Nils Frahm - Screws

is offering up his new opus as a free download, as well as available physically from Erased Tapes.

Berlin-based pianist and composer Nils Frahm didn't let a broken thumb slow him down. Instead of taking a forced sabbatical, that would've lasted months, he instead wrote 9 gorgeous miniatures for 9 fingers. 9 compositions for solo piano, unaccompanied and unadorned, the music is glacial and patient, resonant and laden with intention. He has absorbed the strengths of Satie's virulent strain, but ditched a lot of the frivolity the French are famous for. Anyone who got into either of Gonzales' solo piano records will be in heaven. Perfect music for window gazing, watching the oncoming fall.

Nils Frahm tends to be associated with what is called 'Neoclassical' music, sometimes known as 'Modern Classical' or maybe merely 'Ambient', but he has discarded a lot of the stylized elements, the clicks, cuts, groans and droans, to make something bare and timeless. The singularity of style is approaching, and we are reverting back to pure MUSIC: melody, harmony, rhythm. I foresee a renaissance in all things classic. You will begin to see trad jazz, chamber quartets, Baroque counterpoint. Everybody is mining the past, to become their truest selves, and its like we're living in a timeless void, devoid of genre restrictions and exclusivity. Everybody is trying to make their heart's music to the best of their abilities, and Nils Frahm has the chops and expertise to make an emotional statement, to conjure a mood. It is nice hear to something unaffected, unstylized. Honest and simple and very, very effective.

Screws, and anything on Erased Tapes really, is perfect reflective music for the abandoning summer, for the onset of Autumn. Frost creeps over the windows like a cataract, a lifetime of memories emerges from the sudden stillness and dark. The 9 songs of Screws can act as an amniotic cathedral of emotions, a holy temple of reverberation, recombinant sounds forming crystal shifting clouds of ringing piano beauty. It can bring tears to yr eyes, and peace to yr heart. It can quiet yr mind, it can make you a better person.

Nils Frahm writes beautiful music, which he is making available digitally for free, with hard copies available from Erased Tapes.

Screws

if yr in or around Portland, this evening, you can see Nils live, at Classic Pianos, with Marcus Fischer.

Nils Frahm with Marcus Fischer

Classic Pianos

3003 SE Milwaukie Ave.

Portland, Or 97202

event page

Grouper - He Knows, He Knows, He Knows

Here's a tiny sliver... Grouper seems to exist on her own plane. Calling through the mist, reaching out through the windows. Seeking connection, yet defying it. Liz Harris' ambient drones have heart, a heart that is broken. It is black eyed and sullen and bewitching. This miniature album (it was released on a 3" CDr and vinyl 7". It came out between Way Their Crept and Wide. On it, she explores the limits of her voice, which ripples like a pond in the woods over the course of these three tracks. She sounds entirely sweet, seductive. A siren that calls you to sharp rocks. Edges you further on into the night-time. Like the work of Leyland Kirby, aka The Caretaker, she uses reverb and delay to give a sensation of recollection, and the loop-y subject matter of the material makes it seem like a memory played over and over. Someone you can't forget? What compels Liz Harris to construct these worlds? Is she just that anti-social? My friend said once that Grouper's music was like someone in a bedroom, nodded out on junk, slowly rocking and absently strumming a guitar. Only this time, even the guitar is missing. There is nothing to hold her down - she is otherworldly. I heard another reviewer mention the works of Arvo Pärt, these three songs also seem like spectral choruses. I finally saw Grouper play live, as part of the Improvisation Summit Of Portland (you can read about that here if you like. She played in a nearly black room, with a dancer swinging a lantern like the hermit. Her music put owls in my mind, cast shadows of branches. People like Grouper are part of what lured me out towards the NorthWest, i just felt this compulsion to be NEAR them. People like Grouper, Earth, Daniel Menche, Pete Swanson (not sure if he's still here or not). Finally being in the same room with Liz Harris, breathing the same air; it was something i'd been ANTICIPATING. It seemed fated. To see her live, was to re-appreciate her music. I've been listening to this year's Mirroring project with Jesy Fortino of Tiny Vipers, as well as the epic A I A : Alien Observer. She's inspiring; its like she'll lead you down a dark tunnel with a lantern of stars. She'll show you drawings on the wall. She's one of the masters of the modern drone and loop. Raw heart. Direct appreciation. A shadow on the walls of yr mind. This is witchcraft... Grouper's music possesses you. It made me feel like i want to listen to this person every day. I want to fall in love, and have my heart broken. I want her to tell me stories. I've decided to hear every note of music that she's made, let her wraith-like sadness and distance transport me. To a shadowy place, full of soft white light. Speaking softly. Slowly. Sometimes not at all. The sound of evening falling, the streetlights arising. Memories of Autumn. It is black-clad and it is smoking.
 Lose yrself...

