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Duane Pitre, “Varolii Patterns” (Important, 2023)

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This latest cassette/digital release from composer/Just Intonation enthusiast Duane Pitre has its origins in a piece written for the brass ensemble Zinc & Copper a few years back (“Pons”), as he stumbled upon an intriguing process while “experimenting with microtonal electronics.” While those experiments did not ultimately make it into the final piece, they later surfaced as one element within 2021’s Omniscient Voices. That was just a fraction of the material recorded using that process, however, as Pitre had repeated it several dozen times and found himself with a considerable backlog of compelling material that was not an ideal fit for Omniscient Voices. Naturally, that led to the release of Varolii Patterns, which collects six of those process experiments that Pitre deemed strong enough to stand on their own both individually and as an album-length statement. The result is a unique and hypnotic suite of Just Intonation synth pieces that make magic from shifting patterns that “slip in and out of rhythmic focus.”

As every artist knows, finding fresh ways to escape familiar patterns is a constant struggle and there have been countless ingenious strategies devised to subvert creative stagnation since John Cage famously blew everyone’s minds in the 1950s by embracing the I Ching as his guiding force. I have no idea what Pitre’s own process entailed beyond using an eight-voice synth tuned to Just Intonation, but the end product certainly feels more like a living organic entity than a series of compositions. Naturally, the tuning alone ensures that Varolii Patterns is brimming with unfamiliar and otherworldly harmonies, but the rhythm of the shifting patterns is unusual and unfamiliar as well, approximating the shifting, erratic rhythm of ocean waves rather than the rigid time signature of composed music. To my ears, the haunting “Varolii Pattern 10-1” is the most mesmerizing of the album’s variations on a theme, as a steady pulse smears into an undulating and hallucinatory haze of strange dissonances and oscillations. Moreover, it rarely sounds like Pitre is ever doing something as mundane as simply playing notes and chords–it instead feels like an interwoven tapestry of moaning, whimpering, dissolving, and smearing sounds resembling the ambient sounds of an extradimensional aviary where the normal physics of sound no longer apply.

While I would stop short of calling anything on this album remotely conventional, some of the other pieces do feel a bit less alien. For example, it is possible to imagine the ghost of Pitre’s originally planned brass composition in “Varolii Pattern 11-1,” but it also feels like it may have been composed for a tuba ensemble submerged in something nightmarishly gelatinous. The following “Varolii Pattern 12-1” is the closest thing to familiar terrain, as it feels a lot like warm, gently pulsing ambient drift (albeit ambient drift with unusual harmonies). Elsewhere, “Varolii Pattern 8-11” fitfully locks into a heaving, throbbing groove of sorts that sounds like a techno remix of Phillip Glass that has been stretched, slowed, and smeared into unrecognizability. That is certainly a neat trick, but the closing two pieces are even stronger. In “Varolii Pattern 10-2,” an erratically repeating brass-like pulse creates alien harmonies and changing rhythmic patterns as it interacts with the organically shifting swells of the undercurrent.

“Varolii Pattern 4-2,” on the other hand, sounds like a cross between a curdled trumpet solo trapped in a loop and a pitch-shifted chorus of phantasmagoric whales, but that mindfuckery somehow remains semi-firmly grounded in sustained drones. Every single one of these pieces is fascinating if one listens close enough though, albeit with the caveat that Pitre’s harmonies may be a hard sell for more dissonance-averse ears. Aside from that, the sole caveat is the overall similarity of the pieces, but I find Varolii Patterns more akin to witnessing a magician improbably pull off six very cool tricks in a row despite some challenging self-imposed constraints. While I suppose this is intended as a minor release in the grand scheme of Pitre’s oeuvre, it is at least the second of his releases to feel like some sort of revelatory bombshell to me (Feel Free being the other that springs to mind). I now need to revisit Omniscient Voices immediately, as I have the sneaking suspicion that I may have slept on yet another audacious harmonic achievement.

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Pauline Oliveros-Stuart Dempster-Panaiotis, “Deep Listening” (New Albion (1989)/Important (2020))

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Originally released back in 1989 on the New Albion label, this landmark celebration of extreme natural reverb has finally received a long-deserved reissue in honor of its thirtieth anniversary. Obviously, production technology has evolved quite a lot since the ’80s and site-specific performances have since become a somewhat common occurrence in the experimental music world, so Deep Listening does not feel quite as radical now as it did when it was first released. Nevertheless, it is still quite a strange and magical album, as I cannot think of any other accordionists who have descended into a two million gallon cistern to explore the incredible acoustic possibilities inherent in a 45-second reverb decay. 

As someone without a deep technical understanding of how reverb works, I found the new liner notes from recording engineer Al Swanson and Peter Ward quite helpful in explaining exactly why these recordings feel so unreal, but such knowledge is not necessary to appreciate this album: I have been able to enjoy the epic and eerie slow-motion beauty of Deep Listening for years without knowing a single goddamn thing about phase integrity or slap-back. While I cannot say I was exactly clamoring to see this album released in the vinyl format, I am absolutely delighted to see it resurrected and back in the public consciousness.

For some reason, my mind has proven extremely resistant to viewing Deep Listening as anything other than a Pauline Oliveros album. Obviously, she is the most famous and influential member of this trio, as well as the artist most closely associated with “deep listening” as a kind of philosophy, but it would be more accurate to view this album as both the birth of Deep Listening Band and the beginning of a long, fruitful creative partnership with composer Stuart Dempster. 

