’s gnarled and heaving soundscapes.

The first piece that Sabra and Tabbal wrote together was “Roots,” which surfaced last year on Ruptured’s The Drone Sessions Vol. 1 compilation. That piece is reprised here as the sublimely beautiful closer, which was a great idea as it is one of the strongest songs on the album. However, it also illustrates how this collaboration has evolved and transformed, as “Roots” has the feel of a dreamy, bittersweet synth masterpiece nicely enhanced with hazy, sensuous vocals. Execution-wise, it is damn hard to top, but the duo’s more recent work feels like a creative breakthrough that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Put more simply, the pair previously merged their two styles in an expected way to great effect, but then they started organically blurring into a single shared style and the results turned into something more memorable and transcendent. The first major highlight is “All The Birds,” which calls to mind a collision between the murky, submerged dub of loscil and what I imagine a bossa nova album by Julee Cruise might have sounded like. As cool as all that sounds, however, the reality is even better due to the muscular, snaking synth undercurrent and surprise snare-roll groove. (As an aside, the Julee Cruise resemblance may be no coincidence at all, as one of Tabbal’s earlier albums features an unambiguously Twin Peaks-inspired title.)

Snakeskin‘s other immediately gratifying stunner is “In Our Garden,” as ugly viscous synth sludge blossoms into an incredibly haunting vocal piece that grows steadily more compelling with psychotropic bird-like flickers and flutters, seismic crunches, and a delirious synth crescendo of swooning romantic grandeur shot through with deep sadness. That feat is immediately followed by my personal dark horse candidate for the album’s centerpiece, “One By One.” The thread that holds the piece together is Sabra’s half-unsettling/half-mantric repetition of the title phrase, but the pair unleash one hell of a roiling and lysergically smeared maelstrom around it. Moreover, the production is absolutely dazzling, as it feels like an impossibly complex living tapestry of visceral textures and churning, heaving movement (and it somehow ends feeling akin to a hallucinatory bell ceremony in a lost mountain temple). Notably, there are only eight songs on the album, so Snakeskin would still be half-brilliant even if all the remaining songs sucked, but the other four songs are just a slightly lower tier of greatness, ranging from gnarled, feedback-ravaged ritualistic drone (“Snakeskin”) to something resembling chopped, screwed, and deconstructed Crystal Castles (“Signs”). With eight songs and eight hits, this is a serious album-of-the-year contender.

Listen here.

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Amulets, “Between Distant and Remote” (Beacon Sound, 2019)

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Randall Taylor has quietly emerged as one of the most talented and distinctive tape loop artists in the world over the last few years, steadily releasing a prolific flow of cassettes on a variety of labels. Remarkably, however, Between Distant and Remote is his first vinyl release, which I suppose makes this an auspicious occasion career-wise. It is also the first time I have personally delved seriously into his oeuvre despite my general predisposition towards warbly loops and obsessive repetition. 

I suspect the reason Amulets has eluded me until now is that Taylor uses tapes as a compositional tool to craft warm, dreamlike reveries of processed guitar ambiance rather than making the tapes the focus. Of course, the tapes very clearly are the focus in Taylor’s process, but the finished compositions that ultimately emerge could easily be mistaken for the work of an ambient-minded guitarist with a passion for lush layering. If Taylor were a lesser artist, that approach would disappoint me, but Between Distant and Remote scratches a similar itch to classic shoegaze-damaged drone artists like Belong (and it gets there in an impressively inventive way).

The opening “Process of Unlearning” is quite a beautiful and effective statement of intent, as it begins with a loop of an enigmatic squelching noise and slowly builds into a roiling sea of lovely soft-focus guitar noise. Plenty of other artists do guitar-based ambient drone quite well, yet Taylor shows a strong intuition for finding interesting and effective ways to make his work stand out as particularly distinctive. I am especially fond of the wobbly, stuttering tape sounds that become the heart of the piece, yet the more impressive mastery lies in the piece’s thoughtful, subtle, and effective dynamic arc.

To his credit, Taylor was not content to simply craft a pretty swirl of shimmering and quivering guitars, as an undercurrent of distorted, sizzling chords steadily drives the piece towards something that feels genuinely epic by the end of its four-minute duration. I cannot think of any other artists working in similar stylistic territory that share Taylor’s knack for constant forward motion and endless subtle shifts in emotional shading, as there is a definite tendency in the genre to linger in a state of floating or submerged bliss.