He Knows, He Knows, He Knows

Dive Signals - 10,000 Tropics

Here's a pleasant warm breeze that swirled its way into my mailbox; Dive Signals is one Angel Ortega, a bedroom producer from Orange County.

Like a sunset on a cloudy day, warm and gauzy; pink, orange, and red. Colorful drones and smooth downtempo beats that caress all the right pleasure centers, this is like viewing instrumental hip-hop or 90s trip-hop at the bottom of the ocean. A narcotic haze hangs over the whole record, a warm summer lull. This would've been called Folktronica at one point, with its cheap and easy strumming guitars and head-nodding beatbase; if anyone happened to dig that Bibio record i posted a long time ago, or the 2muchachos one, for that matter, will be into this. It could appeal to Grouper and J Dilla fans alike.

Ortega uses the cheapest imaginable gear, with every element tweaked and polished; reverbed, EQed, run through various guitar pedals, 10,000 Tropics is a unified whole, a singular experience, best served up on pillow-y headphones, perfect soundtrack for new spring ambling. Dive Signals is an up and coming talent, only two releases to his credit so far, and 10,000 Tropics can be had, for whatever price you deem worthy. I've really been enjoying this one. Let it be the score for the coming blossoms, pollen and bees.

Band Camp
FB

Selected Ambient Works vol. 2

People like to hate on christmas, venting about capitalism, christianity, family traumas, and other right-wing cacodemons. There is a lot to despise, and it is easy to get washed away in a grinch-green tidal wave of elitism and misanthropy.

Oddly enough, i have managed to dodge the bitterness bus this year; being far, far away from any kind of roots or history, being so far outside of mainstream society that i am just like a kid, agape in wonder at the window of some FAO Schwartz. I have been awash in sensuality, in aesthetics, marvelling at the christmas lights staining the misty evenings, watching hordes of drunken santa clauses take over the streets of SW Portland. Its been an oddly beautiful time, in my life.

This time of year always reminds me of another important, but weird, landmark in my evolution, that is far removed from families and egg-nogs; i started taking psychedelic drugs on christmas. I dropped acid for the first time on christmas, with a flickering candle-lit angel burning itself into my own private mythology. As we get into the opening stages of Capricorn, i feel the elegiac hum, a silent and timeless grace descend like a blanket of heavy Chicago snow, a feeling of REAL religiosity, that is weakly imitated by the hallmark holiday.

Around this time of year, my former wife and i would commemorate this anniversary, liked to hallucinate and trip out on the christmas lights. We had an abysmal daily grind, but loved each other tremendously while on these higher vibrations, and still do. One time, after going through a particularly rough spell, we dropped some acid and listened to Aphex Twin's 'Selected Ambient Works vol II', which has remained in steady rotation ever since, and decided that it was the best christmas music of all time. It was like we were able to see each other with fresh eyes, forget all the hurtful words and bullshit plastic holiday hustle and bustle, we were quiet, serene and timeless, whispering words that echo through lifetimes, through decades, and i hear them, even now. They remind me of the changing of the seasons, of timeless values like love and warmth and family, and i am child-like and in wonder, in my heart.

This music always reminds me to feel that way, far-away ghostly bells that are innocent but alien and eerie, at the same time. I had a friend get mad at me for lending him these disks, at one point, he had some sort of astral projection dream where he was whisked away to some alien airport, where he was being menaced. So if you like that kind of thing, i would recommend checking this out! These discs are some of the most gorgeous, emotional ambient minimalism i have ever heard. I have listened to them 150,000, and i never get tired of them. They plunged me into the deep end of ambient deep listening, an insatiable hunger for atmospheric sounds to stain the night air, to stain the shadows of my mind, until my dreams flicker and flame like a tree top angel.

