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emptyset, “Dissever” (Thrill Jockey, 2025)

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This latest speaker-straining salvo from the duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas was fittingly debuted at the Tate Modern to accompany “a large-scale survey of the global history of art and technology” entitled Electronic Dreams. I say “fittingly” because Dissever both feels like a uniquely visceral and violent strain of high art and some kind of massive and menacing industrial installation. 

I suppose both of those things can be said about some previous emptyset albums as well, but this one is unquestionably more aggressively minimalist and driven by machine-like repetition. Notably, the conceptual inspiration behind that move was an interest in the intertwined evolutions of “cosmic rock, minimalism and electronic music” and late-20th century advances in production technology, so the duo went appropriately analog/retro with both their gear and recording techniques. 

The results are impressively visceral and brutalist, as each piece is essentially an inventive transformation of a single pulsing note into a heaving and hulking industrial juggernaut using a primitive array of dynamic effects. In fact, much of Dissever amusingly suggests either 1) the No Wave minimalism of Glenn Branca’s early ‘80s guitar orchestra work if he’d swapped out his guitars for heavy industrial machinery and a deep passion for sound system culture, or 2) one of Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument performances if she had come from a doom/sludge metal background (or at least a building demolition one). 

My personal highlight is the title piece, as it sounds like a blown-out and overloaded sound system suddenly became sentient and decided to vengefully wipe out the entire dancefloor with an onslaught of seismic bass waves and slashing metallic textures, but nearly every single song is a throbbing and sharp-edged masterpiece of harshly grinding textures, cool tricks with overtones and oscillations, and relentless, heaving physically. This is definitely a strong contender for my absolute favorite emptyset album to date, as Purgas and Ginzburg have conjured quite an immersive display of earth-shaking elemental power from just a handful of notes (and some expertly wielded early hardware).

Listen here. 

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Jules Reidy, “Ghost/Spirit” (Thrill Jockey, 2025)

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This first Thrill Jockey opus from shapeshifting Aussie guitar visionary Jules Reidy is a mindblowing creative leap forward, as otherworldly tunings, American Primitive-style steel string guitar, autotuned pop, futuristic psychedelia, and spasmodic electronics all collide in a one-of-a-kind headphone album supernova. While Reidy’s more vocal- and pop-minded impulses have previously surfaced fleetingly on World in World and elsewhere, melodic vocal hooks are the beating heart of Ghost/Spirit (albeit in a series of unpredictably kaleidoscopic contexts). Normally, the artificiality of autotuned vocals rubs me the wrong way, but the digital soul of these fractal reveries is perfectly counterbalanced by the alien harmonies and twanging, cathartic physicality of Reidy’s guitar playing. I am favorably reminded of how Joanna Newsom’s masterpiece Ys was radically transformed by Van Dyke Park’s bold orchestral arrangements, but Reidy is improbably behind every side of the wild stylistic clashes here (with some help from cellist Judith Hamann, Emptyset’s James Ginzburg, and others). When everything comes together just right, as it does on pieces like “Satellite” and “Maybe,” it feels like Reidy’s dissolving and dreamlike postmodern blues are an indestructible island of zen within a delirious mindfuck of unpredictably collapsing and accelerating electronics and convulsive broken beats.   

Listen here.    

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Jim White & Marisa Anderson, “Swallowtail” (Thrill Jockey, 2024)

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This unusual drum and guitar duo first surfaced back in the dark days of early 2020 with The Quickening, which they boldly recorded without ever having previously performed together. Obviously, both artists are seasoned improvisers and excellent musicians, but I was still taken aback by the instant and incredible chemistry on pieces like that album’s title track. Given the significant hurdles like distance, touring schedules, and other collaborations, it understandably took quite some time before the opportunity to reconvene presented itself, but the duo finally managed to meet up in White’s native Australia in 2022 for some recording sessions in the coastal town of Point Lonsdale. The resultant album feels a bit different from its predecessor for a couple of reasons (no acoustic guitars this time around, “big change of vibe and scenery”), but the three-part “Bitterroot Valley Suite” beautifully recaptures the magic and spontaneity of the pair’s debut while also breaking some very compelling new ground.

