Plutonic Rainbows

Boomkat:

Richard Chartier ponders another poignant predicament as Pinkcourtesyphone with Indelicate Slices, the project’s ninth full length, arriving after sojourns to The Tapeworm and Champion Version in recent seasons.

This is contemporary ambient music at its most opulent and intoxicating, sashaying rococo corridors of gold and red velvet smudged to shimmering pink hues, spinning solipsistic thru a permanent twilight zone of pharmaceutical haze, self-medicated and shielded to an omnipresent darkness that lurks beyond the rose beds.

It’s immaculately smashed and illusive music that slips under the skin and stimulates the imagination with uncanny efficiency, emulating none-more-rarified feels between the old world elegance of Romantic Threat and the digital drizzle of In Voluptuous Monochrome, secreting some stunningly sensitive, psychedelic passages in the 24 minute piece Minimumluxuryoverdose and the 12 minutes of OOBE like plasmic suspense of Above Chandeliers, with the systolic pulse of Problematic Interior rendering something like a recording of an anechoic panic room.

This week I have been listening to the immensely moving record from this artist - completely new to me.

RVNG Intl. have released an album from synth pioneer Pauline Anna Strom - a selection from her extraordinary records and cassettes from the 1980s.

The Quietus:

Given the cosmic, futuristic leanings of the instrumentation, coupled with the classical, film-score motifs in tracks like Morning Splendor and Gossamer Silk, it's understandable that many have pointed out the sense of timelessness to Strom's work. But the notion of time seems to stretch even beyond this collection's sonic parameters. Trans-Millenia Music feels like a body of work completely distant from a need to be placed in a contemporary context. It's not in the least bit dated, but neither does it feel under any pressure to pave a way for future trends. Each glimmering, ascending pattern instead seems to rise above its listener, beckoning you to just be present with it. In its remarkable, honest and human embrace of both the futuristic and the classical, Strom's music transcends and pervades the present. It takes you into a space where there is no nostalgia for the past, no anxiousness for the future, only the present company of sound and the lived experience of it.

Freedom at the 45th floor, In Flight Suspension and Cruising Altitude 36,000 Feet are blissful, all cascading and beaming arpeggios moving with gyroscopic hypnotism. Elsewhere, Warriors of the Sun and Gossamer Silk feel like ancestral, spiritual calls repurposed for a plane of experience where there is only music and the majesty it holds.

Rain on Ancient Keys and Spacial Spectre are haunting, moody ventures into something altogether more mysterious and unknowable, suggesting an understanding of the sonic plane that is perhaps enhanced for someone who is deprived of sight.

It doesn’t all necessarily work. Mushroom Trip, feels like a queasy experience of its namesake, floating somewhere in between playful and seasick. Bonsai Tree, while an interesting example of one of the collection’s few percussive moments, doesn’t slot into the flow of the album - it feels unwieldy, the wrong type of disorienting.

But Trans-Millenia Music is nonetheless a wonderful collection. As the yelped vocal and theremin-like melodies of Virgin Ice and the balearic pace of Energies course their way through your mind and body, it’s hard not to feel like she will soon claim a place as a true legend of experimental electronic music.

While this music cannot predict the future or return us to the past, it seems to understand them both. And in doing so, Trans-Millenia Music brings a sort of ease to the experience of right now. More than three decades on, it seems there’s still no time like the present.

New collection of novellas from this great writer. Four in all. Really good tales. Available now on Kindle and Hardcover from most retailers.

Due for release January 2018, Palmbomen II returns with Memories of Cindy, an intimate collection of eulogic, supernatural house music made for a muse and to bemuse those who make (first) contact. A haunted memory hole of hardware grooves, celestial synth pads and lonesome vocals, Kai Hugo’s warped west coast vantage has never seemed so surreal but certain.

An excellent collection of studio and live material, issued last year. It includes a version of the Stranger Things theme to the Netflix TV show. A great showcase of their material although I very much prefer the 1980s material such as Mothers Of Rain and White Eagle.

The highlight of the album is the incredible ten-minute closing piece, Shadow And Sun which echoes back to their earlier styles with remarkably ease and forms a majestic and uplifting close to the album.

If you are a fan of the band, this is an essential purchase. It's also a good introduction to those who are just discovering this legendary and influential group.

The album is available directly from TD at their Eastgate Music shop.

The master of twisted noise is adding a new album to his incredible discography. Following his monumental album The Gag File on Dais, ‘Switches’ is the next chapter in the evolution of Dilloway's sound. Created on piano and tape ‘Switches’ is a spiralling journey into the rugged mind and soul of one of the most influential figures in radical modern music.

Pressed on 180 g colored vinyl and housed in a reversed board sleeve illustrated with artwork by dutch artist Henri Jacobs on front and label.

Due for release on 15th December. Boomkat has the description on what to expect.

Boomkat:

The return of Pye Corner Audio to Lapsus Records with Where Things Are Hollow, comprised of four new songs and a twenty-four minute duration.

Martin Jenkins explores emotive techno in Resist and Northern Safety Route, two tracks that coast through progressive arpeggios, slow pulsating beats and soaring pads. Meanwhile Mainframe and Continental Drift move through more ambient and melancholic terrains, two cinematic songs that are perhaps reminiscent of works by John Carpenter or Delia Derbyshire. In short, Where Things Are Hollow is a beguiling analogue electronica EP that is guaranteed to delight Pye Corner Audio fans and new listeners alike. This special release will also feature the collaboration of two of the country’s most prestigious independent graphic artists, Alex Trochut and Basora, whose artwork for Where Things Are Hollow is sure to become a collector's piece.*

Penguin Books:

The roots of Hallowe'en lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls' Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging 'soul cakes' in exchange for prayers, and fires burned to keep malevolent phantoms at bay.

From Europe, the haunted tradition would quickly take root and flourish in the fertile soil of the New World. Feeding hungrily on fresh lore, consuming half-remembered tales of its own shadowy origins and rituals, Hallowe'en was reborn in America. The pumpkin supplanted the carved turnip; costumes grew ever stranger, and celebrants both rural and urban seized gleefully on the festival's intoxicating, lawless spirit. For one wild night, the dead stared into the faces of the living and the living, ghoulishly masked and clad in tattered backwoods baroque, stared back.

The photographs in Haunted Air provide an extraordinary glimpse into the traditions of this macabre festival from ages past, and form an important document of photographic history. These are the pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementos of the treasured, now unrecognisable, other. Torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands of strangers.

Amazing selection of photographs. Totally recommended.

A beautifully, haunting score from the Legowelt alias, this 2015 soundtrack to the ten minute documentary about the elusive Skunkape, that apparently resides in the Florida everglades is a mesmerising album and one you simply must own.

The soundtrack for Brad Abrahams documentary on South Florida's strangest bipedal resident, as told by the rare few who claim they've encountered the creature. At over 1.5 million acres, the 'Glades are the largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi, with thousands of acres untouched by man. If indeed something this strange could exist, it would surely be here.

These tracks were all written for the documentary, most didn't end up in the final cut, mostly because the movie is just under 10 minutes long. But these sounds will linger beyond the images of the screen for a long time.