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Klara Lewis, “Thankful” (Editions Mego, 2024)

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This latest solo album from Swedish composer Klara Lewis is billed as “a heartfelt tribute to her friend, mentor and former label boss, Peter Rehberg” and a “precise homage” to his “methodology and spirit.”  Notably, Editions Mego released Lewis’s debut album Ett in 2014 when she was only 21 years old and her vision has undergone some rather dramatic evolutions since then.  For example, one of my favorite aspects of Ett was Klara’s near-complete avoidance of conventional melodies or instrumentation.  While that stance has certainly softened over the ensuing decade, Lewis is still every bit as adventurous and unpredictable in 2024 as she was back then–her songs just happen to have stronger melodic hooks now.  In keeping with that “anything goes” spirit, Thankful is fascinating miscellany that delves into everything from solo ukulele performances, unhinged techno mutations, Disintegration Loops-style slow-motion melody obliteration, and an achingly gorgeous elegy.  Unsurprisingly, all are wonderful, which makes Thankful yet another characteristically excellent Klara Lewis album.

The centerpiece of the album is the opening title piece, which is a 20-minute loop-based opus inspired by Rehberg’s early laptop masterpiece “Track 3” (from 1999’s Get Out).  The aforementioned similarity to Basinski is admittedly a rather superficial one, as “Thankful” is essentially a melancholy string loop that gradually becomes more and more distorted and corroded as the piece unfolds.  In spirit, however, it is clear that Lewis is coming from a very different place altogether, as the transformation undergone by “Thankful” is considerably more elemental and violent than anything I would expect from Basinski.  As with the Pita piece that directly inspired it, Lewis’s piece steadily becomes a snarling, blown-out maelstrom that shares more common ground with a fucking volcano than with any melodic tape loop experiment.  In fact, a river of lava is a perfect analogy for the piece, as it is objectively beautiful while leaving a scorched ruin in its wake.

In an amusingly left-field twist, that blackened drone epic is followed by a very brief and unadorned ukulele piece (“Ukulele 1”) and then a relentless crunching and pounding industrial nightmare (“Top”) that lies somewhere between a warehouse techno banger that went completely off the rails and someone playing Space Invaders though a massive sound system that is about to blow up.  Notably, “top” was one of Rehberg’s favorite terms of enthusiastic agreement and I am sure he would have appreciated the maniacal, speed-shifting relentlessness of that piece, but I would personally reserve that exclamation for the tender, sensual, and absolutely sublime piece that follows (“4U”).  The flickering backwards melody and dreamy shimmer are especially effective in the wake of “Top,” as it makes me feel like my soul is ascending towards the divine light after my body was flattened by a runaway bulldozer.  The album then winds to a close with one final surprise, as Lewis returns to her ukulele with a vengeance for “Ukulele 2.”  It initially calls to mind the rustic willful naivete of fellow Swedes Enhet För Fri Musik, but soon follows the same trajectory as “Thankful,” as it feeds back upon itself until it is reduced to a gnarled and nearly unrecognizable ruin.  Fittingly, the storm eventually passes to leave behind a somewhat battered yet resilient ghost of the opening theme, which makes for a fitting and moving closing statement: Rehberg himself may be gone, but his outsized influence will definitely continue to ripple outwards and find new forms for years.  Top.

Listen here.

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Klara Lewis, “Live in Montreal 2018” (Editions Mego, 2022)

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Klara Lewis has been a unique and consistently interesting artist ever since she first surfaced, but 2020’s Ingrid felt like a massive breakthrough and just about everything that she has released since has been stellar (live albums included). Unsurprisingly, Live in Montreal 2018 does nothing to derail that streak, but there are a couple of somewhat big surprises with it too. The first one is the date of the performance, as I had no idea that Lewis was on this plane two years before Ingrid came along. That is not to say that Live in Montreal would have necessarily eclipsed 2016’s excellent Too had it been the follow up, but the Lewis of 2016 was an artist who seemed categorically disinterested in doing anything the conventional/expected way. And the comparative melodicism of 2018’s fitfully great collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner (Care) felt like a one-off experiment in applying her non-musical found sounds to a more traditionally musical vision rather than a change in direction. 

As it turns out, however, Care was merely a tease of greater things to come and the lucky attendees of this performance got a sneak preview of those greater things long before the rest of us. The second big surprise is that this album is composed of seemingly all new material rather than variations on Lewis’s existing work—it feels aesthetically akin to a proto-Ingrid, but a stage before that piece was distilled to just a single perfect motif. Obviously, that narrowing of focus yielded great results, but this more varied and shapeshifting approach yielded some legitimately great results too, elegantly blurring the lines between drone, noise, spacy synth explorations, and pop plunderphonics.

As with a lot of live albums these days, the only significant difference in sound quality between Live in Montreal and one of Lewis’s more formal recordings is that it feels like there is a thin veil between me and the full harmonic richness, clarity, and crunching physicality of the music. Obviously, that is less than ideal, but that loss is presumably offset by a more significant gain like “it was not possible to reproduce the magic and spontaneity of this performance in a studio.” In any case, this album consists of a single 47-minute piece “with three distinct discernible sections” and an overarching theme of “permanent collapse” in which “strange sonic elements introduce themselves, rise to the fore, threaten the fundamental discourse only to recede on the brink of destroying the work itself.” 

