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Madeleine Cocolas, “Bodies” (Room40, 2024)

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This latest full-length from Australian composer Madeleine Cocolas is billed as a companion piece to 2022’s acclaimed Spectral, as the two albums have something of a conceptual yin/yang relationship: Spectral was devoted to “evoking memories and emotions,” while Bodies “is about being present in your body.” The title also has a dual meaning this time around, as Cocolas sought to explore “similarities between bodies of water and human bodies” and “blur the boundaries between them.” As is the case with most conceptual inspirations behind instrumental albums, it is hard to say how much of that actually comes through in the music, but it makes for interesting contextual background and it seems to have triggered a significant creative evolution, as Madeleine makes beautiful use of manipulated field recordings. That element alone is enough to set her apart from other ambient/drone artists in the Room40 milieu, but I was also struck by her talents for sound design and virtuosic ability to interweave countless moving parts in dynamically compelling ways. At its best, Bodies feels like a minor deep listening/headphone masterpiece.

The opening “Bodies I” provides an alluring introduction to Cocolas’s current vision, as it slowly fades in as a seismic drone throb beneath gently undulating and murmuring strings lingering in a flickering state of suspended animation. Gradually, it intensifies in power and takes on a more spacy, dreamlike tone, but the overall effect is akin to that of a billowing cloud of blissed-out ambiance with a roiling and unpredictable swirl of anguish and unease at its center. It is probably one of the most mesmerizing headphone pleasures on the album, but the following “Drift” is a similarly inspired slow burn. For one, it is the first piece to noticeably involve water sounds and her talent for sound design transforms those sounds into something that feels wonderfully immersive, viscous, and physical. “Drift” is also an unusually melodic piece, as a pulsing organ melody is gradually fleshed out with warm, rich chords. Also unusual: the chords and melody predictably steal the focus initially, but closer listening reveals a vivid psychotropic wonderland beneath the surface, as the layers of moving parts increasingly bend, smear, pan, change speeds, change rhythms, and organically ebb and flow around the melody. To my ears, that is what makes Madeleine Cocolas’s work feel like something special and singular: her genius for weaving together richly detailed layers of continually evolving field recordings, processed voices, and electronic instruments into a seamless organic fantasia.

The following “The Creek” can reasonably be described as a more sensuous and ambient-adjacent variation on the same themes (viscous water sounds, slow-motion drone swells, shimmering dreaminess, etc.), but the album’s second half descends into more darkly lysergic terrain. The biggest surprise is “A Current Runs Through,” which opens with gnarly feedback blooms and a slowed down heartbeat before expanding into smoldering doom metal chords. That is merely the foundation, however, as she pulls off some truly gorgeous sorcery with chords converging and resolving in unusual ways. “Exhale” heads even deeper into the darkness, landing somewhere between a chopped-and-screwed Coil, a demon visitation during sleep paralysis, and the lonely final breaths of someone in a shuddering ice cave as an extradimensional portal yawns into being. The final “Bodies II” then brings the album to a close with a different flavor of darkness, alternately resembling a deconstructed giallo soundtrack, a haunted parking garage groaning to life, a fog-shrouded folk horror moor, and a fading phantom broadcast from deep space.

To Cocolas’s credit, all six pieces on Bodies are absorbing and masterfully executed enough to make picking a favorite a challenge. Normally, I am not someone who goes into raptures over sound design, but this album is a rare exception where the mixing and production are impressive enough to eclipse the compositions themselves (in a good way). In the album description, Madeleine notes that when she listens to these pieces, she imagines herself floating on her back with her “ears half submerged in the water, being pulled back and forth by currents and tides with a sense of vulnerability and release.” While I don’t think anyone has ever managed to successfully capture that sensation in album form, Madeleine Cocolas probably comes closer than just about anyone (just like it is damn near impossible to paint anything as beautiful as a real sunset, it is a mighty tall order to record something more impressive than an actual ocean). That said, I genuinely love how Madeleine makes water sound on this album, but I am even more impressed by how she has brilliantly mirrored some of its physical traits in the structure of these pieces (fluid, cyclical transformations; a sense of immersion; the dissolution of clear boundaries between layers). Cocolas is definitely onto something wonderful here.

Listen here.

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Saint Abdullah, “Inshallahlaland” (Room40, 2022)

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It is not quite accurate to say that Saint Abdullah completely reinvent their sound with each new album, but is fair to say that Mehdi and Mohammad Mehrabani-Yeganeh are far more interested to exploring meaningful new territory than with building upon their past successes. While that is certainly an admirable trait, it can also be a frustrating one, as I know Saint Abdullah will probably never fully return to the more industrial-indebted aesthetic of their earlier albums (which I love). 

