All kinds of experimental music can be found on Bandcamp: free jazz, avant-rock, dense noise, outer-limits electronics, deconstructed folk, abstract spoken word, and so much more. If an artist is trying something new with an established form or inventing a new one completely, there’s a good chance they’re doing it on Bandcamp. Each month, Marc Masters picks some of the best releases from across this wide, exploratory spectrum. August’s selection includes feedback loops made with water, abstracted takes on songs by Kylie Minogue and Billie Holliday, a survey of experimental sounds in Canada, and the soundtrack to a film about the aftermath of war in Kosovo.
Chad Clark & Damon Smith
Hallucinated Citations
Cassette
The first collaboration between Chicago guitarist Chad Clark and St. Louis bassist Damon Smith, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. From the start, the pair sound in sync, taking a relatively minimal approach—Clark mostly dealing in small notes and sharp chords, Smith using percussive string plucks and quick sawing—while building up momentum. That forward motion is sustained throughout four rich pieces, a couple of which stretch well past the 10-minute mark. The energy across Hallucinated Citations is so consistent, it’s hard to pick out highlights, but Smith and Clark do save the best for last. Final track “the Section sign §” brings their kinetic interplay to a peak, suggesting their next meeting could reach an even higher level.
DISHMISHA
Podos-keller-Palladin
I know nothing about the Russian artist Dishmisha and that’s part of what makes Podos-keller-Palladin so interesting: its five overdriven tracks sound like they come from nowhere. There’s a hint of the best overblown EDM purveyed by the digital hardcore contingent 30 years ago, but who knows if Dishmisha has even heard of that short-lived scene. Regardless, every cut here is a fuzzed out swirl of fast beats and broken-down machinery. Dishmisha is good at varying the speeds and volumes throughout, but my favorite parts are when things careen fully out of control. Take “Saravah Soul,” a dizzying two-minute detonation that sounds like a room full of dot-matrix printers trying to escape a four-alarm fire.
Liz Meredith
Repro – Ext
The latest release from Baltimore-based violist and composer Liz Meredith builds upon her excellent 2019 album Repro. That album mixed viola, electronics, and tape loops into four diverse pieces that explored heavy drone and choppy rhythms. You can hear similarities in the way Meredith patiently and imaginatively manipulates her sound sources on Repro – Ext, but this time around it all feels bigger and bolder. Across two nine-minute-or-so tracks, Meredith grinds out looping drones with a gravity that feels extracted from the earth’s core. The tension between, as the label puts it, “the immaculate premise of the perpetual drone and the slow deteriorations and strange protrusions that characterize the materials of capture,” make for an engrossing listen, as Meredith’s assured arranging of noises creates a world to get lost in.
George Rayner-Law & Stonecirclesampler
Research and Development 1: Field Annihilation // Technoise Cuts Through Stone Circle Ambient Grime
Cassette
An extremely busy and compelling split release from two UK-based noise/drone artists. George Rayner-Law describes himself as a “sound worker,” and his 15 tracks exude the sweat and focus of devout labor. Processing and looping field recordings, Rayner-Law creates “a kind of totalising, annihilating sound” that is both confrontational and fascinating. It’s dense noise, but offers enough pores and gaps that you can enter its three dimensions and poke around inside its windy tunnels. Stonecirclesampler, an even more prolific artist, matches Rayner-Law’s energy and volume by centering noise around rhythmic repetitions, shaping beats that cut through fields of static. A track like “Over” is almost blindingly simple in its stereo-destruction, pounding a loop so thick and fiery it’s hard not to be hypnotized.
Post Scriptvm
Cекта
Cassette
The cover of Cекта is both disturbing and compelling: a head with two closed eyes and a third open one grafted in the middle, above a mouth lodged with a squirming crustacean. It’s a nice match for the music of the Russian American artist Post Scriptvm, which can be unnerving and calming, as if soothing drones and troubling echoes are sides of the same coin. Cекта offers six tracks in 30 minutes, running from elongated tones that drift and reverberate to throbbing miniature beats and dead voices that haunt the surroundings. Post Scriptvm sees this tape as a companion to his 2016 album, Tучи над Борском, and certainly if you like this you’ll do well to check that one out too. But Cекта also stands on its own as a contained, well-conceived work, a kind of bombed-out dream where things that passed long ago still vibrate.
Sengle
Orange Toddler
The new release from Vietnam-based Sengle, comes with a disclaimer from the artist: “I don’t especially recommend listening to it.” Fortunately, I do! Made mostly on one synth over the course of a month last fall, the album has a consistent aesthetic—mostly minimalist electronic sounds doled out in repetitive patterns—yet a wide range of results (Sengle opted not to even out the volume from track to track “to prevent boredom.”) Some pieces, like the sparkling “The Wise Man,” pay some homage to early Space Age electronic work like that of Raymond Scott. But the title of the album was chosen because it’s “the opposite of a blue old man,” and most of it does feel fresh, especially the longest track, the 11-minute “IRL,” which mixes ambience, noise, and industrial rhythms into a cavernous and seemingly endless musical space.
Erikk Skodvin
After
For at least two decades, Berlin-based artist Erikk Skodvin has made tense, evocative music both under his own name and in the project Svarte Grenier. His latest work is the soundtrack to a “a docu-fiction hybrid film set in Kosovo…which deals with the aftermath of war.” Using cello, zither, and synth, Skodvin creates short, dense pieces, some of which also contain the vocal and violin work of Denmark’s Katrine Grarup Elbo. As with much of Skodvin’s previous music, the sound here is dark and distant, making the listener feel as if they’re walking through pitch-black forest catching glimpses of movement and light. What’s most impressive is how quickly Skodvin can create these tangible atmospheres; few tracks here are much longer than two minutes, yet each establishes an enveloping universe that could persist for much longer.
Various Artists
Anthology of Experimental Music from Canada
Compact Disc (CD),
Italian label Unexplained Sounds Group compiles interesting experimental music from places all over the world, including Lebanon, Japan, Persia, Peru, and more. Their latest anthology features 15 artists from Canada, offering a pretty wide range of fascinating sounds. Much of it is drone-based and seems generated with electronics, but the amount of territory covered is impressive given those parameters. There are mesmerizing held tones, waves of ambience, hints of busy field recordings, and swells that evoke movie soundtracks. Kaunsel’s “Geometry Problems” has a mechanistic beat that’s like abstract dance music; e. dulanowsky’s “Time to Go Outside” ripples like an unidentified outer space transmission; Kuma’s “An Ending Given Human Form” suggests the far-off sounds of an ancient ritual. Every track has a little story to tell, making Anthology of Experimental Music from Canada as much of an experience as a sampler.
Jacob Wick Ensemble
Something in Your Eyes
Compact Disc (CD)
It’s not easy to describe Jacob Wick’s approach to music. His sound floats between chamber jazz, wild improvisation, classical-leaning structures, and dramatic vocalizations along the lines of Scott Walker or Circuit Des Yeux. But there’s so much more to his aesthetic, and it flowers quite nicely on Something in Your Eyes, ostensibly a covers album in which Wick’s Mexico City ensemble make abstracted, highly-morphed versions of songs by Emmylou Harris, Alice Coltrane, Kylie Minogue, and Billie Holiday. Wick seems more interested in matching the intangible spirit of the originals than covering them in any conventional sense. The result is a beguiling album of complex, unpredictable tracks, peaking when Wick’s scale-climbing vocals match the crests of his collaborators, who with drums, cello, violin, bass, and guitar, weave spells that are more like séances than songs.
