DECAYCAST Reviews: ALGIERS “Shook” (2023)

Before we dive into the album, let’s address this pesky comparison that Algiers have been getting lately: TV On the Radio. If you have been listening to music made by black people or if you are a black person who makes music that is stubbornly uncategorizable, receiving said comparisons will be inevitable. This is a comparison that the band savagely smirked at on their track “Can the Sub-Bass Speak?” But if you will, I can be able to help explain why the egregious comparison to such a band may not be as farfetched and random as it seems.

Like TVOTR, Algiers can kick out an electrifying jam when they need to, and when it happens, you can feel the passion through your body and soul. But they are not above also singing with a tired, angry world-weariness of negro spirituals long ago. And often when they sing, it is of anything they can use to either survive or battle the inevitable decline of our nation. They also gleefully mix genres when they sing tracks of despair, love, strength and hope. The difference between Algiers and TVOTR, remains this: neither Tunde Adebimpe or Kyp Malone can spit a smooth 16 like Fisher, tho.

On “73%”, Franklin Fisher spits as if he has been waiting for a long minute to shit talk the abyss and as he does it, he makes damn sure he isn’t alone. Zack de la Rocha gets his turn to grit his teeth on “Irreversible Damage” while the notoriously anonymous billy woods and horrorcore visionary Backxwash each trade red-eyes bars with Fisher on the first single “Bite Back” wrapping up the hell felt during the space between now and the 2020 protest/coronavirus plague. Throughout Algiers’ discography, it always sounded like the band wants more than justice, but a sense of revenge. It sounded like looking for resolve and not receiving one. Shook is the first album where Fisher no longer sounds alone.

If you are one of those who enjoyed the There is No Year bonus “Void”, you will be glad to know Fisher has not lost that wild fervor, as he spits bile towards clueless Caucasian people with supposed POC friends on the cover of “A Good Man”. But amidst the sneering at the world around him, Fisher also takes time to zero into his own world and heal his heart in the process. After going through a breakup, “I Can’t Stand It!” tackles his depression after the breakup with the assistance of Future Islands’ frontman Samuel T. Herring. Where past songs tackle the desolate scene that began with an Atlanta train station announcement (“Everybody Shatter” with Southern poet Big Rube), “Momentary” is that glimpse of light ending the album with a poem/meditation on death with Lee Bains III (of Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires) at the podium.

I neglected to mention the continued genre-agnostic attitude on this record, but all that needs to be said is that the album takes genres ranging from dub to jazz to garage rock to electronica to hip hop to gospel and soul and manages to weave them all in the project without sounding any bit out of place. As a result, the album feels constructed with the ear of a musical auteur. It was created to sound less like just a disc with songs on it, and more like a soundtrack to a collection of feelings and moments at one time. It’s the sound of coming to grips with everything that has happened.

Calling Shook a record of community would feel reductive and too focused on the red herring, but if the artists didn’t also know what it is to kick against the gates of hell, and choose to help rage against it, too, there is no telling whether or not it would have worked. It’s easier to say that if you felt an energetic lull on There Is No Year, Shook will sooner put that worry to bed than it would that pesky comparison they have been receiving. – mynameisblueskye

Order “SHOOK” here:

https://algierstheband.bandcamp.com/album/shook

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DECAYCAST Reviews: Giovanni Marks “2 Plaza 2” (2022)

Giovanni Marks’ 2 Plaza 2

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Every artist has a set aesthetic that adds to their art, and no one proves this better than rapper/producers. Whether you are the newscaster, the emo kid, the gangsta or anything, rap music has a tendency to have artists that box themselves in and make it hard to really allow complexities within that. Giovanni Marks is a different animal.

Those who hopped aboard the train either during the subtitle or Giovanni Marks phase, whether he was on Briefcase Rockers, Gold Standard Laboratories, or his own Get Crev Labs, will notice his aesthetic/role is of the cyberpunk, the scientist, the afrofuturist, the nerd with the Kid n’ Play haircut and Dracula cape. If hip hop is currently in its punk rock phase, Giovanni Marks is the New Wave/synthpunk with colored hair, jumpsuits and plenty of electronic instruments to hook up on stage. But while that aesthetic can give way to ideas of being introverted or reclusive, 2 Plaza 2 suggests that this spacey, futuristic aesthetic that Marks has been cultivating for years during his time as an MC is a universe that anybody can take part in.