On the bright side, that also means that every new Saint Abdullah album has the potential to blindside me with a bold leap forward into previously uncharted creative territory. In that regard, Inshallahlaland falls a bit short of being a particularly revelatory album as a whole, yet it does explore some characteristically intriguing and thoughtful themes and features quite a fascinating longform piece (“Glamour Factory”). For me, the appeal of Inshallahlaland begins and ends there, but that one excellent 20-minute sound collage is enough to make the album a significant release that fans will not want to pass over.

According to the Iranian-raised Mehrabani-Yeganeh brothers, the central themes of their latest release are: 1) how society is less-than-accepting of people with multiple identities, and 2) how we connect with human voices on a uniquely deep level (even when they appear in sampled and deconstructed form). Both themes are particularly prominent in the opening “Glamour Factory,” which borrows part of a speech by “one of Iran’s pre-eminent film voiceover artists” about how working in film allowed him to break free of society’s deeply ingrained identity prejudices to some degree.

Unsurprisingly, that sentiment resonated deeply with the brothers, as they are attempting to achieve a similar liberation through their own work. Also, they drolly note that it “felt fitting to sample the ultimate sampler.” That speech proves to merely be a starting point, however, as “Glamour Factory” mostly makes me feel like I am channel surfing Iranian TV on hallucinogens, as it is freewheeling, psychotropic swirl of sampled voices, looped fragments of songs, and street noise that fitfully plunges into passages of wild manipulations, distortions, and stammering edits.

In fact, it almost feels like someone pressed a collection of television snippets to vinyl, then handed it off to a avant-garde-minded turntablist for the full chopped and screwed treatment, though there are also some beautifully minimal or melodic passages thrown into the mix too (as well as some flashes of dark humor celebrating “the benefits of mechanized civilization”). If “Glamour Factory” had been stretched out to consume the entire album, I would probably proclaim Inshallahlaland to be an unambiguous triumph, but it is instead rounded out by three shorter pieces of varying quality.

My favorite of the lot is “Blurring Of Management Theory,” which deftly combines a shivering and shimmering melodic theme with an endlessly shifting backdrop of clicks, pops, squelches, and subdued rumble. It is admittedly more of a snack than a meal though and I remain perplexed by the brothers’ love of bloopy synth improvisations exhibited on the other pieces. That said, the successes of Saint Abdullah continue to delight me even if their hit-to-miss ratio is less than ideal, as this project is an endearingly personal, unpredictable, and playfully outré one quite unlike anything else.

sounds can be found here

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Steve Roden, “Stars of Ice” (New Plastic Music(2008)/Room40 (2022))

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Back in 2008, Steve Roden quietly released one of my favorite ambient albums of all time in a signed limited edition of 250. Of course, I did not realize it at the time, so it took another decade or so before Stars of Ice finally made its way to my ears. Happily, however, Room40 has now reissued Roden’s hauntingly beautiful collage of obscure and antique Christmas records, which will hopefully nudge many more receptive ears towards this modest, one-of-a-kind masterpiece. 

While I am sure I would have greatly enjoyed the original album if I had heard it when it was first released, it is worth noting that my appreciation for texture has evolved considerably over the years, so maybe Stars of Ice uncannily got to me at precisely the right time. In fact, I wonder how significant a role Roden himself has (indirectly) played in my shifting tastes, as he has always been ahead of his time in regard to celebrating details and nuances (as well as inventively repurposing “non-musical” sounds) and we seem to be in the midst of a textural renaissance at the moment. That said, most of Stars of Ice is as nakedly beautiful as music can get, so the quavering murkiness, crackling and popping vinyl, and pleasantly lapping waves of hiss are mere icing on an already gorgeous cake. This is an absolutely brilliant and magical album.

The album takes its name from a Chinese Christmas carol record that was one of the eclectic pair of pieces that Roden salvaged for his primarily sound sources. The other lucky winner was a song entitled “Snow” from a clearly hit-packed 78 entitled “Songs From the First Grade Reader.” Unsurprisingly, I suspect both pieces would be nearly unrecognizable to their original composers in the wake of Roden’s radical deconstructions, yet this is not one those albums where the character of the original pieces is completely obliterated into noisy abstraction, as Stars of Ice is an unusually melodic entry in the composer’s oft-challenging oeuvre. 