In fact, it is Dempster’s trombone and didgeridoo playing that most prominently sets the tone for the album’s two most memorable pieces: the bookends “Lear” and “Nike.” To some degree, that suggests “shallow listening” on my part, as Oliveros’s subtly shifting bed of lingering accordion tones is crucial in shaping the subtly hallucinatory and harmonically rich backdrop in “Lear.” Nevertheless, it is the deep, roiling drone of the didgeridoo that gives the piece its heft and it is the slow, majestic trombone melody that evokes its distinctively timeless and somber feel.

That melancholy and vaguely medieval-sounding aesthetic is apt, as “Lear” was incorporated into Lee Breuer’s production of King Lear (though I do not know if it was originally composed with that in mind). “Nike,” on the other hand, is a bit more abstract and inventive, as it gradually takes shape from a ghostly miasma of voices, clattering metal pipes, and breathy conch shell drones. Admittedly, it takes a little while to fully come together, but it is a quite a bizarre and compelling piece nonetheless, resembling an angelic choir in a desolate factory that gradually curdles into an infernal-sounding crescendo that calls to mind an ancient battlefield littered with corpses (or at least a banshee caught in a thunderstorm).

Between those two poles, there are a pair of more subtle and nuanced pieces: “Suiren” and “Ione.” For the most part, “Ione” is kind of a beatific and meditative inversion of the palette employed for “Lear,” as the didgeridoo and accordion converge into a languorously undulating bed of shifting harmonies. More importantly, Dempster’s trombone melodies are not at all portentous and blood-soaked, instead lazily unfurling like smoke in something approximating a major key. 

It is not a bad piece by any means, but “Suiren” is considerably more compelling and is arguably the one piece that most fully captures the transformative alchemy of the cistern’s unique acoustics. Aside from an unconventionally employed garden hose, Oliveros, Dempster, and Peter Ward completely abandoned their formidable arsenal of instruments, seashells, and metal pipes to see what they could achieve solely with the sound of their voices. 

As it turns out, they could achieve quite a lot, as “Suiren” unfolds as a phantasmagoric fog that lies somewhere between Gregorian chant and time-stretched Tuvan throat-singing. It is quite a hauntingly lovely piece and also a comparatively quiet one, which makes it the arguably the one that benefits the most from deep listening (there are no dramatic motifs to steal the focus away from its nuances). It is also very effective illustration of one of Ward’s observations about the acoustic character of the space: aside from the long decay, the smooth and pure nature of the cistern’s reverb “makes it impossible to tell where the performer stops and the reverberation takes over.”

Another illustrative piece is “Balloon Payment,” one of the three bonus tracks that Important has added for their reissue: it is nothing more than the sound of a balloon being popped, leaving roughly 45 seconds of rumbling reverberation in its wake. It is admittedly kind of a throwaway piece that only needs to be heard once, but the other two newly added songs (“Phantom” and “Geocentric”) are an inspired curatorial inclusion, as they broaden the album’s mood palette and end Deep Listening on a considerably brighter note than the war-like intensity of “Nike.”

Notably, all three new pieces were taken from Deep Listening Band’s The Ready Made Boomerang (1991), which was recorded in the same cistern with a somewhat expanded ensemble. I suspect that means Important has no plans to reissue that album and that decision makes sense: the primary appeal of Deep Listening is that it was a cool idea and a fascinating process: trying to unravel the blurry relationships between sounds and their lingering afterimages makes for a very absorbing listen.

It was a great experiment and statement of intent, but Dempster and Oliveros did not need to repeatedly collaborate with that same cistern once they learned its acoustic secrets. Moreover, these pieces are far from the best that Dempster and Oliveros have recorded together, as Important’s previous Deep Listening Band reissues capture the pair in significantly more sophisticated and refined form. As such, Deep Listening is unquestionably a significant and influential album, but it should be appreciated as the initial creative breakthrough that led to even better things rather than something akin to a stand-alone crown jewel in Oliveros’s discography.

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Eliane Radigue, “Geelriandre/Arthesis” (Important, 2019)

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I have mixed feelings about vinyl-only reissues, but there is no denying that they are an extremely effective way to rekindle interest in a long-neglected album that should not be languishing in obscurity. This album is an excellent example of that phenomenon, as Geelriandre/Arthesis has been fairly easy to track down digitally for a while and few were clamoring for it. Now that it is getting a formal physical resurrection, however, it is deservedly back in the public consciousness. 

As far as Radigue albums go, it is a somewhat unique one, occupying a grey area between the more divergent Alga Marghen albums and her more universally revered drone epics. It shares much more common ground with the latter, but it sometimes feels like an embryonic version that is still partially indebted to the avant-garde zeitgeist of the era. Nevertheless, it is quite a fascinating album, taking an alternate and almost sci-fi-damaged path quite unlike the pure and focused vision of Radigue’s later recordings.

Eliane Radigue’s discography is quite a uniquely confounding chronological mess, as it took an unforgivably long time for the world to recognize her as one of the twentieth century’s most singular and gifted composers. That is admittedly true of many other female composers as well, but Radigue has been more prolific than many of her peers. To give an especially damning example, her landmark Adnos trilogy was completed in the early ’80s, yet only managed to get released in 2002. While it is not quite on the same level as that opus, Geelriandre/Arthesis also languished unheard for decades, as these two pieces date from the early ’70s and only surfaced in 2003 on the Italian Fringes label (it was then reissued roughly a decade later on another Italian label, Senufo). 

