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Eliana Glass, “E” (Shelter Press, 2025)

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On its face, this smoldering debut from NYC-based jazz chanteuse Eliana Glass seems like quite an inspired outlier for the historically avant garde-minded Shelter Press, as the smoky, sensuous minimalism of these depressive torch songs resembles absolutely nothing else previously released on the label. I certainly cannot fault their instincts, however, as the allure of E is immediately obvious from the first notes. To my ears, these darkly beautiful piano and voice performances evoke the chills-down-my-spine intensity of the late, great Patty Waters (minus the more harrowing and extreme bits), but Glass’s vision was more explicitly inspired by Carla Bley, Annette Peacock, and Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (all of whom are covered here).

There are also some unexpectedly leftfield details revealed in the album’s description, such as a fondness for vintage analog effects, subtly hallucinatory contributions from her brother (sound artist brother Costa Colachis Glass), a piece inspired by conceptual artist Agnes Denes, and the involvement of Francis Harris (one half of deep house duo Frank & Tony). Notably, the Agnes Denes piece (“Human Dust”) is one of the album’s two stone-cold masterpieces, as Glass’s languorous reading of a matter-of-fact post-mortem accounting of an artist’s life is a powerfully haunting and darkly funny meditation on mortality (“achieved 1/10,000 of his dreams,” “was misunderstand 3800 times when it mattered,” “was loved by 17 people including his parents,” etc.). Notably, the album’s other stunner is one of Glass’s own songs (“Good Friends Call Me E”) and it is an absolute supernova, as she soulfully tosses off one perfect line after another (“I get over you like the last one”) over a gorgeously simmering and swinging backdrop from drummer Mike Gebhart and bassist Mike Rinne. The remainder of the album is compelling as well, unsurprisingly, but “Good Friends Call Me E” is the sort of piece that makes me want to run out into the streets to tackle random pedestrians and demand to know why they are not listening to it right now. 

Listen here.

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Kassel Jaeger, “Shifted in Dreams” (Shelter Press, 2023)

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This latest opus from INA GRM’s François J. Bonnet is loosely inspired by René Daumal’s unfinished philosophical novel Mount Analogue (1952), which recounts an imagined expedition in which explorers hunt for a mountain that can “only be perceived by the application of obscure knowledge.” It has been a few decades since I last read Mount Analogue or watched the film it partially inspired (Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain) so my memory of both is blurry at best, yet that did not impair my appreciation for the album, as Bonnet characteristically channeled the theme in his own inventive and compelling way. The gist is that familiar sounds and structures become increasingly rare as the album unfolds, but Bonnet had a deeper philosophical agenda as well, as Shifted in Dreams is a meditation on how our current world is in a “blurred and uncertain state where the reality of signs loses its consistency while, paradoxically, the reality of senses and impressions becomes imperative, obvious.” Bonnet is clearly not a fan of that situation, unsurprisingly, and refers to it as “the reality of demons.” Putting aside the death of meaning and general existential horror of our times, however, the dissolving of the familiar is wonderfully fertile creative ground for a Kassel Jaeger album, as Bonnet is exceptionally good at layered and evocative sound design. This is a beautifully crafted headphone album (but probably only for those armed with the obscure knowledge of how to listen deeply).

In keeping with the central theme of dissolving familiarity, the opening title piece is the most conventionally musical stretch of the album, resembling a warm but melancholy organ mass. There is admittedly a lot of tape hiss and murk obscuring the sound of the organ, but that is probably as close to the recognizable physical world as this album ever gets and that situation does not last long at all (the piece plunges down a rabbit hole of mindfuckery after a few minutes). The general vibe is best described as “I am in a numbing fog of painkillers in a cathedral during an air raid, but everything is in slow motion and also made of crystal.” While those crystalline sounds remain a regular occurrence for the duration of the album (Bonnet got his hands on a Cristal Baschet), just about everything else is an elusive and shape-shifting fog of field recordings, asynchronous loops, analog synth, processed guitar, and studio wizardry.

The album’s centerpiece is “Dissipation of Light,” which feels like a floating world of gently pulsing, flickering, and dissolving melodies that steadily becomes more haunted and tense before unexpectedly blossoming into a cosmic fantasia. That piece also kicks off a great mid-abum run, as the following “Gullintoppa” and “Sôlên I” are highlights as well. The former combines slow, lovely chord swells with texturally vivid field recordings to evoke the feeling of a sun-dappled autumn reverie in a park while more unsettling and ominous sounds increasingly gnaw away in the periphery. “Sôlên I,” on the other hand, unexpectedly transforms from deep exhalations and electronic drips into a buzzing, chirping, and psychotropic synth dronescape. Again, however, all is not right with the world, as it also sounds like there is an orchestral nightmare blearily howling from a nearby void and maybe even another slow-motion air strike as well (one of the sounds lies somewhere between “streaking fighter jet” and “blurred and softened air raid siren”). As for the remaining pieces, they call to mind everything from a chopped & screwed improvisation on a broken calliope (“Barca Solare”) to a hapless brass band frozen in suspended animation (“Allée des Brouillards”). That is not an experience that many other albums can promise, but the real magic of this album lies in its vivid, exacting, and inventive execution. Given Bonnet’s central role in contemporary sound art, the fact that he has a real gift for crafting richly immersive sound worlds is hardly breaking news, but Shifted in Dreams is unquestionably one of his more inspired statements.

