Given the holiday and some household projects that needed to be tended to, I decided to pump the breaks this past week with the Down in the Bunker review column. Hey, it’s summer, life happens, and some times you gotta get out of the bunker and get some sun. But, I hope to get back to a steady writing routine in the coming weeks. For this installment, I spent quality time with some fresh new releases from Nathan McLaughlin, People Skills, James Rushford, and a split between Talugung & Family Ravine. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or comments. As always, thanks for checking in.
By my count, this is the first solo album from long-time favorite, Nathan McLaughlin, in over five years, though he actually refers to this as the proper follow-up to his 2012 full-length, The Refrigerator Is Emotional on Senufo Editions. Regardless, McLaughlin has indeed slowed his pace of solo recordings in recent years, focusing more on collaborations with fellow Big Time Nature Bros like Seth Chrisman and Josh Mason. With Ruined By Luxury he returns with an expansive rumination on the idea of one’s space and, I presume, the inevitable loss of that space – themes that McLaughlin has explored to a certain degree on previous efforts but certainly not to the same depth as on this release. Here McLaughlin is painting on longer, sidelong canvases with only his banjo and trusted reel-to-reel machines. On “Ora”, tape loops clank and wash away in a slow-motion decay and left in their wake is the subtle presence of what I believe is McLaughlin’s room sound activity. Gradually waves of bowed banjo are introduced where they swell and recede, and either McLaughlin’s subtle tape work colors in the space between or things drift to near total silence. To be clear, this isn’t all starry-eyed tranquility, there are several movements within “Ora” and the flip side’s “Labora”, that feature both heavy low-end drones and piercing banjo overtones that exude a fairly grim and unsettling quality. At points, I’m thinking of all this as an American Primitive take on the work and ideas of Jürg Frey and Richard Skelton, but then again considering his own back catalog, I’m reminded that this is pure Nathan McLaughlin through-and-through. Ruined By Luxury is like meeting up with an old friend that you haven’t seen in years and picking up on a conversation that you’ve previously had without skipping a beat: a lot has changed, but it all flows so naturally.
People Skills is the solo project of Philly-based artist, Jesse Dewlow. To date, I’ve only laid ears on his two proper full-lengths that came out on Siltbreeze (2013) and Blackest Ever Black (2016), but he has a smattering of other releases that go back almost a decade now. On those full-lengths, though, Dewlow concocted a rather murky post-industrial sound that displayed a knack for smudged DIY pop songcraft, somewhere along the lines of Pink Reason or Russian Tsarlag, but with a more experimental edge to it. After a bit of a hiatus, Mount Moriah Tocsin marks the first of three new People Skills releases due out in the coming weeks/months and it finds Dewlow exploring slightly different sonic terrain. If I have my facts straight, Mount Moriah is a cemetery located in Philadelphia that as of a few years ago was, pardon the phrasing, all but left for dead. There have been efforts to restore this historic site over the past few years, though. I mention this because this new tape on the great Alien Passengers imprint does not just reference this location in its title, the notes for the release indicate that it was “Performed and recorded at the cemetery by Jesse Dewlow October 2018.” What you hear over the course of the two sides of this tape has little to do with song structures. In fact, other than the occasional sampled voices, vocals do not factor into these tracks at all. I’d describe this more as tapping into the energy of a space and the lost memories of those that inhabit that space. The release is filled with queasy sound samples and rhythmic tape loops that create an eerie hypnotic quality. In places, it sounds like a dream collaboration between Leyland Kirby and Thought Broadcast – all hazy and mysterious, like a less frightening and more humane Upside Down. Be prepared to binge away on this latest round from People Skills.
So happy to see Power Moves Library back in action after an extended break. From 2013-2017, this Toronto-based label was issuing some of the most interesting contemporary avant sounds out there with captivating releases from such artists as Delphine Dora, Chik White, Posset, and Derek Baron to name but a few. They were also responsible for the excellent Excavation Series that unearthed and compiled a wide range of sounds from around the world. This latest release is a split between two of the label’s signature artists: Talugung and Family Ravine (which is the latest recording alias of label head KW Cahill). Talugung, the solo project of Ryan Waldron, has previously put out three other releases on the label. 2016’s Folded Spring was a dizzyingly brilliant collection of sampled acoustic instrumentation and source material that was chopped and spliced with computer editing software to compose these fantastical sound environments. Waldron’s work as Talugung is really deserving of far more attention, and his side of this tape only adds to my firm belief in that. The sounds here flow together more effortlessly; gone are the jarring edits and transitions of Folded Spring. You hear what could be described as a sort of generative ambient gamelan ensemble attuned to the cosmos, but there is an audibly airy presence flowing through some of these unnamable instruments that keep you firmly planted in the here-and-now and questioning what it is that you’re actually listening to. It’s truly a gorgeous 18 minutes and 38 seconds of music. Family Ravine’s side finds KW Cahill returning to the electric guitar after several acoustic explorations with his brother in East of the Valley Blues and field recording excursions on his own as Downer Canada. If I’m not mistaken, you have to go back to some of the earliest Power Moves’ releases when he was working as Running Point that he was messing around with an electric six-string. Throughout his side’s three tracks, he free-associates his way through a worldly view of the blues and minimalism, from vaguely West African origins to more chiming and hypnotic Delta fingerpicking patterns. Cahill’s poetry, printed in the inner j-card, mirrors the flow of the music in what he describes: “To be cut like film strips, one scene leads to the next, to be rolled out in length and lit by the sun or to be spooled back in its canister and hidden in a box under the bed.” 1/2s is worth rolling out and taking all in on multiple occasions.
James Rushford – The Body’s Night LP (Black Truffle)
Rushford has been involved in some of my favorite collaborations in recent memory. In particular, his album, Manhunter, with Joe Talia and Cover You Will Softer Me from his project Ora Clementi with sound artist Crys Cole have logged quite a bit of turntable time over the years. His work with Oren Ambarchi and Kassel Jaeger, and several others that I’m sure I’m overlooking has been equally as compelling. The Body’s Night, however, is Rushford’s first solo release in a decade and one in which he composed, performed, and recorded everything on his own. As the title implies, there is a slightly foreboding nocturnal quality to the music that is established in the opening moments and seems to carry through the entirety of the piece. The label blurb mentions inspiration taken from black metal production values, which I admit I initially scoffed at a bit, but subsequent listens have illuminated a sort of scuzzy, washed out quality to some of the synth sounds and the occasional dramatic build that would likely invert the corpse paint of your most free-thinking avant metalhead friends (ok, maybe that’s a bit much). What I occasionally pick up on is some of the non-whispered moments of Felicia Atkinson’s A Readymade Ceremony, but there are more aural intricacies at play that are often times hard to pin down. Is that synth, string, or wind instruments in that section? What is creating all of that crackling and rustling sound? Is someone moving around in my house right now? Shit, is someone behind me? It’s tempting to draw on the cinematic qualities as the sounds unfold here, but dammit The Body’s Night doesn’t need to accompany anything: it has its own narrative structure; it is its own self-contained world. Put down your phone, close the lid of your laptop, and just listen. You’ll be slightly on edge, but you’ll be swept away nonetheless.
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