There were apparently also “various other objects and instruments” involved as well, but they never manifest themselves in recognizable ways, as the heart of Stars of Ice is essentially just snatches of vocal melodies and a crackling and hissing backdrop of pleasantly warm and murky organ chords (or at least something that sounds like an organ after Roden was finished with it). For a while, the piece feels like it is just going to linger in suspended animation forever, which would be apt given the “enchanted snow globe/slowly dissolving into the grooves of a wobbly old record” atmosphere, yet new threads (clipped vocal melodies, plinking and shivering strings, a choir, and a colorful host of coos, mumbles, and warbles) soon appear and begin weaving together in interesting and lovely ways.

For the piece’s first half, the warm chords, bittersweet central melody, and the flickering and ghostly choral snippets conjure one of the most sustained stretches of sublime, pure beauty that I have yet heard. The piece never stops glacially and subtly transforming, however, so that section is just one particularly exquisite phase of an immersive and hallucinatory journey towards a final stretch that approximates a haunted music box haltingly playing a fragmented, wrong speed recording of a rural Chinese or Eastern European traditional music ensemble. 

Admittedly, I likely would have been perfectly happy if Roden had just lingered in the most beautiful stretch forever, but the subtly intensifying shadows and sense of mystery that follow are what elevate Stars of Ice to something deeper and more complex than merely a masterfully executed collage of lovely sounds. In that regard, the album is characteristically stellar sound art, but Roden’s larger achievement is how masterfully he managed to convey ineffable feelings of beauty, sadness, and longing from just a couple of children’s records that no one has presumably thought about in half a century.

Samples can be found here.

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Steve Roden, “Oionos” (Room40, 2022)

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I am thrilled that Room40 is digging up and reissuing some woefully underheard gems from Steve Roden these days, as a hell of a lot of fascinating work passed me by in the pre-Bandcamp days of hyper-limited physical releases. Stars of Ice (due for a reissue in February) was especially revelatory for me, but this more modest initial dispatch from Roden’s vaults is quite a treat as well. 

As far as I know, Oionos has not been released previously, yet it dates from a 2006 exhibition in Athens, Greece entitled The Grand Promenade. The premise of the exhibition was to create a “dialogue” between “contemporary site-specific works” and “various archaeological and historical sites in central Athens,” but Roden fell in love with the Church of St. Dimitris Loumbardiardis (not among the planned sites) and managed to talk the curator into allowing an exception. Notably, the architect behind the church was the same man (Dimitris Pikionis) who designed the original promenade, so Roden’s selection was a thoughtful and inspired decision, as he felt the path leading to the church provided a “stronger impression of Pikionis’s vision” than the actual promenade (unlike the main promenade, the path to the church escaped being “restored” in preparation for the 2004 Olympics).

Originally constructed in the ninth century using materials salvaged from surrounding ruins and described as “likely the most secluded and serene” of Athen’s assortment of Byzantine-era churches, the Church of St. Dimitris Loumbardiardis is remarkably still in use. That presented something of a challenge for Roden, as his installation needed to harmonize with and enhance its peaceful environs without disrupting what made the place so alluring in the first place. He eventually decided to hang his sound installation from a large tree and opted for characteristically Roden-esque lowercase sounds that “could blend with all of the insect noises and the overall quiet of the area.” For his sound sources, Roden chose “field recordings and small, poor objects such as tin whistles, toy harmonicas, and the like.” Significantly, the latter were inspired by a basement display case of “non-instruments” located in Athen’s museum of musical instruments, as Roden felt the modest items meshed nicely with Pikionis’s interest in blending “indigenous culture” with “intellectual and modern culture.”

In more concrete terms, Oionos is essentially an hour of gently whirring, whining, and crackling suspended animation. There is also a wandering, disjointed melody that calls to mind either a slowed down recording of wind chimes or a malfunctioning music box that emits sparks and feedback as it strains to produce a fitful melody. I suppose that makes Oionos a very “ambient” piece, but it can also be more than that depending on how attentively I choose to listen: sometimes it feels like fragments of a wrong-speed Andrew Chalk album floating above a rich landscape of subtle, shifting textures, while other times evokes a pleasant sense of unreality, as if submerged ghost melodies struggle to surface from a quiet haze of insectoid whines, burbling water, and gently windblown leaves. 

It is quite a beautifully realized piece, yet I can understand why it was not released until now, as it lingers in delicate stasis rather than undergoing any kind of significant evolution (an approach far more preferable for an installation than an album intended for home listening). Then again, Steve Roden is hardly an artist known for adhering to convention, so listeners already familiar with his oeuvre will likely enjoy basking in this meditative sound world a great deal. For the merely Roden-curious, there are probably better albums to start with, but Oionos is still strong enough to effectively convey why his work remains so revered in sound art circles.

Samples can be found here.