Listen here.

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Félicia Atkinson, “Image Langage” (Shelter Press, 2022)

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This latest album from the consistently fascinating Atkinson is yet another plunge into a vibrantly textured and otherworldly dreamspace, this time drawing inspiration from an abstract dialog between house and landscape. Or more specifically, “Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world.” In keeping with that theme, Atkinson “revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work.” Naturally, there are some other conceptual layers as well (this being a Félicia Atkinson album, after all). One of the more interesting ones is the decision to give the album a name that resembles a “fake title of a fake Godard film.” 

In an obvious sense, that is apt given how Image Langage feels like a film with no actual images, but Godard’s mischievous meaning-dissolving weirdness is also manifested in how Atkinson wields and repurposes her sounds. In more concrete terms, that means that Atkinson deliberately used instruments alternately like field recordings or characters in a murky, surreal narrative and often reduces her voice to an unpredictably drifting and elusive presence. The overall effect is like being lost in a beautiful dream where an unreliable narrator periodically drifts in with riddle-like non-clues that only lead me deeper into Atkinson’s eerie, soft-focus enigma.

This album is billed as “an environmental record” about “getting lost in places imagined and real.” Naturally, one of the real places central to the album is Atkinson’s home on the “wild coast of Normandy” where much of the writing and recording took place (the rest occurred at a lakeside residency in Switzerland). I bring all this up because Image Langage has an unusually enigmatic and slippery aesthetic that blurs the line between songcraft and more abstract/outré fare. At times, the album can feel very “ambient,” but it is actually chasing something akin to impressionistic clairvoyance/clairaudience. While fully grasping the shades of meaning lurking within a Félicia Atkinson is often a tall order, Thea Ballard crafted quite an illuminating statement for the album’s description, noting that Image Langage evokes a visit to Atkinson’s seaside home in which we are “invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred.” 

In more practical terms, that means that the overall impression left by Image Langage is that of staying in a benignly haunted cottage populated by whispered voices, bleary drones, ephemeral flickers of piano melody, and hallucinatory manipulations of nature sounds. Unsurprisingly, I find that to be characteristically immersive and fascinating Atkinson territory, but Image Langage also has a handful of great individual pieces that transcend the baseline “ASMR-inspired ambient for well-read seaside ghosts” aesthetic. Amusingly, a case could be made that this is Atkinson’s “dub album,” as two of the strongest pieces share some common ground with artists like Pole and loscil.

My favorite piece is the album’s single, “Becoming A Stone,” which features a hushed monologue (“I believe that a fence will keep animals out, just outside the kitchen window”) weightlessly drifting over a quiet bed of clicks, pops, a lazily repeating chord, and a wandering, bleary melody. Elsewhere, the more structured “The House That Agnes Built” is the loscil-esque piece, as Atkinson sensuously whispers over billowing, deconstructed dub centered around a sonar-like ping. Those subtle dub techno elements suit Atkinson’s aesthetic quite well, but there are a couple of drone-based pieces that are similarly strong. 

In particular, “The Lake is Speaking” is classic Atkinson, as it feels like a wandering piano melody is guiding me through a harmonically rich labyrinth of undulating dream drones. The title piece is yet another highlight, as hushed overlapping/doubled voices languorously bubble up from an uneasy backdrop of flute and/or harmonium drones. It all adds up to yet another wonderfully sublime album from a consistently compelling and endlessly evolving artist on a path entirely her own. Image Langage feels like getting a glimpse of someone’s most intimate journals, but only after an erasure poet got there first, leaving behind only a series of maddeningly enticing decontextualized fragments and a lingering sense of a beautiful mystery destined to remain forever unsolved.

Listen here.

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Thomas Ankersmit, “Perceptual Geography” (Shelter Press, 2021)

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Three years after the mesmerizing Homage to Dick Raaijmakers, Thomas Ankersmit is back with yet another bombshell inspired by an underappreciated electronic music visionary. In this case, that visionary is Maryanne Amacher, who also happens to be the person who fatefully introduced Ankersmit to his Serge modular synth. Naturally, the Serge retains its central role from the Raaijmakers album and Ankersmit masterfully wields it again to conjure up another hallucinatory swirl of phantom sounds and strange aural phenomena. 

The conceptual themes are bit different this time around, however, as Ankersmit explores the ideas laid out in Amacher’s “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of a Perceptual Geography” essay. Unsurprisingly, Ankersmit does a stellar job psychoacoustically mapping out his own compelling perceptual geography with this release, but his most striking bit of sorcery actually occurs off the album, as the piece was engineered to trigger otoacoustic emissions, which are “sounds emanating from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves.”

The album fades into existence with a quietly oscillating electronic hum that gradually becomes increasingly disrupted by squelches, blurts, crackles of static, swells of feedback, and something resembling shortwave radio transmissions. That is admittedly not radical territory for a vintage modular synth album, yet each sound feels like a meaningful building block that incrementally moves the composition closer and closer to one of Ankersmit’s beguiling set pieces. 

