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Tasos Stamou, “Monoliths” (Moving Furniture, 2021)

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Discovering this London-based composer’s adventurously psychedelic collages of traditional Greek music was one of 2021’s great musical pleasures for me, so I was very eager to hear this ambitious double album follow up to Antiqua Graecia. As expected, it is a characteristically wonderful and unusual release, but it is also marks a detour away from Stamou’s impressive run of Greek-themed albums. The theme of the aptly titled Monoliths is instead Stamou’s attempt to “collide” the two sides of his working methods: live performances and studio work. By my estimation, it was a very successful collision, but it was mostly a behind-the-scenes one, as I would be hard pressed to determine where one approach starts and another begins. 

As a result, the more immediate and striking theme of the album for me as a listener is that each piece feels like an extended experiment in crafting an immersive, complexly layered sound world from just a single recognizable instrument. At least, that is how Monoliths unfolds for its first half, as the bottom drops out of the album’s hallucinatory feast of bells, organs, and steel drums to reveal a considerably more processed, abstract, and psychotropic second hour of drone-damaged mindfuckery. That approach admittedly makes Monoliths a bit less accessible than some of Stamou’s more conventionally melodic work, but serious heads looking for a deep and sustained dive into otherworldly psych meditations will likely love this immersive tour de force.

The opening “Bells Drone” sounds deceptively like it could be layered field recordings of wind chimes at first, as bells of different sizes amiably jangle and clang for couple minutes before any real evidence of Stamou’s hand starts to emerge. Soon, however, some tones start to linger supernaturally and the mood darkens into uneasy shadows of dissonance. It is quite a wonderfully hallucinatory and entrancing piece, evoking an ancient ritual in a cavernous subterranean temple revealed behind a dissolving reality. 

While it is the shortest piece on the album at a mere 13 minutes, it is nevertheless a solid representation of the album’s first half: a simple and minimal theme gradually transforms into a vividly multi-dimensional dream world. On “Chord Organ #2,” for example, an organ drone slowly evolves into a Catherine Christer Hennix-esque nightmare of dark harmonies before unexpectedly resolving on a note of sun-dappled transcendence. “Steel Drum Drone,” on the other hand, steadily becomes something akin to a lovesick tropical Steve Reich. That one is another favorite, as I am quite impressed with how Tasos weaves together patterns of plinking and bleary steel drum melodies into a thing of woozy multi-layered beauty.

In fact, I love every single one of the opening three pieces, but they turn out to be a mere prelude to two pieces in which Tamou goes totally bananas. In the first, “Supernormal,” Stamou mingles a chirping electronic drone with squealing and sliding strings en route to an harrowing mindfuck that calls to mind a goddamn demon summoning (the final stretch of oscillating synth thrum is especially choice). The closing “Synapse” improbably features some even more gnarly sounds, passing though such colorful stages like “menacingly gelatinous bass throb,” “an undead gamelan ensemble wanders the deserted streets in search of their next victim,” and “a simmering and intense prepared piano performance over quasi-industrial rhythmic loops.” This is an absolute feast of an album: five great longform pieces in a row spanning nearly two hours. Most days, I admittedly prefer the more meditative/ritualistic first half to the more nightmarish second half, but Stamou was swinging for the fences with every single piece on this album and the result is a monolithically stellar release.

Samples can be found here.

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Tongues of Mount Meru, “The Hex of Light” (Moving Furniture, 2020)

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This latest release from Jon Wesseltoft and Lasse Marhaug’s long-running (if fitful) drone project was recorded all the way back in 2013, which makes for quite a perplexing mystery, as I cannot understand why such a great album would remain on the shelf for so many years (especially since Marhaug himself runs a label). Most likely, however, The Hex of Light was simply the victim of Marhaug’s incredibly prolific output, as well as Mount Meru’s tendency to bounce from label to label with every release. 

Also, it appears as though this project was either on hiatus or completely defunct for quite some time, though Wesseltoft and Marhaug have performed together in Meru-esque form as recently as 2016. Aside from that, it is probably also safe to say that Wesseltoft poured quite a lot of time into mastering and editing this monster, as The Hex of Light‘s two longform pieces represent crushingly dense and mind-melting drone heaviness at its absolute best.