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Scanner, “Earthbound Transmissions” (Room40, 2021)

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This latest release from Robin Rimbaud is hopefully the first of many deep dives into the Scanner archives, as he ambitiously spent part of his lockdown digitizing and mixing his unreleased work from the ’80s. The big story, of course, is that Earthbound Transmissions features some of Rimbaud’s early work with appropriated phone conversations that predates Scanner’s 1993 eponymous debut. 

Those scanned calls are only one facet of these recordings, however, as this album documents a formative experimental stage immediately after Rimbaud’s acquisition of a “luxuriously expensive” Fostex 280 four-track recorder, which he combined with a Digitech RDS 7.6 Time Machine to make looping, layered sound collages. For the most part, Earthbound Transmission feels like an unusually strong release from the ’80s DIY noise cassette scene (albeit more on the “murky ambient” side of the spectrum), but there are also a handful of pieces that legitimately feel like lost Scanner classics.

The opening “The Canonization” is a solid and representative example of the baseline aesthetic of Earthbound Transmissions, as it unfolds as a roiling and murky sea of grayscale drones. As a composition, it is not particularly memorable, but the actual notes played are secondary to the hissing, clouded, and frayed textures that Rimbaud conjures. That is not quite enough to make it an album highlight, but it is a damn good starting point for some of the other pieces, as one or two imaginative touches can easily transform that foundation into something hauntingly beautiful. 

Such welcome innovations start to appear with the following “Comus,” which uses clattering metal, an obsessive ticking rhythm, and voice fragments to evoke a tense and enigmatic scene from a gloomy Cold War-era train station in Eastern Europe (like a John le Carré novel, but artier and more hallucinatory). “Split Substance” is better still, as a chopped and garbled male voice combines with pulsing string samples for something resembling a haunted radio broadcast. 

The next run of hits kicks off with “His Begging Bowl,” in which a found recording recounts the poignant final moments of a beloved family dog over a backdrop resembling a smearing music box melody. Weirdly, it sounds like it is about to become a Daft Punk anthem at one point, but instead veers into trance-like, Oval-esque repetition. 

The two “Drones Places” pieces that follow are mesmerizing as well. The first is a pitch-perfect dose of shuddering industrial menace, while the second features static-drenched voices (some funny, some sad) crackling across a warmly, billowing ambient dreamscape. “Soft Endclose” is another scanned phone call gem, as a chaotic squall of noise and colorfully accented conversations fitfully unfolds over a minimal ambient shimmer. 

My other favorite pieces are the languorously melancholy and grinding industrial textures of “River Whispering Run” and the wryly amusing plunderphonic groove of “Unhelpful.” The remaining pieces are solid too, but there are probably four or five songs that rank among Rimbaud’s finest work, which is not something I was expecting to find lurking in dusty thirty-year-old tapes of unreleased music.

Samples can be found here.

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Lawrence English, “Lassitude” (Room40, 2020)

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It has been roughly three years since Lawrence English last released a proper solo album (2017’s Cruel Optimism), though he has kept himself quite busy with collaborative work since then (most notably as half of HEXA). Nevertheless, I have always been quite fond of his solo work, so I was hoping that he had something ambitious in the pipeline and this latest release hits the mark in that regard. While I am not sure that I would necessarily characterize Lassitude as one of English’s major releases, it is at least half brilliant and takes quite a different approach to drone than his usual fare. Part of that uniqueness lies in the fact that English focused entirely upon the pipe organ for this release, but Lassitude is perhaps even more significantly influenced by its inspirations, as one piece is inspired by Éliane Radigue and another by Phill Niblock.

I suspect Lassitude‘s title is intended as droll exploitation of the word’s dual meanings, as the timing of the release certainly coincides with an abundance of dispiriting and mentally wearying events throughout the world. However, in a highly localized sense, English seems to also be alluding to how physically exhausting it can be to play a pipe organ: in his description of the album, he notes how sore he was after “holding the bass pedals and manipulating the stops ever so delicately” for the performance of the title piece.

The organ in question, currently housed in Brisbane’s Old Museum, dates from the 19th century and is presumably a familiar instrument for English, as pipe organs have been audibly surfacing in his work since at least as far back as 2014’s Wilderness of Mirrors (and I doubt there are a wealth of other building-sized instrument options in his immediate vicinity). Given the complexity of the instrument, I would not envy anyone trying to master advanced melodic compositions, but the organ’s elaborate system of stops allows for nuanced tonal changes that are extremely well-suited to drone-based compositions such as these (or those of Kali Malone). Given that, it is no surprise that both of Lassitude‘s lengthy compositions are hyper-minimal drone works, though the stylistic difference between the two is admittedly quite dramatic.