While I sometimes have a hard time determining which elements constitute “the work” and which ones are the threatening interlopers as the piece unfolds, the trajectory of the opening section is quite easy to grasp: an intense choral sample plays over a subdued, gurgling, and crackling industrial rhythm, becomes erratic, then settles into a looping and haunted-sounding melody just as a visceral assault of white noise erupts. In a rough sense, it resembles a killer noise set tenaciously trying to tear its way through a classical requiem with only moderate success, which is a very appealing aesthetic given the fine balance of beauty and violence that Lewis achieves.

I am not sure if the noise element necessarily wins in the end, but the original choral theme is eventually reduced to a bleary drone augmented by woodland sounds like chattering birds while the noise/industrial elements rhythmically continue onward to steer the piece into a fresh passage of flanging drones over a heaving, crunching sea of roiling white noise. Gradually, however, it starts to feel like me and my chirping avian buddies are now at the seaside (along with some quivering feedback ghosts) as large waves relentlessly crash upon the shore, yet that too proves to be an ephemeral interlude, as Lewis soon starts to segue into her next dazzling set piece. While the next section could reasonably be described as “warm ambient drones,” they are vividly enhanced by a shapeshifting host of dissolving and hallucinatory new elements (hiss, submerged backwards melodies, glimpses of Spanish guitar, Whitney Houston belting out (nearly) unrecognizable fragments of “I Will Always Love You,” etc.). 

All of those other elements gradually vanish, however, leaving a gorgeously psychotropic and crystalline drone palace in their wake. For her final trick, Lewis ends the pieces with frayed, shivering synth swells that spectrally wobble over a stark backdrop of crackling textures. It is an appropriately beautiful conclusion to the set, but Lewis’s more impressive achievement is how organically fluid and compelling the journey to get there was: this album flows along wonderfully and the bridges between its major events never lull, nor does it ever feel like Lewis artfully stitched together a trio of different pieces into one. There is a definite arc to this album and it is a thoughtful and satisfying one with no missteps or unnecessary detours to be found. While live albums outside the improv/jazz milieu are historically not my favorite thing, this one is a rare and notable exception, easily ranking among the finest releases in Lewis’s already impressive discography.

Samples can be found here.

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Caterina Barbieri, “Fantas Variations” (Editions Mego, 2021)

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I was completely floored by the opening “Fantas” when I first heard 2019’s Ecstatic Computation, so I was thrilled to discover that it was unexpectedly getting its own well-deserved album of remixes. Given the brilliance of “Fantas” itself and the circle of talented and unusual artists surrounding Barbieri, I never had any doubt that I would enjoy Fantas Variations immensely, but I was still pleasantly surprised by the unexpected directions that some of these variations took, as the source material is damn near unrecognizable in some cases (especially in Evelyn Saylor’s startling opener). 

Naturally, much of the album’s draw for me lies in hearing what reliably great familiar names like Kara-lis Coverdale and Kali Malone could do with Barbieri’s intense synth opus and I was not disappointed in that regard. However, it is primarily the more unfamiliar artists (to me, at least) who steal the show, particularly on Bendik Giske’s haunting saxophone variation and Jay Mitta’s hyperkinetic snare freakout that resembles an unhinged, psychedelic Latin dance party or polka-themed nightmare.

Evelyn Saylor’s hazy and cooing a capella opener sets the bar quite high for bold and audacious interpretations of Barbieri’s work, as it almost sounds like it could be a lost vocal movement from Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, but with a more pronounced vocal jazz influence and some surprisingly intense wails near the end. Later on the album, however, Baseck turns up with the infinitely more bananas “Fantas Hardcore,” which sounds like it should be the soundtrack to sped-up footage of some first-person shooter video game or a supernaturally intense rave. Neither of those left-field surprises rank among my favorite pieces on the album, but they certainly illustrate how adventurous and wild some of Barbieri’s collaboration choices can be. 

On the more “safe” end of the spectrum, Walter Zanetti seamlessly transposes “Fantas” for guitar to approximate something akin to a mesmerizing Emeralds demo tape, while both Kali Malone and Kara-lis Coverdale beautifully adapt the piece to their own aesthetics (a breathy, slow-motion pipe organ reverie and a delicate, spidery solo piano performance, respectively). Carlo Maria, on the other hand, turns the piece into a driving bit of thumping synth-driven psychedelia that arguably recalls Emeralds again, but a considerably sexier and more dancefloor-driven incarnation of the band. 

As great as all of that can be, it is unquestionably Bendik Giske’s smoldering and serpentine “Fantas for Saxophone and Voice” that stands as the album’s most obvious and instantly gratifying masterpiece, though I am also greatly charmed by Jay Mitta’s half-brilliant/half-ridiculous vision of simply playing the original song, but adding some crazily over-the-top and relentless snare rolls to it. While I never expected Fantas Variations to eclipse Ecstatic Computation, I am nevertheless surprised at how well it succeeds as a weirder and more fun sister album.

