Asa Tone set to release Live At New Forms this month

01 November 2021

Asa Tone, the multidisciplinary outfit of Melati Malay, Tristan Arp and Kaazi, are getting ready to release Live At New Forms later this month. Originally a commissioned work by producer and festival curator Yu Su for the New Forms Festival in Vancouver in 2020, Asa Tone worked together remotely whilst in lockdown in Mexico City, New York and the Australian rainforest, “embracing new approaches in chance-based composition”, as the press release explains. Malay, Arp and Kaaazi “individually recorded a pool of generative loops and field recordings in lieu of performed “songs,” adhering to general tempo and key parameters”. The result, a continuous 30 minute piece, was then adapted and spatialized for a 4D sound / 32-channel audio system by Yu Su and its showing at the festival was paired with a custom modular video work by artist Nika Milano.

Ahead of the album’s release, Asa Tone are enticing us with ‘II’, offered with a visual accompaniment by Milano.

Live At New Forms is out on November 19th through Leaving Records

Kyle Bruckmann releases double album Mesmerics/Hindsight

28 October 2021

Photo: Lenny Gonzalez

Kyle Bruckmann is a man of many talents: a composer, educator, improviser, electronic musician and master oboist. Having been a fixture of the Chicago experimental music underground for several years, he has also built a reputation as a prominent experimental musician in Oakland where he now resides.
Bruckmann has just released his first electronic solo album, Mesmerics/Hindsight, a bewilderingly double record that traverses wide-ranging sonic terrains, blending industrial, noise, psych, and trance. The highlight on Mesmerics/Hindsight A is on space while Mesmerics/Hindsight B highlights periodicity. The album “anachronistically evokes, from a sardonic post-techno vantage point, both late 60s and late 70s experimentation”, describes the press release. “By turns hypnotic, immersive, and bludgeoning, Mesmerics/Hindsight charts an unlikely Venn diagram linking the Day-Glo legacy of the San Francisco Tape Music Center with proto-Industrial’s bleak, gray throb.”

Mesmerics/Hindsight was composed and crafted between Bruckmann’s home studio and the electronic music labs of two colleges he teaches at, where he had access to instruments such as the classic Buchla, Moog, and E-mu gear and also more contemporary Eurorack modules. Speaking about the outcome, he described it as “an interleaved love letter to two volatile junctures (both especially salient in the history of the synthesizer) on which I’ve remained perennially fixated: the heady intersection of ‘art music’ experimentalism with ‘popular’ psychedelia as the 60s skidded through the Altamont Pass into the 70s, and the gag reflex of post-punk and industrial as the 70s gave way to the Anglo-American neocon hellscape of the 80s.”

For a staggering taste of what’s on offer, listen to “Used To Dance”, taken from Mesmerics/Hindsight B.

Beauty Pill announce Instant Night EP; watch the video for new single ‘You Need A Better Mind’

27 October 2021

Photo: Morgan Klein

Beauty Pill aren’t slowing down. After releasing their full length Please Advise last year, the Washington, D.C. based band have announced details of a new EP, Instant Night, set for release via Northern Spy on December 3rd. The good news comes paired with a thrilling single and video for ‘You Need A Better Mind’. Speaking about the track, Beauty Pill’s Chad Clark comments:

“The Roland TB-303 is an old Japanese synthesizer that was designed to convincingly mimic the sound of a bass guitar. It was introduced in 1981, it sounded like a toy and failed miserably, and it was ultimately discontinued in 1984. It makes freaky, wiggly, cartoony sounds. It sounds fuck-all like a bass guitar. Why am I telling you this? One ended up in my hands for a week. I did a lot of silly stuff with it. I did come up with this one worthwhile riff, which I built a song around. The song is called “You Need A Better Mind.”

“It was recorded with my band in a single take at the end of a recording session for another song. We were tired. None of us cared that much if we failed. The fun spirit you hear in this song is mostly exhaustion… that kind of punchy exhaustion you get late at night when you’ll laugh at anything. The lyrics were inspired by the spooky/funny 10-minute movie “Rachel”. “The song is about the scourge of American loneliness. It is by far the fastest, easiest song Beauty Pill has ever created. We hope you like it.”

Here’s the video for ‘You Need A Better Mind’, directed by Drew Doucette.

Sam Wilkes releases second album One Theme & Subsequent Improvisation

25 October 2021

The legend that is bassist, producer and composer Sam Wilkes, a key player in the Los Angeles’ contemporary jazz scene, released last week his second full-length album, One Theme & Subsequent Improvisation, through Leaving Records. The album sprouted from one improvisational recording session also featuring two drummers, a Maestro Rhythm King drum machine, and two synthesists, who played “one repetitive theme that led to two subsequent movements of improvisation”, as the press release explains. Wilkes then tried “find new music through an immersive process” and “decided to destroy the audio of predetermined sections of the music through tape, sampling, and effects experiments.”
One Theme & Subsequent Improvisation is one of those records that you can’t put away. Get a taste with ‘The Drums’ below.

Dummy’s debut album, Mandatory Enjoyment, out now

23 October 2021

Photo: Dummy

Following the release of two cassette EP’s last year, LA band Dummy released yesterday their debut full-length album, Mandatory Enjoyment, through Trouble in Mind Records. The group’s drone-pop style weaves together influences as wide-reaching as 60s melodicism, 90s UK noise pop, spiritual jazz, Japanese new age, and Italian minimalism, to create a blissed-out, beautiful and addictive web of sound.

The album’s mesmerizing closing track, ‘Atonal Poem’, was the last single to emerge and Alex from Dummy had this to say about it:

“”Atonal Poem” is the sound of a rock band obsessed with new age music. We were listening to a lot of very peaceful music played on malleted instruments. It’s kind of like, wouldn’t it be funny to try to write a song like this? Why not break the rules? Why not challenge the expectations, especially within yourself? We wanted to create something uninhibited and untethered to convention. We had no idea where it would take us, but this track was the result. In the mythology of the record, this song represents the visitor’s journey home, far away from the atrophy and decay of life on Earth.”

‘Atonal Poem’ comes with an accompanying video. Watch it below.