Paul Kantner, Grace Slick & David Freiberg, Baron Von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun (side A)

1973's Baron Von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun leaps out to an energetic start with "The Ballad of the Chrome Nun" — it strikes me as a sort of precursor to Patti Smith's rock songs, but I'll likely never know whether Smith was influenced by Grace Slick.  There's still some softness here, and throughout the album, that would never be at home on any album associated with punk — the drums are low in the mix and lack impact, while layered vocal harmonies fill the foreground.  The rest of the album generally lacks the drive of "The Ballad of the Chrome Nun", with memorable songs like "Walkin'" alternating with less focused tracks.  Guests range from Jerry Garcia, whose guitar solos are prominently featured, to the Pointer Sisters, who are apparently some of the voices filling the foreground.  Kantner and Slick are working to move away from the overt hippie influences on 1970's Blows Against the Empire, but they haven't settled into the commercial rock template of Jefferson Starship.  The resulting album wanders between these influences, along with some straightforward rock that has a bit in common with late-era Jefferson Airplane — the magic of their talents is obvious in places, but it generally fails to sustain.  The front cover image, which depicts the muscle of human bodies, references nothing, which seems to further reflect the album's confused search for direction.

Toy Love, Live at the Gluepot (side C)

Between the punk rock aggression of the Enemy and the stripped-down duo format of Tall Dwarfs, Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate fronted the pop band Toy Love.  The band also featured future Bats and Minisnap bassist Paul Kean, along with Jane Walker on keyboards and Mike Dooley on drums.  Toy Love's studio recordings have already been compiled on the 2005 double-CD Cuts (and reissued on the Toy Love double LP in 2012).  Live at the Gluepot, also from 2012, captures an entire concert from the group's heyday in 1980.  It includes songs familiar to Toy Love fans, like "Squeeze", "Cold Meat", and "Swimming Pool", alongside undocumented oddities like "2nd to Last Song T.L. Ever Wrote".  For a live recording from the soundboard to cassette, the quality is impressive, if imperfect — the sound is impressively clear, but Knox's funny lyrics are sometimes hard to discern, and the drums sound almost comically dry.  While in the studio, the group seemed to interact in a more unified fashion, here Bathgate's punk rock roots leap out — he often appears to drive ahead of the rest of the group, pulling most noticeably in front of Dooley's more neutral drumming.  It also amazes me that Toy Love played such long headlining sets — Live at the Gluepot fills a double-LP.  The reissue includes a nice booklet with notes, classic photos (in addition to those on the cover), and reproductions of old articles and flyers. 

Robert Wyatt, Nothing Can Stop Us (side A)

1982's Nothing Can Stop Us collects mostly tracks from Robert Wyatt's 1980 and 1981 7" singles.  Side A of the album collects A-sides, and side B collects the equivalent B-sides in the same sequence.  I cannot, however, find evidence of a "Born Again Cretin" / "Red Flag (o.k.?)" 7", and these two songs seem to appear only on the LP.  Two of the singles were splits with other artists, and both B-sides are included here — Disharhi's performance of their song "Trade Union" and Peter Blackman reciting "Stalingrad".  Of the eight Wyatt performances, he only wrote one, the opening "Born Again Cretin".  In the others, he seems to find consistent political content, from the overt lyrics of "Red Flag" and "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'", to his emphasis brought to subtler words in Chic's "At Last, I am Free".  Because the songs were recorded as different singles, the personnel varies, but the sound is surprisingly consistent.  Wyatt uses a similar, bright digital keyboard sound throughout his tracks, and it's generally placed in the foreground.  His voice is recorded to match the keyboard, and other sounds are brought into line in the mix.  The album consistently emphasizes early-80s sonic trends — everything is syntactically clean and bright, despite being a simple and modest recording.  The cover painting, of a worker protesting within the Rolls Royce logo, nicely matches both the political contents and rough-hewn sound quality.