Amusingly, it also just got released again as part of INA-GRM’s Electronic Works boxed set, but this reissue is still its first physical release in the US. Interestingly, the earlier of the two pieces (“Geelriandre,” recorded in 1972) was composed for the Arp 2500 synthesizer, which soon became Radigue’s signature instrument. Apparently, not immediately though, as 1973’s “Arthesis” was composed for a Moog synth at the University of Iowa. I would not have expected a visionary Parisian electronic music composer to turn up in Iowa in the early 1970s. I may need to completely reevaluate that state.

I was a bit surprised to discover that “Geelriandre” predates Radigue’s deep, lifelong devotion to Buddhism, as its lingering, bell-like tones imbue the piece with a very ritualistic and “Eastern” feel. Or possibly a feel more like a lonely buoy, hollowly chiming in a windswept bay in the dead of night. In either case, it is quite an evocative sound and I am curious about its source, as it has a distinctly “metallic” timbre, and there is no mention of bells or gongs being involved in the performance. 

Notably, however, “Geelriandre” is a rare duet for Radigue, as it was composed for Gérard Fremy, who accompanies her on prepared piano (likely the source of the bell tones, though they seem improbably deep and sustained at times). The beauty of the composition primarily lies in the fact that it does not feel like a composition at all. Rather it feels like a field recording of a strange and dreamlike ceremony where ancient gongs reverberate in a quietly oscillating, machine-like hum, evoking a time-stretched recording of a Buddhist mass on an abandoned space station. 

The following “Arthesis” further deepens that sense of haunted otherworldliness, as the pulsating and ghostly minimalist thrum of Radigue’s drones partially hides a host of ominous-sounding subterranean groans and scrapes. Again, an empty space station feels like an incredibly apt comparison, but now it feels like there is some massive, unknown creature slowly making its way through the air ducts, announcing its terrifying progress with sounds of distantly shuddering and warping metal.

Despite being a fairly devout fan of Radigue’s work, I was a bit slow to fully appreciate this unique and quietly wonderful pair of structurally and temporally ambiguous drone works. I suspect my initial lukewarm reaction was because Geelriandre/Arthesis conspicuously lacks much of what I love about Radigue’s major works: elegant, perfect simplicity and gradual, sublime transformation. Both traits are admittedly present on this album to some degree, but they are not the focus, and neither piece feels like it has a deliberate arc or evolution. 

As a result, I mistook Geelriandre/Arthesis for a primitive version of Radigue’s later work until it slowly dawned on me that it was instead a highly evolved version of something else altogether. That is what makes this an important album, as it captures a rare moment when Radigue turned her formidable talents towards texture and mood, as if she was masterfully portraying a single scene in great detail rather than embarking on a transcendent abstract journey. Also, it helps that the two scenes Radigue paints are so alien and weirdly beautiful, as if she was trying to capture the elusive and fragmented dreams of an android. That certainly is not the expected territory for an Eliane Radigue album and partially explains why these recordings languished unheard for so long: these two strange visions were presumably both too far ahead of their time and radically outside of time to be fully appreciated in their own era.

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Phill Niblock, “Music for Cello” (Important, 2019)

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It recently occurred to me that Phill Niblock has a remarkably meager discography for a visionary composer with a body of work that spans five decades. I hesitate to describe anyone’s career as undocumented these days, as the experimental music world is drowning in live recordings, unfortunate one-off collaborations, vault scrapings, and unnecessary reissues. Nevertheless, Music for Cello makes a strong case that Niblock probably has quite a backlog of unheard masterpieces wrongfully gathering dust somewhere, as the three pieces compiled here all date back roughly forty years (or more). 

That said, they all sound like they could have been recorded this week. While these pieces chronologically represent quite an early stage of Niblock’s lifelong fascination with sustained acoustic tones and the interplay of frequencies, his mastery of the form was already amply evident. In fact, Music For Cello is actually superior to some albums from Niblock’s classic run of Touch releases. I am delighted that I finally got to hear it.

As some more alert readers may already suspect at this point, Music for Cello consists entirely of cello pieces. In fact, all three were performed by the same cellist (David Gibson) despite a twenty-one-year gap between the earliest recordings and the most recent. The three compositions are presented in chronological order, so the album opens with 1972’s “3 to 7 ‚Äì 196,” a work that Niblock notes was his first to feature extremely precise tuning (a sine wave oscillator and frequency counter were used to tune Gibson’s cello to exact frequencies). 

Niblock also notes that the piece is intended to be played at a high volume, as that intensity makes the overtone patterns more prominent. In more practical terms, “3 to 7 – 196” employs a steadily snowballing mass of uncomfortably harmonizing cello drones to weave something that resembles a nightmarishly buzzing swarm of harrowing dissonances. It is quite a tour de force of exquisite discomfort, as the gnarled and oscillating death cloud beautifully ebbs and flows and changes shape as various tones are added and subtracted. Also, it is heavy as hell.