The first of those starts taking shape around the 9-minute mark, eventually reaching a crescendo that sounds like asteroids slowly smashing into the hull of my spaceship while I fight off a swarm of psychedelic crickets. Things only get wilder and more intense from there, as the simmering brew of abstract electronic sounds repeatedly blossoms into striking new forms, at times even resembling a killer noise guitar act. 

The first truly “wow” moment hits around the 16-minute mark, as a haze of beeps, buzzes, and other squiggling and squirming electronic sounds starts to feel like it is actually burrowing into my goddamn mind. That is a hell of a trick, as the piece seems to transform as I turn my head from side to side. I suspect the live experience is even more transcendent, as Ankersmit always “tunes his instrument to the resonant characteristics of the performance space, so that the sounds activate the structure.” He clearly takes the physics of sound very seriously and it pays off beautifully. 

Naturally, there are more dazzling climaxes as the album unfolds, including one that starts forming around the 26-minute mark in which Ankersmit sounds like the best damn noise artist on the planet. I easily could throw around some more colorful terms describing what transpires (“lysergic space aviary” and “gibbering, squelching cacophony” spring to mind), but the only thing that matters is that Perceptual Geography contains some of the most challenging, absorbing, and masterfully executed sound art that I have ever heard.

Samples can be found here.

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Félicia Atkinson, “Everything Evaporate” (Shelter Press, 2020)

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This latest release from F√©licia Atkinson is ostensibly a minor and somewhat transitional one, as it is a cassette intended as a sort of culminating document of a year spent traveling and performing. As with all recent Atkinson releases, however, the reality is far more complex, enigmatic, and deeply conceptual than anything that can be easily summarized in just one sentence. 

Partly inspired by the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and partly intended as “a reassessed document of public performance with improvised studio interventions acting to break the linear stream of the live-on-stage temporality,” Everything Evaporate is an intriguing and sophisticated release that seems to exist at the borderline of form and dreamlike abstraction. As such, it is not the optimal entry point for the curious (that would be 2019’s The Flower and the Vessel), but deep listening reveals this release to be every bit as absorbing as the rest of Atkinson’s recent hot streak.

For the most part, Everything Evaporate is an remarkably apt title for this release, as several of these songs sound like they are heeding that command in real-time. On the opening title piece, however, Atkinson largely picks up exactly where she left off with The Flower and the Vessel. Granted, it is a bit more minimal than usual, as Atkinson’s breathy monologue unfolds over an oscillating and gently heaving bed of droning bass tones.Her seductively accented voice remains sharply in focus though, so the heart of the piece is an mysterious, poetic, and evocative spoken word performance.

At this stage in her career, Atkinson’s ASMR-influenced narratives are very much the strongest and most instantly recognizable feature of her work, as she manages to make even mundane phrases like “can I get a cup of coffee please?” seem pregnant with deep hidden meaning. While her voice is unquestionably the center of everything, however, there are plenty of unpredictable other factors driving and shaping Atkinson’s recent work, as she seems to draw a significant amount of inspiration from both literature and visual art.

Characteristically, those “outside” influences rarely manifest themselves in expected or conventional ways. The following instrumental “I can’t stop thinking about it” is a prime example of how those disparate threads converge, as Atkinson conjures up a surreal miasma of plinking marimbas, chirping birds, and spectral drones. At first, it all feels like a lazily clinking, disjointed, and formless haze, but the drones sneakily increase in richness and intensity for a shimmering and dreamlike crescendo. 

Notably, that piece also contains an excerpted fragment of a Helen Frankenthaler interview that recounts how she ruined a painting by messing with its fragile ambiguity. While that recording makes up a very small part of the album, its sentiment seems to be the guiding force at the heart of Everything Evaporate. I suspect Atkinson was being quite sincere when she titled the piece “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

The next piece, “Transparent, in movement,” continues to explore that same hazy, impressionistic, and erratically plinking aesthetic, but Atkinson’s voice returns for another cryptic monologue and the piece gradually converges into a slow, stumbling rhythm of sorts. Naturally, that alone is enough to make it a stronger piece. However, that is arguably just the piece’s backbone, as a hallucinatory swirl of peripheral sounds blossoms outwards as the piece progresses towards an eerie finale of darkly twinkling piano.

The following “Don’t Assume” opens as yet another spectral haze of blurred drones and disjointed marimba plinks, but they are bolstered by an ascending roar of more visceral, metallic tones this time around. The piece admittedly takes a while to catch fire, yet it is worth the wait, as it eventually opens up into a genuinely creepy crescendo of overlapping, pitch-shifted voices and snatches of sinister-sounding sing-song melody.

It feels like I am eavesdropping on a group of dead-eyed, possessed children joining together for either an occult incantation or a distracted performance of a macabre nursery rhyme. That late-album descent into darker territory continues into the closing (and ominously titled) “This is the gate,” as an insistent harp-like chord obsessively repeats over a phantasmagoric mélange of floating feedback-like tones and murky smears of metallic chimes. Gradually, form emerges as rippling piano arpeggios overlap and the underlying metallic shimmer converges into a loose pulse of sorts. By the final moments, it actually blossoms into something quite beautiful as Atkinson’s buried voice murmurs beneath some tender, lingering chords and a warm, all-enveloping hiss.

