Category: AMN Reviews

Twice a year, Unexplained Sounds Group puts out its Annual Report, a compilation of largely unreleased and new recordings from experimental artists around the globe. This mid-year edition was released in late June and consists of over 3 hours of music. The first impression you have upon listening to the album is of its depth…

Spanish artist Susana López (now also known as superhero “Susan Drone”) fires earthenware drones, nubbly and pebbly to the touch; they have heft and a pleasing tactility. Her latest collection, Stupor Mundi, is christened in honor of early inspiration Asmus Tietchens, and consists of four tracks, each longer than the one that precedes it. The first two…

World Without was recorded in late 2021 by a group put together by veteran Euro-free jazz saxophonist Paul Dunmall. He teamed with Steven Saunders (guitar), Dave Kane (bass), and Miles Levin (drums). I am about 99% certain that Miles is the son of long-time Dunmall collaborator Tony Levin (the drummer who passed away in 2011,…

MAW is the trio of Frank Meadows on bass, Jessica Ackerley on electric guitar, and Eli Wallace on prepared piano and synth. They quietly released their debut last year, a recording of sparse and low-key textual improv. Here, they continue in that general direction with four live recordings aptly titled as such. The first pair…

The sound mapping project continues, this time featuring odd and experimental music from Finland. The music herein is heavily acoustic with ample folk overtones, but well-grounded in tape music experimentation. Thus, there is a strong emphasis on blending conventional instrumentation with electronically-mediated sounds. The leading track, Pekko Käppi’s Transrational Folk Song n.9, is a short…

It is hard to believe that One Shot has been around for a quarter century. After a long dormancy, the group put itself back together in 2021 to honor late member guitarist James Mac Gaw. This is the second release of the reconstituted One Shot since 2008. The current lineup is Emmanuel Borghi on keys,…

This album caught me unaware. While I have heard one other Matthew Mercer recording, that was a while ago and I cannot recall any specifics (one of the downsides of spending many waking hours listening to music). Regardless, Sub/Super consists of two long, subtlety shimmering and rolling drones – one 36 minutes, the other 14.…

Last Sunday, Marilyn Crispell (piano) put on a rare performance in Chicago along with Bostonian Damon Smith (double bass) and Chicagoans Jason Stein (bass clarinet) and Adam Shead (drums). It took place at the Hungry Brain, a small venue with great sightlines and sound. I have been a fan of Crispell since hearing her on…

Sound in Silence is sui generis among small electronica labels. Since 2006, Athens-based founder George Mastrokostas has curated an impressive library of ambient and adjacent artists from around the world, readily identifiable in their colorful, kraft cardboard envelopes affixed with a “polaroid style” cover image. Now, Sound in Silence celebrates its one hundredth release with the compendium These Clouds…. Two albums released in…

Faded Photographs is the most song-centric album Yagya, the project of Icelander Aðalsteinn Guðmundsson, has released since The Inescapable Decay of My Heart ten years ago. The present reviewer, impressed by earlier works like the luminous Rigning, has always categorized him an ambient instrumentalist with a subtle dub sensibility, if one of the most talented. As this very pretty album proves,…

Annika Socolofsky turns tradition upside-down and sideways on these eight pieces. A powerful, classically-trained vocalist, she is also well-versed in other forms of singing and not afraid to take an expansive view of genre and form. Her accompaniment (when not acapella) is a chamber group of cello, sax, clarinet, piano, violin, and percussion. Here, she…

Wild Up, a large modern music collective based in Los Angeles, continues its series of Julius Eastman recordings with three more pieces in this release. A tragic figure – gay, black, and likely suffering from mental illness in an era that was even less open to these characteristics than today – Eastman died young and…

The Lonely Bell hangs somewhere on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. For this beautiful, bewitching album, he (real name Ali Murray) first creates presence in order to portray absence, the unease of failed community. Over two, slowly burning twenty-minute pieces, the air remains heavy. However, the subtle rising of a signal…

The final show of the 2023 Winter / Spring program and marking their 25th anniversary, Lampo welcomed back Marcus Schmickler.  As many may know, Lampo has been a massively appreciated fixture in the Chicago experimental music scene since the 90s.  The organization has been consistently and tirelessly presenting boundary-breaking musical performances, the likes of which…

The sound worlds of Richard Bégin are grounded in electroacoustic ambient incorporating shimmering structures combined with static, pops, and clicks. This adds analog warmth to an approach that otherwise would be leaning toward the cold and dark. Indeed, several tracks of the ten on this recording include patterns of synth chords that are both ominous…

Hatomatsuri is the latest dense slab of tinnitus-inducing walled noise from Merzbow. All of the usual musical(?) elements are present – grinding substrates of distorted static, sculpted feedback, wispy features, and drill-like staccato constructs. From these building blocks, Merzbow assembles two 15-minute tracks of loosely-controlled chaos. While Hatomatsuri does not break much ground when compared…

Michael Bonaventure is a sui generis composer and performer. Based in Edinburgh and Amsterdam, he composes experimental pieces for organ and electronics, often blending traditional instrumentation and his classical training with other sources and influences in a surprisingly seamless fashion. Works 2018 – 2023 is a collection of his recent efforts and a follow-up to…

Jeannine Schulz is from Hamburg and her third album Humble, released by Toronto’s Polar Seas Recordings, is a bold statement of masterful artistry. The nine pieces stretching over forty-five minutes center on sensitively played and manipulated guitar, picnicking within air textured as by a watercolorist´s practiced hand. It feels like it takes place in a meadow, with a…

Relentlessly blasted with a fire hose of information, one must be forgiven for missing some essential news. Who knew that Jozef van Wissem, the world’s most interesting lutanist, and Jim Jarmusch, one of our most interesting Americans, have been releasing music together for years now? Not this guy. Fortunately, I found out just in time…

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first modern writers to incorporate psychological terror and macabre elements into his works. Poe’s exploration of the psyche, obsession, and the dark side of humanity continues to shape horror literature and film today. Indeed, his deliberate pacing and use of unreliable narrators – characters who deceive, have incomplete…