I suppose that yet again you’re going to require some kind of editorial introduction to this page? You always do, why is that? Next you’ll be demanding we proof read the damn thing or telling us we keep repeating things, here’s some more album reviews (seemingly all in rather white album covers this time)

Jon Mueller – dHrAaNwDn (Rhythmplex) – It was pure curiosity that took us to this Jon Mueller album, someone we’d never heard of until today, this as a result his curiosity that made him click on the image of a band he’s never heard of, a band called Cardiacs. We all know what curiosity did for the cat and this higher plane is a rather rewarding one. dHrAaNwDn has been not quite bubbling or boiling in the studio for most of the afternoon now as much as it has been echoing, bouncing off the walls, making the studio feel like it might be twice the size it actually is. Four tracks, each piece around fifteen minutes long, each piece kind of positively doing the same as the previous one, four pieces of percussive art. it feels very spiritual, like some kind of ritual, four painterly pieces of music, a relentless shapeshifting pile-on of drumming. Just drumming, just percussion, just ritual. Recorded in the massive Meeting House at the Shaker Heritage Society in Albany, NY, you need to go read the full notes on the Bandcamp page for the full background and the details of how Jon Mueller played four drums for over six hours in this Meeting House and how engineer Fred Weaver travelled by truck from Pennsylvania, hauling and then constructing a complete mobile recording studio to record the drums and the intense acoustics of the room by placing microphones throughout the space. dHrAaNwDn (read as ‘hand drawn’) offers a partial document of this session, featuring various long-form pieces from the day. 

It surely shouldn’t feel as warm and inviting as this should it? As engaging? It is rather intense, I considered referencing Rothko and sitting in one of his rooms for a moment but no, it is as immense, it does take you with it the way Rothko paintings do, far more relentless though, rhythms that do indeed “form a dissolved state between frenetic dance and Zen, driving both energy and contemplation simultaneously”. It is a big sound, the shifts are wonderful, it probably is, from his point of view, a spiritual exercise.And yes, for the listener, it might not be much different.

Bandcamp

We Are Winter’s Blue And Radiant Children – No More Apocalypse Father (Constellation) – Where were we?  A new quartet of Mat Ball (Big Brave), Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), and Jonathan Downs and Patch One (both Ada), A debut album that at first kind of sounds like you’d maybe expect a quartet from the just mentioned bands might sound, that slow moving widescreen cinematic. They say they are presenting “six modal lullabies drenched in seared distortion, slathered across striding electronic pulses”. Apparently Ball and Menuck began creating music in and for the bleakest moments of Montréal winters: “We’re honouring that idea of winter, when you come inside and your house is warm, a place that only exists because of how cold it is outside,” so said Menuck. Seems they later recruited Downs and Patch to flesh out their initial ideas. What would you really expect though? Maybe not No More Apocalypse Father  or indeed the beauty of Uncloudy Days with all those bits of frozen rain and broken trees? Maybe once you get into the body of the work it is rather unexpected. I guess the bigness of it all was the expected part, the expansive ambitions of Godspeed and such…

“Seeing things from a distance and not being able to intervene happens a lot on the record,” Menuck explains. “If you’re a feeling and thinking person, that’s just part of the human condition. We watch horror unfolding from afar, unable to do anything concrete to change it.”

A powerless witness, able to describe but not intervene?  Winter is a powerful thing, a state of mind beyond immediate control, it is a graceful album, a beautiful set of works, it is as big as you’d expect it to be, as dramatic and powerful as Winter can be, as warm as when you are safe indoors away from the harrowing of it all. Maybe that band name is a bit much, then again they can call themselves whatever they like when they’re this good, when they bathe you in sound like this, it is kind of like watching a blizzard from the warm indoors, or the sea crashing against the cliffs, or the cloud rolling over the Welsh mountains faster than you can move but all okay because you’re inside watching in, listing to if, marvelling at it. Some of it is the winter sunshine, that watery warmth, that hope of the first bud, that sensation of the first snow drop in the snow melt, all those sensations you come through and (Goodnight) White Phosphorous…

Bandcamp

Møster! – Springs (Action Jazz) – Møster! I guess they come with an exclamation mark, no bad thing, I do like to exclaim. Møster! are an “amalgam of 1960’s/1970’s modal acoustic and electric jazz and 1970’s experimental rock, but also echoing Brazilian music, doom, contemporary music, 1990’s indie rock and metal, and nordic ambient house. The band lineup is still the same, Motorpsycho guitarist Hans Magnus ‘Snah’ Ryan; electric bass player of Elephant9 Nikolai Hængsle; and Spidergawd and ex-Motorpsycho drummer Kenneth Kapstad”. Not hearing that much in terms of metal but everything else appears to be in there within the two rather fluid tracks and the forty or so minutes of music. it mostly a jazz thing, it is mostly experimental, right now it if feeling slight Brazilian in an almost Magma flavoured easy-listening kind of way. Smooth, fluid yet deliciously awkward without ever getting uncomfortable about it all. Considerate jazz rock and rather rewardingly detailed, two pieces of music that are rather in the zone and instantly rewarding. Do like the way the pieces change and evolve in such subtle ways…

Bandcamp / Physical