First Impressions 035: Aqueous-funk warbles, an acid-techno peak, celestial folk-blues, dream-pop pools and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

Recently, Longform Editions released two works heavily based on field recordings from amby downs and Seaworthy and Matt Rösner. Though often warmly received, many media outlets struggle to accommodate any general coverage for Longform Editions works. They’re not albums, and they’re not singles in the industry definition that dates back nearly 80 years, when Columbia Records started producing vinyl. Media conditioning versus the unbound limits of creativity is a long argument worth having, but in the immediate instance, it means Longform Editions has needed to slowly eke out a presence through constant social media communications. Instagram offers the opportunity to share samples of music via Spotify in posts or stories, which is valuable for sparking interest. However, both pieces did not meet Spotify’s criteria for this purpose: they were deemed ‘ineligible’ because the platform’s technology could not distinguish either as music. The use of field recordings as material to compose and produce music is long and varied, yet, as the world’s most-used platform for music consumption, Spotify has determined how it can be classified. Of course, the chances of discovery for any music that doesn’t fit corporate coordinates and industry format definitions are low, though extending that to what you can and cannot share is a very particular kind of cultural ring-fencing. In the case of amby downs – aka artist Tahlia Palmer – whose work explores ideas around First Nations history, identity, and connection, it’s a worrying determination. The movement toward inclusivity in artistic expression includes sound itself.
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OK, let’s go:

Album I -  Von Spar / Eiko Ishibashi / Joe Talia / Tatsuhisa Yamamoto: – I’d only heard of Cologne’s Von Spar via their 40th anniversary live performance of Can’s Ege Bamyasi with Steve Malkmus in the Damo Suzuki role. Here, they’re joined by Eiko Ishibashi and her frequent collaborators, drum and percussion aces Joe Talia and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. The impressionistic jazz daubing found across much of Ishibashi’s work coasts here into playful patterings, bubbling over taut funk, languid guitar breezes, and digital pop noodling. It’s an open-ended delight taking flight on Ishibashi’s velvet flute echoes, as rhythms interlock in an aqueous warble, shuffling towards something like samba pastiche. There’s a cool and clear line back to TNT-era Tortoise and other post-rock bands of the time that mapped minimalist electronics as the matrix for their jam collages, though this ensemble feels much less like a studio construct, playing more in the realm of smart, spongy improv, just like their aforementioned Cologne forebears.

Glass House – Patrick Shiroishi: The LA composer creates music that explores the tension points embedded within the ideals of family togetherness. Glass House employs an expressive range in line with the dramatic nuance of the theatre work, using an episodic approach that tips teeteringly towards the off-kilter, like a nod to the ultimately absurd nature of family. It opens with a tentative trickle of piano that owes much to the discordant beauty of Morton Feldman before overflowing into a rippling rush of notes, mapping an emotional course with a fraught sense of beauty. Field recordings of fraternal camaraderie rub against storming polyrhythms and wigged synths, while quieter moments reflect a domestic melancholy, played out with stirring strings and a ticking, metronomic banality. Shiroishi evokes the fragility of the theatre and album title in his eviscerating juxtaposition. James Baldwin comes to mind with Glass House: ‘For nothing is fixed, forever, forever, forever.’

Acid Mt. Fuji – Susumu Yokota: A 30th anniversary remaster for this 1994 album from the Japanese totem for airy ambient, techno, and house works running parallel to urban club hedonism, believing nature was the true out-of-body experience. Acid Mt Fuji was Yokota’s debut full-length, beginning a prolific run until his death in 2015. This extended set’s full-tilt techno template is distinct for Yokota’s sense of space: acid trips for the outdoor type. It’s far from the delicately simmering Sakura, the lower-key 1999 work that stands as my peak Yokota, though both works are ghosted by a sense of the supernatural, as if Yokota’s main collaborator was a higher power he lived by every day.

Omoya: Houses For The Blue Meditation – Masami Makino:

Tokyo’s Makino summons visions through his 12-string guitar from dark nights where the earth can feel like a hallucination. Ominous in feeling yet ultimately liberating in spirit, Makino first uses field recordings and pitch pipes to create rumbling drones filled with an eviscerating emptiness. From this void, his guitar rises like a phoenix, glowing with twilight hues as it emerges from the cusp of chaos into soul-stirring beauty. Imagine the celestial sky mirrored in a murky pool on the ground, and you have the expanse of this deep work.

Beneath The Surface - D York: From the Icelandic label Moatun 7, run by the extremely busy Arni Grétar, who performs as Futuregrapher, comes an album from this US producer, created in response to and as a tribute to Grétar’s public emotional turmoil earlier this year. York has been making music since the 1980s but is entirely new to me. Designed to run cyclically through stages of grief to healing, York’s swarming ambient begins like a breeze on the verge of becoming heady, moving through warm spectral tones and undercurrents of rising tumult with equal weight. It has a gentle quality despite its inspirational source, perhaps in the same way a loved one would delicately handle serious circumstances, where everything needs to be taken in to work through to the other side with space and clarity.

Shyness - CHANTSSSS: The debut album from this Italian producer begins with slow, steady gushes of celestial tones that could well be a choir pitchshifted down to a shimmering wash. Bass throbs and keening vocals add urgency, cutting through the vapourous haze, teetering on the suggestion of song. Once again, we find ourselves at the haziest end of modern ambient, circling in dream pop’s orbit but distanced from its dynamics and contrasts. CHANTSSSS is locked into the power of resemblance without imitation. In this realm, he’s now wading in a highly populated crystalline pool. I’m secretly hoping someone will piss in it.

Thanks for reading.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.