Eleventh Dream Day, New Moodio (side A)

I've followed Eleventh Dream Day for over 20 years.  I most admire their raw and guitar-heavy moments, and when their approach becomes too clean and pretty, they often disappoint me.  After the dual-guitar power of Beet and Lived to Tell, I always perceived 1993's El Moodio as a bit of a step back.  It's a bit too pretty and careful, and there's too much emphasis on the vocal melodies for my taste.  When I learned about the forthcoming release of demos from that album, I pre-ordered a copy, and it's lived up to my expectations.  The songs are still a bit catchier and less tonally-static than my favorite parts of Lived to Tell (or even their recent Riot Now!, which I also quite like).  It's hard to tell if this stylistic chapter reflects the influence of new guitarist Wink O'Bannan, or if the band was using the melodic emphasis to seek commercial success.  Perhaps the songwriting merely reflects the creative chapter in the band's life.  Even on the prettier songs, the recordings on New Moodio capture the band's live energy and power — they seem to have been freed from a click track and from overly-pretty mix.  They also seem to be having a lot of fun playing, perhaps because they were making demos with an unclear future for the album.  The mixes here aren't perfect, with weirdly uneven stereo balances, so I'm guessing they were made quickly for listening, but the band's enthusiasm and energy come through clearly — unlike El Moodio, there were no fashion-conscious mix decisions here to age poorly.  New Moodio also contains great songs like "Sunflower" that were omitted from the final album and never before released.  The simple painting of a crab, surrounded by hand-lettered titles, reflects the perfectly rough-hewn quality of the contents.

David Thomas, More Places Forever (side A)

On 1985's More Places Forever, Thomas collaborated with two members of Henry Cow, Lindsay Cooper and Chris Cutler, and also his long-time Pere Ubu associate Tony Maimone.  The strongest voice here, which everyone follows, is Lindsay Cooper.  Her abstract double-reed melodies create the compositional foundation for the pieces.  Thomas's lyrics develop narratives that interweave with the melodic structure.  While the songs use repetition, there are not obvious verses or choruses in the structure or lyrics.  Maimone's bass playing impressively gives a rock feel to their timing and groove, while following the complicated melodic structure of the compositions.  While Cutler accentuates the compositions rhythmically, he and Maimone do not operate as a conventional rock rhythm section — Cutler dances around the beat implied by Cooper's reeds, as Maimone locks into the same implied pulse.  The sound of the album is modern and slightly sterile — it subtly references then-contemporary new wave hits, or perhaps then-commercial jazz recordings, more than any work these artists have done before.  And the completely absurd front cover painting and design, with their pastel hues, bear no relationship to the music, or even Thomas's lyrics.

Alex Lukashevsky / Felicity Williams / Daniela Gesundheit, Too Late Blues (side A)

I'm a fan of Alex Lukashevsky's work going back to his old band Deep Dark United, and on 2012's Too Late Blues, he reworks the old Deep Dark United song "Princess of Darkness".  This rearrangement gives a sense of how his aesthetic has evolved.  With Deep Dark United, the underlying vocal and guitar melodies of "Princess of Darkness" are surrounded by countermelodies and a driving percussion part that goes against the core rhythm of the song.  On Too Late Blues, all of the arrangement closely augments the core structure of the song.  The accompanying female vocals follow the vocal melodies with harmonies or echoes, and the vibraphone follows the guitar melody.  Even the percussive guitar from the chaotic introduction conveys the structure clearly on its own, with only minimal help from vocals.  The rest of Too Late Blues follows a similar structure — Lukashevsky's inventive songwriting is emphasized, and the new songs seem to have grown even more personal and distinctive.  The arrangements, which rely more on vocals than instruments, help to further emphasize his compositional and lyrical vision.  I miss the chaotic arrangements and energy that flattered his songs in Deep Dark United, but I also appreciate the almost-transparent insight into his mature songwriting voice.  The recording is obviously primitive, but the sparse arrangements keep everything in the foreground, and the weird timbre of the acoustic guitar fits the songs nicely.  The cover image of the three singers captures both the singer-songwriter tradition of Too Late Blues and its distinctly modern quality, and the thick, printed inner sleeve is a nice touch.

John Wiese, Dramatic Accessories (side A)

John Wiese has made countless albums, both solo and in collaborations, for over a decade, but 2008's Dramatic Accessories is the only one which I'm familiar with.  On it, Wiese uses a fairly narrow compositional palette of noise and scraping sounds.  The closest comparison to his sound selections would be Hugh Davies, as they appear to be acoustic sounds that are more amplified than processed.  Where Davies performs these scrapes in rapid succession to create dense layering, Wiese relies here on a sparser approach.  He also, in at least one place clearly manipulates panning, in a way that would be hard to achieve acoustically — as this panned sound repeats, I assume some looping or copying was also exploited.  Wiese's compositions feel more free than purposeful, with little evidence of internal logic or differentiation between tracks.  He does create wide dynamic variation, as quiet scrapes alternate with loud ones in a somewhat purposeful fashion.  The fidelity of Dramatic Accessories is thick and midrange-y, and it's hard to tell if this is purposeful, or where in the chain the limitation was introduced.  It's pressed on a slightly odd slab of vinyl, with edges that have corners at the top and bottom, instead of a more triangular peak in the center.  Dramatic Accessories is beautifully and memorably packaged in a thick piece of folded paper that seems to be screened, in multiple colors, on the outside, and printed on a glossy texture on the inside.