According to English, the opening “Saccade (For Éliane Radigue)” was largely inspired by classic Radigue albums like Adnos, Trilogie de la morte, and L’Île Re-Sonante and he makes absolutely no attempt to conceal that influence at all. In fact, “Saccade” is textbook Radigue fare on its face, as it is essentially just a single pulsing, quavering tone that gradually blossoms into a hypnotic swirl of chirping and buzzing oscillations. To his credit, however, English brings some impressively effective innovations to Radigue’s signature aesthetic, condensing her characteristically epic time scale into a lean and heavy 20-minute dose of visceral, slow-burning, and hallucinatory drone nirvana. That could very well be unintentional, as not many artists share Radigue’s superhuman patience, but English’s more distilled and dense incarnation of simmering and throbbing oscillation worship could not possibly have been executed any more beautifully: “Saccade” is harmonically and rhythmically absorbing and intense from start to finish. 

The pleasures of the Niblock-inspired “Lassitude,” on the other hand, are a bit less readily apparent, though that is partially because all of the action takes place in a lower frequency range. That said, the piece is considerably more consonant than predecessor, unfolding mostly as a single deep chord undarkened by ugly harmonies. Consequently, it feels comparably placid and “ambient,” though sufficient volume and focused listening reveals seismic, slow-motion transformations continually unfolding in its rumbling depths.

As an homage to Niblock, “Lassitude” is admittedly solid, but it is no better or no worse than its inspiration and too minimal to allow much (if any) of English’s individual character to manifest itself. As such, it is by far the weaker of the two pieces. Unlike “Saccade,” however, the title piece was recorded as a single one-take performance (a first for English). Seen in that light, “Lassitude” is quite an impressive feat of control, patience, and nuance.

Of course, given that this is an album and not a public performance, I still cannot help but wonder how much better the piece could have been if it had been subjected to English’s full compositional, editing, and production powers. Given how beautifully “Saccade” turned out, it is hard to imagine that “Lassitude” would have been anything other than a similarly sublime stunner in those circumstances. Then again, maybe not, as it is difficult to envision much that would not pale in comparison to “Saccade.” In fact, it may very well be the single best piece Lawrence has ever recorded: a mesmerizing, billowing dream cloud curdled by endlessly shifting dissonances.

Samples can be found here.

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Norman Westberg, “Jasper Sits Out” (Room40, 2017)

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Room40’s excavation campaign of Norman Westberg’s wonderfully hypnotic and self-released solo guitar work continues with this 2014 tribute to the Westberg family dog. Notably, this release was already reissued once before (as an extremely limited vinyl edition by Hallow Ground), but this new incarnation is both remastered and expanded. 

More notable still, Jasper Sits Out was the first of Westberg’s homemade releases that Lawrence English ever heard, making it the album that inadvertently dragged this quietly beautiful facet of his artistry into the light. As such, I half-expected Jasper to be a towering culmination of the entire reissue campaign, but it is more or less on the same level as all the consistently fine preceding releases (aside from one truly dazzling piece).

The original version of Jasper was comprised of two epic 20-minute compositions, the title piece and “Homeset Trunc.” The opening “Jasper” is very much textbook Westberg, beginning as kind of a warm and insistently pulsing haze before cleaner tones appear to weave a shifting, jangling, and ringing melodic foreground. 

The magic of the piece lies in how seamlessly and organically Westberg plays with that central motif, building an undulating pointillist fog with calmly insistent forward momentum. In doing so, he achieves two desirable feats at once: creating a dreamlike and hypnotic throb while ceaselessly crafting an unpredictable and complex web of evolving harmonies and micro-rhythms. It is amusing and unexpected that someone associated with the crushing juggernaut of Swans may be even more gifted in the arts of nuance, restraint, and patience. 

Yet another trait that separates Westberg from like-minded solo guitarists is that his laser-focused control even extends to the compositional arc of his pieces. When an artist is performing alone with just some looping pedals, the tendency is almost always to keep all the plates spinning until all of the necessary elements are in place for the crescendo, then elegantly fade away. “Jasper” admirably bucks that trend by resolving into a final repeating chord. It may not be electrifying or dramatic, but it is undeniably effective and satisfying.

The atypically industrial “Homeset Trunc” is quite a bit different, boasting a steadily throbbing and churning machine-like rhythm. Naturally, Westberg exploits that strong percussive undercurrent as an opportunity to plunge deeper into abstraction than usual. At first, he keeps things rather subdued and modest, but after several minutes the bottom drops out and the piece grows dramatically more hallucinatory. 

