Lingua Ignota—Sinner Get Ready

Lingua Ignota’s latest remake of the 1987 Swans album Children of God is a quieter affair than followers may expect. Kristin Hayter hails from an active noise scene in Rhode Island which has until now provided her stylistic template—and an endless supply of abusive men to draw inspiration from. Sinner Get Ready swaps out screeching power electronics for restrained analogue instrumentation, giving further emphasis to Kristin Hayter’s intense vocals than ever before.

This proves a double-edged sword. The strength and vulnerability of Hayter’s performance shines brighter. The deficiencies of her repetitious lyrics become impossible to ignore. It sounds uncharitable, but Hayter is a one-trick pony; she uses religious iconography to explore the power dynamics of violence, abuse and revenge. This is interesting the first few times you hear it but very quickly feels hackneyed and overwrought.

Similar to Nick Cave’s compulsive invocation of Jesus, Hayter’s treatment of Christianity feels awkward and lazy, like a first-resort attempt to cram power into their work. Perhaps this exposes a bias in my own enjoyment of noise—but I can’t help feeling that a vital layer of abstraction and transcendence gets lost in all the structure and dogma. When Hayter was turning everything up to 11, it brushed the transcendence that lies within organised religion—the zenith of which can be found in the album Yirat Hashem, by an unknown artist. Quieten things even a little, and the whole illusion crumbles and feels like fool’s gold.

Sinner Get Ready is enjoying a rapturous reception but I can’t really figure out why. Lyrically and thematically it retreads the exact same ground as its predecessors—and instrumentally it is nowhere near as brave, unusual or arresting. Previous Lingua Ignota album CALIGUA was the body and the blood of Christ. Sinner Get Ready is some nice crackers and communion wine that got delivered to the church by Brakes.

Sinner Get Ready is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

The Microphones—Microphones in 2020

For Microphones in 2020, Phil Elverum resurrects a long-dead nom de plume under which he recorded much of his most enduring and beloved work. Elverum has been a bold and restless artist throughout his decades-long career, which arguably came to a head with the passing of his partner Geneviève Castrée in 2016. In the wake of that loss, Elverum disparaged the mystic introspection that characterised his early work and turned to raw, brutal realism. A door had been opened, or closed, it seemed, forever.

The title of Microphones in 2020 is consciously absurd. If Elverum has outgrown soul-searching, why resurrect the project? And what place does it have in a year which has seen far greater focus on community action and the collective good than personal stability and mental health?

It’s a welcome surprise then, to find The Microphones’ sound almost unchanged from its past life 17 years ago. Very little has been ‘transformed’ or ‘modernised’; Elverum’s warm and melancholic guitar has the same old tone, his bass still buzzes and drums clip uncontrollably. The waves of distortion feel like an old friend. This plays into the lyrical content of the album rather neatly, as Elverum lists off production techniques, inspirations and aspirations of his early twenties. It’s a kind of straight-faced self-parody, almost like an experimental exercise; “can I return to this point in my life? Does it still exist?”

There’s a security that comes with age; an assured voice, confidence, balance, the ability to assert, relax, listen, make plans. Old Microphones feels like raw nerves kneaded by brass knuckles, born from the fire and confusion of troubled youth. In an edition of the podcast Song Exploder, focused on his track ‘I Want Wind To Blow’, you can almost hear Elverum’s cringing and wincing as he tries to reconcile his twenty-year-old voice with that of his late thirties. But perhaps that’s where Geneviève comes in, albeit indirectly. It’s only human to treat companions as vessels for your own stability, your own sense of self, to the point that when “the beast of uninvited change” visits, an entire life falls into disorder and must be radically reshuffled. Old doubts, fears, uncertainties and modes of expression wash back ashore, suddenly as acute as they felt all those years ago.

All this retrospection could’ve been arrogant, self-serving, self-mythologizing. You only have to look to Mark Kozelek’s recent work for that. But Microphones in 2020 is too wry and objective to fall into those traps. It explores how seriously we take ourselves when we’re young, how earnest and impassioned we can be, discussing how goofily endearing and valiant that outlook is. Elverum sings of him and his friends, “we’d go on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon”. It’s a refreshing counterpoint to the popular notion that idealism and imagination die before you hit double figures. They’re visible in most of us long after that point and never die, lying dormant but rumbling, waiting to squeak out of the cracks.

Microphones in 2020 is just as confrontationally personal as 2016’s A Crow Looked At Me. It’s actually helped by its distance from Geneviève’s death, Elverum’s laser focus given permission to roam rather than firing again and again on the same open wound. There are moments of ecstatic beauty here which 2016 Elverum would not have allowed in his work. And a long-dormant sound is resurrected, every bit as fresh as it was all those years ago.

Microphones in 2020 is available for purchase and steaming here. Watch the audio/visual presentation below.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

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Laurel Halo—Possessed

Metahaven’s 2018 documentary Possessed summarised the first steps of our messy divorce from technology. The internet age promised a joyful future delivered by instant, uncensored global communication. But the web has instead tangled us. It's bought itself out, reduced humans to commodities, been hijacked to sow profound worldwide division. Its chatter has become as deafening as it has meaningless. We are reliving the 1970s, a perverse rotting of the previous decade’s utopian values. With Possessed, Laurel Halo provides the soundtrack to this disintegrating future.

Possessed is at its most striking when noisiest. ‘Zeljava’, a lead-heavy and costive mid-point track, lingers long after it’s finished. But even the soundtrack's gentler passages—with Halo stepping back to make space for Metahaven’s visuals—make a very strong impression. Contrasts between the soundtrack’s two extremes are abrupt and jarring. Themes are introduced as flippantly as they are chucked away, and instrumentation is unswervingly eclectic. Possessed is a picture of chaos. A whole comprised of mismatched, conflicting pieces.