Jar Moff, Commercial Mouth (side A)

Jar Moff squeezes a lot of ideas into 2013's Commercial Mouth.  The album contains two side-long tracks, with the B-side being the title track and the A-side having an unpronounceable title.  Each track evolves continuously without reference back to any previous point.  New sounds are constantly introduced, and they're often different from what has come before.  Some sounds have pitch and shape, where others have more noise-oriented timbres.  While it's not clear that an analog source was used, references to analog synthesis appear alongside textures of overtly digital origin.  In addition to the digitally-constructed noises, some of the resonant timbres do not resemble a conventional analog filter.  While the pieces flow organically, there does not seem to be any overarching logic to Jar Moff's compositional strategies.  The pieces generally maintain a constant dynamic level, with brief, temporary changes as sounds enter and exit the field.  The record is heavily compressed to achieve a very loud pressing volume, which might further reduce dynamics that were originally included.  The frequency distribution skews heavily into the presence frequencies, which might also contribute to the volume of the vinyl pressing.  Bass sounds do occasionally appear, and they sometimes provide brief moments of pulse in a field that usually lacks any sense of time of rhythm.  The impressive packaging provides more structure than the musical contents.  A geometric pattern and artist / title information is screened on the plastic sleeve, to appear in front of another geometric pattern on the outside jacket.  Since each pattern is a single color, it gives a simpler and more coherent presentation than the constantly-evolving palette of Jar Moff's music.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, Green River (side A)

While CCR had an incredibly consistent run for several years, 1969's Green River is my favorite Creedence album.  It stands out with its songwriting, with obvious classics like "Bad Moon Rising" along with slightly less-famous ones like "Wrote a Song for Everyone".  My only complaint might be the sequence, with the two weakest songs at the end ("Sinister Purpose" is especially undifferentiated).  And of course, the iconic cover image and design still look great.  What stood out to me on this listen was the sound of the album, and especially the rhythm section.  To make room for the bright and present vocals and guitars, the drums are particularly buried.  The snare lacks attack, in a way that could be described as friendly, and the cymbals wash out in the background.  The bass is incredibly clean and obviously direct — there's enough detail on top to hear the articulation, but the lack of overtones or any sort of distortion is noticeable.  It's not a classic bass sound, but it fits perfectly in the mix, and it leaves a lot of room for the guitars.  While the presence frequencies are full of guitars and vocals, the master drops off in the higher treble frequencies, at least on my copy (an original enough pressing to have been on Fantasy).  By 1969, it was definitely possible to capture at least more high treble than is heard here.

Mission of Burma, The Horrible Truth About Burma (side A)

While Mission of Burma today are seen as heroes of the American post-punk underground, that status is not at all audible when listening to The Horrible Truth About Burma.  This 1985 album captures live performances from their final 1983 farewell tour, and it sounds like a document of a working band on the road in small clubs.  The sound quality is rough and midrange-heavy, and no effort was made to add polish — talking and modest applause between songs is included without editing.  It's also amazing to picture the band touring with an extra analog tape deck to document their efforts — these recordings predate any digital technology, and there was obviously no budget for an extra truck.  The performances are preserved with imperfections, but the amazing energy of Peter Prescott and Roger Miller at their best was obviously unmatchable.  Apart from the inclusion of "Peking Spring", which predates even Signals, Calls, and Marches, the songs mostly emphasize the group's more drone-y songs, without the foreground melodies of songs like "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" or "Academy Fight Song".  Martin Swope's tape manipulations behind the soundboard grow more perceptible here than they often feel on the studio albums.  I was disappointed to learn that various reissues have sought to diminish much of the album's authentic magic — in addition to beginning with an added "Revolver" and attempting a "modern" mastering job, one version of the album even edited out applause and conversation between songs!

Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde (side C)

1966's Blonde on Blonde is obviously a canonical record that is hard to write about.  What surprised me here is how far it feels from Dylan's folk roots.  The songs still hint at Dylan's troubador background.  While Highway 61 Revisited is fully electric and arranged, the song structures retain hints of feeling found, as much as created.  The historical referents, and the feeling of timelessness, have been largely abandoned by Blonde on Blonde.  Songwriting, arrangement, and recording quality here all borrow more from then-contemporary rock music than from any traditional folk influences.  Sonically, Blonde on Blonde nearly matches the bright, present quality of a Beatles album.  While the incredibly loose, unrehearsed performances do not match the polish of hits in 1966, it feels more like a rehearsal for a rock album than an impromptu folk session.  And songs like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" borrow their structure and melodic feel from blues-based rock more than Dylan's folk background.  Even the cover image, which wraps around the gatefold and lacks any other design elements, abandons the white frame that brought an older feel to Dylan's previous albums.  As Dylan began to move back toward idiomatic folk elements after Blonde on Blonde, I find it easy to forget just how much the double-album fits into the rock of its day.

Hi Sheriffs of Blue, untitled singles compilation (12" EP)

The Hi Sheriffs of Blue released two 7"s, in 1980 and then 1981, before collecting the four songs on to this 12" EP, which is packaged in a plain black disco-sleeve.  Only a year later, in 1982, the group, with an expanded line-up, recorded a more polished four-song EP.  That EP featured more careful musicianship and a sonically clearer technical quality.  The original singles document the group in its simpler and more primitive state.  Mark Dagley's involvement with the Girls traces a more direct line here, with similarly atonal and narrative vocals.  In addition to Dagley's past band, these songs draw from both their no-wave counterparts and blues-based rock.  The style foreshadows the way '90s bands from the Blues Explosion to Royal Trux loosely and creatively drew from blues-based influences in a more abstract and primitive setting.  Hi Sheriffs of Blue did not assume an ironic posture, but took a more literal path to chaos that feels closer to their peers in New York at the time.  The A-side songs, from the first single, are more driving rockers, while the two parts of "Cold Chills", from the 1981 single, employ starker arrangements.

Seefeel, Fracture / Tied (10" EP)

On 1994's Fracture / Tied, Mark Clifford moved simple drum loops to the foreground of Seefeel's sound.  Each track, which occupies an entire side of the 10" EP, is structured with a simple drum machine loop that repeats from beginning to end.  The drum loops sounded incredibly sterile by the standards of 1994, to give a sense of modernity, but by the extreme standards of digital sounds only a few years later, they sound smeary, with evidence of classic analog circuits in the signal path.  The loops provide propulsion and rhythm, with a lack of meter that situates them far from any possible dance music reference.  Underneath the foreground rhythms, washy atmospheric sounds play in the background.  Everything has a lot of reverb, so the only recognizable source is a female voice on "Fracture".  It's hard to tell how much these parts were performed or programmed to create the subtle textural evolution that lays under the electronic loops.  The simple orange cover, on nice textured paper, foreshadows the austere design style that artists like Alva Noto brought to prominence in album covers, only a few years later.

The Nightingales, The Nightingales (12" EP)

Robert Lloyd and his crew continue under the Nightingales moniker, more than 30 years after they released their best-remembered album Pigs on Purpose.  After moving to a cleaner style in the late-80s, they've even returned to the post-punk aesthetic for which they're best remembered.  The 4 song EP The Nightingales, which preceded Pigs on Purpose by only months in 1982, follows a similar stylistic pattern.  The obvious influence here is the Gang of Four's classic Entertainment! LP, with bright, jagged guitars and syncopated drums in the foreground.  While many of the songs on Pigs on Purpose, like Entertainment!, cleanly reference rock song structure, The Nightingales feels a bit less focused and coherent.  Structural elements are harder to discern, as the songs seem to hop about more through time.  Lloyd's vocals, while retaining his references to crooning, tend to be buried somewhat in the background.  The recording of The Nightingales feels even more simple and primitive than Pigs on Purpose.  Where Pigs on Purpose had found a cover design style to match the contents, this EP employs a comedic newspaper reference with little relationship to the band's music.