2 Plaza 2 is a project that finds GIovanni Marks taking a backseat from rapping to assist friends like Juan Huevos and pink siifu with the avant-garde production he is known for. Take the opener, for example. A slow red siren rumble of synth bass giving way to an anonymous rewound sound all adding up to a sound that is as musically unsettling as it is fascinating. That is just “Alternative C”, which bears the subtitle of being the “nox-vox version”. While you are busy working out how the vox version would be delivered, singer Joseph Squire transforms a stomping noiresque beat into a seductive R&B track that leaves before you find yourself really falling into the groove.

Friends from art-rapper/multidisciplinary artist Koreatown Oddity, Pink Siifu and Mason Williams all come in to give color to Marks’ production from the rallying “Baby Teeth” to the intergalactic stream-of-consciousness delivery in “all night long” (which is delivered as both a regular track and a “space dub”) to the bounce of “Samuraid Hott” that will surely have trouble evading Shabazz Palaces vibes. They all may sound like fragments of ideas underneath a half-hour, but the shift from style to style is fascinating enough not only to keep your attention, but to likely leave you wanting to revisit such world all over again.

2 Plaza 2 can be described as a front row seat into Giovanni Marks’ world of spacey production, but what is different about this project, it’s that it insists that this electronic/avant-rap universe he has been building for years now isn’t only for him.

Listen/Buy here https://getcrevlabs.bandcamp.com/album/2-plaza-2

– Mynameisblueskye

DECAYCAST Reviews: Flesh Shuddering “Heroin​-​Hooked Hound” (Cruel Symphonies, 2022)

This album is packaged with great intention and effect, complete with a chic track booklet (I actually handed these out in middle school at a mall once with a Christian youth group), fold out poster and liner notes inside a medium sized garbage bag with a picture of said opiate crazed canine displaying full doggo junkie madness.  Excellent use of silence and quiet interruptions of the harsher bits. Synth, blasting harsh noise, fucked up tape loops and samples dancing around one another. Whispering maddening phrases in the apartment above you, while other parts are fillies with wanton bashing of scrap metal as screeching vocal loops disintegrate into violent thrashing feedback tones.  

This album gets psychedelic with the tape editing and post production effects guiding the recorded sessions into interesting and unexpected directions. Lots of approaches and moods presented on both sides, some tortured vocals that sound like they were recorded in the ventilation system of an insane asylum shine through in rather awkward ways, whether it be one of the three members of the band or a sampled phrase. Side two gets into some demented surrealist darkness of slurping synth tones and acoustic sounds.  But right back into piercing harsh noise squelching, the hound needs more and is coming back for more .  A real highlight from this project. I expected marconympha worship and instead find this collective making an extremely music concrete album with elements of harsh noise and industrial synth and tape manipulation driving things into odd spaces of fragmented chaos this one come highly recommended for the weirdos.  – Jacob DeRaadt

https://cruelsymphonies.bandcamp.com/album/heroin-hooked-hound

DECAYCAST Reviews : GRST “Container​+​=​object EP” (2021)

DECAYCAST Reviews : GRST “Container​+​=​object EP” (2021)

GRST ‘container​+​=​object EP’’s pleasingly adjunct description states only that it relies upon  ‘a variety of electro-acoustic techniques and physical modelling’, eschewing any form of wild conceptual structure in favour of a more detailed sonic study. Connoisseurs of physical modelling synthesis will no doubt recognise its presence – we’re not dealing with bold new territories here, but rather some extremely pensive, rhythmically free wanderings that travel from additive washes to organic plucks and rattles. The absence of any measurable pulse is perhaps ‘Maracaibo’s’ strongest feature – its textures are allowed to ebb and flow between various synthetic states without ever feeling pressured to reveal a defined compositional logic.

In contrast, the second track, ‘aruba’, invokes a distinctly modular tact, tying bursts of reverb to the gestating clangs and urgent bounces across glass and metal. We get some nieve stabs at melody, too, meandering repetitions that dance back and forth like the song of a sinister, cartoon music-box. Theres no development proper, nor does there need to be – ‘container​+​=​object’ works precisely because it sets up a limited palette and then proceeds to meekly explore its affordance, the listener invited to observe as GRST tests the sonic properties of each corner in turn. 

– Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully

Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully is a composer, video and performance artist from the UK. He produces work under the Distant Animals moniker (www.distantanimals.com), and runs both the production company 7000 Trees (www.7000trees.com) and the Difficult Art and Music label (difficultartandmusic.bandcamp.com). He holds an actual proper grown-up PhD in contemporary music, and currently lectures at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. 