As the deeper tones plunge and warp, Westberg weaves a rippling web of arpeggios that gradually becomes a dense and swirling cloud of twinkling, pulsing, and undulating layers. Needless to say it is quite beautiful, but the best part is that the heavenly ocean of shimmer is periodically disrupted by surges of ugly vibrato and pitch-shifts to add a welcome element of menace and fragility. I can honestly say that I never heard anything quite like it from another guitarist and I cannot even begin to unravel the mechanics of how it was assembled or performed: it is truly a tour de force. 

Although it takes a while to catch fire, the pay-off is mesmerizing enough to make it a solid candidate for my favorite Westberg piece to date. Given that, the newly added “A Particular Tuesday” has quite a tough act to follow, but it proves to be a fine coda despite my unreasonably high expectations. It is admittedly a bit less distinctive and more overtly improvisatory than the rest of the album, but it compensates by being more melodic and instantly gratifying. It kind of sounds like a languorous and glimmering ten-minute interlude during a Slowdive live set designed to give the rhythm section a break, but it gradually fades away rather than erupting into a song.

Aside from noting that the bonus track is not quite on the same level as the original album, the only real critiques than can be leveled at Jasper Sits Out are about what it is not rather than what it is. Given that Westberg performed the entire album himself with a guitar, there are some very fundamental dynamic, textural, and compositional limitations: for the most part, Jasper Sits Out unavoidably sounds like a solo guitar album. 

That is perfectly fine by me, of course—when Westberg is in his usual form, as he is on the title piece, he is easily one of the most beguiling and distinctive solo guitarists active today. At his best, however, he transcends the self-imposed constraints of his craft to plunge into sublime and rarefied territory all his own. He is at that level with “Homeset Trunc,” reaffirming yet again my belief that Westberg is secretly one of the strongest minimalist composers of his generation.

Listen here.

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Lawrence English, “Cruel Optimism” (Room40, 2017)

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In recent years, my expectations of what a new Lawrence English album might sound like have gotten increasingly blurry, as he has an admirable tendency to explore new concepts and collaborations that lure him far away from the classic drone fare that initially put him on the map. Cruel Optimism is arguably a return to English’s more straightforward drone work in some ways, but it feels like quite a corroded and scorched return, which certainly fits nicely with English’s somewhat dark conceptual inspiration. Needless to say, it is a characteristically fine album and quite a distinctive one as well, evoking a kind of bleak orchestral grandeur flourishing amidst crumbling ruin and decay.

Cruel Optimism takes its title and some of its inspiration from Lauren Berlant’s book of the same name. I am sure Berlant’s book would be quite hard to succinctly summarize even if I had read it, but English was most fascinated by how she addressed trauma, observing “it was a jumping off point from which a plague of unsettling impressions of suffering, intolerance, and ignorance could be unpacked and utilized as fuel over and above pointless frustration.” 

Wresting beauty from a plague of unsettling impressions is not an easy task, but English had plenty of help from a slew of talented collaborators including Mats Gustafsson, members of Swans, Chris Abrahams from The Necks, and a full choir (Australian Voices). On paper, a drone artist teaming up with (almost) a couple dozen vocalists, trombonists, pianists, and saxophonists sounds like a perfect recipe for a wildly misguided and overblown mess, but most of the contributors are only present in simmering and understated form. 

In fact, it almost sounds like English made two albums: the first was a sweepingly dramatic quasi-symphonic epic, then the second (and final) one was an obliteration of that material. Aside from the uncharacteristic brass and choral textures, Cruel Optimism sounds a lot like an unusually dense album that English could have made on his own (given enough time…and maybe a trombone).

That said, however, density is definitely one of Cruel Optimism‘s defining characteristics, as is its stark and foreboding mood. There are occasionally lulls and crescendos, but Cruel Optimism mostly feels like a sky choked with slow-moving black clouds with only the merest flickers of sunlight breaking through. Or perhaps like a creeping flow of unpredictably bubbling magma. The latter image is most strongly evoked by the album’s glorious centerpiece, “Object of Projection,” where an elegiac procession of lush synth chords is enhanced by surging washes of hiss. 

Another stand-out is the brief “Exquisite Human Microphone,” as Gustafsson’s subdued and throbbing sax drones unexpectedly erupt into erratic brass swells amidst a drifting haze of strangled howls and processed piano textures. I was also quite fond of “Somnambulist,” which builds to a wonderful crescendo of roiling hiss and buried guitar shimmer. 

For the most part, however, Cruel Optimism feels like ten variations upon a single dark theme rather than a suite of individual songs. Unsurprisingly, that aesthetic choice has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the whole album blurs together into a somewhat monochromatic and glacially unfolding reverie without much in the way of dynamic variation or melody. On the other, Cruel Optimism feels achieves a kind of bleakly monolithic majesty. Now that I say that, it belatedly occurs to me that this album is kind of Lawrence English’s own Monoliths and Dimensions.