Niblock and Gibson gamely keep the visceral discomfort party going with 1978’s “Descent Plus,” which presumably earned the “plus” because the duo revisited the piece in 1995 to add several more layers. Like its predecessor, “Descent” is a manifestation of some deep thinking about how frequencies interact and collide. In this case, Gibson played “four cello tones descending one octave over twenty-two minutes, from 300 hertz to 150 hertz,” a feat achieved by sloooowly detuning his instrument “without lifting his bow from the strings.” 
The later recordings added several additional drones that did NOT move, giving the glacially plunging tones a static foundation to uncomfortably harmonize with. 

Unsurprisingly, the piece is another feast of escalating darkness and discomfort, though it is much more of a slow-burner than the previous demonic storm of malevolent buzzing. Instead, “Descent” sounds like a score to a horror film or thriller in which the composer subtly adds some dissonant harmonies to imbue a quiet scene with an ominous sense of tension, then mercilessly continues to ratchet up that tension for the next twenty minutes with little hint of relief or resolution.

That said, the album closes with an unexpectedly lovely departure from its long stretch of roiling dissonance, revealing that the young Phill Niblock did not quite spend ALL of his time dreaming up ingenious new ways to weave slow-motion clouds of billowing horror (just most of it). Naturally, “Summing II” (one section of a larger, mostly unreleased four-part work) has some frequency experimentation at its core, but the essence is that Gibson’s drones gradually build into an increasingly rich and immense chord over the course of thirty minutes. I suspect that the album art (portraying a brilliant sunrise) was directly inspired by “Summing,” as the piece is a perfect evocation of a fiery orb slowly rising above a dark horizon to burn away the clouds and bathe the landscape in light and warmth. 

It is also a perfect end to the album, erasing all of the previous tension as it builds into a benevolent, all-engulfing roar. Of the three pieces, I am most enamored of the ugliest and most viscerally intense one (“3 to 7 – 196”), yet all the compositions improbably combine to form a beautifully crafted and coherent triptych (despite their varied origins and the fact that they were presumably never intended to be presented together). 

Obviously, Niblock continued to hone his artistry and recorded a handful of legitimate drone masterpieces in the decades since these pieces were recorded, but the organic tone of the cello, the elegant simplicity of the compositions, and the physical/raw production of these performances add up to a timeless work that ranks among Niblock’s best. Which it absolutely should be, given that Niblock patiently waited more than four decades for all of these various threads to finally come together just right.

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Caterina Barbieri, “Born Again in the Voltage” (Important, 2018)

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Last year’s Patterns of Consciousness was a massive, ambitious, and occasionally dazzling psychotropic opus that sought to reshape consciousness through pattern manipulation, instantly establishing Caterina Barbieri as one of the most compelling contemporary synthesizer composers. Naturally, it will be a damn tough act to follow, but Born Again in the Voltage is not its highly anticipated successor, as its four pieces were recorded back in 2014 and 2015. On this more drone-based affair composed for the Buchla 200, Barbieri is joined by cellist Antonello Mostacci for a more modest and understated batch of songs. As such, Voltage is not quite as striking or distinctive as Barbieri’s debut, but it is still quite good and “How to Decode an Illusion” is an absolutely gorgeous work.

The album opens with its most slow-building and minimal piece, “Human Developers,” which gradually takes shape around a core motif of distorted synth pulses with long decays. Soon after, Mostacci’s cello takes over the foreground and a wonderfully moaning, shivering, and whining swirl of strings coheres, yet Barbieri’s Buchla eventually makes a decidedly seismic resurgence. That is probably the most compelling part of the piece, as she whips up a shuddering earthquake of deep throbs that rumble up from the depths. That climax turns out to only be the piece’s halfway point though. The second half emerges from that crescendo as a twinkling, cosmic fantasia of rapidly rippling arpeggios, buzzing chords, and vibrantly chirping electronics. It kind of feels like I am in an electronic aviary that is simultaneously hallucinatory and a bit too busy and cacophonous to be entirely comfortable. I am not sure if that is an entirely good thing, but it is certainly a unique headspace to inhabit for a while.

The following “Rendering Intuitions” is considerably calmer, as it is built from a slowly churning bed of Mostacci’s moaning cello drones. Gradually, a glacial and elegiac chord progression coheres and the piece achieves a kind of lurching, melancholy beauty. It is hard to tell what (if anything) Barbieri is doing performance-wise, as synthesizers are conspicuously absent, but her hand definitely shows in the layering and processing of the intertwining cello themes. In a purely textural sense, I am actually fonder of the warm and organic cello sounds than those of the Buchla, but the next piece shows that the latter can open up an absolutely sublime world of rich emotional depth in the right hands.

“How to Decode an Illusion” is a legitimate stunner, as Barbieri balances a slowly burbling, buzzing, and throbbing melody with bittersweetly swooping bloops and a vivid, haunting undercurrent of buried feedback, crackling noise, and distorted afterimages. It feels a lot like a beautifully heartfelt requiem penned by an android, but the bubbling forward momentum and vibrant textural dynamics create a perfect blend of light and shadow that prevents it from ever becoming a slog through sadness. In fact, it could very well be the most wonderful piece that Barbieri has released to date.