In the album’s description, Anderson notes that Swallowtail‘s engineer (Nick Huggins) was an avid surfer “attuned to the cycles of tides and sunrises and sunsets and ocean rhythms” and suggests that “all of that got into the music.” I could not possibly agree more with that assessment, though I would have guessed that it was actually White who was the surfing enthusiast, as his drumming throughout this album beautifully mirrors the dynamics of rolling and crashing waves. Notably, Anderson’s playing evokes water as well, but I would characterize her circular arpeggio patterns as something more akin to ripples in a pond, which is a strategy that works quite well here. In fact, that magic formula runs throughout nearly all of Swallowtail‘s strongest pieces, such as the opening “Aerie” and the aforementioned “Bitterroot Valley Suite”: Anderson’s rippling and chiming arpeggio patterns are breathlessly propelled forward by the rolling, elemental power of White’s drumming. That said, those pieces are considerably more dynamically and melodically complex than that sounds, as White’s crescendos ebb and flow just like actual waves and Anderson’s patterns often branch out into tendrils of melody in the spaces between those climaxes.

When Anderson and White veer into more conventional rhythmic or melodic terrain, however, the results can be a bit uneven. That makes sense, as it feels like a waste to relegate a world-class drummer like White to a straightforward beat if he is not playing a pre-existing song (there is a big difference between jamming and improvising, as the former is basically sonic chloroform for me). More significantly, I imagine that improvising strong melodies, hooks, and song-like passages in real-time over the shifting foundations of a free-drumming tour de force would be quite a daunting task indeed (and a counterintuitive one as well). The way I see it, if you find yourself at a beach with big waves rolling in, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to hop on a board, find your balance, and ride those waves as far as they’ll take you than it does to try to impose your will upon the fucking ocean.

The intuitive grasp of dynamics like that are what make Anderson and White such a formidable improv unit: they let the music organically flow and simply go where it leads them without imposing their egos upon that flow, though such alchemy only works when both artists are on the same wavelength and have the improv chops to take their mind completely out of the equation. That said, the closing “Aurora” is quite a lovely and surprise outlier, as White sticks to a simple beat to give Anderson a chance to stretch out and weave a languorous, sun-dappled melody that evokes a scenic drive along a gorgeous coastline with the windows down.

After hearing Swallowtail, I immediately went back and listened to The Quickening again. After I finished kicking myself for sleeping on that debut, I was struck by what an impressive (and evolving) body of work Anderson and White have amassed sheerly through spontaneous improvised performances. Despite following Marisa’s work for nearly a decade and being a casual fan of several Jim White projects (Dirty Three, Boxhead Ensemble, his collaboration with Nina Nastasia), I definitely did not expect this to be the duo that would finally give Bill Orcutt and Chris Corsano a run for their money, but that was entirely because I had no idea how amazing Jim White’s playing could be when he is given free reign to indulge his stumbling, tumbling, and off-kilter freeform virtuosity. Thankfully, I have now been cured of my ignorance and this duo will have my full and enthusiastic attention every time they convene until the end of time.

Listen here.

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Black to Comm, “At Zeenath Parallel Heavens” (Thrill Jockey, 2023)

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I am almost always intrigued by the eclectic and unusual inspirations behind Marc Richter albums and this latest full-length for Thrill Jockey is no exception. The core concept at the heart of this one is the “hybridity within each and every one of us,” which Richter set out to mirror through a mixture of self-created sounds and manipulated samples. Things got more interesting along the way, however, as Richter had the epiphany that his own methods are quite similar to artificial intelligence “hallucinations,” which is a phenomenon in which an overloaded AI starts perceiving non-existent patterns or spewing incorrect or nonsensical conclusions.

Beyond that, the methods behind this album remain an enigma to me, as does the inspiration behind the album’s curious title, though Richter does note that the song titles borrow phrases from poetry and mythology with a deliberate leaning towards erotic innuendos and the ridiculous. Naturally, most of the humor and ridiculousness that found its way into these sound collages is far too buried or oblique to be readily apparent to listeners, but I had no trouble at all grasping that At Zeenath Parallel Heavens is yet another excellent Black to Comm album. In fact, this might be one of the most beautifully focused and immersive albums that Richter has ever released.