DECAYCAST Reviews: B L A C K I E “Face The Darkness” (2020)

B L A C K I E: Face the Darkness reviewed by mynameisblueskye

“What is freedom to the average person?”

How ever you answer that question, the one thing you should know is that it probably doesn’t mean the same thing as does to art-punk auteur Michael LaCoeur aka B L A C K I E. To those who have ever listened to B L A C K I E, you will release that his album represents a natural freedom. The freedom to just be the man he was made to be without the world seeking to destroy him or cage him in. Nomadic by nature, nonconformist by choice and perhaps even by nature and unafraid to encourage it for others in his position. The opening lines of “While They Try to Kill Each Other” outlines one of his overall thesis of being B L A C K I E over electric drums better than any of us could ever try.

“Children laugh while they try to kill each other/at least the blood returns to the earth where it belongs, and out of the hands of in power”, bellows Michael in his dry and world-weary town crier scream. With danger everywhere in his wake, it would make sense that he finds silver linings here…if that is what you want to call it. On “There Is No Light”, he reports the history of laid waste in front of and committed towards the people. “There was no food, there were fists/there were no light, there were fists” all to come back to the devastating line. “We use to eat each other!” Entrails wrapped in crimson blood line the periphery of wherever B L A C K I E looks, even amongst those who towards those who call themselves allies and heroes. His second overall thesis “I am not you’r nigger!” is delivered in an angry tone only punctuated by a deep sense of pain and sorrow.

B L A C K I E’s mind may be a mass of continuously spinning wheels, but he will be damned if it ever spins for you. Even as he tackles topics such as suffering from a crippling addiction (“How to Let It Control You”), toxic “patriotism” (“Wave Your Flag”) and fascism/fake empathy (“Uncounted”), Michael knows that even HE is not above occupying the hot seat. Painting a picture of anxiety through a descriptive lens, “Meet the Demons” is claustrophobic in its description of not being able to think and feel freely.

Not being able to just be without judgment. So, after all of this, hearing him emerge free and ready to escape on “It Can’t Define Me” feels not only heartening, but like an anthem written to those looking for their own escape. B L A C K I E’s Face the Darkness may start off as B L A C K I E in the slaughter line witnessing victims meeting their end in HD and plotting his escape from such slaughter, but it sees to it that he isn’t his own cause of danger to himself. In the midst of this, B L A C K I E emerges with one last message (clue, rather) that overall defines not only the entire album, but the world and the philosophy of B L A C K I E: “Look around/Don’t look down”.

– Mynameisblueskye

Mynameisblueskye is a singer, songwriter, poet, and occasional blogger. An American-born Renaissance man who loves music so much, he has too many videos in his Watch Look after list. His bandcamp can be found here:

DECAYCAST Reviews: Tristan Welch “Asset / Defect” (Self Released, 2020)

 

On his newest EP, “Asset / Defect”  Tristan Welch explores a timeless dichotomy  of positive and negative expansions and contractions through space, silence, time and sound. Through glassy, shifting drones and tone poem movements ringing present, like a warm blanket after a cold night adrift on the nights moon last beam.  The album opens up with beautifully articulated  mid tempo oscillating synth pulses,  a faint buzzing underscored with a warm bath of tones; a calm yet slightly unnerving  respite; a rest for the restless, for the anxious, and for the forgotten.  This is slow patient, music, for one in a process of uncertainty, as well as one of discovery knows  that things can change, and every once in a great while, for the better, and maybe this time they will, that is the question this music asks, what is  change,  and when will it be cast upon us?

‘Given the inherently political nature of most of his music, “Asset / Defect” is a rare turn inward for Welch. As a person in recovery, “Asset / Defect” is an audio/visual accounting of sorts, a result from tallying up the ledger of negative character defects and positive assets. An accounting feat that is musically reflected in the clear balance between beautiful, ebullient tones and grainy distortion held at tension within the work.”

The A side  “Asset / Defect” seems a bit brighter in sound presentation overall but across the twenty minute EP, Welsh offers two movements which compliment each other in a dichotomy of undulation.  Wet delays and thick intertwined braids of reverberated strings cast doubt to those casting doubt, give hope to those giving hope, and push us all to look inward to a change of fresh air and relief.  The B side offers a similar, more contemplative, introspective place where the listener can identify with these living breathing wave manipulations, like a warm bath, tingling the skin, but never fully encapsulating the full dynamic of touch and pressure. Beautiful music for complicated times.

 

Highly recommended.