After that triumph, the closing “We Access Only a Fraction” comes as quite a bizarre and candy-colored shock, resembling a relentlessly cheery, bubbling, and hyperkinetic synth pop freak-out. Or at least, it would sound like synth pop if it were not so maniacally busy and over-the-top. I truly do not know quite what to make of it, which I suppose is an achievement of sorts. In one sense, it is a bit annoying, but it is also transcendently bonkers, taking a mercilessly repeating simple theme and elevating it to over-caffeinated, tumbling lunacy. As a one-time experiment, its arpeggiated mayhem has some definite appeal, but a full album in that vein would be a borderline psychotic endeavor. I am relieved that Barbieri has thus far not opted to explore that direction further.

Aside from the questionable success of that final piece, however, Born Again in The Voltage is a strong and enjoyable album. Barbieri occasionally makes some unusual compositional choices, but they do seem like deliberate choices rather than flaws and the execution of her ideas is every bit as focused and vividly realized as her work on Patterns of Consciousness. The only real caveat with this release is that Barbieri’s overarching aesthetic vision feels like it was still in the formative stages, as each piece on Voltage seems to pull in a different direction. That said, it was an unexpected delight to hear a cello composition from her. Moreover, Barbieri’s talents as a composer were already quite formidable at this stage of her career, as “Illusion” is easily one of the best synth pieces that I have ever heard. While Patterns of Consciousness is unquestionably a more essential and visionary album than this one, Born Again in the Voltage is the more accessible and melodic of the pair. As such, it is a welcome addition to Barbieri’s discography, offering a more instantly gratifying entry point for new fans than her more challenging, sprawling, and consciousness-warping 2017 epic.

Listen here.

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Caterina Barbieri, “Patterns of Consciousness” (Important, 2017)

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Following a handful of elusive limited edition cassettes, Berlin-based composer Caterina Barbieri makes her formal debut in a big way with this massive and mesmerizing double LP epic. On one level, Patterns of Consciousness is quite possibly the epitome of Important Records’ long-standing obsession with pure synthesizer albums. On deeper level, however, this album is a unique and ambitious experiment that also happens to be synth-based, as it is structurally inspired by Barbieri’s interest in baroque lute music and conceptually inspired by a desire to trigger a fracture in consciousness through subtle shifts in hypnotically repeated patterns. Either way, it is quite an achievement.

This is actually Barbieri’s second full-length for Important (or for any label, for that matter), as she first surfaced in 2014 with Vertical on the label’s Cassauna imprint. ¬†Predictably, that album was similarly synth-centric (it was composed for a Buchla 200), but otherwise bears little resemblance to this latest salvo. All of the vocals, techno touches, drone elements, and grinding textures from that release earlier are gone and forgotten, which makes sense, as it seems like Barbieri was still finding her direction at that point. I think she has conclusively found it now, as Patterns seems much more like an inventive, coherent, and honest fusion of her far-reaching and esoteric aesthetic and conceptual interests. 

In fact, it would be an understatement to say that Barbieri has an interesting background for a modern synth composer, as she has studied classical guitar in Italy, extensively researched the history of Hindustani music, and written a thesis on “3D spatialization and the perception of time, space and sound spectrum in vertical music.” In the wrong hands, such a resume would undoubtedly translate into something rather bloodless and over-cerebral, but Barbieri proves to be quite adept at using her deep knowledge to take relatively accessible and vaguely Kosmiche music into more transcendent and psychotropic realms than usual. The closest stylistic antecedent for Patterns of Consciousness is prime/early Tangerine Dream, though Barbieri has clearly assimilated that influence in a rather curious and oblique way.

The area where Barbieri’s unique sensibility manifests itself most conspicuously is that of structure and sequencing. For example, each piece is composed of just a few simple intertwined patterns and nothing more, unrelentingly pulsing and burbling along from anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes with no significant new motifs or melodic shifts ever turning up to disrupt the entrancing spell. Also, on a larger scale, the album itself is structured rather bizarrely: each piece that has an actual name, such as the opening “This Causes Consciousness to Fracture,” is followed by a much slower piece with the same title presented as an acronym (“TCCTF,” for example). The two pieces seem paired in name only, unless any shared patterns are slowed to complete unrecognizability, yet they certainly seem designed to give the album a very unusual rhythm (the more complex and kinetic pieces are always followed by languorous and comparatively simple ones). 

That disorienting dynamic push/pull pattern is not broken until the final piece, the slow-moving coda of “Gravity That Binds.” Despite their significant differences, however, these seven pieces are thematically held together by a thread of strong, uncluttered melodies and enormous attention to small-scale dynamics. Given the understated nature of the album, Barbieri keeps the effects subtle, but her constant tweaks are more than enough to keep her themes sounding fresh: nothing is ever static and all of the various threads are constantly shifting in relation to one another and leaving a vapor trail of bleary after-images.

If Patterns of Consciousness has a fault, it is only that its mantric repetition, deceptive simplicity, and minimalist aesthetic do an unintentionally fine job of concealing Barbieri’s more radical intentions. Also, I am not sure that her foundational premise was actually successful in “unfolding new layers of perception” or unlocking unused psychic potential in me, though I doubt such changes would register all that dramatically in the conscious mind if they occur. 

The subject certainly interests me, but I have historically had much more of a noticeable psychoactive response to experiments with inaudible frequencies than I did with these shifting patterns. Still, it was a valiant effort that yielded an unusual album, so there is little to grumble about. More importantly, no one at all would care about the conceptual ambitions of this album if the actual music was not good (which it is), so any triggered hallucinations, revelations, or breakthroughs into a higher mental plane are just icing on the cake. 

