#38: Greed is an unfillable hole

This week’s new music:
Spotify
Apple Music

A thing I got pretty wrapped up in over the past week was America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation, a cooking competition hosted by the people behind the PBS show of the same name, as well as Cook’s Illustrated, whose classic hand-rendered drawings of food prep and storage tips are a soothing reminder of the simple truth that you should not waste a lemon.

Anyone who knows the long-running PBS series knows the personalities—Julia! Dan! Jack!—who are the judges on the show, and really they aren’t here to judge anyone, you’re all winners. The entire show, in fact, barely operates as a standard reality competition because everyone, contestants included, is just so nice. It’s all so drama-free—which is nice right now, imagine that—that I’m not even sure how it got made. (The first season premiered a couple of years ago, but be forewarned that Amazon seems dead-set on spoiling the outcome in promo tiles for the new season, so don’t scroll too far.)

Now here’s this week’s new music.

Albums

Arvo Pärt, Silentium

Album of the week: Inventive reimaginings of four famous Pärt compositions from four different groups of musicians—the most astonishing of which, though, is Tabula Rasa’s second movement, performed by A Far Cry at around half the speed of the original. It’s not unlike the slowed + reverb phenomenon, but applied to one of the most beguiling, heartfelt pieces of modern classical music—and my synapses exploded. / Bandcamp, Bleep, Boomkat, Apple Music

Kim Hiorthoy, Ghost Note

When music is like deciphering a puzzle, sometimes that is the music that sticks in my head. Certainly when it’s anything in an “experimental” category. Even when I’m not listening to it, I’m thinking about it—and this is an example of that. What I’ve decided is that this album works—for me, at least—because it’s delicate to the point of struggling to make itself heard, finding melodies where they aren’t obviously presenting themselves. / Bandcamp, Boomkat, Apple Music, Spotify

Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith, Defiant Life

It’s rare for me to hear something like this, that feels as if it’s speaking to the present moment, commenting on this time that we are all living through right now. But here it is, in an album that’s at least categorically jazz, because why not—but what it really is, is a subtle maelstrom. It sneaks in, with brief moments of dissonance giving way to full-throated discord giving way to an entirely fucked-up situation, and only after a while of sitting there in this music, a little bewildered, did I start to realize that, right up until the very end, there hadn’t been a moment of true peace in the whole thing. / Apple Music, Spotify

Perila, The Air Outside Feels Crazy Right Now

Aimless in all the right ways, in ways that feel like we can just see where this song takes us, see what happens, without any sort of grand designs in mind. Not everything needs to be everything. Sometimes there’s just enough, right now, and this meandering ambient guitar work is exactly that. / Bandcamp

Shit and Shine, Mannheim Hbf

Four-four-forever. As is Shit and Shine leader Craig Clouse’s habit: Find an idea—in this case, a single, repetitive beat—and then find out whether absolutely driving it into the ground is even a bad thing. (In fact, it is a very good thing.) Or more succinctly, in the words of David Brent, “A good idea is a good idea forever.” / Bandcamp, Bleep, Apple Music, Spotify

Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson, Bone Bells

Two of today’s most profoundly inventive musicians on their respective instruments—Courvoisier on piano and Halvorson on guitar—bring out the demon in each other on this, their third collaboration. It’s dizzying in how good it is, not simply in their technical playing (which is something in itself), but in the creative ways they manage to wrench every sort of note-like thing from their instruments. / Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify

Jeremy Young, Cablcar

The inner-worldly quality of this album is something else. It’s eerie, but there’s a distinct warmth in a way that’s anything but distant. The answer is in how its made, a process that’s as fascinating as the music itself: “Young’s ‘Studieau Royale’ is outfitted with monophonic oscillators, every note on Cablcar was tuned by hand and employed by attenuation. No keyboards, no synths, no digital plugins or VSTs—all frequency dials, voltage cutoff knobs, tubes and magnets; pure electricity.” / Bandcamp, Boomkat, Apple Music, Spotify

Oh No Noh, As Late As Possible

This album delivers solidly as an acoustic-experimental, jazz-not-jazz ride on a late ’90s Chicago (as in, Tortoise, Sea and Cake, Directions in Music) train. And it gets more interesting: Oh No Noh has made an audio stem available of the title track on a recordable chip along with a microphone mounted (along with a microphone) to an upcycled cassette tape.

It looks a little like an IED, but is cool nonetheless. / Bandcamp, Spotify

Tracks

Stereolab, “Aerial Troubles”

A: The lyrics to the new Stereolab song are amazing.

C: I’ve never noticed their lyrics.

A: Not even “I’m OK, feeling good, why do I swim in blood?”

C: Dah dah, n-dah dah. That’s Stereolab.

The Serfs, “Bodies in Water”

Seriously infectious synth-guitar pop here in the vein of circa 1987 Echo & the Bunnymen. A remarkable nuance here—and one that’s really effective—is that there’s no chorus, which really sets the song apart from its influences. Because right there is where the clichés might have crept in, where an obvious two-step-up resounding refrain might have entered the picture. Instead, it’s this insistent, dual-chord sequence that never wears out its welcome.

Kira McSpice, Wiles, “Empty A”

Haunting, Grouper-like, and the B-side instrumental rework is chilling.

Empty A, by Kira McSpice & Wiles

from the album Empty

Mutual Aidalwayslethargic

Suede, “Blinded”

A previously unreleased track, now available on a new B-sides collection, this is a torch song if ever there were one, achingly delivered by Brett Anderson, who seriously still has it. There’s a particularly “My Death” Brel-via-Bowie moment that I’m not sure any other band today could pull off so convincingly. / Spotify, Apple Music

Jlin, B12

As with Jeremy Young’s Cablcar, above, when I like a thing, and then I find out how it was made, the ways I like it expand, and the ways I listen to it include deciphering it even further. In this case, it’s a track by Jlin, whose manipulation of percussive sounds will never not intrigue me. Everlasting, in my mind. As it turns out, “B12” is composed of samples captured from objects held at Sydney’s Powerhouse Musuem. Also, the museum has made its collection of audio samples available for anyone to use.

Mix

From December, this Malibu mix pushes the limits of ethereal, and proves there are no limits. Infinitely beautiful. / NTS, Soundcloud