Samples can be found here.

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Klara Lewis, “Ingrid” (Editions Mego, 2020)

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I was quite curious to see which direction Klara Lewis’s latest album would take, as her previous solo releases were generally quite radical and hyper-constrained in their avoidance of anything resembling conventional instrumentation. While both Ett and Too are aptly described by Editions Mego as “eerie rhythmic variations,” such a summary falls short in conveying the uniqueness of Lewis’s vision, as it often felt like she was quixotically attempting to compose pop songs solely from murky field recordings and decontextualized fragments of beats and melodies. With Ingrid, however, Lewis makes a dramatic and unexpected aesthetic reversal, as she slowly transforms a haunting and melodic cello loop into a wonderfully gnarled and heaving longform piece.

This album, a one-sided LP, is intriguingly billed as an improbable blend of William Basinski-style loop disintegrations and black metal intensity. In a general sense, I suppose Ingrid can reasonably be described as exactly that, but the similarity to Basinski’s work lies primarily in Lewis’s compositional technique rather than its tone. Great Basinski albums like El Camino Real and 92982 are extremely nuanced, tender, and dream-like affairs. Ingrid, on the other hand, evokes something considerably more raw and primal.

In fact, it can reasonably be described as “nightmarish,” though it definitely feels nightmarish in an arty Japanese horror film way rather than a “shrieking church-burners in face paint” way. Moreover, it maintains an earthy, physical foundation even as it becomes increasingly volcanic and frayed. In more practical terms, that means that Ingrid opens with a bittersweetly beautiful and emotionally resonant cello melody, but it soon becomes disconcertingly frozen in time, damned to repeat the same short melodic fragment for all eternity (or at least the duration of the album). While the initial melody is a poignant and sensual one, the “locked groove” moment isolates just a brief fragment of slow-motion, see-sawing melancholia and obsessively repeats it for the next nineteen minutes.

Admittedly, that frozen melody is quite a cool trick, but the meat of the album lies in how Lewis increasingly corrodes and distorts that fragment as the piece unfolds. At first, the transformation merely manifests itself as a quivering and shimmering haze that radiates outward from the dense and groaning string loop. I cannot tell exactly what Lewis is doing or how she is doing it, but it seems like the loop and its lingering hallucinatory nimbus begin to increasing feed back upon themselves, resulting in fluttering oscillations and occasional swells of sharper, more ringing tones. 

As that happens, the low end starts to gradually amass rumbling intensity as well, as each repetition of the loop feels like a more intense subterranean surge than the last. At a certain point, the central loop starts to feel like just one component in a much richer tapestry of layers, as it becomes increasingly subsumed by the roiling, distorted low end while the high-end shimmer coheres into something resembling a structured chord progression. Aside from that, the piece’s rhythm transforms as well, as the gnarled, smoldering undercurrent of distortion lingers and lags enough to fall out of phase with the central theme’s original pulse. Once it reaches its seismic crescendo, however, Lewis gradually allows the heaving elemental power of the low end to fade away, leaving behind an unexpectedly tender and lovely coda that almost feels like dreampop or shoegaze.

For the most part, I have absolutely nothing critical to say about Ingrid, as it is a flawless, hypnotic, and impressively relentless piece of music with a purposeful trajectory and an elegant symmetry. I even appreciate the unusual format, as it drives me crazy when people release longform pieces that require me to flip a record at some arbitrary midpoint. It is heartening that Lewis both acknowledged the limitations of the vinyl format and found a clever way around them (an important skill in this current period of vinyl supremacy). 

However, I will say that Lewis’s earlier albums were objectively a bit more original and unlike anything anyone else was doing. That said, plenty of wildly inventive artists release disappointing albums because originality and execution are two separate things. My favorite artists tend to be those that manage to strike an optimal balance between bold ideas, vibrant production, and compositional craftsmanship and Lewis absolutely nails that trifecta with this album.

Given that, I feel fairly confident in stating that Ingrid is a major creative breakthrough for Lewis and possibly her best album to date as well. It is undeniably still a cerebral and conceptually interesting work, but those artier tendencies are a hell of a lot more effective when they are woven into a roiling tsunami of visceral power and emotional intensity. I suppose that might be where the metal influence most strongly manifests itself, as Lewis has blossomed into a formidable composer who has managed to extract the cool and dangerous elements of the genre without bringing along any of its flaws. The result is an experimental music album that sounds like it could beat me up, steal my girlfriend, and decimate a hotel room, which definitely has a stronger and broader appeal than any similar fare with a less favorable balance between the cerebral and the physical.

Samples can be found here.

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Caterina Barbieri, “Ecstatic Computation” (Editions Mego, 2019)

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This Italian synth visionary made quite a spectacular impression with 2017’s Patterns of Consciousness and now makes her Editions Mego debut with its proper follow-up. To some degree, Barbieri picks up exactly where she left off, as Ecstatic Computation shares its predecessor’s masterfully executed conceptual conceit: using subtle shifts in obsessively repeating patterns to achieve a trancelike and hallucinatory effect. 

