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emptyset, “ash” (Subtext, 2023)

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It has been a while since this duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas last surfaced, but they are back with a new EP to celebrate Subtext’s 50th release. Since releasing 2019’s Blossoms, the pair have been quite busy with other projects, as Purgas’s research played a crucial role in the release of The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969​-​1972 while Ginzburg has kept himself occupied with running a record label, releasing solo albums, and performing as part of “experimental supergroup” Osmium. 

Emptyset was never fully dormant, however, and Ginzburg and Purgas convened in Bristol this summer to shape their accumulated ideas into one of their most focused and singular releases in recent memory. It is also one of their most concise, as ash clocks in at an extremely lean 16-minutes. If this were any other project, that brevity would suggest a serious dearth of fresh ideas or compelling new material, but it is exactly the right length for a perfect distillation of emptyset’s viscerally spasmodic and pummeling percussion assaults.

Much like their Manchester peers Autechre, it is very easy to forget that James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas were ever interested in making beat-driven music aimed for the dancefloor, as they long ago plunged into an avant-garde rabbit hole of abstract deconstructionism, cutting edge sound design, and self-built instruments and have not looked back since. 

I bring up that origin for a reason, as understanding that ash was inspired by Bristol’s sound system culture is crucial to grasping the appeal of the duo’s current vision. In fact, I was initially underwhelmed by these songs, as I could not understand why Ginzburg in particular would want to regress to punishing, no-frills rhythm workouts after blowing me away with the droning immensity of his 2021 solo album crystallise, a frozen eye.

Eventually, however, I got around to listening to ash on headphones and everything immediately made sense again: this is not an EP intended for casual listening. The correct way to experience ash is to crank it up so loud that you can feel every seismic crunch, vibration, and throb. Once I had that revelation, ash immediately transformed into something considerably more brilliant and unique. 

This is absolutely not the place to look for great songcraft or killer beats, but it is probably one of the best releases around for those looking for precision-engineered brutality, masterfully harnessed spatialized sound, and intense physicality. Someone should commission a forward-thinking ballet company to choreograph a mind-blowing performance for one of these songs immediately.

Musically, ash-era emptyset shares a healthy amount of common ground with classic Godflesh, as the main ingredients are overloaded bass and a fondness for bludgeoning, mechanized repetition, but it would be closer to the mark to suggest that their primary influences are “convulsions” and “the futuristic battle scenes from the Terminator movies.” 

Some pieces certainly evoke robot tanks rolling over piles of crunching bones in a scorched and broken landscape more strongly than others (“embers” being the best example), but the differences between these six songs are less important than their common ground of shuddering waves of distorted bass, lurching rhythms, and slow-motion machine gun snares. Experiencing this album is a lot like getting thwacked in the head with six different baseball bats: they would certainly all have their own unique character, but the subtle differences between them would be unavoidably eclipsed by the force of the impact.

To my ears, the best moments are probably “cinder” (I half expected viscous trails of blood to start running down my walls when the opening fog of grinding and menacing dissonance appeared) or the title piece (“a giant sentient typewriter with malicious intent” meets “the space-time continuum warps, stretches, and tears during a fireworks display”), but every one of these pieces is an absolute banger. 

That is an impressive achievement in itself, obviously, but a full album of such uninterrupted bludgeoning would be absolutely exhausting and would quickly yield diminishing returns. To their everlasting credit, however, Purgas and Ginzburg understood the limitations of their vision and were wise enough to keep most of ash‘s violent, churning convulsions under three minutes: if there was ever an album that has earned the coveted “all killer, no filler” mantle, it is this one. Every single song makes a deep impact and the whole thing is over long before any numbness starts to set in.

In a 2017 interview, Ginzburg noted that he and Purgas leave “piles and heaps of detritus on the cutting room floor” and now I understand why: ash is the sort of perfect distillation that could have only been made by absolutely ruthless editors willing to throw away months of work and several albums worth of material to just to wind up with one great 16-minute EP.

Listen here.

