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Black To Comm

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Black to Comm, “At Zeenath Parallel Heavens” (Thrill Jockey, 2023)

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I am almost always intrigued by the eclectic and unusual inspirations behind Marc Richter albums and this latest full-length for Thrill Jockey is no exception. The core concept at the heart of this one is the “hybridity within each and every one of us,” which Richter set out to mirror through a mixture of self-created sounds and manipulated samples. Things got more interesting along the way, however, as Richter had the epiphany that his own methods are quite similar to artificial intelligence “hallucinations,” which is a phenomenon in which an overloaded AI starts perceiving non-existent patterns or spewing incorrect or nonsensical conclusions.

Beyond that, the methods behind this album remain an enigma to me, as does the inspiration behind the album’s curious title, though Richter does note that the song titles borrow phrases from poetry and mythology with a deliberate leaning towards erotic innuendos and the ridiculous. Naturally, most of the humor and ridiculousness that found its way into these sound collages is far too buried or oblique to be readily apparent to listeners, but I had no trouble at all grasping that At Zeenath Parallel Heavens is yet another excellent Black to Comm album. In fact, this might be one of the most beautifully focused and immersive albums that Richter has ever released.

The album’s description suggests that “Richter’s audio occultism” was pushed into “even more divine, transcendent territory” than usual, which is an interesting claim given the rest of his discography. It may very well be an accurate one, as there are several pieces that achieve a sublime or celestial level of beauty, but Richter’s path to transcendence is not without some hard detours into nightmare territory along the way. That said, the opening descent into dreamlike bliss does last for two full songs. The first, “Then Began the Harp to Fashion,” is a lush swirl of subtly warping drones, quivering whimpers, skittering percussive clicks, rhythmic throbs, and jangling metal. It is a hell of a piece, as it elegantly and organically morphs and swells like a sentient supernatural haze, but the host of strange and beautiful textures that Richter unveils are a recurring pleasure for the album’s entire duration. Unexpectedly, however, that opener is immediately eclipsed by the following “Steep Thy Plumage in His Sweetness.” The piece deceptively opens with a motif that sounds like a stretched and slowed reverie of brooding strings, but a host of sensuous textures gradually creep in until it becomes a swooningly gorgeous melange of hisses, oscillations, choral voices, and gentle throbs worthy of its archaically horny title. Also, despite being only four-minutes long, that slow-motion heaven somehow manages to blossom into an unhurried epic that feels like a tender (if deconstructed) ballad sung by a lovesick robot.

The situation becomes considerably more gnarly with “Never Heed the Tongues of Wooers,” however, as that otherwise great advice is soundtracked by a menacing fog of squirming, curdled strings and infernal ululations. Unexpectedly, the mood brightens into a lovely fadeout of drones and subtly spacy synth tones after a cathartic percussion interlude. The fragile beauty lingers on for the following “Time Will Fly on Equal Pinions,” but the respite from sinister-sounding mindfuckery abruptly ends with “La société des rêves,” as oozing, unnerving drone swells and weirdly springy thuds provide an eerie backdrop for overlapping vocal loops of a French child. That weirdness only continues to deepen, as the piece is further enhanced by a stammering brass fanfare and violently disruptive splashes of warped choral voices.

The following “Musik im Schatten” draws out the darkness a little bit longer, resembling a heavy drone performance in a metalworking shop with sporadic sirens in the distance, but the final two pieces bring the album to a close in more warmly sublime fashion (even the piece that translates as “Slime of Ignorance,” which I dearly hope is not another erotic innuendo). Richter still has one final surprise up his sleeve, however, as the final “On the Grass Her Shoes of Deer-Skin” feels like a shimmering exotica-inspired mirage of a moonlit grotto. That is quite a delightful note to end on, as it makes me feel like I was just spat out onto a tropical beach by some kind of phantasmagoric theme park ride that felt like it lasted for several lifetimes (and just in time to hit the tiki bar before eagerly getting back in line to experience the whole mind-melting ride again!). This is a truly wonderful headphone album.

Listen here.

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Black to Comm, “Before After” (Thrill Jockey, 2019)

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I definitely did not expect any more Black to Comm releases this year (or even next year), as composing and mixing the massive and wildly ambitious Seven Horses for Seven Kings likely kept Marc Richter very busy for a very long time. I woefully underestimated the volume of material birthed from that transcendent bout of inspiration though, as another album is already here and it is another great one. While the two albums originate from the same sessions, Before After is billed as a deliberately composed companion album rather than a collection of orphaned tracks. 