The album’s description suggests that “Richter’s audio occultism” was pushed into “even more divine, transcendent territory” than usual, which is an interesting claim given the rest of his discography. It may very well be an accurate one, as there are several pieces that achieve a sublime or celestial level of beauty, but Richter’s path to transcendence is not without some hard detours into nightmare territory along the way. That said, the opening descent into dreamlike bliss does last for two full songs. The first, “Then Began the Harp to Fashion,” is a lush swirl of subtly warping drones, quivering whimpers, skittering percussive clicks, rhythmic throbs, and jangling metal. It is a hell of a piece, as it elegantly and organically morphs and swells like a sentient supernatural haze, but the host of strange and beautiful textures that Richter unveils are a recurring pleasure for the album’s entire duration. Unexpectedly, however, that opener is immediately eclipsed by the following “Steep Thy Plumage in His Sweetness.” The piece deceptively opens with a motif that sounds like a stretched and slowed reverie of brooding strings, but a host of sensuous textures gradually creep in until it becomes a swooningly gorgeous melange of hisses, oscillations, choral voices, and gentle throbs worthy of its archaically horny title. Also, despite being only four-minutes long, that slow-motion heaven somehow manages to blossom into an unhurried epic that feels like a tender (if deconstructed) ballad sung by a lovesick robot.

The situation becomes considerably more gnarly with “Never Heed the Tongues of Wooers,” however, as that otherwise great advice is soundtracked by a menacing fog of squirming, curdled strings and infernal ululations. Unexpectedly, the mood brightens into a lovely fadeout of drones and subtly spacy synth tones after a cathartic percussion interlude. The fragile beauty lingers on for the following “Time Will Fly on Equal Pinions,” but the respite from sinister-sounding mindfuckery abruptly ends with “La société des rêves,” as oozing, unnerving drone swells and weirdly springy thuds provide an eerie backdrop for overlapping vocal loops of a French child. That weirdness only continues to deepen, as the piece is further enhanced by a stammering brass fanfare and violently disruptive splashes of warped choral voices.

The following “Musik im Schatten” draws out the darkness a little bit longer, resembling a heavy drone performance in a metalworking shop with sporadic sirens in the distance, but the final two pieces bring the album to a close in more warmly sublime fashion (even the piece that translates as “Slime of Ignorance,” which I dearly hope is not another erotic innuendo). Richter still has one final surprise up his sleeve, however, as the final “On the Grass Her Shoes of Deer-Skin” feels like a shimmering exotica-inspired mirage of a moonlit grotto. That is quite a delightful note to end on, as it makes me feel like I was just spat out onto a tropical beach by some kind of phantasmagoric theme park ride that felt like it lasted for several lifetimes (and just in time to hit the tiki bar before eagerly getting back in line to experience the whole mind-melting ride again!). This is a truly wonderful headphone album.

Listen here.

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Radian, “Distorted Rooms” (Thrill Jockey, 2023)

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It has somehow been seven years since this long-running Vienna trio last surfaced with 2016’s stellar On Dark Silent Off, but they seem to have spent that time diligently dreaming up innovative new ways to be amazing. In a general sense, Radian’s vision is not a far cry from the austere, jazz-adjacent post-rock of their celebrated labelmates Tortoise. The magic of Radian, however, lies in the band’s singular attention to detail and their quixotic compulsion to continually turn sounds upside-down in imaginative feats of dynamic sorcery. The overall effect is akin to that of dub techno being made by an incredibly tight live band, but the live aspect is quite illusory, as Distorted Rooms presumably sounds almost nothing like what the band originally recorded (in fact, the band themself note that one piece “eliminates nearly all traces of the original performance”). While many of the sounds do remain present in one form or another, Radian revels in celebrating and amplifying the barely audible and non-musical bits while also eliminating or burying the louder, more traditional “rock” tropes like chords and melodies. Obviously, The Dead C have made a fine career out of similarly deconstructing and inverting rock music, but Radian are the gleaming, precision-engineered opposite of Dead C’s own shambling, spontaneous, and blown-out vision.

The opening “Cold Suns” was also the album’s first single, but it is unclear if it was chosen because the band believed it to be one of the most perfect distillations of their vision or if they merely thought it was one of the album’s more immediately gratifying pieces. I suspect the reason may be the latter, as the album’s second single “Skyskryp12” features a similar level of comparatively heightened drama. For the most part, however, “Cold Suns” offers a fairly representative first impression of Radian’s current direction: gently stuttering loops, killer drumming, and a remarkably minimalist palette of guitar sounds. Unlike many other songs on the album, however, it eventually coheres into a brooding and tense chord progression, which lands the piece in somewhere near the post-punk revivalism of Moin (at least until the bottom drops out for a lengthy outro of distorted vocals, smoldering distortion, whimpering synth quivers, and broken, skeletal drums). “Skyskryp12” has a roughly similar aesthetic, but with one key difference: after it collapses upon itself, it kicks back into gear and builds towards a darkly cinematic crescendo. While both pieces are admittedly enjoyable and satisfying, however, the album’s strongest pieces tend to be the ones with a bit of a lighter touch.