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UCC Harlo, “Topos” (Subtext, 2023)

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This is the second solo album from NYC-based violist/composer/musicologist Annie Garlid and it borrows its name from the Greek word for “place.” Notably, Garlid moved back to the US in 2018 after spending a decade in Europe (playing viola in a German opera orchestra, among other things) and that return to her home country unsurprisingly stirred up some deep and unfamiliar thoughts and feelings. Those ruminations directly inspired Topos conceptually, as the album is a meditation on the “simultaneous familiarity and foreignness” of Garlid’s surroundings and her entanglement “with a place that was both in her memory and in front of her eyes.” Regardless of its inspirations, Topos is a very different (and stronger) album than its predecessor United, as Garlid’s medieval and baroque influences are newly downplayed in favor of a more sensuous, hallucinatory, and vocal-centric vision. While that transformation makes a lot of sense given Garlid’s work with artists like Caterina Barbieri, Holly Herndon, Emptyset, and ASMR artist Claire Tolan, her assimilation of those disparate influences is impressively seamless and inventive, as Topos feels like the blossoming of a compelling and distinctive new vision.

The five pieces that compose Topos cover an unexpectedly expansive stylistic territory, as each individual piece takes a very different path than the other four. For example, the opening “Riverbeds” is not a far cry from Laura Cannell’s sublime art-folk, as string drones sensuously rub up against one another beneath hushed, spoken vocals. It is a fine piece, but the two that follow are the ones where Garlid’s vision truly catches fire.

On “March 6th” she conjures up a psychotropic folk dance by combining a viscerally stomping and clapping rhythm with a serpentine pizzicato string motif, Siren-esque choral stabs, and vocals that resemble an eerily harmonized jump rope game. On the following “Ocelot,” Garlid’s hushed voice ruminates on her favorite childhood animal (“you were the jewel of the catsssss”) over a gorgeously sensuous groove enhanced with dreamy vocal harmonies. It is sexy, simmering, and psychedelic in all the right ways, but I was most struck by the seemingly effortless virtuosity of Garlid’s vocal phrasing, as she artfully veers between trance-like spoken word, warmly harmonized choral melodies, creepily unsettling effects, pregnant pauses, and hissing sibilance.

The album’s final piece, “Forest Floor,” is yet another gem, as Garlid enlists a handful of collaborators (her sister Thea, flautist Rebecca Lane, saxophonist Eve Essex) to craft a wonderfully shapeshifting ambient fantasia of whispers, field recordings, hazy snaking melodies, and subtly trippy chorused guitar fragments. Given its more vaporous and elusive form, it does not quite match the impact of the album’s stellar first half, but it makes for quite a lovely way to end an album, as the closing minutes evoke a ghostly folk ensemble slowly dissolving in a thunderstorm. The album’s remaining piece (“Robert”) is not quite up to the same standards, acting more as an interlude than a fully formed statement, but that does not otherwise dilute Topos‘ impressive run of highlights or dampen my view that this album is a huge creative leap forward for UCC Harlo. That said, “March 6th” and “Ocelot” are on a separate and revelatory plane all their own, as they easily rank among my favorite new pieces in recent memory and resemble no other artist that I am aware of.

Listen here.

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Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective, “Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế” (Subtext, 2021)

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Unraveling the discography and line-up mutations of this Ho Chi Minh City-based collective turned out to be quite an unexpected challenge, as they have been releasing full-lengths and EPs since at least 2014, yet this latest album is being billed as the project’s debut. I thought this might be the first release with “collective” appended to the group’s name, but that is not the case either. That said, the project now appears to be a trio consisting of original members Phạm Thế Vũ and Jung Buffalo, as well as relatively recent addition Zach Schreier (who ostensibly composed much of the album).

In any case, this latest release bears little stylistic resemblance to several of RCD’s previous releases. Much of that is likely due to the involvement of Berlin-based producer Ziúr, who alternately punched up the songs to Subtext’s exactingly high standards, “reduced them to a cinder,” or “beamed them into the fifth dimension.” Regardless of how this album took shape, it is quite a dazzling and deliriously kinetic achievement, resembling a freewheeling Carl Stone-esque plunderphonic tour de force of shapeshifting Vietnamese cultural fragments.

The title of this album roughly translates “Sleeping Through the Apocalypse,” which is a colorful yet remarkably apt description of the trio’s dizzying and disorienting vision. The “sleep” part is a bit misleading though, as this album more closely evokes the troubled, jumbled, and cacophonous dreams of an overstimulated and media-saturated mind in an increasingly unraveling world. In more concrete terms, that means the album is a hyper-caffeinated maelstrom of surreal collisions and transformations. I tend to loathe most releases that could be described as “aggressively genre-defying” or “like _____ in a blender,” but there is a coherent overarching “sound collage” vision here that weaves all of those jarring shifts into a churning and warping near-masterpiece of mindfuckery.

