Experimental Music

[Music] Various Artists – Decay, Death and Darkness – Aural Visions Of Beksiński’s Art

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Zdzisław Beksiński was a Polish multimedia artist whose utopian realist works stood in stark contrast to his rather jovial personal demeanor.  He may have been an artists whose work could scare the hell out of you, but he was also quite a decent man who had a fondness for classical music, as well as some rock (his son, Tomasz, was a noted DJ who committed suicide in 1999).

Once again, the brilliant folks at Eighth Tower Records, a subgroup of Unexplained Sounds, have released a compilation whose subject inspired some of the most brutally dark ambient music artists active to come up with some bleak aural monstrosities.

[Music] black (w)hole – altered states

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black (w)hole are an Austrian drone-psych band who are covering similar ground to Masaki Batoh’s legendary group Ghost.  Don’t think that this is their only influence, however.  One can hear shards of Blue Cheer, The Melvins, and other Japanese psych bands like High Rise and White Heaven. This is well-recorded, powerful, and drone-laden enough to let your mind melt for a few moments. Recommended.

[Music] Various Artists – ELECTROFRAMEWORK

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Unexplained Sounds empresario Raffaele Pezzella is on a quest to make sure the best in experimental and electroacoustic music gets published.  It seems like, week after week, he is releasing a compilation of stunning quality from a specified region, a broad retrospective, or his own delightfully noisy work as Sonologyst.

These tracks might melt your headphones a bit, but the sounds are, in their own way, blissful.  Familiar names such as Sonologyst, Stefan Schmidt, Fahmi Mursyid and Thomas Grenzebach appear alongside a slew of new artists whose career trajectory will be interesting to follow.

Another masterpiece of a comp.

[Music] Various Artists – Anthology of Electroacoustic Lebanese Music

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When he’s not working on his own music as Sonologyst, Raffaele Pezzella of Unexplained Sounds captures a lot of attention by releasing travelogue compilations covering the best of experimental and dark ambient music from various countries and regions. This one may well be his crowning effort.

All of these, with the exception of Sharif Sehnaoui, are unfamiliar names, but the sounds, which range from slow, churning, rhythmic drone to post-Industrial noise, the compilation introduces what I’m hoping is an energetic crop of new music composers whose influence will spread quickly both inside and outside the Levant.

Could a Syrian or Iraqi electroacoustic scene be next?  I surely hope so!

Sharif Sehnaoui

[Music] Hviledag – Minder i Fire Satser

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Hviledag is the moniker of Anton Friisgaard, who has an EP due for release on September 22.

Listening to it, it seems Anton has captured the spirit of the best of 1970s Kosmich Musik out of Germany (think Cluster/Kluster and the solo releases by Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius [RIP], Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze during their peak in the mid-1970s, and even pre-robot Kraftwerk).

Don’t think, however, that this is some boring copy of the masters.  Anton brings fresh ideas to the genre.  The recording quality, however, is so familiar and comfortable to me that if this release were to come out on vinyl, I would be thrilled to listen to it and place it along with the greats mentioned earlier.

[Music] Ataşehir – Colorful Places to Live and Play

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Ataşehir is the side project of Sumatran Black, an expatriate residing in the Anatolian side of Turkey.  The music roaring out of my speakers sounds, in part, like a black-ambient version of a 1950s B-Movie sci-fi soundtrack (trust me, this is a high compliment, considering my brother and I grew up as fans of the film genre and the music it produced) and a touch like the end of the movie Solaris, where film composer Eduard Artemiev goes into a drone which grows louder and louder until it crescendoes.

There is an amusing irony that the song titles, as Ataşehir mentions on his site, “are taken from aspirational advertising slogans of various residential developments from around the world.”

There is a bleak, black beauty to this album.  It ends with a progressive-rock length final track clocking in at 48 minutes. Colorful Places to Live and Play Bandcamp Exclusive Compilation Version. . As it turns out, it is the least brutally dark track on the album, making for a pleasantly drony listening experience.

[Music] Necromishka – The Space Between Us

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This is another weird, nearly terrifying, yet wonderful work from the nexus of musicians floating around Tel-Aviv and involving Tamar Singer.

Necromishka continue the neofolk tradition, mixing it with some of the hallucinatory vibe which gave early Current 93 its power.  The vocals in Beast of Prey, for instance, are slowed down to something so eerie that they should have belonged to a character in a David Lynch movie.

The other tracks give the feel of the soundtrack that should be made, if anyone is insane enough to try it, of Isadore Ducasse’s ur-Surrealist masterpiece, Les Chants de Maldoror.