Given both that objective and Barbieri’s singular compositional rigor, Ecstatic Computation bears little resemblance at all to the work of other synth artists, but it also sounds quite different from the sprawling and sometimes overwhelming Patterns of Consciousness as well. While it is hard to pick a favorite between the two albums, this one is definitely the more accessible, as Barbieri has distilled her vision into a much more concise and focused presentation. This album is also quite a bit more varied and unpredictable, as Barbieri occasionally allows the machine-like precision of these pieces to careen off the rails and unleash a glorious and vivid shower of sparks.

Anyone in search of one single piece that perfectly captures all that is unique and wonderful about Barbieri’s vision would be well-served by heading straight for Ecstatic Computation‘s opening stunner “Fantas.” The piece begins by slowly billowing up through a static-ravaged fog streaked with howling, corroded snatches of melody, then coheres into a propulsively tight, dense, and pulsing arpeggio theme. It is an eerily beautifully and tense motif on a purely musical level, yet I am still more stuck by how sleek and futuristic it all sounds. Curiously, however, that central theme dissolves around the halfway point to reveal a disorientingly blurred and woozy interlude that sounds like out-of-phase tape loops of an organ mass. Initially, Barbieri’s choice to derail that impressive initial momentum seems like a quite a perplexing one, but the original theme slowly fades back into focus to ride out the piece’s final minutes…except that it is not quite as straightforward as that. 

Instead of fading away or just ending, the central theme is instead deconstructed, slowed, and stretched until it is destroyed in a visceral flurry of eruptions that feels like a dangerously close fireworks display. From start to finish, “Fantas” is a tour de force performance that vividly illustrates where Barbieri is at this stage of her career. Most other synth artists are content with coming up with a killer patch and shaping it into a composition—with Barbieri, that seems like it is merely the starting point. It is very easy to picture her room strewn with obsessive diagrams, notes, and drawings as she wrestles to find a way to transform each new piece into something mesmerizing and surprising rather than merely good.

Following the virtuosic latticework of that initial statement of intent, Barbieri allows herself to get a bit loose and experimental for next few pieces. While “Spine of Desire” is merely a brief and pleasant interlude, “Closest Approach to Your Orbit” is yet another intricate pattern of subtly shifting and transforming arpeggios. For the most part, it is a more understated work than “Fantas,” which enables the tumbling and occasionally squirming patterns to be a bit more hypnotic as there is no prominent melodic figure to steal the focus. There are some unusual dynamic and textural curveballs to be found as well, as the piece opens sounding vaguely like a marimba and closes sounding like a harpsichord, while everything in between is characteristically burbling and futuristic.

Aside from that, there is yet another climactic eruption of reverberating fireworks. The following “Arrows of Time,” on the other hand, is quite a radical detour, as Barbieri replaces her synth with a ghostly layered chorale of her own vocals over some sparse chords. It is quite a lovely piece and one that is far outside Barbieri’s usual approach, yet it still feels strange and haunting enough that it would not seem out of place in a space-themed Kubrick or Tarkovsky film. 

The album is rounded out by two final pieces that return to the rough template of “Fantas” with some ingenious and distinctive twists. The better of the two is the twinkling and majestic “Pinnacles of You,” which becomes increasingly frayed and disorienting as notes begin to sizzle and unpredictably lag and linger. The slower and simpler “Bow of Perception” is initially less impressive, but gradually becomes appealingly erratic and unstable as individual notes start to break free of their pattern to squeal and squirm. Also, the final moments sound like a vividly kinetic laser battle at an unhinged robot dance party.

I am hard-pressed to find any flaws at all with this album, as the only real caveat is that it unavoidably feels less substantial than its massive and wildly ambitious predecessor. That is fine by me, as I am just as happy with a short, filler-free, and oft-brilliant array of new pieces as I would be with another grand statement on par with Patterns. Every single piece on Ecstatic Computation is an inspired one, particularly “Fantas” and “Pinnacles of You.” I suppose that arguably makes this Barbieri’s “singles album,” but it is a remarkably thoughtful, coherent, and thematically consistent one. 

I am hard-pressed to think of any other artists that embody the balance of surgical exactitude and artistic vision as beautifully as Barbieri, as this album feels like the work of a hyper-intelligent android that has discovered human emotions and feels them quite intensely.While I am generally loathe to describe any artists’ work as “essential,” it seems reasonable to state that any collection of contemporary synth albums that does not include either this one or Patterns of Consciousness has quite a glaring hole in it. In the span of only a few years, Barbieri has established herself as one of the select few synthesizer artists who sets new standards and redefines what is possible with each new release. Ecstatic Computation is an excellent illustration of why she has earned that stature.

Samples can be found here.

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Klara Lewis and Simon Fisher Turner, “Care” (Editions Mego, 2018)

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The news of this intriguing collaboration delighted me, as Klara Lewis has carved out quite a wonderfully idiosyncratic and incredibly constrained niche over the last few years by largely avoiding any recognizable instrumentation. Consequently, I had no idea at all what would happen when her surreal collages collided with Simon Fisher Turner’s formidable talents as a composer. As it turns out, a pure collaboration resulted, as Care does not particularly resemble either artist’s previous work. Instead, it feels like several divergent albums have been deconstructed, warped, and obliterated to leave only some lingering shards in a shifting and hallucinatory fantasia of drones, textures, and field recordings. That fundamental disjointedness can admittedly be a bit challenging at times, but Care ultimately comes together beautifully with the lushly rapturous closer, “Mend.”