My personal favorite is “Stak,” which also happens to be the piece in which Radian obliterated their original performance almost entirely. In place of that erased performance, Radian conjures a wonderfully seething groove of quietly thumping kick drum, skittering cymbals, insistent bass throb, and a host of subtle guitar and amp noises. To my ears, it sounds like a refreshingly novel strain of dub techno in which the omnipresent warm, hazy synth pads are jettisoned entirely for a lean, muscular and industrial-damaged groove enhanced with a host of subtly echoing and psychotropic creaks and gurgles. Unfortunately, I am not sure anyone else could replicate this particular strain of dub, as Martin Brandlmayr’s virtuosic “quiet storm” drumming feels like an absolutely essential ingredient. The other big highlight is “C At The Gates,” which opens in a deceptively entropic state, but gradually coheres into a pleasantly broken and jazz-inflected groove of heavy industrial textures, sludgy seismic bass, and strangled feedback.

The following “Cicada” keeps that post-punk party going a little bit longer, albeit in somewhat more stomping and driving fashion, as it calls to mind an ingeniously remixed performance of someone like Ike Yard on an especially good night. The album then closes with a bit of a departure from that winning formula in “S at the Gates,” but it makes for a fitting coda, as Radian stretches and breaks their groove into a fractured, sputtering, and dissolving state of suspended animation. That one purposeful exception aside, Distorted Rooms is one killer, exactingly realized hit after another, so it looks like I will remain a devoted Radian fan for the foreseeable future. By any metric, this is an excellent album, as the trio are masters at manipulating dynamic tension, ruthlessly carving away every trace of fat in search of taut perfection, and inventively transforming familiar instruments in unexpected ways. In fact, serious fans of sound design and studio technique may very well consider this album to be a masterpiece of sorts, as this is one of the most fascinating examples in recent memory of how radically a performance by an ostensible rock band can be transformed into something sleek and futuristic through creative mic placement and unconventional mixing decisions.

Listen here.

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Colleen, “Le jour et la nuit du réel” (Thrill Jockey, 2023)

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As someone who has loved Cécile Schott’s work since 2003’s Everyone Alive Wants Answers, I have long been fascinated by the various twists and turns that her vision has undergone over the years. While there have certainly been stretches in which she has lingered upon a vision for more than one album, Schott’s creative restlessness invariably steers her into adventurous and unfamiliar territory eventually. As a result, Colleen’s small discography is divided into an impressive number of distinct phases (the sample-driven collage era, the viola da gamba years, the synthesizer years, etc.). In a general sense, this latest full-length (her ninth) is a continuation her recent synthesizer phase, but it is also a significant break from her previous work in that vein: Le jour et la nuit du réel is seven-suite double album of minimalist vignettes exploring how a motif can be significantly transformed through the manipulation of synthesizer settings alone. Given the fundamental constraints of that vision, the album admittedly feels a bit less substantial than several of Colleen’s previous releases, but connoisseurs of nuance and elegant simplicity will find much to love.

The album’s title translates as “The day and the night of reality,” which is a nod to both the album’s structure and its primary inspiration. The “reality” bit is a reference to how “subtle or radical” changes to synth settings can completely transform how the same melodic phrase is perceived by the listener, which Schott likens to how new information can transform our feelings about a person or situation (i.e. our perception of reality). In keeping with that theme of transformation, the album is divided into “day” and “night” LPs and the first LP concludes with a suite entitled “”Be without being seen,” which is intended to function as a “twilight transition zone.” According to Schott, the “day” pieces feature “more friction, tension, and abrasive timbres” in order to channel the “invigoration of daylight,” while the “night” pieces feature “slower, more melancholy textures and longer trails of delay.” Being a longtime fan of both melancholy and trails of delay, I personally prefer the album’s second half, but both sides of the album share a hell of a lot more common ground than they do differences: every single piece on the album is essentially a simple melody unspooling over a shifting bed of arpeggios. Schott’s gear was similarly stripped down, as the entire album was recorded analog-style with just a Moog Grandmother synth and two delays (Roland RE-201 Space Echo and “her trusted Moogerfooger Analog Delay”) and “no additional digital production.” Interestingly, this album is the first entirely instrumental album that Schott has recorded in well over a decade, but it began its life as an “an album of songs with lyrics in the style of her previous album,” so Schott’s muse definitely led her quite far from where she originally intended to go (and I suspect this new vision must have been considerably more challenging to realize than what she originally had planned).