Those final two pieces are my favorite ones on the album and rank among some of Atkinson’s finest work, particularly “Don’t Assume.” That said, “This is the gate” is probably Everything Evaporate‘s most radical creative breakthrough—or at least the most successful incarnation of the aesthetic evolution that runs throughout much of the album. 

More than any other piece, “This is the gate” evokes an absorbing and gently hallucinatory state of suspended animation, as Atkinson creates the illusion that all of the instrumentation is floating, decontextualized, and untethered to any structure. Then, she begins subtly sliding each piece into place until her lazily lingering tones converge into a warm web of rippling harmonies engulfed in a comforting sea of hiss.

That is not a far cry from what happens elsewhere on the album, however, as the biggest difference is only that other songs achieve a similar sleight of hand by transforming disjointed percussive instruments into richly layered drones. As a result, Everything Evaporate is an especially rewarding album for focused listening, as it is a delight to hear Atkinson pull metaphorical rabbit after rabbit out of her hat, subtly and surreptitiously transforming her hyper-minimal palette of misused marimbas and a voice into pieces of impressive depth and mystery.

Samples can be found here.

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Félicia Atkinson, “The Flower And The Vessel” (Shelter Press, 2019)

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This latest album was composed and recorded in “impersonal hotel rooms in foreign cities” as Atkinson ambitiously toured the world while pregnant, making plenty of field recordings in far-flung locales like Tasmania and the Mojave Desert along the way. I am not surprised that those conditions were particularly amenable for her hushed, dreamlike, and ASMR-inspired vocal work, but I did not expect the underlying music to be quite as fleshed-out and hauntingly lovely as this. 

While Atkinson cites both Japanese flower arrangement and childhood memories of French impressionist composers as significant influences, her elegantly fragmented and floating reveries are uniquely and distinctively her own. I do wonder if the Ikebana influence was the final missing puzzle piece for Atkinson’s artistic vision though, as The Flower And The Vessel strikes me as her strongest release to date. Her aesthetic has not changed all that much (nor would I want it to), but her intuitions for focus, clarity, and balance have definitely become stronger and more unerring.

As befits an album quietly recorded with minimal equipment in hotel rooms, The Flower And The Vessel opens in subdued, enigmatic, and blearily soft-focus fashion. After a brief introduction (“L’Après-Midi“) that is essentially just Atkinson’s murmuring and whispering voice, the album begins in earnest with the shivering drones and rippling melancholy piano arpeggios of “Moderato Cantabile.” It is quite a lovely and tender piece, but the lion’s share of Atkinson’s artistry is devoted to the textures and dynamics, as floating and swelling tones alternately crackle, sensuously throb, or hang in the air like a warm mist. 

It is not until the third piece (“Shirley to Shirley”), however, that the album truly catches fire. Musically, “Shirley” is an elegantly blurred and simmering bit of slow-motion psychedelia, as a languorous swirl of field recordings and synths floats above a lazily fluid bass line. The best part is the vocals though, as Atkinson shares a cryptic and confessional-sounding monologue that is multitracked and processed to sound eerily supernatural. From that point onward, The Flower And the Vessel blossoms into quite a quietly stunning album, as even a simple piece like “Un Ovale Vert” is a rapturous reverie of overlapping ripples and submerged snatches of evocative field recordings.

While “Shirley to Shirley” is never quite unseated as the release’s high-water mark, the second half of the album shows Atkinson to be an absolute sorceress at wielding slow-building tension and conjuring wonderfully disorienting and hallucinatory scenes. “You Have To Have Eyes” is an especially striking and mesmerizing example of Atkinson’s unique and creepy mystique, as her whispered monologue slowly builds to a dense web of buzzing textures, obsessively repeating loops, and snippets of a truly haunting child-like voice.It is a beguilingly fragile, intimate, and lovely piece that also makes me feel like I am about to be murdered by a demonic doll in an abandoned orphanage. 

Atkinson gamely allows those sinister shadows to deepen further with the murky and pointillist “Linguistics Of Atoms,” but the gently dreamlike “Lush” steers the arc back towards beauty and human warmth, resembling a hypnotic and ritualistic gamelan performance under a starry desert sky. I quite like Atkinson’s “ASMR-damaged Fourth World dreamscape” aesthetic and it surfaces a few more times before the album ends, but the two pieces that diverge from it a bit are more noteworthy. 

The best is the achingly lovely and gently swaying “Joan,” as a gorgeously woozy and wobbly organ theme slowly emerges from the quavering thrum of the opening collage (the chattering birds are a nice touch too). Atkinson’s bleary and beautiful organ melodies return once more for the closing epic “Des Pierres,” but it does not linger in sensuous, quavering warmth forever, as guest Stephen O’Malley helps build the piece to a roiling crescendo of pulsing guitar noise.