Given that, trying to accurately describe even a single song is hopeless, as my notes are filled with phrases like “the most incredible Terry Riley song ever just became Vietnamese cloud rap karaoke.” The closing “Đme giựt mồng” that I just described is one of the album’s stone-cold gems, but there are quite a few other highlights to be found as well. Some other favorites are “Aztec Glue” (“dreamy pulsing synth reverie gets violently interrupted by an in-the-red Ben Frost remix”) and pair of pieces that feel like they could be the work of a supernaturally possessed radio (“Eri Eri Eri” and “Infinite”).

The former sounds like a deranged pile of overlapping stations or Carl Stone at his most kaleidoscopic and unstable, but the collective further spice things up with psychotically shifting speeds and an unexpectedly rapturous crescendo. “Infinite,” on the other hand, sounds like Vietnamese dance pop chopped and stretched into a stammering nightmare. The stammering is especially impressive, as the piece sometimes feels like a cacophony of the world’s airwaves is organically shaping into pulsing rhythms.

At other times, the album calls to mind free jazz, whale songs, or Popul Vuh and absolutely all of it is vividly fried, as this album is a gleefully shapeshifting feast of wide-ranging and inspired ideas from start to finish. In fact, it feels favorably like channel-surfing through like a dozen different cool albums at once. This is instantly one of my favorite albums in the Subtext canon.

Samples can be found here.

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James Ginzburg, “crystallise, a frozen eye” (Subtext, 2021)

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This latest solo album from emptyset’s James Ginzburg completely blindsided me, as it feels like his two of his longtime fascinations have finally converged into one gloriously crushing and intense tour de force. In characteristically cerebral fashion, Ginzburg conceived of crystallise, a frozen eye as an acoustic counterpoint to emptyset’s artificial intelligence-driven Blossoms, but what he ultimately arrived at feels considerably less conceptual than most Subtext albums. Or maybe the concept just feels completely eclipsed by the churning intensity of the music. 

In any case, this album feels like the most natural direction in the world now that it exists, as Ginzburg essentially just combined emptyset’s viscerally seismic approach to sound design with his deep interest in more traditional and earthy sounds (his previous solo album wove together strains of Gaelic folk music, Iranian traditional music, and Indian classical music). 

Yet another “obvious in hindsight” move was Ginzburg’s leftfield decision to enlist devoted bass enthusiast/past collaborator Joker for the mastering role, ensuring that all of the songs pack some seriously house-shaking low-end heft. All of those seemingly disparate threads combine seamlessly to yield a work of almost elemental force that feels like the culminating achievement of Ginzburg’s career. This has to be one of the heaviest and most unconventional drone albums of all time.

The album opens with something resembling the chiming of an old grandfather clock, which presumably indicates that it is now time to be enveloped in a churning and heaving sea of massive, buzzing strings. In that regard, “light evaporates” is a resounding triumph as a statement of intent, as it feels like miles of viscerally rattling, thick metal cables tuned to the resonant frequency of the earth are being shaken by a strong wind. That immense, buzzing behemoth is reasonably representative of the album, but Ginzburg is impressively inventive at achieving a similar effect in varied and divergent ways. 

For example, “on obsidian expanse” sounds like Glenn Branca’s “Guitar Trio” if it had been written for an ensemble of cloned Ellen Fullmans (lots of buzzing, rattling strings, and droning unison notes). Unexpectedly, it ultimately transforms into an outro that feels like a psychedelic ancient palace ritual, but most other pieces undergo minimal transformation, as there is no real reason to evolve further when a piece is an absolute monster right from the first notes. 

In fact, all eleven songs are legitimately awe-inspiring to some degree and some feel downright revelatory. The most adventurous one is probably “the eyes behind,” which sounds like an orchestra trying to tune crystal instruments while broken glass rains down in slow motion and someone strangles a saxophone. However, the vaguely New Age-y “a gate left open disappeared” is an especially strange trip as well, as it sounds like an ’80s synth guy trying to simultaneously evoke a giant celestial harp and compose a sequel to Music for Eighteen Musicians. 

That said, my favorite pieces mostly come near the end of the album and there are quite a few of them: “border, dispersing” (an ancient war procession crossing a mountain pass), “twilight in pierced velvet” (three killer noise guitar bands churning up a roiling cacophony), and “outside, infinite” (Branca reimagined as Eastern-inspired desert psychedelia). Only the latter dips its toes in any attempt at melody, but that is basically just gilding the lily when nearly every damn song is an immense, heaving and oft-rapturous celebration of visceral textures and harmonically rich seismic thrum.

Samples can be found here.