To my ears, however, it actually sounds like both (in a good way): given the exacting sequencing and arc of Seven Horses, it would make sense if a lot of great songs did not quite fit that particular vision. Most of these eclectic, stand-alone pieces are certainly strong enough to have made the cut for Seven Horses, but I am glad they ultimately wound up on Before After instead, as this album is closer to my preferred aesthetic of playfully experimental and hallucinatory collage.

If I had any doubts about whether Richter had enough legitimately great material left over from the Seven Horses sessions for yet another strong album, they were completely erased within the first minute of the truly infernal “États-Unis.” The core of the piece is a nightmarish, sickly swirl of choral voices that phantasmagorically reverberate and smear together into ugly harmonies. Richter eventually grounds that floating horror with some brooding chords, but I am not sure he needed to, as he had already achieved a wonderfully disturbing “ruined cathedral of the damned” feel. I particularly enjoyed the crunching industrial noises, the strangled feedback, and the wonderful interplay of the various textures quite a lot, which illustrates the defining character of Before After: these eight pieces feel like a freeform playground for fitfully brilliant and compelling inspirations rather than a suite of meticulously crafted compositions. 

The blurting, screaming chaos of the following “His Bristling Irascibility (Mirror Blues)” is the most extreme example of that tendency, resembling a hyper-caffeinated Nurse With Wound in exotica mode having a complete psychotic breakdown. Such chaos and cacophony is the exception rather than the rule though, as Richter soon returns to warped beauty with “They Said Sleep,” inventively transforming an early medieval folk song into a grinding, howling, and mind-obliterating maelstrom of ravaged angelic derangement. The first side of the album then unexpectedly winds to a close with a lovely and subdued piano piece that has an endearingly lurching and tumbling rhythm that resembles out-of-phase loops rubbing up against one another.

The album’s second half opens with “Eden-Olympia,” a wonderfully roiling sea of rapidly hammered piano tones that slowly accumulates hallucinatory layers as it builds towards a reverberating percussion crescendo. In keeping with Before After‘s unpredictably phantasmagoric trajectory, the following “Othering” takes a deep plunge into pagan/ritualistic-sounding heavy psych that sounds like a sinister hurdy-gurdy ensemble (it calls to mind Cyclobe’s amazing Derek Jarman soundtracks as well). “The Seven of Horses” follows suit in a very similar vein, but the strangled bagpipe-like drones are strafed by blurting, splattering electronic noise and whines that evoke a sky full of fireworks (or, less desirable: falling bombs). 

Both pieces are absolutely wonderful and among my favorites on the album, as Richter does a stellar job of blurring the illusion of an ancient and exotic imagined past with gleefully gnarled mindfuckery. The album ends on a more subdued and sublime note, however, as “Perfume Sample” repurposes material from Seven Horses into a weirdly mass-like outro of half-ghostly/half-anthemic chords. It is the least substantial piece on the album, but it is an interesting and effective closer sequencing-wise: it feels like a well-earned glimpse of transcendence at the end of a series of bizarre and deeply unsettling nightmares.

Amusingly, I feel a vague, low-level sense of guilt for liking this album as much as I do, as Richter’s last few albums as Black to Comm have been very ambitious, focused, and sharply realized artistic statements. Before After does not quite fall into that category, as it seems like Richter simply had a bunch of cool ideas and just let them unfold organically without much concern for their role in the larger whole. Even the individual pieces do not feel particularly “composed,” as each one is generally devoted to a single theme that just kind of starts and stops at whatever point feels natural. Given the strength and imagination of Richter’s visions, however, that casual, unpolished brilliance works quite well and this album never feels indulgent or half-formed (nor does it feel overwrought, obviously). It favorably reminds me of LPD’s “Chemical Playschool” series, but if they were mercilessly edited until only the best parts remained. 

It is clear that Richter devote quite a bit of time into shaping these fascinating soundscapes into a coherent album with a thoughtful arc, even if that arc feels like an elusively shapeshifting series of darkly hallucinatory fever dreams. It might not be a sweeping and panoramic epic like its predecessor or 2014’s Black to Comm, but the more modest pleasures of Before After are definitely inspired enough to belong in that company (and they occasionally surpass it).

Samples can be found here.

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Black to Comm, “Seven Horses For Seven Kings” (Thrill Jockey, 2019)

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Over the last several years, Marc Richter’s Black to Comm project has swelled considerably in ambition and scope, blossoming into a shape-shifting and idiosyncratic force with a strong propensity for the epic. With this latest album, his first for Thrill Jockey, Richter reaches a darkly hallucinatory new plateau with his art. It is difficult to say whether Seven Horses For Seven Kings is Richter’s masterpiece, as there is stiff competition from a couple of his other recent albums, but it is unquestionably his heaviest and most vividly absorbing opus to date, unfolding as a disorienting and harrowing nightmare that increasingly stretches and strains towards transcendence.