While it admittedly takes a few songs before The Flower And The Vessel begins to make a deep impression, it definitely makes one, as Atkinson pulled together quite a strikingly beautiful and seductively hallucinatory batch of songs. “Shirley to Shirley” easily ranks among the finest pieces that Atkinson has ever recorded, but almost all of her recent albums have had least one rapturously sublime centerpiece. The difference with this one is merely that the gulf between “Shirley” and the surrounding material it is not a wide one at all: several of the songs on the last half of the album would have easily been stand-out pieces on any previous release. That said, they belong here and here alone. 

While the consistently high level of quality is a delight, The Flower And The Vessel is quite an impressive work as a focused, compelling, and immersive whole as well. The appeal transcends music, as it is closer to a hypnagogic, impressionistic travelogue of remote locales shared with quiet, tender intimacy. The Flower And The Vessel is Atkinson’s defining masterpiece (and probably the single most beautiful and effective embodiment of the Shelter Press aesthetic as well). I love this album.

Samples can be found here.

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Thomas Ankersmit, “Homage to Dick Raaijmakers” (Shelter Press, 2018)

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I suspect I am far from alone in being unfamiliar with the music of Dutch composer Dick Raaijmakers, as there is not a hell of a lot of electronic music from the ’18 and early ’60s that has aged well. In his time, however, he was an important and pioneering figure in that milieu, performing significant electro-acoustic research and co-founding STEIM. He was also a thoughtful and inventive theorist and his ideas have proven to be a bit more timeless than his recordings. For this piece, originally commissioned by Sonic Acts, Thomas Ankersmit worked with similar tools to those that were available to Raaijmakers, but the album’s true raison d’être is the exploration of holophonic sound fields. Wielding frequencies with scalpel-like precision, Ankersmit is able to trick the inner ear into conjuring new sounds that do not actually exist on the recording, transforming and evolving as the listener’s spatial relationship to the speakers changes. It is a very neat trick, obviously, at times feeling like the album has physically burrowed directly into my head and started aggressively rearranging things. Ankersmit definitely would have been burned as a witch if this album had been made in earlier times.

One recurring thing that I have noticed with albums designed to trigger aural hallucinations is that the hallucinations are never, ever pretty ones like trails of shimmering colors. Rather, they tend to be far more on the infernal side of the equation, evoking something somewhere between an uneasy sense of vertigo and a nerve-jangling psychotic break from reality. Naturally, Ankersmit does not shy away from continuing that proud tradition, so it must be said that Homage to Dick Raaijmakers can be an incredibly dissonant and challenging bit of sound art during its synapse-frying crescendos. In the right hands, a modular synthesizer and some sine wave generators can be every bit as brutal as the most howling white noise assault. Unlike a harsh noise album, however, Homage has an extremely nuanced and enigmatic trajectory, seamlessly drifting from crackling, humming, and buzzing stasis into vividly textured vistas of eerie beauty or eruptions of harrowing dissonance. As such, this album feels like floating through a lysergic electromagnetic cloud that unexpectedly blossoms into one otherworldly set piece after another. The first and most beautiful such moment occurs rather early on, as a motif that sounds like an undulating chorus of malfunctioning short-wave radios dissipates into erratic sputtering, then unexpectedly re-coheres into haunting and tormented-sounding sonar pings in a gathering storm of static. It is quite a ghostly and weirdly lovely passage, but it is an elusively short-lived one destined never to repeat.

Instead, the piece morphs into a surreal miasma of electronic beeps and smeared synth tones that seems to achieve the piece’s first significant holophonic moment, feeling like the air around me has become kind of a living and claustrophobia-inducing fog. After that, the album seems to plunge into the ocean’s depths for a while, settling into a deep, submerged-sounding throb ravaged by bursts of electrical interference and violently shifting tectonic plates. At its peak, the cacophony is not unlike Merzbow, as Ankersmit gamely unleashes a howling onslaught of searing and splattering destruction. Unlike Merzbow, however, that caustic blizzard is actually a comparatively more listenable passage that eventually gives way to something far more bizarre and uncomfortable. It is fascinating how the blunt force of the piece has almost an inverse relationship to its heaviness, as the oscillating swirl of deep drones that follows feels like it is bending and warping reality in a sickly and unnerving way. After that, the album only grows stranger, dissolving into a brief void of sustained whines and the illusion of skipping, mangled tapes of field recordings (and possibly some kind of large, psychedelic owl). That, of course, is the calm before the storm, leading into an unhinged and buzzing crescendo of sanity-eroding whines.Its power is weirdly sneaky and cumulative, as it feels like I am surrounded by high-tension power lines that all seem to be emitting similar frequencies—but not quite the same frequency, resulting in a relentless and inescapable cloud of oscillating, dissonant harmonies that lasts for an uncomfortably long time. In some ways, it definitely feels like an endurance test, but it also feels like the air itself is shivering and alive and the sensations subtly shift as I move and tilt my head. In fact, it almost becomes meditative once I start to become numb enough to the dissonance to appreciate the spectral layering.