From the first moments of the opening epic “8,” it was abundantly clear to me that Care was going to be quite a bizarre and disorienting experience that would sidestep just about every expectation that I had. That statement is not meant as unambiguously rapturous praise, as my mind was not instantly blown or anything—the album simply takes a very different path than I imagined. For example, I have always found Lewis’s collages to be tightly and meticulously crafted, yet “8” is an extended dive into a fog of amorphous, drifting, and abstract phantasmagoria. It does not have anything remotely resembling a conventional structure or even anything resembling an unconventional structure, as nothing is constant at all.

Instead, it feels like I am floating weightlessly through an ether of ghostly drones, vaporously indistinct voices, and submerged song-fragments that is unpredictably and jarringly disrupted by stuttering and jackhammering deconstructions of sultry dance anthems. I doubt I would even describe it as having “dream logic,” yet it is still a strangely compelling piece solely because the duo manage to make seemingly benign snippets of pop music feel lysergic and haunted. While I have personally never died, “8” feels like an eerily uncanny evocation of what the final mental spasms of death might be like: near-silence mingled with occasional intrusions of real ambient sounds like voices and birds, as well as colorfully vivid and ephemeral blasts of disjointed memories.

The following “Drone” is considerably less of an uncategorizable mindfuck, initially resembling a brooding and throbbing dip into Fisher Turner’s soundtrack work. At some point, a strange harmonica- or hurdy-gurdy-like motif emerges and it seems like something more significant might cohere. That proves to be an illusion, however, as the piece instead dissolves again into a mysterious coda of crackling noise. Elsewhere, “Tank” takes a somewhat similar trajectory, blurring together moody cinematic atmosphere with eruptions of noise and dreamlike snatches of field recordings from far-away places. 

Of the two pieces, “Tank” fares a bit better at achieving a kind of “hallucinatory travelogue” feel, but I still cannot escape a nagging desire for the duo’s fragmented entropy to cohere into something more structured in a lasting way. Instead, Lewis and Fisher Turner just conjure up the occasional fleeting glimpse of a surreal and vivid vista that quickly dissipates back into abstraction. The album’s sole exception to that tendency is the swooningly lovely closer “Mend.” 

Like the rest of the album, “Mend” is composed of just a few simple pieces precariously held together, but differs from them in that the woozily squirming central theme is quite a strong one and it remains constant. In fact, it even steadily builds as the piece unfolds, gradually transforming from an undulating, liquid drone into a vivid crescendo of swirling and howling tendrils. There are also some crackling and enigmatic radio transmissions in the background to deepen the experience, but the real magic is the main theme itself, which constantly heaves, shudders, and sways like a massive, slow-moving snake.

I am always a bit confounded when an album features one piece that is on a completely different plane than all of the others, as I tend to wonder if an artist just decided to release an album to showcase that one piece or if the other pieces were also intended to be great in a way that somehow eludes me. Given the caliber of the participants here, I have to assume it is the latter, especially since “8” displays an extreme attention to detail and sound design. The uncharitable interpretation would be that Lewis and Fisher Turner had some excellent but divergent ideas and the only way they could seamlessly bring them together was by completely obliterating them into kaleidoscopic fragments.

The alternate possibility is that the duo set about making a boldly experimental headphone album that feels more like a memory virus than a series of structured compositions: intriguing, sharply realized forms erratically appear only to disintegrate, dissolve, or get pulled apart until they are just another part of an enigmatic and living fog of real and imagined sounds. If so, that was a great idea, though I remain perplexed by the execution. For now, I merely like that unapologetically abstract side of the album, while I absolutely love the more conventionally structured “Mend,” but I am open to the possibility that the rest of the album will someday grow on me if I immerse myself in it long enough.

Samples can be found here.
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Bruce Gilbert, “Ex Nihilo” (Editions Mego, 2018)

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Remarkably, this is the first Bruce Gilbert solo album that I have ever heard in its entirety and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it is radically different from any of his other work that I have encountered: it is clear that I woefully underestimated the depth and breadth of the Gilbert oeuvre. 

This latest release continues to delve deeper into the coldly futuristic and menacing vein of his previous Editions Mego album (2009’s Oblivio Agitatum), yet does so in wonderfully explosive and visceral fashion. Ex Nihilo feels like the soundtrack for a bleakly alienating dystopian city of endless metal and neon, composed by a cyborg with a fairly hostile disposition. Those hoping for any trace of melody or tenderness in Gilbert’s industrial dread should probably skip this one, but there is definitely a gleaming, inhuman majesty to these grinding and throbbing soundscapes.