Richter certainly has a gift for properly setting the stage for a uniquely phantasmagoric experience, as “Asphodel Mansions” slurs and oozes into being as a squirming mass of sickly, deflated, and uncomfortably discordant horns. In fact, the early pieces on all evoke the feeling that I have just been drugged or fatally poisoned and that I used my last burst of strength to stumble into a cabaret before fading out of consciousness. As my life ebbs away, I can hear all of the expected sounds of a small jazz band, but they all take on a menacingly disjointed, distended, and hellish texture as the neon-lit room spins around me. Even the drums in “A Miracle No-Mother Child At Your Breast” are not safe from the infernal transformation, as they feel like they are happening at an extremely slowed time-scale in which every lively fill is reduced to a deep, hollow, and echoing caricature of itself. 

Richter also seems to draw inspiration from fundamentally uncomfortable and unpleasant sounds during that first phase of the album, as the crescendos are rife with artfully blurred and transformed homages to alarm clocks and car alarms. In fact, it is not until the third piece, “Lethe,” that the veil of dissonant and undulating grotesquerie starts to dissipate, allowing the first hints of a more structured and deeper album to creep into the frame. 

At first, the shift towards more warm and melodic fare takes the shape of a smoky and serpentine saxophone over a hissing and throbbing backdrop of drones, but glimpses of considerably more detailed and harmonically rich vistas increasingly emerge as the album reaches its midpoint. In that regard, “Ten Tons of Rain in a Plastic Cup” feels like the doorway that frees me from the claustrophobic cacophony, then opens into somewhat more expansive and varied hellscape, as its swirling dissonance is gradually eclipsed by an ascending and darkly radiant progression of synth chords (albeit one gnawed by inhuman howls).

The following “Licking The Fig Tree” is the first unambiguously beautiful piece on the album, as a passionate eruption of free-jazz saxophone howls and squirms its way across a warm and lush landscape of deep organ chords. After that reverie, however, the bottom drops out and Seven Horses hits its lysergic, fragmented, and fitfully visceral crescendo. On the album’s single (of sorts) “Fly On You,” masses of shivering drones and strangled horns collide with booming and clattering percussion that sounds like massive, clanking machinery trying to replicate the sounds of a ping-pong game. “If Not, Not” is even more unhinged, as it feels like a thunderous taiko drumming ensemble drifts in and out of phase beneath a chaos of guitar noise and dissonant synth tones…and then gets joined by the cabaret chanteuse who was enigmatically absent from the album’s first third. 

Normally, the appearance of a recognizable human voice would soften such a roiling miasma, but not this time, as the vocalist’s phases grotesquely smear, warp, and intertwine into sinister incomprehensibility. The anachronistic Japanese war drums recur a few more times, most notably in “Semirechye” (courtesy of guest Jon Mueller), but the album’s final stretch is primarily significant for featuring its most most gorgeous and swooningly hallucinatory pieces. The first of those is “Angel Investor,” which is essentially just an immensely dense and oversaturated two-chord organ motif embellished with a vibrant nimbus of alternately howling and angelically warbling tones. In characteristic Richter fashion, however, the piece undergoes a brief rocky spell in which it violently warps like a collapsing star. Even heaven itself is precarious in the context of this album.

The ominously titled final piece (“The Courtesan Jigokudayū Sees Herself as a Skeleton in the Mirror of Hell”) is the most lovely of all though, as its squirming and ghostlike loops recall Richter’s Jemh Circs project (repurposed YouTube samples) at its most achingly sublime. That title also sheds some light on one of Richter’s probable inspirations for the album, as it references a hauntingly macabre Yoshitoshi woodblock print, which itself references the much older Japanese/Buddhist tale of “The Hell Courtesan.” 

Though it has taken several different forms and tones since it first appeared, it is ultimately a tale of enlightenment and redemption, themes that Richter seems to have a deep interest in (samples of evangelists are a recent recurring theme in his work and “The Deseret Alphabet” references the Mormons’ doomed attempt to create a new alphabet). I would hesitate to call Black to Comm “religious” though, even if if it occasionally approaches the ecstatic. It seems more accurate to say that Richter is fascinated and inspired by the myriad ways in which people wrestle with meaning and the condition of being human. 