Obviously, such passages can be quite a rough ride and Homage is not particularly conducive to passive, casual, or frequent listening, but I genuinely appreciate how Ankersmit seems to revel in the more uncomfortable passages. Genuinely experimental sound art should hurt a bit if it is done right and Ankersmit does it exactly right. I am actually surprised at how rare albums in this vein seem to be, as previous generations took care of all the research needed to weaponize frequency manipulation, yet virtually no one seems to make use of their findings. And those that do seem like goddamn sorcerers. I grasp that psychoacoustics is a cerebral and complex field, but understanding it essentially adds an entirely new dimension to sound and it is an extremely cool one (not at all like the difference between 2D and 3D film). On a related note, it would be very easy for an album in this vein to turn out quite bloodless and academic-sounding in the wrong hands, so I am also impressed with how skillfully that peril is avoided here. There are certainly some aesthetic nods to early electronic music, as Ankersmit adapted Raaijmakers approach of treating music as more of a “weather system” than a structure of melodies and harmonies, but the palpable aural phantasms that he conjures up are very compelling, very visceral, and very contemporary.

Samples can be found here.
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Tomoko Sauvage, “Musique Hydromantique” (Shelter Press, 2017)

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Although she has only released one full-length album before now, Paris-based artist Tomoko Sauvage has been making very strange and beautiful music for over a decade. The reason for that lean discography became instantly apparent when I watched video of one of her performances, as a mere recording cannot hope to capture the fascinating and ritual-like installation that makes her work so singular: Sauvage sits in a circle of ceramic bowls beneath ice blocks suspended from the ceiling by rope (each bowl mic’d with a hydrophone). As can be expected, there are plenty of slowly dripping and gently sloshing sounds to be found here, but Musique Hydromantique takes the idea of water-based sound art to a much deeper and more compelling extreme than I previously thought possible, manipulating subaquatic feedback and “singing bubbles” to wonderfully eerie and otherworldly effect.

Tomoko Sauvage has unquestionably carved out a distinctive niche over the course of her career, as I cannot think of any other artists who could reasonably be described as “obsessed” with hydrophonic feedback, but her process has evolved quite a bit since her 2009 debut (Ombrophilia). This latest suite of pieces, for example, is considerably more naturalistic than Ombrophilia‘s studio compositions, as Sauvage recorded Hydromantique “live” with no electronic effects or editing. Normally, I do not care all that much whether someone performed something live, as I would rather hear something that sounds great rather than something “artistically pure” that could have been better if the artist had spent more time on it and used all of the tools at their disposal. In Sauvage’s case, however, that distinction matters a great deal, as the machine-like noises in “Fortune Biscuit” become a dazzling feat of sonic sorcery rather than a mere nod to musique concrète/field recording.

The secret lies in the aforementioned singing bubbles, which are apparently created by porous terra-cotta. It is worth noting that Sauvage’s vision was initially triggered by a Jalatharangam performance by Aanayampatti Ganesan, which involves water-filled porcelain bowls of different pitches being struck (like a xylophone). After watching videos of both artists, the word “obsession” seems completely apt for Sauvage’s approach, as the only real similarity is that she too fills bowls with differing water levels to make different pitches. Nearly everything else that Sauvage does is a radical innovation on an ancient art: amplifying the smallest sounds, focusing on what is happening under the water, employing chance as a compositional device, unveiling the secret sounds of ceramics, and working with random drips and layers of sustained tones rather than melodies.

Obviously, using a hydrophone to record water dripping into bowls results in an extremely constrained palette, but each of Hydromantique‘s three pieces has its own distinctive character (figuring out how to achieve that is probably another reason why Sauvage records so infrequently, I suspect). The opening “Clepsydra,” for example, sounds like a woozy, slow-motion and impressionist recording of dripping stalactites and overlapping church bells (Sauvage gets deep, ringing tones by flicking the side of her bowls). 

“Fortune Biscuit,” on the other hand, sounds like a roomful of malfunctioning sewing machines (or a crackling and indistinct shortwave radio transmission) beneath a shifting and ghostly feedback drone. As much as I enjoy the other pieces, “Fortune Biscuit” is the one that captures Sauvage at her most ingenious, harnessing and amplifying the strange and unique properties of “biscuit” (porous terra-cotta). 

Sauvage saves the best for last, however, as the epic 20-minute “Calligraphy” is easily the most hauntingly beautiful work on the album. Sauvage recorded the piece in an echo chamber located in a former factory and makes inspired use of the resultant reverberance and extended decay times. While there is an erratic backdrop of Sauvage’s usual deep bell-like tones and dripping water, “Calligraphy” is very much a drone piece primarily devoted to her beloved subaquatic feedback. Sauvage subtly manipulates the bowls’ ringing tones by slowly dipping a fist-sized orb into the water, subtly altering the water level to create glissandi and something like vibrato. The overall effect is quite an eerie and supernatural-sounding one, as Sauvage’s indistinct, whining tones overlap, intertwine, and slowly slide to weave fleeting dissonant harmonies.

Obviously, there are a few caveats with a release such as this, the most obvious being that Musique Hydromantique is unapologetically challenging sound art. Also, Sauvage’s aesthetic is a quiet, understated, and slow-moving one. As such, these songs require significant patience and focused attention to fully enjoy. Also, an understanding of how the sounds are created is an essential part of the experience, as the process is the most compelling part of Sauvage’s aesthetic. Her light touch, calm focus, devotion to chance, and reverently ceremonial performances makes it seem like these curious and magical sounds have always existed (just outside our threshold of hearing) and were patiently waiting millennia for an especially sensitive channeler to turn up and finally bring them to our attention.