In particular, I was most struck by some of the slower, later pieces on the album, such as “INTCAEB” and “SOTRS,” which resemble a sort of narcotic, sensuous, and bittersweetly melancholy twist on an organ mass. More significantly, Patterns of Consciousness as a whole feels like a major artistic statement through sheer obsessive repetition, slow-burning accumulation of power, and Barbieri’s singularly lute-influenced and arpeggio-heavy approach to modern synth composition. It is extremely damn hard to establish a distinctive voice wielding only a synthesizer, but Barbieri has succeeded admirably at it. No one else sounds like this.

Listen here.

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Sarah Davachi, “Vergers” (Important, 2016)

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Sarah Davachi’s impressively prolific 2016 finally winds to a close with this release, which is arguably the finest of her three albums this year. Following the uncharacteristically acoustic/organic All My Circles Run, Vergers again returns to the synthesizer (in this case, a rare, vintage, and analog EMS Synthi 100), but the two albums are actually not all that different: a completed Sarah Davachi album always sounds languorous, gently hallucinatory, and elegantly minimal regardless of how it originally started. In any case, the big draw here is the opening 20-minute epic “Gentle So Gentle,” as it is easily one of Davachi’s strongest and most beautifully sustained compositions to date.

As it is currently only being released on LP, Vergers is an album that is very much shaped by its intended medium: the entire first side is devoted to the aforementioned longform opus “Gentle So Gentle,” while the second side is composed of two comparatively minor pieces in a roughly similar vein. 

Initially, “Gentle” feels like just another warm, hazy, and lazily undulating drone piece, albeit quite a good one. Gradually, however, more and more details and layers begin to blossom forth from Davachi’s droning bliss-cloud and the piece slowly coheres into a hypnotic pulse and starts to reveal hidden depths of emotion. The overall feel is like a dense, rolling fog filled with mysterious, flickering lights or, more prosaically, like an especially beautiful bit of classical music that has been blurred and time-stretched into unrecognizability. 

As a composition, it is sublimely gorgeous, simple, and pure, but there are a lot of less obvious details that I found beguiling as well. The most significant is Davachi’s talent for artfully keeping her various motifs mysterious and half-hidden, allowing just enough melody into the light to make an impression without ever being fully explicit. Also, there is a wonderful precariousness and fragility to the piece, as a number of textures feel wispy or frayed and piece gradually dissolves into a heavenly coda rather than escalating in density. In short, it is an absolutely perfect piece of music.

Naturally, the second half of the album has a tough time measuring up to such a quietly stunning opening salvo. One fundamental hurdle is that shorter compositions do not get to fully benefit from Davachi’s greatest gifts as a composer: her near-supernatural patience and her lightness of touch. Davachi is definitely at her best when she has a chance to stretch out and unhurriedly weave her slow-burning magic. 

If a piece is only a mere eight minutes, like “Ghosts and All,” it needs to make an impression a bit faster. 
Much like “Gentle So Gentle,” “Ghosts” initially takes root as a deceptively simple drone piece, albeit one with a considerably murkier and more ominous tone. Soon, however, a mournful violin theme appears over the dark throb and the song takes its form. After the album’s beautifully understated first half, however, the violin theme feels a bit too blunt and dirge-like for my taste. Also, it does not so much evolve as just appear and gradually fade away. 

The closing “In Staying” fares a bit better, as its more harsh, metallic-sounding texture is balanced out by the subtlety of its shifting pulse of throbs and slow phase shifts. Again, it never gets around to blossoming into something more, but its ten minutes of small-scale shifting dynamics and textures is enjoyably hypnotic nonetheless. While it is not a threat at all to unseat “Gentle So Gentle” as the album’s centerpiece, “In Staying” is exactly the kind of piece that I could casually have playing in the background for hours without ever getting bored of it.

I suppose this review makes it sound like Vergers is only half-great, which I suppose is technically true, but I feel like the album’s entire raison d’être is “Gentle So Gentle,” which is a masterpiece. As such, I see the second side primarily as just a couple of bonus tracks appended to an absolutely stellar EP (though I admittedly do like “In Staying” quite a bit). The vinyl format is especially useful here, as Vergers is practically engineered to facilitate playing the A side to death, which is exactly what I expect to do.

Listen here.

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Diane Cluck, “Boneset” (Important, 2014)

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It has been a very long time since a formal Diane Cluck album has surfaced, as even the collages/odds-and-ends collection Monarcana dates from nearly a decade ago. However, she has been far from idle during her “hiatus,” touring regularly and releasing an irregular trickle of excellent new work through both a tour CDr and her ongoing (and ambitiously mis-named) “Song-of-the-Week” project. Of course, the downside to that piecemeal approach is that the bulk of these new pieces (and their arrangements) will already be quite familiar to devoted fans, but those who have not been closely monitoring Diane’s recent activity have a couple of her finest songs ever awaiting them.

Diane’s work has undergone quite a significant evolution since her last major statement (2005’s Countless Times), which is certainly to be expected—people can change a lot in 9 years and Diane is no exception. For the most part, however, the transformation from Countless Times-era Cluck to Boneset-era Cluck is entirely a positive one, though I admittedly miss her early intensity, vocal layering, and playful sense of experimentation. 