That said, it would not surprise me at all if Seven Horses was intended as a deeply abstract reenvisioning of Jigokudayū’s story, as it definitely feels like an album that valiantly strains to pour a lifetime of anguish, lust, doubt, and transfiguration into two slabs of vinyl. I am not sure such a quixotic feat is entirely possible, but Richter’s efforts certainly make a powerful impression regardless of his intentions or inspirations. While both Black to Comm and Alphabet 1968 have their share of compositional wonders that rival Seven Horses‘ strongest moments, this album is nevertheless on a plane all its own in terms of distinctiveness, execution, and boldness of vision.

Samples can be found here.
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Black To Comm (Type, 2014)

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It has been quite a long wait since the last proper Black To Comm album (2009’s wonderful Alphabet 1968), so it was an absolute delight to have Marc Richter unexpectedly re-surface in December with an inspired return to form (and one of the year’s finest and most singular albums). 

While this latest release understandably bears almost no resemblance to Marc’s decidedly outré soundtrack for EARTH (2012), it also does not seem to follow any obvious, linear progression from his previous work either. Black To Comm is its own self-contained, anomalous world of vibrant, hallucinatory sound art brilliance, resembling nothing less than the beautiful nexus where drone, space rock, psychedelia, and the flickering unreality of late-night semi-consciousness meet. 

Richter does not waste any time at all in wrong-footing any listeners expecting a traditional drone album with this effort, as the beautifully woozy, shimmering, and squiggly synths of “Human Ghidrah” are relegated to the background by a bizarre (and impassioned) metaphysical spoken word performance that resembles late-night TV televangelism. The speaker is definitely not a televangelist though, as a televangelist would never urge me to grab my own anus and pull myself inside-out like this guy does. 

While no other pieces feature spoken-word other than the similarly unhinged closer (“Them”), “Human Ghidrah” sets an ambitiously unpredictable tone for the album that Richter does not waver from. Also, the spoken-word bits are an admirably bold move on Richter’s part, as he deflects the focus from some rather beautiful underlying music, opting to embrace the weird and unexpected rather than settling for just an excellent drone piece.

None of the eight pieces spanning Black To Comm share much in common in any specific sense, but they all display a similarly original vision and similarly ingenious construction. The most instantly gratifying and accessible highlight is the effortlessly epic and haunting “Hands,” which is probably the compositional high-water mark of Richter’s career: its garbled and processed vocal melody, elegiac piano chords, swooping synthesizers, and surreal array of peripheral sounds seem to condense the beginning and end of an entire world into just under 5 minutes. 

While nothing else on the album quite rivals that spectacular achievement, a few pieces come quite close. For example, the 20-minute “Is Nowhere” is an absolute monster of a drone piece, effectively enhancing its fragile, haunting central motif with field recordings before bulldozing it all with some wonderfully harsh, gnarled synthesizers. The aforementioned “Them” is yet another highlight, achieving nearly 15 minutes of sputtering, hallucinatory, and otherworldly grandeur before its deeply strange vocal catharsis erupts.

The remaining four pieces are similarly interesting and enjoyable, despite being somewhat less audacious in scope. “Spectre Teeth,” for example, is a buzzing, Middle Eastern-tinged drone piece featuring still more eerily tweaked vocals, while the heavy, engulfing thrum and exotic vocals of “1975” sound like the crescendo of an especially deranged and ambitious prog album. 

Later, “Fackeln in Sturm” unfolds a subtly lysergic array of shimmers, swells, and warped vocals over an echoey krautrock-meets-dub groove. Not to be left out, the remaining “Spiralen Der Errinerung” is possibly more bizarre than anything else on the album, resembling nothing less than some kind of ancient and deeply hallucinatory religious ceremony half-heard through heavy metallic grinding and something that sounds like heavily amplified Tibetan throat-singing.

At the risk of sounding somewhat hyperbolic, Black To Comm truly is a staggering and singular achievement and it is one that only could have come from Marc Richter: there are so many bewildering artistic choices, odd juxtapositions, eclectic influences, and disparate threads on display here that it is a marvel that it all works so well and feels so perversely natural. I was also struck by how disorientingly timeless the album feels. 

While the technology, techniques, and some of the influences certainly come from Earth (the planet) circa 2014, the music somehow always sounds completely unstuck in both time and place, seamlessly evoking at various points a lonely organist in an empty church, snatches of particularly weird half-remembered dreams, ancient cults, or something completely otherworldly altogether (and all while never lapsing into anything remotely mundane, derivative, or easily recognizable). I truly cannot say enough good things about this album, as Richter has delivered a legitimate, unqualified, start-to-finish masterpiece. This was my personal favorite release of 2014 by a landslide.

Listen here.