As striking as it is, trying to assess how Cruel Optimism fits into English’s oeuvre is a somewhat tricky endeavor, as I do not think it is quite on the same level as his best work if judged by strictly by “entertainment” considerations such as beauty, listenability, or immersiveness. Viewed as an artistic statement, however, Cruel Optimism is quite a bold and focused move forward. 

For one, it is both distinctive and devoid of any obvious outside (musical) influences: it does not sound like a traditional Lawrence English album and it certainly does not resemble anyone else either. English could easily keep revisiting familiar territory and probably churn out a wonderful, yet straightforward and unchallenging, drone album every year. Instead, each of his recent albums has felt like an artist restlessly stretching and pushing the boundaries of his aesthetic and some of those experiments work better than others. 

To English’s credit, Cruel Optimism leaves his comfort zone much farther behind than most of his other recent albums. Lawrence English is clearly not a man who is content to repeat himself at this stage in his career. That said, he is also not a chameleon: all of the expected Lawrence English tropes are still in place here, but they are presented in almost unrecognizably scorched and blackened form. That might not be the easiest and most satisfying way to experience English’s vision, but this is not the easiest and most satisfying time to be alive and Cruel Optimism is a compelling honest and artistic refraction of that reality.

Listen here.

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Norman Westberg, “MRI” (Room40, 2016)

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As much as I love Swans, one of 2015’s great mysteries for me was trying to figure out why some people liked Norman Westberg’s solo 13 album so much, as it just seemed like a very straightforward ambient-drone album in every way. Consequently, I did not have especially high expectations for Room40’s second Westberg reissue, which compiles three even earlier pieces from his homemade, self-released CDrs. 

As it turns out, however, MRI is a hell of a lot more compelling than its predecessor. While the general aesthetic is basically the same (hazy processed-guitar soundscapes), MRI features considerably more in the way of subtle dynamic shifts and disquieting dissonances. Aside from just being deeper, more complex, and more nuanced than what I had previously heard, this album is actually quite distinctive and unique as well. I now completely understand why Lawrence English was so keen to unearth Westberg’s largely unheard solo oeuvre.

The prosaically titled MRI ostensibly takes its inspiration from magnetic resonance imaging, which Westberg underwent when he discovered that he was experiencing uneven hearing loss. However, the degree to which that experience shaped this album is quite hard to unravel, as the provenance of these recordings is a bit confounding. 

Of the three pieces included here, one (“Lost Mine”) is a new piece dating from 2015 and another (“410 Stairs”) was the title track of its own self-contained 2012 release. Also, the original “MRI” apparently surfaced in 2012 as well, but it is something of a phantom: it only appears in Discogs as part of a compilation pulling together Westberg’s MRI, 410 Stairs, and Plough EPs. 

Moreover, “MRI” is not particularly obvious in its nods to medical scanning technology, seemingly borrowing only the subtle cycling/pulsing sounds and perhaps evoking a bit of immersive unreality of being cozily inserted into the heart of a machine. Thankfully, Westberg did not derive any inspiration from the annoying buzzing sounds common to MRIs.

While Westberg used SoundForge to originally edit these newly remastered pieces, the originally recordings were done with a very stripped-down set-up that usually consisted of a just a guitar, some delay effects, and a couple of amps recorded to tape. Also, “MRI” was essentially recorded “live” in one take. Nothing on MRI sounds improvised or sketch-like though, as the overall effect is one of elegantly simple variations on a theme. 

The theme itself is quite simple as well, as Westberg essentially just creates a warmly droning bed of guitar haze and tape hiss, then embellishes it with quavering rhythmic waves and shivering dissonances. Working with such a limited palette proves to be very effective here, as each minor shift in pulse or harmony is able to make maximum impact because there is no clutter to hide behind and no melodies to grab the focus: just a beautiful, gently throbbing drift that gradually changes moods as the smallest changes trigger new oscillations and complex, unexpected harmonies. 

On the opening title piece, the drones gradually become more shadowy and ominous, culminating in the brief eruption of an undercurrent that sounds legitimately gnarled. The longer and more beautiful “410 Stairs” is not nearly as haunted-sounding, however, instead maintaining a consistent mood of bittersweet warmth that gradually builds in power with layers of jangling, bell-like waves. The closing “Lost Mine” initially starts in a somewhat similar mood, but heads in a very different direction, as blurry, treble-heavy layers bleed into one another and drift in and out of sync to create a gently psychedelic blur.