For me, the centerpiece of the album is the five-part “Les parenthèses enchantées” suite, which Schott named for a French idiom that means “a beautiful moment destined to end soon.” The suite is certainly beautiful and ephemeral enough to justify its title, but its duration (around 20 minutes) actually makes it the longest suite on the album by a significant margin. Lurking within those 20 minutes are both of the album’s most sublime highlights. In the first, “Movement I,” Schott delves into decidedly Satie-esque territory, as an understated melody quietly unfolds over a simple arpeggio pattern with appropriately wistful results (and the occasional trilling and fluttering flourishes leave behind a lovely vapor trail of hazy delay). Unsurprisingly, “Movement III” shares a similar mood, but features considerably more flickering and stuttering in its central melody, which gives it an unusually spontaneous, vibrant, and unpredictable feel.

Naturally, the other six suites have their own character and beautiful moments as well (the two-part “The long wait” being another favorite), but Schott’s larger achievement lies in how masterfully she manipulates her synth and delay settings to seamlessly move between moods ranging from dreamy calliope to glassy murmurs of feedback to something resembling laptop-ravaged banjo (as well as quite a few other places that elude easy description). I was briefly tempted to observe that the album’s other caveat besides Schott’s aggressively minimal “nothing but a synth and some delay played in real-time” vision is that several pieces are far too brief to leave a deep impression, but I ultimately decided that she intuitively knew when to end each piece before it started to overstay its welcome. Also, it does not matter if there are six or seven 1-minute pieces if the album itself adds up to a substantial and dynamically satisfying whole (which it does). Consequently, the only real caveat here is that Schott achieved something both wonderful and highly specific, so how much one loves this album is entirely dependent on how much one appreciates her craft and virtuosic attention to detail: other Colleen albums may have more memorable or more moving songs, but no Colleen album can boast stronger performances or a more focused vision. It remains to be seen whether or not Le jour et la nuit du réel will someday become one of my own favorite Colleen releases, but I do feel confident in stating that is a gorgeously realized work of art, as I can think of very few other artists who could weave a few simple melodies, patterns, and arpeggios into a unique and quietly mesmerizing tour de force of perfect, uncluttered elegance like this one.

Listen here.

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Oval, “Romantiq” (Thrill Jockey, 2023)

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This latest album from Markus Popp marks yet another intriguing stylistic detour for his endlessly shapeshifting Oval project, as he delves into “an omnipresent and yet oft ill-defined, even maligned area of music and art–the romantic.” The idea for this album first began as a multimedia collaboration with digital artist Robert Seidel intended for the grand opening of Frankfurt’s German Romantic Museum, but the endeavor soon evolved and expanded beyond the original purpose, as the two artists “sought a more expansive definition of ‘romantic,’ extending outward from the museum’s comprehensive survey of the 19th-century epoch in art.” That said, I suspect only Popp knows how influences from literature, architecture, and visual art helped shape the album, as my ears can only process the final destination and not the journey. In the case of Romantiq, that destination feels like a series of brief vignettes/miniatures assembled from period instrumentation and filtered through Popp’s fragmented and idiosyncratic vision. Given that this is an Oval album, of course, very few of the 19th-century sounds are instantly recognizable as such (aside from some occasional piano), but Popp’s kaleidoscopic and deconstructed homage to the past is a characteristically compelling and intriguingly unique outlier in the Oval canon (and it is often a textural marvel as well).

The album’s description promises a perfume-like experience (“rich scents flooding the senses before evaporating on the breeze”), which feels weirdly apt, as most of the pieces feel like a fleeting impression of something beautiful rather than an intentionally substantial experience (though the album itself is a substantial whole). That approach makes sense given the album’s origins as just one part of a larger installation, yet these pieces do not feel like they are missing anything—they simply feel purposely ephemeral, elusive, and impressionistic. In more concrete terms, many of the pieces sound like a music box made of crystal that has been modified to make its simple melodies unpredictably stammer, smear, and flicker. While that is an admittedly cool baseline aesthetic, the stronger pieces on the album tend to be the ones that enhance that foundation with some kind of inspired addition. For example, the opening “Zauberwort” features both a trombone and a recording of an opera singer unrecognizably “atomized into smoke trails.”