In some ways that is true, but there is also a great deal of intelligence and ego-less artistry in how they are harnessed and presented here. All of that adds up to a particularly rarefied and exquisite pleasure, particularly since iconoclastic new works by “serious” composers seem a bit rare these days (though Michael Gordon, Ellen Fullman and Eli Keszler spring immediately to mind). Musique Hydromantique is a work very much in the tradition of visionary folks like Alvin Lucier and La Monte Young: it is an album that only Sauvage could have made and it is hard to imagine anyone else taking this direction any further, yet this simple, pure, and meditative work is a beguiling self-contained world that reveals a wealth of intriguing new possibilities.

Listen here.

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Félicia Atkinson, “Hand in Hand” (Shelter Press, 2017)

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Félicia Atkinson’s radical artistic transformation over the last several years has been quite an interesting one, as each new release seems to distance her further and further from her excellent work as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier and into much stranger and more challenging territory. With her last major statement, 2015’s A Readymade Ceremony, Atkinson shifted the focus away from music towards a strong emphasis on whispered spoken-word performance of repurposed found texts mingled with George Bataille and her own poetry. 

Hand in Hand goes still further in that direction, often reducing the accompanying music to an absolute minimum to focus almost entirely on an eclectic and evocative array of hushed readings from old plant books, magazines, JG Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and her own writings. The overall effect is often wonderfully surreal and intimate, but Atkinson’s hyper constrained and minimal palette does not offer enough melodicism or dynamic variety to quite carry a full album. A few of the individual pieces, however, are quite mesmerizing (particularly the closing “No Fear But Anticipation”).

The album opens in lovely (if deceptive) fashion with the subtly smeared psychedelia of “I’m Following You,” a woozy reverie for Fender Rhodes organ. For better or worse, that is Atkinson’s sole foray into conventional melodicism on Hand in Hand, a decision that will never stop perplexing me given her oft-stellar past work as a multi-instrumentalist. 

Intellectually, of course, I get it: during the prime of the first phase of her career, Atkinson was one of the most compelling voices in the cassette underground, but she fit very comfortably within that milieu. With her more recent work, she has forged a much more divergent path that is very much her own. That is certainly gutsy and inspired, but I wish the break with her past had not been quite so decisive sometimes, as it is like watching a great boxer fight with one of his arms tied behind his back. 

Initially, however, Atkinson’s radical minimalism serves her fairly well in the Phillip K. Dick-inspired “VALIS,” as the overlapping, French-accented voices of her breathy and sensuously whispered monologue feel increasingly disconcerting and inhuman as an undercurrent of noise-damaged and insectoid textures swells below. While she never attempts anything quite as gauche as singing, Atkinson is admittedly quite skilled at using her voice as an instrument, managing to imbue even the most mundane passages with magnetic intensity and mystery while subtly employing effects to add a patina of hissing, out-of-focus unreality.

The following “Curious in Epidavros” unveils still more of the album’s recurring themes, namely a sort of plinking, hollow metal percussion and a blurting, squiggling arsenal of modular synth textures. Variations on those two elements surface quite a lot in the following songs, which is a very disorienting and counterintuitive aesthetic indeed: half primitive home-made marimba, half retro-futurist space music. Naturally, such a strange blend of the ancient and the future leads to some interesting directions, such as the broken, shuddering, and wobbly dub-techno of “Adaptation Assez Facile” or the druggy bass slide and clattering ping-pong ball soundscape of “Monstera Deliciosa.” 

The downside is that many pieces feel like brief, sketch-like experiments rather than fully formed ideas. One notable exception to that trend, however, is “Visnaga,” as the hollow plinking percussion feels like a dull, broken bell resonating through the eerie streets of a deserted town and the strangled, sputtering synth flourishes only deepen the air of menace and desolation. 

Atkinson’s hushed and fraught vocals seem especially unsettling and confessional, which is an impressive testament to the perverse genius of her art, as the text merely extols the virtues of a desert plant. Elsewhere, “A House A Dance A Poem” reprises the deeply broken and warped dub of “Adaptation,” tweaking the formula with a buried transmission of chopped, stammering vocal snippets and an invasive, random-sounding high-hat that feels like a grotesque parody of dance music.

Aside from “Visnaga,” the unquestionable zenith of Hand in Hand is saved for the final piece (the aforementioned “No Fear But Anticipation”). For one, it is quite a bit sexier than the rest of the album, as Atkinson ruminates on the nature of desire. More importantly, she does so over a sensuous and understated groove that offers some rare glimpses of non-subverted chords, melodies, and rhythm. That alone would be enough to make it the album highlight, but it goes still further to build to a wonderful outro of wildly chirping synth jabbering. 

Aside from that, Hand in Hand is mostly a curiously challenging, uneasy, and chance-influenced affair that bears little resemblance at all to any of Atkinson’s peers in the contemporary experimental music scene. ¬†That gulf would almost be wide enough to make Atkinson seem like a hermetic autodidact/outsider artist, but she actually does seem to be part of an established movement: she just happened to be born at the wrong time, as her passion for found text, unconventional tools, and bizarre juxtapositions would have made her very much welcome in the Surrealist/Dada milieu or the ’60s/’70s avant-garde that birthed so many of her current influences (Robert Ashley, Joan La Barbara, etc.). 