In their place, however, is a much stronger emphasis on songcraft and consistency: there are no spontaneous one-take performances or sketches to be found on this latest effort, just 8 complete, well-crafted songs that have been gradually distilled into their current states through months and months of touring. Diane has always been an amazing songwriter and performer, but now it seems like she is quite a bit more comfortable with those roles.

While some of Cluck’s earlier fire, ragged off-the-cuff charm, and chills-down-my-spine rawness may be gone, the more organic and earthy aesthetic embodied by Boneset is not entirely a softening of Cluck’s edges, as her lyrics are just as personal, poetic, idiosyncratic, articulate, wise, tender, and moving as ever. The most disquieting of the batch is one of the earlier pieces, “Content to Reform,” where she addresses the EP’s primary theme of cyclical death and rebirth in particularly unflinching sharp-focus (“I die and I die, sloughing off cells….everything spends out its day and then its content will reform until it breaks again.”). As bleak as that sounds (it is bleak), it ultimately comes across as a perversely joyous and eerily beautiful piece, owing largely to its moaning cello accompaniment and lilting vocal melody.

The album’s other centerpiece is a relatively new song, “Heartloose” (the pieces are arranged in rough chronological order). Again, Cluck is joined by cellist Isabel Castellvi, but “Heartloose” is considerably more propulsive and Romantic in theme than “Content.” To my ears, it easily stands among Cluck’s best work, offering up great melody and lyrics that are absolutely heart-melting in their guilelessness, particularly the final verse (“And I have so much for you! Do you know how I get shy to show you?”). Yet another fine piece is Boneset‘s darkly exotic closer, “Sara,” which features an unusual stuttering melody; references to Hindu and Mesopotamian goddesses of destruction and the underworld, and lyrics like “her dirt rain dark down, my falling skin stripped so lonely.”

If Boneset has a flaw, it is that there is too little of it. Aside from containing only two truly new songs (the piano-based “Why Feel Alone” and the largely a capella “Not Afraid to Be Kind”), half of the songs hover around the 2-minute mark. That latter trait inadvertently amuses me quite a bit, as it almost seems like Diane was hell-bent on perfectly adhering to Wire’s famous 1977 Rules of Negative Self-Definition (no decoration; no chorusing out; keep to the point; when the words run out, it stops; etc.). 

Though I am sure that Cluck crafted these pieces completely independently of advice from any aging post-punk luminaries, that aesthetic works just as well for her as it did for Pink Flag—Boneset is direct, distinctive, and powerful despite ostensibly treading genre territory that has been well-covered. While it does not necessarily eclipse any of Diane’s past triumphs (such as Oh Vanille), Boneset is most certainly still on the same level as them. More importantly, it is a hugely welcome return for a singular artist that has been far too quiet for far too long.

Listen here.

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Éliane Radigue, “Adnos I-III” (Table of the Elements (2002)/Important (2013))

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There has been an avalanche of fine dispatches from Éliane Radigue’s voluminous vault in recent years, which both pleases and overwhelms me, as I want to hear them all and cannot hope to keep up. Adnos is one of the latest of those great albums and offers the added appeal of being a major, decade-spanning, formative work as well. Originally composed between 1973 and 1980, these three lengthy pieces are stylistic precursors to Radigue’s minimal drone epic Trilogie de la Morte (widely regarded to be her masterpiece). While Adnos is not quite on the same level as its similarly ambitious successor, it certainly comes damn close.

The Adnos trilogy is quite an interesting suite historically, as it began fairly early in Radigue’s career—not “feedback era/assistant to Pierre Henry” early, but not long after Radigue started making music using a Buchla synthesizer in a NYC studio that she shared with the similarly amazing Laurie Spiegel. 

The first part of Adnos was originally performed at Mills College in 1974 after Radigue was invited to play there by Robert Ashley (for an “embarrassingly low” $250). That occasion proved to be quite fateful, as some visiting students turned Éliane onto Tibetan Buddhism, which wound up having a profound influence on much of her future work (both thematically and structurally). Despite that revelation, the two sequels (spanning another seven years) still feel very much like variations on the original theme and seem like they could have easily been composed at the same time. Also, the first “Adnos” actually seems more transcendent and meditative than its successors, which are a bit more experimental in nature.

Despite the fact that this is box set containing a somewhat lengthy booklet, very little information is divulged regarding how two of these three hour-long epics were created. Amusingly, however, very specific information is provided regarding “Adnos II,” the most aberrant and dissonant segment of the trilogy (Arp synthesizer, 3 1/4 tape decks, and a three-octave filter). 

It is probably a decent bet to assume that “Adnos I” and “Adnos III” were the fruits of quite similar set-ups, though the presence of recognizable synthesizer tones is often quite hard to detect. In any case, these three pieces all roughly follow a similar stylistic and compositional trajectory: a minimal, droning electronic hum glacially transforms into something more as subtle oscillations and harmonies gradually snowball. Sort of like a butterfly gradually emerges from a chrysalis, except that the butterfly is sometimes complex and dark rather than pretty.

Aside from parts of the aforementioned and divergent “Adnos II,” these pieces present exactly what I have grown to expect from Radigue: entrancing, slowly unfolding beauty and a timeless sonic purity delivered with almost-superhuman patience and attention to nuance. For the most part, there are few textures or stylistic indicators that tie Adnos to any fixed period in time: humming feedback will always sound like humming feedback. 