To my ears, the album’s centerpiece is the wonderfully phantasmagoric “Okno,” which feels like a smeared and convulsive orchestral loop dueting with a glass vibraphone, but that description fails to do it justice (it more accurately lies somewhere between “violently remixed film score” and “chopped and screwed rendition of ‘Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy'”). The following “Touha” is quite wonderful as well though, as it approximates a crystalline and psych-damaged variation on Aphex Twin’s Drukqs-era computer-controlled piano pieces. Elsewhere, “Cresta” and “Amethyst” combine for another strong one-two punch, as Popp beautifully elevates his “crystal music box” vision with psychotropic tendrils and a host of burbling, gurgling, and smeared electronic sounds.

Admittedly, there are also a couple of more traditionally piano-centric pieces that do not quite connect with me, but this is otherwise a solid and playfully anachronistic (if modest) album that reaffirms my Oval fandom yet again. Obviously, some Oval releases make a much deeper impact on me than others, yet the recurring theme in Markus Popp’s career continues to be one of bold and continual reinvention. While it has been roughly three decades since he first exploded onto the scene with his groundbreaking “skipping CD” innovations, he continues to focus his formidable production skills on bending and stretching the boundaries of electronic composition and seems to have an almost pathological aversion to ever repeating himself or taking an expected path. While plenty of artists give fans exactly what they want, Popp is one of the rare artists who is far more interested in nudging adventurous listeners towards sounds and ideas that transcend the familiar (like a perfume-esque and partially architecture-inspired fantasia of deconstructed 19th-century romanticism, for example).

Listen here.

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The Soft Pink Truth, “Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?” (Thrill Jockey 2022)

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When I first heard the thumping house/disco EP Was It Ever Real?, I had a very hard time believing that it could possibly be a teaser for something more substantial, as much of that EP felt like top-tier Soft Pink Truth that leaves very little room for improvement. If those songs did not make the cut for the full-length, I felt the album surely had to be either absolutely brilliant or absolutely wrong-headed with no possible middle ground. As it turns out, I was at least right about the “little room for improvement” bit, as Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? is not noticeably stronger than the preceding EP. Instead, it feels more like a lateral move, taking Drew Daniel’s star-studded house party in a more kaleidoscopically arty and eccentric direction.

Unsurprisingly, Deeper features roughly the same international cast of talented guests as the EP, but there are some noteworthy new additions as well, such as Nate Wooley, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, and Jaime Stewart (Xiu Xiu). The result is a bit less “all killer, no filler” this time around, but the trade-off is that Deeper is an appropriately deeper and more immersive plunge into Daniel’s psyche, touching upon everything from Barry White to George Bataille to krautrock while still managing to be functional, forward-thinking, and archly fun dance music.

The album kicks off in style with its first certified banger, “Deeper,” which deceptively fades in with bleary drones before launching into a straight up classic disco groove with all the requisite hand claps and funky guitars. There is enough subtle dissonance to give it a somewhat delirious and unreal feeling right from the jump, but things do not get truly art-damaged until an unexpected church bell passage subsides. While the groove remains unswervingly propulsive for a bit longer, the insistent sexy thump is increasingly mingled with generous helpings of kitschy string stabs, tropical-sounding guitars, hazy flutes, and a host of other inspired psych touches before it all dissolves into smeary abstraction.

I suppose the extended running time and ambient comedown preclude “Deeper” from being a hot single, but several of the pieces that immediately follow gamely rekindle the dancefloor fire. “La Joie Devant La Mort” is one of the album’s more “perverse pop moments,” as Jaime Stewart sings a George Bataille line about being in search of joy before death over an endearingly weird groove that calls to mind Coil’s Love’s Secret Domain album colliding with “A Fifth of Beethoven” and a chorus of tiny frogs. Wasner then takes the mic for the breezily sensuous “Wanna Know,” which milks the album title’s question for all its worth over a groove that could have been plucked from a Love Unlimited Orchestra album. The following “Trocadero” then pays homage to the “sleaze” disco subgenre synonymous with the titular SF club before “Mood Swing” ends the first half with a killer slow-building disco fusion of spiritual jazz, gurgling psychedelia, and Reich-ian piano patterns.