The album opens in impressively snarling and hostile fashion with “Undertow,” which feels like a randomized and chromatic series of densely throbbing drones that relentlessly moves forward like tank. Despite lasting for over six minutes, it never quite evolves into anything more, which seems to be exactly the point: “Undertow” is essentially just a mercilessly buzzing and roiling juggernaut of a piece. I quite like it, as Gilbert’s vision is a fairly singular and powerful one despite its self-imposed limitations. I am especially struck by his talent for self-effacement, as “Undertow” feels like it was created by a malevolent algorithm in a bad mood rather than a human. 

I suppose plenty of modular synth music also sounds like the direct result of math and circuitry, but what matters is how well an artist is able to harness that power and steer it towards something novel and interesting. In that regard, Gilbert succeeds on two levels. On pieces like “Undertow” and “Hymn,” the sounds he gets are truly vibrant, gnarled, jagged, and immense-sounding: Ex Nihilo is a legitimately heavy album. 

Beyond its occasional dazzling displays of brute force, however, Gilbert does an impressive job of creating and sustaining his own vividly realized sci-fi nightmare world, which can be quite immersive despite its sharp edges. Taken as a whole, these nine pieces have an evocative, cold beauty to them that stealthily surfaces whenever the buzzing and grinding industrial cacophony wanes in intensity.

That said, I do tend to like the more ravaged and corroded pieces the most, especially the aforementioned “Hymn,” which sounds like the most blackened and inhuman interpretation of that word possible. Initially, however, there are some tenderly whimpering and dreamily swooping tones that sound like an elegant dance of ghostly feedback. That does not last long, however, as the opening motif is soon eclipsed by densely lurching and grotesquely glimmering fantasia of crawling and blurting bass tones; sickly harmonies; and shrilly twinkling synth arpeggios. It feels a lot like a nightmare in which a starry night sky has turned evil and decided to smother me. 

The following “Black Mirror” is similarly harrowing, as it sounds like Gilbert took a bunch of contact mic recordings of heavy construction equipment, then set about making them sound even more industrial: it is roughly four minutes of brutally grinding, shuddering, and buzzing industrial chaos. Even the less overtly hostile fare on Ex Nihilo can be quite challenging though. For example, the eerily pretty and burbling reverie of “HA8” proves to be just a mere prelude to much darker fare, dissolving into a miasma of distant rumbling and ugly quavering synth washes that sounds like a chorus of slowed down sirens in disharmony with one another. 

In fact, now that I think of it, Ex Nihilo sounds like a darkly lysergic futurist dystopia built largely from repurposed sirens and construction noises. It definitely feels like Gilbert painstakingly crafted a haunted and shadowy imaginary city, then gleefully set about trying to soundtrack it with what he envisioned car alarms and jackhammers might sound like in 300 years. That aesthetic is far more listenable than it sounds, but it is still quite a challenging and perverse vision.

Only one piece divergences from that aesthetic much at all: the obsessively throbbing “In Memory of MV,” which sounds like a locked groove of a thick synth or wave generator pulse with some subtle industrial textures billowing out from the edges. It still sounds like the machines are in control, but it is at least possible to imagine Gilbert in the picture turning dials somewhere. That is not the case with the rest of the album for the most part, as he was far more intent on crafting a richly textured, unsettling, and imaginative world than he was in crafting individual songs or leaving much evidence of his touch. 

While a few pieces are focused and confrontational enough to work as solid noise pieces, Gilbert’s real achievement lies in the masterful and sustained illusion that he conjures: Ex Nihilo is a glimmering and nightmarish cityscape seething with dread and menacing machinery. It certainly is not pretty, but it is unquestionably a powerful and memorable vision. Bruce Gilbert’s prodigious talents for subversion and alienation remain as sharp as ever.

Listen here.

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Thomas Brinkmann, “A 1000 Keys” (Editions Mego, 2016)

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Lamentably, I have not been following Thomas Brinkmann’s career at all until now, as I had unfairly assumed that he was exclusively a techno producer and probably not of much interest to a connoisseur of the fringes like me. As it turns out, however, his releases for Editions Mego are quite radically experimental and very much to my taste, particularly this one. 

A 1000 Keys has its roots in an intriguing and ambitious premise: Brinkmann basically converted the sound of a grand piano into binary code as a “fatal homage to minimalism and a consequent denial of virtuosity and the idea of creative genius.” Naturally, that claim was more than enough to pique my interest, but I would not have stuck around for very long if that concept had not translated into such a gloriously visceral and dissonant tour de force. Brinkmann decisively delivers on his bold promise, taking the more chromatic and violent strains of modern classical piano composition to an impressively inhuman extreme.

In keeping with his ballsy and quixotic rejection of all warmth and humanity, Brinkmann named each of these 18 pieces using three-letter airport codes. His reasoning was that airports are “non-places that establish their own space-and-time continuum, while lacking individual identity and history.” Also, they are “sterile passages for anonymous, objectified masses.” I definitely like the way Brinkmann thinks. 

Unsurprisingly, the corresponding music is similarly anonymous and lacking individual distinctions, turning something that would normally be a flaw into a perverse virtue of sorts. There is nothing resembling a conventional melody anywhere on 1000 Keys and Brinkmann does not expression much interest in differentiating the pieces with significant rhythmic or dynamic variations. He even seems content to mostly restrict his activities to the rumbling lower registers. 