The latter unquestionably has its appeal, but it is refreshing to encounter such a lull-free addition to the canon. Moreover, that sense of unwavering purposefulness brings me to the most curious aspect of Amulets: Taylor essentially uses tape loops to make himself a one-man rock band and he does it very well. He also uses his tapes to give his sounds a warbling and frayed texture that I very much enjoy, but I am struck by how modestly he employs his arsenal of Walkmen: almost every loop is designed to seamlessly blend into the quivering haze rather than assert itself. It feels like Taylor just wanted to make languorously lovely multilayered guitar music that he could play live and the tapes are merely the ingenious way he found to make that work.

While the whole album is quite good, I most prefer the pieces where Taylor balances dreamlike beauty with ragged edges and gnarled textures. In that regard, “North Coast, Falling” steals the show, as its lazily rippling arpeggios are embellished with a stammering and dissolving melodic loop that feels simultaneously grinding and strangled. And then a snarling and sputtering tide of guitar noise slowly rises up and threatens to consume everything.

In less assured hands than Taylor’s, that is exactly what would have happened, but the noise ultimately dissipates to make way for a tender and lovely coda. Elsewhere, “Where The Land Meets the Sea” casts a delicately lovely spell with a woozy two-note pulse and a chiming, music box-esque melody before erupting into a seismic crescendo of dense and sizzling power chords. The following “No Signal,” on the other hand, largely eschews Amulets’ usual beauty in favor of something that sounds like a howling and mournful guitar catharsis accompanied by roiling static and ringing buoys. 

It is quite a quietly incendiary piece, displaying a passion and rawness that I would not normally associate with either tape loops or guitar-based ambient. Remarkably, that hot streak lasts right up until the end of the album and each piece manages to have its own distinct character. In “Feigning Night,” for example, exhalation-like washes of tape hiss and backwards melodies gradually blossom into a densely shuddering mass of layered guitars, rumbling bass drones, and distantly twinkling piano motifs. Later, the closing “Like Warm Air (We Rose)” feels like I just unexpectedly tuned into an angelic radio station as the earth shakes and burns around me.

As I listen to Between Distant and Remote more and more, I keep finding new details and nuances to love, so I am hard-pressed to find much to gripe about: there are seven songs on this album and every single one is wonderful in its own way. That said, I do wish Taylor had used non-musical loops a bit more frequently and prominently than he does, as some buried voices and environmental sounds would have made the album a more mysterious and complex experience. That is not exactly a shortcoming though—merely an observation about how a great album might have become a somewhat greater one. 

Truly iconic artists do not just make music that sounds good—they have something extra that gives their work an instantly recognizable personality and soul. For example, Ian William Craig works in similar stylistic terrain, but transcends other artists because his voice brings a human tenderness and vulnerability into his soundscapes. Taylor, for his part, transcends other artists through sheer craftsmanship and unerring songcraft instincts alone. For someone working in the experimental music milieu (and with tape loops, no less), he has a truly exceptional knack for hooks, concision, and textural dynamics.

While it admittedly took me a few listens to fully appreciate the depth and vividness of the Amulets vision and see Taylor as a uniquely talented loop wizard rather than an unusually good ambient/drone artist, I got there eventually and can now fully appreciate Between Distant and Remote as the understated masterpiece that it is. This is one of the year’s finest albums.

Samples can be found here.

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Colleen, “Colleen Et Les Boîtes À Musique” (Leaf (2006)/Beacon Sound (2017))

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Recently reissued, this unusual EP/mini-album was originally composed as a continuous hour-long piece for the French radio program Atelier de Création Radiophonique. The adventurously narrow theme of the endeavor itself is the unusual part, as the entire program was created from sounds generated from antique music boxes. Given that extreme constraint, this material was never intended to be formally released as an album, but Leaf liked these alternately surreal and playful experiments enough to release it anyway (albeit in somewhat altered form). When it was first released back in 2006, this modest release felt somewhat slight and anticlimactic in the wake of Colleen’s classic first two albums, yet I have gradually warmed to it quite a bit over the years. While I still think much of this release is strictly for devout fans, it would be a mistake to overlook it completely, as it features a couple of woefully underheard gems.

The original version of Les Boîtes À Musique that Cécile Schott composed was a longform collage in which the individual vignettes were bridged together by music box-themed movie samples. Consequently, the altered shape of this album was driven by necessity, as obtaining the rights for all of those film snippets would likely have been a logistical and financial nightmare. As a result, the album is comprised of fourteen discrete pieces of varying lengths that range from under a minute to almost seven minutes. 