This project first surfaced back in 2009 with an LP on Important Records (The Ocean of Milk) and has had quite a strange and confounding trajectory ever since, leaving behind just a small handful of limited physical releases documenting only a few short years of activity. As a result, it impossible for me to tell exactly how much the project has evolved since its beginning and I also have no idea if this release is a mere vault-clearing or a sign that Wesseltoft and Marhaug have rekindled their great partnership anew. I am naively hoping for the latter, as it is rare to find two artists so perfectly intertwined and single-mindedly focused on achieving something so nightmarishly monolithic (or succeeding so beautifully).

Obviously, both artists are Norwegian and share long histories in extreme music, so it was inevitable that they would cross paths, but Mount Meru was born specifically from a shared desire to “explore their mutual interest in long-form music, psycho-acoustics, the phenomenology of sound, and its correlation to perception.” Based on The Hex of Light, it is clear that the duo took that interest in psycho-acoustics very seriously, as it feels wildly misleading to describe this album as anything akin to a “drone album” in the conventional sense. Instead, drones are merely the structural framework that the pair use to unleash two truly harrowing slabs of squirming and buzzing heavy psych.

Of the two pieces, the opening “Foliage” is by far the most harrowing, as it instantly resembles an impossibly dense mass of infernal, hallucinatory crickets whose chirps smear and bleed together into a sickly, buzzing swirl. And in a broad sense, that is exactly where it lingers for the next nineteen minutes, as Wesseltoft and Marhaug seem perfectly content to maintain that unbroken, squirm-inducing tension and seem decidedly disinterested in providing any respite in the form of a chord change or convergence upon any non-dissonant harmonies.

When it comes to the details, however, “Foliage” is a mesmerizingly rich, dynamic, and endlessly evolving piece, as new patterns of throbs, pulse, sweeps, and oscillations continually form and dissipate in the queasy maelstrom of sinister buzzing. That said, a gently undulating organ drone gradually becomes more and more prominent as the piece unfolds, resulting in a final stretch that feels weirdly meditative despite its sinister, churning undercurrent. 

Notably, the album’s two pieces were designed to “reflect into each other,” so the following “Affinity Birds” opens as a slowly undulating and calm mass of buzzing drones, then grows steadily more gnarled, ugly, and unsettling as close harmonies increasingly amass and linger malevolently. By the time it reaches the end, all of the grounding bass tones have vanished, leaving only an infernal and ghostly insectoid hum of clashing tones. The symmetry is perfect, as the album opens as a nightmare, fleetingly blossoms into something almost beautiful, then steadily dissolves into an even deeper nightmare.

If I had to choose a kindred spirit for The Hex of Light, the album that immediately springs to mind is Catherine Christer Hennix’s landmark The Electric Harpsichord, as the two share a similarly nerve-jangling approach to harmony. I have no idea if Wesseltoft and Marhaug dabbled in Just Intonation themselves, but it does not matter, as they certainly manipulated microtonal shifts effectively enough to make their harmonies every bit as alien and disorienting as those of Christer Hennix.

The similarities between the two album go deeper than their similarly drone-based structure and unconventional approach to harmony, however, as The Hex of Light evokes a similarly phantasmagoric, timeless, and ritualistic scene. Granted, modular synths are a bit more anachronistic for an ancient temple than a harpsichord, but the illusion manages to hold up regardless (presumably since the duo seem to use synths or synth-like sounds solely because of the degree of microtonal control they offer).

I am always reluctant to embark upon indulgent poetic fancies when describing an album, but I think such a thing is warranted here, as more prosaic language feels hopelessly inadequate in conveying the scope of The Hex of Light‘s power and mystique. This album’s diabolical, chittering thrum feels exactly like the sounds I would expect to be gnawing at my sanity if I were a feverish and malarial explorer desperately trying to escape a cursed jungle after stumbling upon a horrifying occult ritual.

Samples can be found here.