 

-Dr. Decaycast

 

 

DECAYCAST Reviews: Waxy Tomb “Imminent Fold” (Gilgongo Records, 2019)

DECAYCAST Reviews: Waxy Tomb “Imminent Fold” (Gilgongo Records, 2019)

WAXY TOMB is the work of multimedia artist Jules Litman-Cleper. We’ve been following the work of WAXY TOMB here at Decaycast for many years and after a splatter of homemade CDR’s over the years it’s nice to see her work presented in proper LP format, as well as adorned with the nuanced, futuristic, cyberpunk influenced digital art that they have come to be known for through video, live performances and 2D works. The LP is also accompanied with an art book containing expanded variations on a theme of the cover art. The other-worldly visuals are the perfect compliment for the music; dark, nuanced, intricate, alien, and complicated.

The sound of “Imminent Fold” continues where previously homemade releases have left off, with conceptually dense, yet structurally often minimal and stripped down electronic compositions, though there is structure; these exist as “songs” in the traditional sense, however they gel and mutate within the lexicon of Waxy Tomb’s visual and aural landscape to continue to tell a part of a larger story. The voice has always been an important aspect of Litman-Cleper’s work, and this LP is no exception, pushing her extended vocal techniques in effected ways further than they have existed before; blending beautifully with the dark, throbbing chirps of synthesizer explorations and static noise crumblings. Litman-Cleper’s sound is at once alien, and robotic, yet natural and “comforting” in a way. She is able to ride the tension of creating simultaneously a record, that, in a sense is both an experimental electronic record and an electronic pop record, and one pinned together through the visual and aural alien language that the artist has come to define within her aesthetic set. Pulling from assumed influences such as Laurie Anderson, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Tara Cross, and Bjork, Litman-Cleper creates a style of experimental electronic , left-field music all her own which speaks an alien language that with “Imminent Fold”, we just begin to understand and are all the more rewarded for it. Highly recommended.

Order via Gilgongo Records

DECAYCAST Premieres: Experimental Artist OUTPUT 1:1:1 Shares “Retroactive Rock Record” Video/Single

Output 1:1:1 is currently preparing for the release of his upcoming EP “Retroactive Rock Record”, due out on November 1, 2019, and has been kind enough to share with us the premiere of the second video, Directed by Elias Campbell and single from the album under the same name, “Retroactive Rock Record”. The track blends slow moving hypnotic vocals, dark plucked ethereal synthesizers and strings, and lush, ominous and lonesome sounding electronic background sounds. The sound of “Retroactive Rock Record” tells a dark and confusing story about confusion, loss, the unknown. The tones blend together perfectly to create at once a hopeful, albeit slightly unsettling sonic vibe. Take a look at the video below and make sure to pick up the album on November 1.

: “Writing this song was incredibly freeing, despite the central idea of it being a complete lack of control. I wrote the lyrics of the song the night of the 2016 US election. I felt a sense of helplessness swell as Trump’s election became inevitable-Canada seems to follow US election cycles pretty closely. I think helplessness can really encourage shame-the sense that I’m terrible and I am in this mess because I deserve this. It takes a lot more than reinforced positive thinking to work through, and writing this song was an attempt to redirect my helplessness into creating something.

watch the video here:

DECAYCAST Reviews : NEGATIVLAND “True False” LP/DL (Seeland, 2019)

DECAYCAST Reviews : NEGATIVLAND “True False ” LP/DL (Seeland, 2019)

If “True False” doesn’t destroy the world, it might just save it. I’m not one bit sure which would be worse. I dare anyone to listen on headphones walking through San Francisco’s Twitternob at twilight as socialmedia workers disperse and sidewalk-blanket markets roll out. Embracing the eviscerated stupidities of consumer society and then fighting to get free of those same idiot entrails now draped across your brain could make Negativland your solo silentdisco dance craze. Inside your head will be not only the sounds of marketforce lunacy, but the ghost traces of three Negativland members who’ve already shuffled off this mortal coil, Ian Allen, Don Joyce, Richard Lyons, kicking their heels at the Earth, the butterfly’s butterfly effect, and members still enfleshed, Mark Hosler, David Wills, Peter Connheim and Jon Leidecker with contributions from Ava Mendoza, Nava Dunkleman, M.C. Schmidt and Prairie Prince but their work is swept into a torrent of sampled language and sound, the electrocuted-elephant effect.