She certainly seems to share that generation’s revolutionary/”anything is possible” mindset, gamely blurring the boundaries between poetry, cut-ups, performance art, conceptual art, and music and even transforming this album into a 7-hour “environmental audiobook” for an exhibition in Rennes. Such ambition and adventurousness certainly do not always translate into accessible music, but the same is true for folks like Stockhausen and John Cage either and current artists are still regularly inspired by those guys. While Hand in Hand is not my favorite Félicia Atkinson album, it is definitely one of her most bold and admirable releases to date, as she is tirelessly straining at the bounds of sound art rather than making any attempt to play it safe. When she succeeds, the results can be quite striking.

Listen here.

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Kassel Jaeger/Stephen Mathieu/Akira Rabelais, “Zauberberg” (Shelter Press, 2016)

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In recent years, Shelter Press has carved out an unusual niche for itself through a series of highly conceptual and ambitiously esoteric releases that blur the boundaries between various forms of art. One of their more intriguing projects as of late is this one, in which a trio of composers attempts to recreate the aura of Thomas Mann’s 1924 masterwork The Magic Mountain (even going so far as to do some field recording in Swiss Alps where the novel was set). The end result is quite a pleasant and subtly phantasmagoric reverie, as the composers’ individual voices are subsumed by a beguiling series of crackling classical music snippets, ominous drones, and ambient outdoor sounds.

It has been more than a decade since I last read The Magic Mountain, so any attempt on my part to try to link Zauberberg to any specific passages would be hopelessly doomed. Thankfully, I do not think that there are many links to be found anyway, as the composers seem to have very much gone for abstract mood and feel rather than anything concrete or literal. The foundation of that aesthetic here seems to be recurring interludes of blurred, reverberant classical music snatches, which is both temporally appropriate and very effective at evoking the beauty, sadness, mystery, and isolation of a sanatorium nestled in the mountains. 

Curiously, however, none of the participants’ signature aesthetics surface much at all, which I suppose makes this a successful collaboration in at least one way. I am not particularly familiar with Rabelais’ previous work, regrettably, but the only conspicuous shades of Jaeger and Mathieu throughout Zauberberg are occasional intrusions of ominous electronic throbs and drones. Those touches create an interesting tension with the rest of the album, as it see-saws back and forth between crackling, pulsing abstract menace and lively, organic sounds like chirping birds and opera records. In many superficial ways, Zauberberg is a lot like a Caretaker album with some birds and pleasantly babbling brooks thrown in.

Compositionally, however, Zauberberg is very much its own entity, as it is kind of a slow-motion flow of dream-like vignettes that bubble up and dissipate for almost an hour (the album is just a single long-form piece). I have mixed feelings about that structure, as it feels quite amorphous and the classical music samples seem to do most of the heavy lifting. That latter part is probably not intentional, but I am sure that the shapeless, drifting structure was very much by design. Such an aesthetic has some inherent shortcomings, however—most notably, there is little on Zauberberg that stands out as particularly memorable or inspired besides the many classical music samples. 

Nevertheless, it works quite well as literal “ambient’ music, softening the edges of reality and imbuing my otherwise mundane surroundings with a pleasant atmosphere of hallucinatory melancholy. If that was all Zauberberg offered, however, it could easily be replaced by simply opening my windows and quietly playing “Swan Lake” with a lot of reverb added. Fortunately, the final third of the album gets quite a bit more compelling and justifies the album’s existence, as murky, haunted-sounding drones unexpectedly give way to much more aggressively processed classical music snippets. That textural change is very effective, as the piece suddenly feels more grainy, hissing and present. Even more effective is the ambiguous closing finale of distantly booming and popping fireworks (or possibly World War I) and the final chilling and ghostly howls as the piece fades away.

Notably, I have listened to this album at least a dozen times now and I am still having difficulty forming a solid opinion, as there are different facets pulling me in different directions. I certainly wanted to like Zauberberg more than I do, as it has a great premise that seems tailor-made for my personal delight and I have enjoyed much previous work from both Mathieu and Jaeger. Also, I loved the hazy sadness that pervades the many classical music interludes: whoever was tasked with manipulating their textures did an impressively effective job. More significantly, the final few minutes are absolutely beautiful—the trio pulled quite a wonderful rabbit out of their collective hat with that crescendo of sad fireworks. 

Unfortunately, however, Zauberberg is just too diffuse to offer a satisfying arc, as any sense of momentum dissipates into frequent lulls and moments of seeming barely there at all. Also, the combined powers of three talented experimental musicians should not result in me thinking mostly about Tchaikovsky instead. It is as if Jaeger, Mathieu, and Rabelais had nearly everything in place for an absolutely perfect and sublime album except for just one or two very crucial elements. As such, Zauberberg is ultimately a good (or even very good) album that shows exasperating flashes of what could have been a masterpiece. I suspect many other people will appreciate it more than I did though, as my perception was unavoidably colored by my (perhaps unreasonably) high expectations.

Listen here.

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