Consequently, the very simple and pure “Adnos I” still sounds like the very cutting edge of drone in 2014, despite being constructed four decades ago (very prescient). Also, that trait goes a long way towards explaining why it took so long for Radigue’s work to be fully embraced—she was very much ahead of her time..or possibly removed from time altogether (also, it probably did not help at all that she was a woman in a very male-dominated field). The other two pieces do not quite maintain that illusion of timelessness as fully though. While “Adnos III” is probably my favorite part of the trilogy, its plinking, phase-shifting dissonances definitely feel temporally related to work of some of Éliane’s contemporaries.

“Adnos II” is, unsurprisingly, the least “eternal” of the trilogy, as it is extremely hard to avoid sounding like A Very Serious Electronic Composer From The 1960s Or ’70s when you are making abstract music with an early synthesizer: the timbres are inherently artificial and dated-sounding (albeit in a pleasantly retro-futurist way). That makes for something of a polarizing work, as I have seen others proclaim that it the highlight of this set, while it is personally my least favorite. I still like it though and can easily see its appeal, as there is a lengthy passage of queasy dissonance and beeps that sometimes sounds quite beautiful and sometimes resembles the cold horror of being adrift in space. The latter is not a feeling that I generally get from Éliane Radigue albums, so that makes for a unique, if somewhat uncharacteristic, entry into Radigue oeuvre.

Naturally, I have a few small gripes (I am chronically dissatisfied), but they are ultimately fairly trivial. For example, I would have loved some more information about both Radigue and the pieces themselves and I am very curious about what Rhys Chatham had to say in his liner notes for the original 2002 issue (on Table of the Elements). However, the stuff that is included instead is very cool in its own right (old flyers, a handwritten letter from Arthur Russell inviting Radigue to play at The Kitchen, etc.).

Also, I found 3 1/2 hours of very similar sounding material to be a bit exhausting and I think each of these pieces would be better appreciated as a stand-alone album. That said, there is absolutely nothing stopping me from listening to each piece as a stand-alone album (they are all on separate discs) and it is certainly convenient to not have to buy three separate releases. In any case, this is a great set. While I would probably not categorize Adnos as one of Radigue’s masterpieces, I certainly would not argue with Important’s claim that this is “one of the high points of modern minimal electronic composition.” It is indeed exactly that—it is just that Radigue is also responsible for some even higher points than this one.

Listen here.

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Noveller, “No Dreams” (Important, 2013)

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When she is at her best, Brooklyn-based experimental guitarist Sarah Lipstate is capable of creating work of almost breathtaking beauty. On this, her debut for Important, she is at her best exactly once. The rest of album is filled with perfectly likable, if unexceptional, forays into muted ambient soundscapes, but it is the Popul Vuh’s Aguirre-meets-gnarled-guitar brilliance of the title piece that makes No Dreams an album worth hearing. I certainly wish the rest of the album were similarly spectacular, but it feels silly to complain that Lipstate only composed one must-hear masterpiece this year.

Several years ago, when I was still an aspiring musician, I tried to record an album that I never finished. The problem was that every time I composed a new song, it made all of my previous songs seem comparatively inadequate, so I just kept endlessly starting over again with an increasingly unattainable baseline of quality. The reason I bring that up is because Lipstate seems to have encountered the exact same problem with No Dreams, but solved it by just putting out everything she had anyway. 

That is certainly a much more productive option than total, heartbreaking creative paralysis, but it means that No Dreams is essentially one sublime, stunning piece and a lot of vaguely pleasant (or sometimes ominous) ambient background. “No Dreams” is not just a centerpiece or highlight; rather, it feels like the entire album’s sole reason for existing.

At least, that is how it sounds at a normal volume. When I play it loudly, No Dreams becomes significantly more compelling, as all of its many complexities and nuances come into sharper focus. Given the proper volume and attentive listening, songs like the throbbing “Manahatta,” the slow-burning, roiling “Purchase,” and warmly hissing and swelling “Fighting Sleep” all sound nearly as inspired as the title track. 

I guess that makes No Dreams a good headphone album and explains how it wound up as one of The New Yorker‘s Best Albums of 2013, but I truly wish Lipstate had not smoothed everything over into a gently pulsing and shimmering bliss-haze. The edges and quirks are what make Noveller unique and they rarely surface here, aside from the overdriven guitar howl of “No Dreams” and a few textures amidst the creepy dissonance of “The Fright.”

Ultimately, No Dreams is a curious moment in Noveller’s discography, as it arguably contains the single greatest piece she has ever recorded, but otherwise feels like a transitional effort. There are a few reasons for that, as Sarah has broadened her palette beyond guitar for the first time ever to embrace synthesizers, pianos, and muted beats. Also, she has spent a lot of time working on soundtracks recently, which seems to have influenced her work enormously. 

In fact, most of No Dreams would probably be an excellent soundtrack, as it evokes depth and mood without ever demanding my full attention. That is not what I want from a Noveller album though. No Dreams is like going to a renowned steak house and getting a salad—it might be a very good salad, but it kind of defeats the whole purpose of going there. Stone-cold masterpiece title track and compositional evolution aside, I would have liked this album much, much more if it had been more forcefully and uniquely “Sarah Lipstate.”

Listen here.

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