The second half is a bit more abstract and eclectic, as the 13-minute “Sunwash” is a chilled out bit of synthy Tangerine Dream-inspired spaciness. To some degree, It feels like it belongs on a completely different album than everything that came before it, but it makes a fine palate cleanser and it technically is on a different album vinyl-wise (Deeper is a double LP). The languorously dub-inflected “Joybreath” extends that post-club “morning after” vibe further, as Rose E Kross whispers and murmurs Bataille lines in French as twinkling piano and bleary sax and vibraphone melodies lazily wander through a fuzzy dreamscape. I imagine it evokes the feeling of waking up on a beach at sunrise after a hedonistic night of dancing and substance abuse, but my life is far too boring for me to be entirely certain of that.

A couple of curious detours then follow, but the album ends on an incredibly strong note with a swooning cover of Willie Hutch’s “Now That It’s All Over” that feels half “psychotropic exotica bliss” and half “Love Boat” theme. It’s a fittingly beautiful and poignant end to the album, as Daniel arguably sheds all of his ironic, sophisticated, and avant-garde tendencies for six minutes of pure naked joy (albeit pure naked joy repurposed from a blaxploitation classic). In any case, it is one hell of a cover as well as the perfect end to a thoroughly enjoyable album. And, of course, both Deeper and Was It Ever Real? have earned a permanent place in my heart for being primarily inspired by an anonymous woman’s decades-old grievance with a club DJ.

Listen here.

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The Soft Pink Truth, “Was It Ever Real?” (Thrill Jockey, 2022)

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I had successfully deluded myself into thinking that I had spent my pandemic downtime wisely and constructively for the most part, but learning that Drew Daniel spent that same period assembling an all-star disco ensemble is now making me lament the sad limitations of my imagination and ambition. The resultant album—Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?—is slated for release this October, but this teaser mini-album (part of Thrill Jockey’s 30th anniversary campaign of limited/special releases) is one hell of a release in its own right and a true jewel in Daniel’s discography.

Naturally, the big immediate draws are the killer single “Is It Gonna to Get Any Deeper Than This (Dark Room Mix)” and a disco/deep house reimagining of Coil’s classic “The Anal Staircase,” but the other two songs are every bit as good (if not better) than that pair, so no self-respecting fan of Daniel’s oeuvre will want to sleep on this ostensibly minor release (very few artists choose to release their best work on cassingle in 2022). Naturally, there is plenty of psychotropic weirdness mingled with all the great grooves, but I was still legitimately taken aback by how beautifully Daniels and his collaborators shot past kitsch/homage/pastiche and landed at completely functional, fun, and legit dance music. No one would raise a quizzical eyebrow if someone secretly slipped this album into the playlist at a party (not until “Anal Staircase” dropped, at least).

Some years back, one of Drew Daniel’s friends was fatefully asked “is it going to get any deeper than this?” while DJing at a club. That question became a “kind of mantra” for Daniel, as he was fascinated by the elusive meaning of that question. I am somewhat fascinated now myself, as it inspired me to think about which elements can imbue a piece with “depth” and whether or not the opening “Is It Gonna to Get Any Deeper Than This (Dark Room Mix)” could be said to meet that enigmatic criteria. My official verdict is “absolutely,” as Daniel’s bevy of outsider disco brethren inventively ride an absolutely perfect, sensuous, and thumping dub techno-style groove for 8 glorious minutes without ever dispelling the magic with a single misstep. It almost feels like Coil and Rhythm & Sound teamed up to record a libidinal, floor-packing party anthem (it’s a damn shame that never actually happened, but it seems like Daniel is perfectly happy and willing to fill that stylistic void himself).

Elsewhere, the following “You Don’t Know (The Full Rose of Dawn)” feels like a sexed-up channeling of “Loose Joints”-era Arthur Russell, while “The Anal Staircase” gamely attempts to translate the stomping and dissonant menace of the original into a catchy house anthem. It doesn’t quite work as well as the other three pieces for various reasons, but the biggest one is probably that guest vocalist Daniel Clarke sits that piece out (he is my pick for this release’s MVP, as his soulful freestyling is a reliable and recurring highlight). On the bright side, it is impressive that a cool Coil cover is handily eclipsed by all three of the original pieces. In particular, the closing title piece makes for one hell of a surprising finale, as Daniel and some talented friends from Acetone, Horse Lords, and elsewhere unleash something that sounds like an improbably wonderful collision of a groovy harpsichord-centric giallo soundtrack with a never-heard-before sexy and spaced-out lounge music experiment by Carlos Santana.

Listen here.

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Matmos, “Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer” (Thrill Jockey, 2022)

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On this latest full-length, the perennially eclectic and boldly adventurous duo of Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt take a break from mining weird and esoteric source material to focus their energies on paying homage to underheard Polish composer and Krzysztof Penderecki associate Bogusław Schaeffer. Matmos were given full access to work their mindbending magic on Schaeffer’s complete recorded works and the resultant album is as characteristically unpredictable and hard-to-categorize as ever: instead of remixing or reinterpreting the Polish composer’s work, Matmos instead took “tissue samples of DNA from past compositions” and “mutated them into entirely new organisms that throb with an alien vitality.” Put another way, Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer attempts to create a conversation or bridge between the “utopian 1960s Polish avant-garde” and “the contemporary dystopian cultural moment.” 

That is certainly intriguing and fertile terrain for a Matmos album, but the resultant songs wound up somewhere even more delightful and confounding than usual, often approximating a collision between fragmented exotica, kosmische, and a Kubrickian sci-fi nightmare. Naturally, that will be very appealing territory for most long-time Matmos fans, as this album is an especially inspired “everything and the kitchen sink” tour de force of quite disparate stylistic threads woven together in playfully disorienting and mischievous fashion by an talented international cast of virtuousos, eccentric visionaries, and plunderphonic magpies.

My knowledge of Bogusław Schaeffer’s work is quite minimal, which makes sense, given that he is not particularly well known outside of Poland. However, I have previously encountered fragments of his ouevre through Bôłt’s “Polish Radio Experimental Studio” reissue campaign (as well as an unknowing exposure via David Lynch’s Inland Empire). Fittingly, Bôłt founder Michał Mendyk was the spark behind this endeavor (as well as providing some presumably much-needed translation assistance). To Mendyk’s credit, reshaping and cannibalizing Schaeffer’s work turned out to be an ideal project for Daniel and Schmidt to throw themselves into, as the end result is quintessential Matmos. 

Granted, the duo’s characteristically morbid and/or gleefully ridiculous sound sources are absent here, but Regards checks a lot of other boxes on my personal checklist for an inspired Matmos album (kitsch colliding with high art, rigorous scholarship and compositional vision colliding with plunderphonic mischief, etc.). The opening “Resemblage” provides a representative window into the album’s baseline aesthetic, approximating a squelchy strain of post-modernist exotica that evokes the feeling of being serenaded by an all-cyborg Xavier Cugat Orchestra in a psychedelic cave. My favorite pieces all follow soon after, as Regards boasts quite a killer first half.

In “Cobra Wages Shuffle,” for example, Matmos unleash something akin to mutant electrofunk played with bath toys that later makes surprise detours into deep space horror, android ASMR, and fragmented NWW-style sound collage. Elsewhere, “Few, Far Chaos Bugles” brings in Turkish multi-instrumentalist Ulas Kurugullu for a mindbending melange of Eastern European folk, tenacious typewriter, Martin Denny, and Thirlwell-esque artificial-sounding horn blurts that evokes the feeling of having a psychotic breakdown on a moonlit beach because incomprehensible alien transmissions are being relentlessly beamed into my head. 

“Flight to Sodom” is yet another hit, capturing Matmos and instrument builder Will Schorre in an unusually poppy mood, as they steer a lurching kickdrum beat and burbling kosmische synths into a Rashad Becker-esque psychotropic bestiary (fitting, given that Becker himself mastered the album). While I do prefer the album’s first half to the second, there are not any pieces that miss the mark–only ones that feature a different balance of broken/fragmented avant-gardism and conventionally enjoyable grooves and melodies. As with all Matmos releases, the big caveat is that Regards is an unrepentantly challenging and kaleidoscopic listening experience, but the rampant exotica touches nicely balance the duo’s more alienating tendencies to make this one of the more fun and consistently fascinating albums in the duo’s oft-difficult discography.

Sounds can be found here.

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