Many of you have probably heard these before, but i would advise giving them a spin, beneath colored lights, perhaps with someone you love and trust. Have a quiet conversation, watch the spaces between the words. I will be playing both discs, on dec. 25th, to commemorate the occasion, and perhaps some of you can join me in the ritual, wherever you may be.

Disc 1
Disc 2

Final - Guitar and Bass Improvisations 1

Listening to this record is like floating in a vat of warm gelatin, with occasional seismic reverberations creating ripples on the surface of yr skin. Now stay there 100 years, until yr skeleton drifts away, and you can taste every star, simultaneously.

This is Justin Broadrick's Final project, actually his first musical incarnation, started in 1983. They began as a consumer electronics-like power noise outfit, but have drifted beyond, to make the chillest and most grandiose dark ambient soundscapes. Here, Broadrick is stripped of the tethers of beat and formula, dreamier even than the already somnolent Jesu. Its like Brian Eno producing Skullflower or Stars of the Lid, and it is astounding that these sounds are coaxed from strings. JKB scores vast, inhuman spaces better than any i know, perhaps tied with Brian Williams, aka Lustmord, but more human and with more heart. Its like the humans wrestling with alien presence in Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, which Final also did a score for.

I pick this album almost arbitrarily, as i've enjoyed listening to it a lot in the past few days, and i'm bouncing back into the writing game. I'm a homeless traveller now, with many interesting experiences and revelations, and lots and lots of good music to succor and aid me. I've also been working on 2 other blogs, and hope to have all 3 working together, in tandem, and making some unusual and interesting art and revelations. All the better to eat you with.

Final - Guitar and Bass Improvisations 1

Owl Splinters

When i was a young man, my friends & i used to like to drive out to the frozen beaches of Lake Michigan, during the winter. We would play on the treacherous shelf-ice, staying well after dark, watching nuclear sunsets over frozen waves, suspended in time. It felt dangerous, sure, but also exhilirating; wild, but also quiet and contemplative. Most of all, it seemed as if we had stepped into another reality, pulling back the purple velvet curtain of twilight; that we were the only people, anywhere.
I've heard Deaf Center's music described as 'desolate'. To me, it definitely has the feeling of examining something vast, something immense, but it does not strike me as empty nor malevolent. Erik Skodvin, one half of the Norwegian duo, is adept at evoking cinematic moods, whether in Deaf Center, or his myriad of solo ventures, such as Svarte Greiner. But where Svarte Greiner is dipped in pitch-black menace, Owl Splinters seems more Solaris than Fri. the 13th.
The pieces, as a whole, tend to flow into another, making a cohesive album, without a stand-out single, per se, although a listener new to their world might start with Time Spent, with its light, minor-key piano lament, or I Would Never Have with its swells of cello feedback, to get a sense of what these two are on about. Overall, the mood is one of a 70s kodachrome saturated thriller, like Satie furniture music observed through thin walls, something ominous, something sad. Most of the album consists of cello and piano, and perhaps it is the organic source of their sounds, and their classical backgrounds, that make Deaf Center stand head and shoulders above their stony, drony brethren. Great care is obviously taken with the placement of each note, the gaps filled with ambience, like reverbs and surface crackle; and musically, they are more adept than yr average bedroom-composer, with slight, masterful dissonances, creating even more mood and texture.
Everything i've ever heard by either of these guys has seemed wholly realized, a world unto itself. I was ecstatic when i realized that they had a new full-length out, as its been over 5 years since their debut, Pale Ravine. I fell in love, instantly, with the new record, and looked forward to listening to it over and over again, to write this review. I designate the status of Instant Classic, and i don't say these things lightly. Its like something just seems right, like you just found the record yr going to be sleeping to for the next 3 months. Most tellingly, for me, is that Deaf Center seems to manifest things from my subconscious, things i don't know that i know, or never quite knew how to say. Its like we're neighbors, in the same haunted hotel. No matter how many times i encounter this with music or art in general, it never ceases to amaze me, or fill me with gratitude.

This is a perfect 10. Check it, now! Then buy 5 copies. Give 'em away as Valentines.



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