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Orphax, “Saxophone Studies” (Moving Furniture, 2018)

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While this is improbably the first Orphax release to be covered on Brainwashed, Amsterdam’s Sietse van Erve has been a significant figure in experimental music circles for nearly two decades, running the fine Moving Furniture label and organizing events at the STEIM Foundation and elsewhere. This latest album is kind of a decade-spanning labor of love, as van Erve solicited audio files from a number of planned collaborators back in 2006 for a project that was eventually abandoned. However, he recently rediscovered some saxophone recordings made by James Fella and decided to revisit them, resulting in the cacophonously brilliant opening piece “JF.” To complement that piece, Sietse then enlisted his father to make some fresh new recordings for him to work his transformative magic upon for a companion piece. While the two pieces sound quite different from one another, both are compellingly unusual forays into longform drone that lysergically swirl and undulate with vibrant harmonic interplay.

I suppose saxophone-based drone albums are not particularly common, but the instrument lends itself quite well to microtonal experimentation and sustained notes, so albums in this vein have likely been a relative fixture in experimental music since Terry Riley’s early days. To his credit, however, van Erve’s approach to this project is a bit of an unusual/outsider one. Namely, he is not a saxophonist and is merely harvesting the sounds from the instrument for his own vision. That might not seem like a big deal, but it completely liberates van Erve from any and all performance-based concerns, so he is not painstakingly assembling the piece in real-time using looping pedals nor is there any real limit to the number of layers he can amass and intertwine. Sietse is also far from dogmatic in his approach to drone in general with the opening “JF,” as the central motif is a swaying dance of shrilly harmonizing tones that are constantly changing their relation to one another. He does not use passing dissonances as mere tool to build tension—he immediately creates a fundamentally dissonant world and happily stays there for the duration. There is no sense that the piece is ever on the verge of unexpectedly cohering into a passage of unearthly beauty, but it is visceral and vibrant enough to remain compelling without any conspicuous evolution or compositional sleight of hand: it is simply a wonderfully tense miasma of waxing and waning howls from start to finish, though there are some wonderfully spectral and ephemeral shapes swirling in the undercurrent. It is a truly stellar and unusual piece.

The following “JvE” is considerably less harsh, as its deeper, more throbbing tones weave a slow-motion reverie of buzzing, oscillating, and flanging drones. In fact, it does not sound much like a saxophone piece at all‚Äìmore like a Sunn o))) that worshipped clarity, precision, and elegance rather than roiling power and density (or like an Eliane Radigue shrouded in fog with a wall of amplifiers behind her). Much like its predecessor, however, there is another layer of activity beyond the actual notes being played. Unlike “JF,” however, “JvE” is understated, slow-moving, and spacious enough for the resultant oscillating cloud of overtones to feel like a prominent and integral part of the piece. As if to underscore that feat, the central motif pulls a bit of a vanishing act in the piece’s final moment to leave only a drifting, dreamlike cloud of hazy melodies and submerged, sputtering entropy. That transformation is particularly impressive when the context of the entire album is considered, as Saxophone Studies began in feral, confrontational fashion and lost very little of its steam and ability to beguile as it slowly and purposefully made its way towards a quiet, understated, and nuanced coda.

I am quite fond of both pieces, making Saxophone Studies a uniformly strong release, but I am most struck by the comparatively harsh discomfort of the opening piece, which takes drone music to a wonderfully tense and confrontational place. There is a vast ocean of drone in the world and most of it all blurs together for me. Very little of it, however, sounds like it is about to leap out of my speakers to kill me, which is why Saxophone Studies is an album that will stick in my memory. With “JF,” van Erve proves himself to be a master at wielding sharpness, shifting dissonance, and unresolved tension to make an extended drone piece feel like a squirming and disconcerting living entity. Of course, focusing exclusively upon “JF” does a bit of a disservice to the more subtle microtonal sorcery of the closer, but two pieces make a perversely effective pairing: it is “JF” that makes Saxophone Studies a memorable and attention-grabbing release, but the more subtle pleasures of “JvE” will remain to be revealed and explored long after I become numb to the howling power of its predecessor.

Samples can be found here.