Back at it with the second installment of the Down in the Bunker review column. This week I tackle a small stack of new releases from Seth Graham, Nite Lite, and Sea Moss, a brimming double-disc collection from Midnite Mines, and a notable obscurity from Amnon Raviv. If you can, take some time to listen through the sound samples linked below each review. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or comments. As always, thanks for checking in.
Seth Graham – Hint CS (Mondoj)
Hint is an EP-length follow-up to Seth Graham’s critically acclaimed album, Gasp, which found him breaking through into bold new areas of jarringly beautiful, sample-based composition – a modernist form of musique concrète that could burst open into moments of pure ecstatic bliss. Hint retains many of these qualities, with the opener “Beyond Sadness” being perhaps the closest continuation of Gasp’s soundworld with its oozing shards of strings, voices, and reeds being disrupted by total silence. Within the release blurb for Hint, Graham noted that he was trying to enjoy the process of making music by not overthinking things and by collaborating with friends. It’s the collaborative nature of a few of the tracks, in particular, that seems to introduce some new sonic wrinkles into Graham’s approach. “Pierre / Ruby” features contributions from More Eaze (aka Marcus Rubio) and the auto-tuned vocals and saxophone sounds steer this into a more song-like, dreamtime jazz zone. “Black / Yellow” features contributions from the Japanese artist Koeosaeme, who also has a brand new album out on Graham’s Orange Milk Records. These two artists seem to be coming from a pretty similar place musically, but this track has a certain spaciousness to the production that wasn’t really heard on Gasp. The tape ends with “Love” where Graham does away with any sudden edits and inhales and exhales deep sighs of ambient grace. Hint is another strong effort from Graham and, um, hints at new directions he may take moving forward.
Midnight Mines – Create Disturbance In Your Mind 2CD (Independent Woman)
My first listen to this double CD from the shadowy London duo, Midnight Mines, was from a tiny boombox blaring from another room in the house and all I was picking up on initially was overblown guitar distortion with the occasional crude dub production values. There’s no denying that a fair share of Create Disturbance In Your Mind, a release that brings together a disc’s worth of selections from the group’s first three tapes and another of unreleased material, can be highly abrasive in places. This is not entirely surprising considering that the New Zealand label that released this collection, Independent Woman Records, has issued works from a veritable who’s-who from the international noise community, not to mention works from NZ heavyweights like Alastair Galbraith and Roy Montgomery. Midnight Mines’ sound fits quite nicely within this catalog, as they share some of the same tendencies towards overblown, no-fi riffage and ampli-fried abstraction as NZ outfits like The Futurians and Armpit. Subsequent listens to this collection have revealed a group with a far more interesting and crudely complex sound, too. In places, it could pass as recently unearthed Chrome recordings and elsewhere as an avant-garage counterpart to contemporaries like fellow U.K. outfit, Mosquitoes. If you get beyond the surface noise, you’ll find that this duo is ‘mining’ some beautifully blasted gems.
NITE LITE – Landcestors LP (Sun Ark/Stunned)
NITE LITE is the duo of Phil and Myste French, the couple behind the mighty Stunned Records, a label that was highly active from 2008-2011 and that was a major inspiration for Free Form Freakout in its early stages (see episodes #6 and #26 of the original podcast). After Stunned ceased operations, NITE LITE issued their first proper long player, Megrez, on Desire Path Recordings in 2012, and that was the last that we had heard from them until now with the release of Landcestors. Not only does it appear that NITE LITE is back in action, but given the co-release credit on the album jacket, this could also potentially mark the re-launch of Stunned Records, too. Only time will tell, I guess. Aspects of spirituality and connection to place have always been central to the French’s work as NITE LITE, which even a simple glance through past album/song titles will suggest, and this again rings true with Landcestors. This new album, however, is perhaps their most labored over and fully realized effort, and is according to Phil, “our most collaborative NITE LITE project to date, with dozens of guest members contributing their sounds, from solo piano to an entire gamelan troupe.” As such, there is a richness and variation in sonic detail heard throughout Landcestors. Manipulated field recordings are still the primary building block of NITE LITE’s compositions, at times these are looped into rhythmic patterns and at others are stretched into ominous drones, moans, and aqueous patter. Without boring you with track-by-track, minute-by-minute minutiae, let’s just say that Landcestors plays out like a surreal dreamscape where you are strolling through a forgotten forest and you encounter a festive indigenous gathering of the Wild Rhythm Sisters. Later, congregating around a campfire, you are spooked by distant, unnamable animal groans, but you eventually find peace and comfort after a visit from the mysterious Oracle. You awaken anew bathed in the Venerable Showers Of Beauty.
If you’re counting the split they put out with The Social Stomach last year on Crash Symbols, Bidet Dreaming marks the third release from Sea Moss, the dynamic Portland-based primitive electronics & drums duo of Noa Ver and Zach D’Agostino. This group’s penchant for pummeling rhythmic noise rock is guaranteed to enliven any basement show or DIY art space: there’s no chin-stroking here, this is pure body music. You might pick up on shades of the corrosive Gay Disco of Guerilla Toss or, for those closer to MN, on a shapeshifting merger between the late Skoal Kodiak and the currently active group, The Miami Dolphins. D’Agostino’s drumming is forceful and inventive, having the ability to drive a groove into oblivion or to change time signatures in the blink of an eye. And, yes, he even uses some cowbell (I’d bet good money they’ve heard an SNL reference on the road a time or two). Noa Ver is able to manipulate her home-built electronics units in all sorts of rhythmically playful ways to match D’Agostino’s drumming, though at times she turns to full-tilt, squelching/belching noise. Similarly, her vocals are an incoherent swarm of animated shortwave barkings that often accentuate the drum pattern being laid down. Noa Ver walkie-talkie’s her larynx to capture her vibrations, conveying something more akin to a positive universal energy than to a language that is inherently limited. When all of these ingredients come together, especially on tracks like “Appease the Peas, Please” and “Feral Fowl”, this makes for one potent sauce.
Amnon Raviv – Mirror LP (Paradigm Discs)
This is a reissue of an album that originally came out in Israel in 1983 in an edition of 50 handmade copies and is, as far as I can tell, the only solo album from Amnon Raviv, who has gone on to be an inspiring, Patch Adams-like figure in Tel Aviv, lifting the spirits of numerous patients while working as a Clown Doctor at various hospitals and cancer units. His album, Mirror, stands as quite a singular listening experience, though Paradigm Discs, a label that has issued a number of worthwhile obscurities throughout its over two decades of operation, noted that some comparisons could be made to the Anal Magic and Rev. Dwight Frizzell Beyond the Black Crack album, which the label also reissued on vinyl back in 2016. There are indeed some similarities between the two albums with their mixture of sparse free jazz elements and waves of sound collage confusion. I could also mention the NWW-like animal cackle in track four or the high-pitched Organum-like drones in track two, but I’m merely forcing superficial pieces into a far more complex sonic puzzle. What I find so compelling about Mirror as a whole is while there are plenty of weird, abstract moments, there are also passages where the flamenco-style guitar playing and string arrangements are so virtuosic and beautiful that it damn near stops you in your tracks. I can’t say that happens all that often with albums that are as distinctly avant-garde, but Mirror is a special album and thanks are in order to Paradigms Discs for getting this back out into the world for more people to hear.
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