What he offers instead, however, is an unrelenting onslaught of jagged, percussive dissonance. Occasionally, he changes the formula a bit with something like a deep, buzzing drone (“TLV”); a scratching and popping rhythm (“YWG”); or an occasional brief interlude of gently burbling synth-like tones (“SFO” and “HEL”), but the overall aesthetic is very clearly one of nerve-jangling punishment and harsh chromaticism.

Aside from the impressive and maniacal show of force, I was most struck by the pieces where Brinkmann digitally obliterates the piano-like elements so completely that his grand piano sounds like crunching industrial machinery, as he does with the relentless and crushing locked-groove of “CGN” and the grinding closer “KIX.” Neither piece would sound out of place on a noise album. Nor would the jagged, disorienting, and dissonant arpeggios of “KGD” sound all that out of place on a Morton Feldman album—or at least they would not if they were played with an uncharacteristic degree of violence. 

For the most part, however, Brinkmann’s pieces remind me favorably of Pierre Boulez’s more confrontational work, but played with an unfeasible number of fingers and very much fixated on the gut-level power of the churning lower register. While those differences are admittedly significant on Brinkmann’s side of the equation, they do not matter all that much on my end. Aside from the two palette-cleansing synth-like interludes, listening to 1000 Keys is basically like being attacked for 70 minutes or so: the differences between songs can seem very trivial as the cumulative effect adds up. No one cares about the nuances that separate being hit with a bat versus being hit with a hammer: both hurt. The same is true of punishing repetition, ugly percussive chords, and roiling chromatic runs in the lower registers.

Perversely, 1000 Keys greatest faults can also be seen as thematically pure attributes. Without question, this is a very single-minded and one-dimensional album and it stretches out for two LPs. Listening to the entire album is exhausting. However, that sameness and unrelenting density also gives the album a monolithic power that effectively emphasizes Brinkmann’s intended statement. 

Another possible critique is that Brinkmann’s “denial of virtuosity and the idea of creative genius” is literally just that: a denial, rather than any kind of replacement. Post-1000 Keys, I am still more than happy to seek out both virtuosity and genius, but Brinkmann at least showed that the alternative can offer quite an impressively bludgeoning and absorbing spectacle. Also, I think he definitely pushed the envelope a bit regarding the piano’s range of expression. 

Admittedly, I wish 1000 Keys showed a bit more depth and variety compositionally, but that is probably beside the point and possibly even antithetical to what Brinkmann was trying to do here. These are not brilliant compositions, but they are fascinating experiments and great art. Thomas Brinkmann basically took one of the greatest symbols of Art and Genius (the grand piano) and weaponized it. More importantly, he crafted an album ferocious and uncompromising enough to make me care. A 1000 Keys is a seriously heavy album.

Listen here.

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Klara Lewis, “Too” (Editions Mego, 2016)

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When I heard Klara Lewis’s self-released EP back in 2012, I was deeply impressed with how effectively she shaped her “found sound” collages into song-like structures, but worried that such an abstract and purist approach would be extremely limiting in the long run (it is hard to craft hooks without vocals or instruments, obviously). As it turns out, my misgivings were largely unfounded, as Lewis has proven to be quite adept indeed at finding inventive and varied ways to exploit her unusual palette. 

In fact, she seems to only be getting better and better at unlocking its deeper possibilities rather than backing herself into a corner. That said, the content of Too probably will not surprise anyone who picked up 2014’s Ett, though it may be a little less rhythmically focused. That is not a detriment though. In fact, it may even be liberating, as Too definitely feels more rich, otherworldly, and emotionally resonant than its predecessor. More importantly, it features “Beaming,” which is a work of absolute brilliance.

Over the course of her brief career, Klara Lewis has quietly revealed herself to be a remarkably assured artist working within some rather rarefied terrain. On one hand, her liberal use of non-musical source material makes her very much an experimental music artist, yet she seems genuinely intent on shaping her extremely non-commercial sounds into almost-songs with almost-hooks and almost-grooves. It is a tough balance to maintain, but it is a welcome departure from the willful insularity and obtuseness that plagues so much experimental music. 

I think the most succinct and glib way to describe her niche is “it sounds like someone trying to DJ a party armed only with albums from Touch artists.” Such sounds definitely do not lend themselves to floor-filling fun easily, yet Lewis often achieves a kind of understated, spectral genius and pulsing subterranean throb with her work, feeling like a bleary, kaleidoscopic, and dreamlike afterimage of nightlife rather than the flesh-and-blood actuality.

Lewis maintains remarkably high standards throughout Too‘s nine pieces, never stagnating, delving into filler, erring into derivative territory, or degenerating into more predictable or straightforward fare. It is all good. There are several songs that stand out for various reasons, however. The first is the rather brief “Twist,” which is shaped from reverberant metallic clangs, an erratic rhythm of dynamically active and phase-shifting clicks, shadowy drones, and an obsessively repeating swell that sounds like a single organ chord processed into unrecognizability. 