Interestingly, Room40’s Lawrence English describes Westberg’s work as “embedded strongly in the American Minimalism tradition.” I am not sure who he specifically had in mind, but these pieces certainly do betray an affinity for patterns and repetition. In any case, something transcendent is certainly happening: the tools and textures employed on MRI share a lot of common ground with what other experimental guitarists were doing around the same time, yet the best moments show that Westberg was operating on a much higher plane compositionally than his peers. 

To my ears, MRI positions Westberg as a kind of a DIY/low-tech Eliane Radigue, attempting to distill drone down to its purest, most minimal form: a single sustained tone that comes alive as a number of small, controlled changes cumulatively create their own shifting pulse and harmonic arc. On the gorgeous “410 Stairs” and some sections of “MRI,” Westberg comes as close to reaching that state of drone nirvana as anyone.

Listen here.

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Rafael Anton Irisarri, “A Fragile Geography” (Room40, 2015)

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Irisarri’s latest album is not rooted in a particularly happy place, as it was recorded after most of his gear and possessions were stolen during a cross-country move. The experience ultimately proved to be artistically liberating though: without his usual studio set-up or his backlog of material to work with, Rafael decided to use the occasion as an opportunity for an aesthetic rebirth. That was the plan, anyway—to my ears, A Fragile Geography is not a particularly radical or revelatory transformation. 

It certainly feels a bit more structured, composed, and grainy than before, but is still basically more of the likable and warmly hissing synth-based ambient music that I have grown to expect from Irisarri (albeit now with slightly broader appeal). Fans of label head Lawrence English or early (read: less dissonant) Tim Hecker will likely find this album appealing, while longtime Irisarri enthusiasts will presumably require no adjustment period at all to appreciate his change of course.

The opening “Displacement” favorably (and unavoidably) calls to mind yet another of my favorite artists: Angelo Badalamenti. While the resemblance is not at all derivative and “Displacement” is far too understated to recall any of Badalamenti’s more iconic pieces, Irisarri does a masterful job of mingling hissing, dreamy beauty with a subtly menacing and disorienting undercurrent that suggests that something is not quite right. While the piece never quite evolves into anything more, its lushly brooding ambiance is a very pleasant place to linger for four minutes or so. The next several pieces thankfully get a bit more ambitious though.

The lengthier “Reprisal,” for example, enhances an otherwise straightforward drone motif with an inspired array of hollow, whooshing, undulating, and shimmering textures as it gradually snowballs in power and volume. I especially enjoyed how the more static-like/white noise elements blossomed to take over the foreground as the more melodic elements faded into the distance. “Empire Systems” is yet another highlight, as a slow-moving drift of chord swells gradually surge in power while increasingly fraying around the edges. 

The following “Hiatus” is even more inspired, as Irisarri enhances his usual chord pattern with a nimbus of wobbly, fluttering, and strangled-sounding synth tones. Sadly, it only lasts for about two minutes though. The much longer “Persistence” achieves a somewhat similar (if lesser) feat, but its appealingly quivering and burbling tones are regrettably pushed to the background by the piece’s languorous and melancholy melody.

That unfortunate penchant for getting bogged down in melancholy completely takes over the closing “Secretly Wishing for Rain,” which is an 8-minute slog of sad piano arpeggios, gloomy synths, and cello from guest Julia Kent. That type of overt, mopey melodrama leaves me quite cold and is probably the best illustration of the gulf separating Irisarri from the genre’s top tier. 

Another somewhat exasperating facet of A Fragile Geography is that each piece feels like a single motif extended and embellished until Rafael eventually loses interest and fades out. It is certainly possible to make great ambient or drone music with that approach (and many artists have done so), but the trick is to not be so transparent about it. Also, it is perplexing that two of the album’s strongest themes wind up being represented by the shortest songs (“Hiatus” and “Displacement”).

All grumbling aside though, Irisarri is absolutely wonderful at detail and texture, which makes a piece like “Reprisal” an extremely compelling headphone listening experience (there is something hidden in there that sounds like a submerged field recording of wolves or whales that is completely lost without them). Consequently, “Reprisal” gets an enthusiastic, heartfelt, and unqualified recommendation from me. I just wish the other five pieces had hit similar heights (or at least stuck around longer when they hit them). Irisarri definitely needs to get better at playing to his strengths. 

Also, there should definitely be more whales and wolves on future albums (or at least more prominent use of field recordings, as Rafael’s use of unusual/buried textures is probably what most differentiates him from the ambient drone herd). That said, A Fragile Geography is still at least half of a very good album and marks a promising step forward for Irisarri. I suspect that his best work is still ahead of him though.

Listen here.

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