Since we’re all of us asleep all the time and find ourselves only occasionally awake on top of that, it occurs to me Negativland works the same way the human subconscious does. Both are made of always-on memory and an involuntary urge to chew up whatever isnt already pink slurry, gnawing in search of that single calorie of nourishment. The transcendental moment may be when you recognize it’s all going down the hatch anyway, out of sight, out of conscious mind. Like the gut, the subconscious isn’t built to chuck things back up for inspection. But barfing is underrated. Like food industry slurry, the ideology industry perfected its methods, designed to evade inspection, no eyes on the kill line, packaged for volume consumption. Negativland is underrated, their music serves as spectacular emetic, geysering your feed to sandblast the monolith of fiat happiness.

“It is Californians’ God-given right to water their lawnsYou know, there is no way to argue with thatPrint the manifesto print the manifestoDo you own research.No way to argue with that.Except with explosives.”

Of the multiple contexts Negativland evokes, mid-20th century ad-man polish has become their arch brand. The smiling voice that locates us in inert collective conscience, situating us in the vacuum space of capitalism’s dominant cultural mode: the con. Having seized pop music and advertising’s means of production, Negativland have long been masters of the weaponized ear worm. Each wriggler is impaled on a barbed hook of dense wordplay, segmented samples sourced from the mediasphere are always-already persuasive, wriggling mashups that compel close-reading at first just to hear the slogan, but then to anchor the preposterous and political contexts from which each source has been sampled. Unabashed about dense language and conceptual complexity, those who refuse to listen will still find their minds on the hook. They may suffer, commercial jingles rendered undigestible by semantic clusterbombs, their preferred identities and rationalizations perpetually stranded between disbelief and stalled rebellion. Close listening requires a doubling of cognitive dissonance, the line, the sources of the line, infrasectionality with the world before you. This doubling is itself a survival strategy for life under late capitalism, to ditch habituated scripts and act in the incomparable present.

“My life in the woods has been ruinedStand by.Pending final test.This noise!Wonderful isn’t it.The sound of American inventiveness.I may go mad.But think of the future you have. Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about? Stand by. The question is lost in the sound of the explosion. Unfortunately. We. You. We are not destroying anything. We. And the creatures that assemble your phone. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world.”

The album includes a booklet that warns “Play twice before reading.” Inside, the crafted lines are transcribed as lyrics so reading without listening separates each verse from the  aural context of each sample. Pulling sources out of context is the most basic method of propaganda, but Negativland makes poetry from propaganda inviting us to another possibility entirely. The poetry of “True False” asserts a politics that doesn’t need to preach or cancel when it can surpass by wide margins of wit and a call to run, hide, then fight back. “True False” bears vital witness to floundering habitually disingenuous simplistic cons that paralyze collective action. Desire and derision may yet survive the slurry to congeal again, the Golem of post-consumer conscience.

-Pharmar Histamine

DECAYCAST Reviews: Bonnie Baxter “AXIS” (Hausu Mountain, 2019)

Ok so once in a while something so twisted, mutated, alien and sinister lands in the inbox and what a rare joy this situation is, and that’s exactly how we would describe the new album “AXIS” from Brooklyn based producer Bonnie Baxter, which, by the way is out NOW on the esteemed and never disappointing Hausu Mountain imprint, and you should go buy it right now! On “AXIS”, Baxter blends chaotic electronic blasts of sputtering, broken IDM rhythms with chopped and mutated alien vocal transmissions. The pacing and intensity are both set on high as Baxter belts forth a scattering array of tempo, time, and timbre changes seemingly on the neckline of a dime, all while creating a dark, unsettling yet unifying and coherent collection of tracks. This is maximalist music for an alien invasion where the beings slice open the ear, amplify it and reconfigure the soud intake structure; it is now inverted and begins omitting violent, brooding, and cynical laugh tracks for the apocalypse. Some tracks such as, “Spirit Enema” focus on more minimalist, albeit twisted takes on IDM/House music percussion with ominous shifting tones backing childlike vocal tone poems. Despite the often whimsical yet twisted vocal presentation, the electronics hold their own and never stalemate, every sound within every track is a now sonic discovery that adds depth and complexity to the album overall and the track within itself.

Other tracks like the later “Celestite” offer lush undulating muffled brass like textures which give breadth to complex yet minimal percussion tom lines as well as wells of elegantly placed reverb and delays, all sitting beautifully and elegantly in the mix. The sheer range of sonic explorations sound wise, percussion and vocal wise is impressive in itself , but the fact that composition wise, this album flows so well, despite it’s wide chaotic reach and conceptual points of entry, drops it in the highly recommended category for us, don’t sleep on this, A+ twisted electronic jams!