The following “Too” is something of a left-field masterpiece, opening with an unexpectedly slow and sensuous groove built from backwards drums, ghostly vocal snippets, and an actual bass line. After dissolving briefly into abstraction, however, the groove reappears in much heavier and explosive fashion, as it sounds like Lewis is now backing a shit-hot free-jazz ensemble of trumpeting elephants. 

Later, “Beaming” reaches even more dazzling heights, opening with surprising warm and hissing drones that sound like they are being dreamed by a futuristic machine. Gradually, some distant field recordings start to seep in, as do some crackling and echoing intercom transmissions. The overall effect is both absolutely gorgeous and absolutely hallucinatory. In fact, it may very well be the most perfect piece of music that I will hear this year. Describing it as lushly melancholic and otherworldly is a good start, but it actually evokes something far more unique than that: it is almost like simultaneously hearing our world and a beautiful alien transmission at the same time in heavenly juxtaposition.

As far as flaws are concerned…well, there just are not any to be found. At worst, Lewis is content to merely weave a quietly throbbing industrial reverie between her more ambitious pieces, but even those are wonderfully distinctive and satisfying. I want to say that the genius of Too lies primarily in the lightness of Lewis’s touch, but this album is actually a goddamn pile-up of unwaveringly great decisions: the textures, the mood, the song durations, the production—just everything. The lightness of touch is quite crucial, however, as Too is a gorgeously vaporous and beautiful album shot through with just enough disquieting darkness to make it all feel like a precarious dream. Such a highwire act could have been easily derailed by something as simple as a clear melody or a too-forceful rhythm, but none of that happens and spell remains both intact and beguiling until the last notes fade. Klara Lewis is a sonic sorceress and this album is amazing.

Listen here.

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Fennesz, “Bécs” (Editions Mego, 2014)

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For reasons that are not immediately apparent to me, Bécs is being billed as the conceptual follow-up to 2001’s landmark Endless Summer. To me, it just sounds like another characteristically likable Fennesz album with a couple of better-than-usual pieces, though it is certainly much brighter in tone than either Venice or Black Sea. In any case, this is a fine (and welcome) return by one of experimental music’s most distinctive voices, but it is not any kind of seismic event. It is very hard to be revolutionary more than once, I guess.

If there is a nod to the sun-dappled radiance of Endless Summer, it comes with the opening “Static Kings,” which offers up a lazy melody and some strummed acoustic guitars, though they are warped and churned fairly aggressively by Christian’s laptoppery. Unexpectedly, however, “Static” also features a bold new innovation: an actual band—of sorts, anyway, as Fennesz is joined by bassist Werner Dafeldecker and drummer Martin Brandlmayr. Their contributions are fairly subtle and last only for the one song, but Christian is uncharacteristically joined by other musicians twice more before the album runs its course.

He is solo again for the second piece, “The Liar,” which brutally erases all traces of any kind of summery vibe. Consisting primarily of gnarled, buzzing swells that gradually grow in power below an obscured haze of melody, “The Liar” instantly makes itself known as one of Bécs‘ clear highlights. The other clear highlight follows immediately after in the album’s 10-minute centerpiece “Liminality,” which balances melancholy drones with a surprisingly simple, beautiful, and unprocessed guitar melody. The playing and the melody are themselves straightforward, yet the production is decidedly not, as Christian works some very impressive magic with texture, attack, and dynamics. The overall effect gradually becomes that of a lovely guitar motif struggling in vain to be heard though an escalating squall of static. It is not quite a perfect piece, but it is intermittently damn close, falling just shy of being a masterpiece.

After that, however, Christian’s inspiration seems to wane a bit, as the remaining four pieces do not quite offer anything new, just more variations on the established themes or single ideas explored without significant development. “Palles Athene,” for example, is a lengthy bit of brooding, spacey ambient that just drifts along ominously for six minutes, while the title piece evolves from jarring, quavering single notes into yet another roaring torrent of static that conceals a poignant melody. It is admittedly almost as great as “Liminality,” but its impact is dulled a bit by the fact that Christian has already pulled this particular rabbit from his hat once before.

Bécs winds down with “Sav,” a grainy, rattling, and crackling soundscape duet with guest Cédric Stevens on modular synth, and the brief “Paroles,” a pleasant acoustic guitar-driven reprise of “Static Kings.” Both pieces are likable in their own ways, but neither quite catches fire, though I do like the sputtering and unpredictable electronics that gradually invade “Paroles.” The vibrant textures that Fennesz and Stevens lay down for “Sav” are very impressive too, but the melodic component seems to have been little more than an afterthought, so the promising foundation remains only that.

All of that basically adds up to yet another solid, enjoyable Fennesz album. It may even be a great album, but it is impossible for me to tell without completely fresh ears, as I have been listening to Christian Fennesz for 15 years now and I am too desensitized to his aesthetic to be appropriately dazzled anymore. For the uninitiated, however, Bécs is probably an excellent place to start (as is Endless Summer, of course). As for those who are already converted, Bécs will not disappoint. It probably will not rekindle an intense passion either, but it certainly adds at least a few more gems to Christian’s already-teetering heap.

Listen here.

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