If one thing unifies Halo's material here, it’s panic. No matter the form, the content is fear. The solo piano of ‘Rome Theme III’ is a good example; bare and baroque when compared to its electronic peers, but no less defamiliarising. The piece stops and starts in staccato half-phrases—it’s like an animal limping from its predator, sustained by will alone, seconds from collapse. Conversely, ‘Breath’ is an amelodic and ambient piece—but it feels like Angelo Badalamenti soundtracking Hell. One of the few reprieves is ‘Stabat Mater (Except)’. This piano arrangement of a 18th century Pergolesi theme acts in delicate counterpoint to the chaos around it.

It’s remarkable how broad Laurel Halo goes on Possessed; how many tones and techniques she touches on. This soundtrack is ultimately so wild and diverse it feels exhausting. But its dense fury does provide a catharsis, and a comforting sense that we’re all as confused as each other.

Possessed is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

SØS Gunver Ryberg—Whities 030

Last year’s Entangled saw SØS Gunver Ryberg straddling the frontier between techno and noise. The release marked her expansion from transcendent noisemaker to something more rounded, incorporating melody and moments of yawning space. Ryberg's music was both more complex and accessible than ever. Her latest release, Whities 030, sees an even more comprehensive engagment with this mode. Intended to explore “the connection between destruction and creation”, Ryberg makes a graceful arc from order into chaos and dissolution, before hoiking us back by the end.

Opener ‘In The Core’ expands and compresses like a biomechanical lung. Its title and timbre suggest a gaping cavern with oil-slicked and artificial walls. Ryberg has soundtracked projects in the past (most famously for Playdead’s platform game Inside), but it’s still surprising just how visual her work can feel. Synthwork on Whities 030 feels in the tradition of 1980s horror maestros. Its sound carries video-nasty nostalgia, and a tension which suggests things may explode into violence at any second.

‘Solar Flare’ is even more oppressive; doused by foggy, thunderous washes of bass. A bright melodic lead eventually swoops in to puncture holes in the texture, but is itself doomy and heavy-legged. The air thickens, and path darkens, the track’s voice is fortified but forbidden to form words. By the end of ‘Solar Flare’, structure is so oblique as to seem absent.

Ryberg runs with this obliqueness in ‘Mirage of Spiral Wavelengths’. We experience further dismantlement and disintegration. To paraphrase Daniel Lopatin, we could be seeing the last known image of a song. Limping and injured, hissing steam from its fissures, the track stutters slowly through a post-apocalypse. Comprising dissolute, fragmentary elements, ‘Mirage…’ is just that—a mirage. Warping in heat haze, the track disappears before our eyes, and eludes understanding. But that makes it no less enticing.

‘Flux’ sees the return of the arrhythmic beats last heard in ‘In The Core’. It consequently can’t help but feel like some kind of return to baseline. With that said, we still walk in disordered territory. Ryberg’s drums are like Autechre procedural generations attempted on a decaying punch-card computer. They grab impotently for coherence but instead abandon to decay. The effect is unique and captivating. ‘Flux’ not only impresses on a visceral level, but is a technical stumper, too. It’s true: any sufficiently advanced music production is indistinguishable from magic.

Given its predecessors, ‘Velvet Dome Of Becoming’ is a curious closer. It’s anchored by a gorgeous drone—what sounds like the best didgeridoo simulation since Richard D. James went by ‘The’ Aphex Twin—and has one foot planted in a verdant organic world. After the toil of this depressive set of tracks, it’s a welcome surprise to end with contemplation, mystery and hope.

Those who recognise SØS Gunver Ryberg’s name won’t need a recommendation for Whities 030. They will already know her as an artist in a state of constant exploration—of sound, of the self, and world that huddles around our bodies. Her every release is outstanding in quality. Each builds on, and often subverts, what came before. Whities 030 does nothing to buck the trend, and reaffirms Ryberg as one of the best producers about. This is another worthy addition to her tremendous catalogue.

Whities 030 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Moor Mother — Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

With 2016’s Fetish Bones, Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) announced herself as a radical experimental musician. At once worldly and otherworldly, Fetish Bones dragged listeners through the corpse of history. It picked up noise, field recordings and spoken word passages along the way. It ruffled feathers, rankled as many as it thrilled, but left no listener untouched. Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes is a refinement and refocusing of its thematic and compositional qualities.

Ayewa’s ideas are still desperate — so is the world — but they coalesce into a more coherent argument than before. And Analog Fluids is as much a compositional patchwork as any of her previous work. In its scattered form, the album is something like Tanya Tagaq’s Retribution. Noise elements screech over conjurations, chants, and spoken-word polemic. But these contrasting elements produce a compelling whole, rather than a busy mess.

Analog Fluids is a set of dissonant sketches which dissect history in all its deathly weight. Moor Mother’s conceit of time travel is her ace-in-the-hole. She collides afrofuturism with the brutal past that necessitated it; the cold earth it grew from. By casting herself, a black American, as time-traveller, Ayewa asks the uncomfortable question: where can I go? And, if the past informs the future — what future do I have?

‘The Myth Hold Weight’ is the centrepiece of Analog Fluids, smashing the past into a present which mirrors its cruelty. Grains of modernity, sloganeering and dark comedy recall Gil Scott-Heron's 'The Revolution...'. This throwback style gains prescience when you remember that in Moor Mother’s world, nothing is new. The cruelty of the past is repeated by the present, because cruelty lies in the modern world’s foundation. When it all ends, Moor Mother will already know what’s coming.

Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe