MEANS

MEANS Magazine monthly round-up of new and shiny things we think are awesome.

Two Worlds : Alfredo Santa Ana / Miranda Wong
(https://redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com/album/before-the-world-sleeps)

Sunning itself somewhere between the virtuosic and the minimal, Two Worlds is a fairly pleasant endeavour: an album of classically-minded piano that drifts jovially around the edges, like the frill of well-considered, aesthetically-pleasing yet entirely functional curtain. What seems, at first, to be a restrained effort, doused in subtly and an almost cautious lilt, gathers pace as it fires through the albums 18 relatively short tracks. Whilst opener ‘Zaloasymphnesis’ is marked by a curious sense of form – constructed of repeating gestural patterns across the piano, trills rather than ‘sensible’ melodic development – but by ‘Lessons for Oblivion’ a certain tension is at play, a movement towards an almost aggressive quality that ties its virtuosic performance to an emotional clarity often missing from contemporary piano music. At 50 mins its not a short album, and some of the tracks feel less interesting than others, especially in the second half, where things deviate towards the more well-trodden end of classical composition. Yet this is a relatively small complaint when each moment feels so fleeting, each track a distinct character in a line-up of possible configurations, a rotating merry-go-round of notes, moods, gestures and forms. 

Drone Prompts 1 : Vintage Credenza
(https://vintagecredenza.bandcamp.com/album/drone-prompts-i-ep)

Nothing says obscure and challenging music like seeing the phrase ‘a super limited run of 15 x 3.5” floppy disks’ crop up in a press release and yet here we are. Built upon a collaborative practice wherein the artist would send fragments of drone to friends with no specific instructions as to how they should be interpreted, the suitably titled ‘Drone Prompts 1’ comprises 4 rather different approaches. Whilst opener ‘Rather Cold’ throws up some wonderfully glacial ambiance – piano and woodwinds rising from a bed of reverb with s production value that equally mirrors the genres largest players – track two ‘End of an Era’ smashes through such introverted meanderings with some questionable acid squelches and a snare drum only a mother could love. ‘The Mystic Cave Speaks’ flirts with a vaguely new-age vibe, with swells of noise framing gloomy drones and extended trills existing somewhere between a flute and a broken modem. Perhaps the icing on the proverbial cake comes in the form of ‘Miloco Sails’, which loiters at the very cuddly side of ambient music but does so with remarkable posterity, wielding elongated vocal textures alongside a hearty smattering of hiss and subtle, almost opaque bass frequencies. 

Explicit Isolation – E/l
(https://mappa.bandcamp.com/album/explicit-isolation)

High fives all round. Ten fucking points. Though loathe to invoke terms like ‘exceptional’, ‘exceptional’ this truly is: rich, acoustic drones that carefully shift through a universe of rasping, creaking, growling sonorities, an ornate tapestry that open up on itself, reaching ever deeper into the nuance of its weave. God that was pretentious, but don’t let it reflect upon the majesty of E/l, which isn’t really pretentious at all – its glacial pace and quiet exposition more properties of the composers rigorous exploration of timbre than a pre-emptive stylistic choice. Although broken in the three parts, it reads like one macro composition, with the emergence of ‘proper’ musical parts – rhythms and melodies – in track 2 bleeding directly from the first parts wonderful restraint, a bed that frames the rattling arpeggios that follow. It reminds me of some of the sadly overlooked stuff released by the Immune label several years ago, a similar approach to organic drone found in the work of Tiago Sousa. I’m sure you can make a thousand similar referents yourself – its not the style that makes it sing as much as the execution: a near perfect meeting point of the organic and the composed, ridged and brittle at once.

The Metamorph – Zenith
(https://themetamorph.bandcamp.com/album/zenith-3)

I guess ‘ambient’ is a fairly catch-all term these days, used to describe pretty much anything that combines being ‘a bit synthy’ with a glacial pace. By those terms I suppose ‘Zenith’ is an ambient album, but its not really comparable with the sort of lush, super-produced heaven-chords of the genres most famous players. Instead, The Metamorph invokes something a mite more restrained, harking back to the spookier end of early electronic music, more Daphne Oram than Brian Eno. Odd rattles and rumbles bed down with fractured, two-note melodies, sounds allowed to petter out, to form aimlessly and go nowhere with beguiling fragility. Its not entirely ground-breaking but pleasant nonetheless – a drawn out stew of synthesis akin to the soundtrack of Bladerunner, if Bladerunner were shorn its more people-pleasing sensibilities, reimagined here as an abstract meandering 27-hour epic directed by Werner Herzog. 

Dead Katz – Lost Amongst the Noise of the Earth
(https://deadkatz.bandcamp.com/album/lost-amongst-the-noise-of-the-earth)

“Lost Amongst the Noise of the Earth” is the kind of album both made and broken by its own inherent simplicity. On the one hand, its plagued by some vaguely redundant, somewhat trite musical choices; on the other, the degree to which the whole thing is half-baked, wilfully underplayed, lifts things into rather enjoyable domain. It’s slowcore through and through, following a fairly trusted formula, but if you’re a fan of that sort of thing it does it pretty well: a healthy balance of buried vocals and morose guitars, looping drum parts and the occasional lo-fi production fandango. Whilst the individual parts are fairly unremarkable (and honestly, if the riffs were a little more interesting the whole thing would elevate faster than a glass elevator in a chocolate factory), the composite effect is pleasant, a fulfilling fix for those already persuaded by the genres charms. Indeed, it is the moments where the album steps out of its own, clearly-defined comfort zone, that things step up magnificently: the whimsical ‘ooh’s’ of ‘From Above’, or the electro-vibe of ‘Blind’, or the coldwave spirit of (album highlight) ‘Standing Outside Your House With a Booombox in The Rain’; moments that fill-in the more straightforward slowcore stick figures with some much needed colour.