Notably, one of the longest pieces, “I’ll Read You a Story,” is a reprise of one of the most sublimely gorgeous pieces from The Golden Morning Breaks. In fact, it is one of the most quietly stunning pieces that Schott has ever recorded, so it is a lock for one of the highlights here as well. I supposed its inclusion could be seen as cheating a bit, but Schott never intended for this album to be released and it made perfect sense for her to conclude her radio session with such a dazzling crescendo.In any case, I am always happy to hear it again. In fact, I suspect it was the primary inspiration for this deeper plunge into the world of music boxes. The marriage is certainly a good fit, as the delicate, wistful prettiness of music box melodies is not a far cry from the delicate, wistful beauty of Colleen’s other work.

Notably, this is not Schott’s first dip into her friend John Cavanagh’s collection of Victorian music boxes, as Golden Morning‘s “The Heart Harmonicon” originated there as well (albeit from a recording made by Cavanagh himself). Back then, music boxes played a small role in Colleen’s aesthetic, but Les Boîtes À Musique makes Cavanagh’s collection the sole focus…sort of. There are a few exceptions and “Story” is one of them for a couple of reasons. For one, its dreamily chiming central theme is fleshed out considerably by Schott’s classical guitar accompaniment. Secondly, much of the bittersweet beauty of “Story” is due to her transformative production wizardry, as the piece is a languorous swirl of backwards melodies, rippling arpeggios, and flickering hallucinatory flourishes. 

Schott takes a similarly loose thematic approach with the album’s other centerpiece, “Your Heart is So Loud,” which stretches and blurs a fragile melody to leave a heavenly shivering wake of afterimages. Though much shorter, “The Sad Panther” is also quite beguiling, unfolding as a slow-motion cascade of hazy backwards melodies. Despite their superficial differences, both “Panther” and “Heart” ultimately achieve the same aesthetic end, feeling like a time-stretched and lovesick tableaux unfolding within a dream-like snow globe world.

If the rest of Les Boîtes À Musique had deepened and expanded that vein, it would have likely been Schott’s third stellar album in a row, but the remaining pieces are a bit more varied, whimsical, and sketchlike. The better ones are quite charming though, particularly the stumbling and fitful rendition of “Happy Birthday” that comprises “Charles’s Birthday Card.” In a similar vein, “A Bear is Trapped” sounds like an obsessive child maniacally trying to play “Pop Goes the Weasel” on a rusty music box that sounds like it is hemorrhaging crucial parts as the crank is enthusiastically wound too quickly. Elsewhere, both “Under The Roof” and “Bicycle Bells” are awkwardly pretty, as tumbling melodies of ringing notes unfold at an erratic pace. 

There are also a couple of smaller themes that stake out their own small parts of the album: a pair of gamelan-themed pieces and a pair of componium pieces (appropriately titled “What is a Componium?”). The latter are some of the more substantial works among the idiosyncratic mixed bag of remaining pieces, particularly “What Is a Componium? Pt. 2,” which is an undulating tapestry of sweeping, overlapping, and crystalline arpeggios. 

There is also one particularly bizarre and aberrant piece near the end, the cheerily pixelated “Calypso in a Box,” which sounds like it could be the mercilessly annoying theme of a video game geared towards small children. I am not sure if that one necessarily counts as a misstep, however, as its brief candy-colored lunacy is certainly an effective palette-cleanser after the lovely “Your Heart is So Loud.” I doubt many tears would have been shed if it had been accidentally omitted from the reissue though.

Obviously, it would be wonderful if every piece on Colleen Et Les Boîtes À Musique sank deeper into the warmly enveloping dream-state conjured by pieces like “The Sad Panther,” but it is still an interesting, unique, and divergent release in its existing form. Schott would have been crazy to pass up an opportunity to step outside her usual working method and dive into a roomful of delightful Victorian contraptions. In hindsight, most of my previous grievances with this EP stem from a simple misunderstanding: I wanted Schott to make my new favorite album and she wanted to see if she could turn a treasure trove of antiques into a compelling hour of radio.She won (understandably). 

The important thing is that Colleen Et Les Boîtes À Musique maintains the fundamental mystique and endearing anachronism of the Colleen aesthetic and that this fleeting departure resulted in a couple of gorgeous new pieces that would not have otherwise existed. It may be a minor release within Schott’s frequently brilliant discography, yet it is a minor release that unexpectedly hits some impressive heights every now and then. 

If this album can be said to have a significant flaw, it is merely the unavoidable one: all of these pieces have been decontextualized from their intended role in a larger piece. As such, less substantial pieces that once filled a crucial place in a continuous flow are lamentably isolated and presented as individual works. Understandably, they wilt a bit under that kind of scrutiny, even if it is not their fault. Hopefully, the original broadcast will someday reappear through the magic of the internet and belatedly right that wrong, but until then “The Sad Panther” and “Your Heart is So Loud” make great consolation prizes.

Listen here.