Half Japanese, Horrible (12" EP)

Half Japanese's sprawling debut triple-LP box, 1980's 1/2 Gentlemen / Not Beasts, is often remembered as a canonical blast declaring the breadth of their vision and launching their careers.  The band's late-80s albums received glowing reviews on their release — they captured a more consistently song-like vision, with slightly better recording fidelity.  The records from in between, including 1982's humorously-titled Horrible, sometimes get lost in the shuffle, but they still sound great on repeated listen.  This era unsurprisingly documents the transition from a more diverse and chaotic band into one playing a more even set of rock-oriented songs.  The qualities that make Half Japanese magical remain.  Horrible features five very short songs with overt vocal melodies, which generally have a slight blues influence and a pronounced chaotic element.  They're followed by a longer and less-structured vamp, "Walk Through Walls".  The recording of the instruments is very lo-fi and primitive, but an effort was definitely made to bring Jad Fair's vocals to the foreground with clarity.  The Jad Fair painting looks great on the cover, but I'm not sure who chose the incongruous font or what they could have been thinking.

Lou Reed, Street Hassle (side A)

I've heard a memorable story about 1978's Street Hassle, of a friend who used to cry every time that she listened, because it can be such an emotionally moving album.  In a way it's surprising, because Street Hassle marks Lou Reed's most overt dalliance with the more austere avant-classical tradition that was clearly part of his milieu in New York.  Juxtaposing a simple, near-spoken vocal with an incredibly repetitive string part, the eleven-minute title track resembles Robert Ashley's work as much as Reed's.  Yet Reed draws from the emotional impact of rock music, in both his lyrics and his performance, to achieve an impact very different from the detachment of Ashley's narratives.  The stylistic departures of Street Hassle also allow for a radical reworking of the old Velvet Underground song "Real Good Time Together", long before the original was officially released on Another View.  In addition to employing the radical binaural experiments of Manfred Schunke, who had previously worked with Sand on Golem, Street Hassle finds nearly every sound recorded very differently from the standard rock vocabulary.  A notable example is the snare drum on "Dirt", which is more wash than impact.  While the cover design hints subtly at the radical content, it looks in many other ways like a typical Lou Reed record, with a slightly-odd portrait of him on the cover.

Cy Dune, No Recognize (12" EP)

It can feel clumsy to write about a record to which I made even a small contribution, and I recorded basic tracks for one song on 2013's No Recognize.  Cy Dune's Seth Olinsky, who also plays in Akron / Family and sometimes with Rhys Chatham, plays most of the parts on No Recognize, and his personality shines through it.  The simple, blues-based songs range from heavy and full-bore rockers to somewhat more spacious arrangements.  All of the songs employ blown-out and exaggerated sounds in their bright and present mixes, even in the more open parts of the EP.  The vocal melodies are consistently melodic and memorable, despite playing a background role to the propulsive music.  It's also impressive how much drive the guitar creates, through aggressive playing and distorted sounds — only "Move the Room" has a propulsive drum part to carry it.  The variety of material leads to No Recognize flowing slightly awkwardly between the songs, as it moves from dense to sparse and back over six short tracks.  The murky cover image of Olinsky emphasizes both his close involvement with the material and its smeary nature.

Jon Hassell, Earthquake Island (side A)

Jon Hassell is usually associated with his sparse, ambient records — he has made countless albums in this style, including high-profile collaborations with Brian Eno.  It's thus easy to forget that his second album,  1978's Earthquake Island, featured a large ensemble, playing more energetic and grooving music.  It employs bass guitar, layers of percussion, and even vocals (but not overt lyrics) to create a series of underlying rhythmic beds — each piece is then built on top of an underlying framework, which repeats for its duration.  Hassell's trumpet still floats above the grooves, along with floaty electronic textures.  While some of the players, like Badal Roy and Miroslav Vitous, have fusion-leaning backgrounds, Hassell's personality pulls them firmly into his more drone-centered approach.  Earthquake Island sounds a bit like an instrumental version of the Talking Heads' Fear of Music, with rhythms that hint at African influences coupled with rock and electronic ideas — while the two albums are roughly contemporaries, Fear of Music obviously received a lot more attention.  Unlike Fear of Music, which uses exaggerated studio techniques to draw attention to its modernity, Earthquake Island's mixes organically draw the listener into the performance.  The front cover painting employs Middle Eastern referents, and it's placed in a then-modern design framework — the combination serves the music nicely.

The Band, Rock of Ages (side C)

In 1972, the Band released the double-live album Rock of Ages.  While the Band's songwriting and performances are exceptional, Rock of Ages is best remembered for Allen Toussaint's horn charts, which appear on two thirds of the album.  He neatly interweaves a five-piece horn section, including jazz notables Howard Johnson and JD Parran, around the Band's performances.  The players seem to interweave effortlessly, with the horns tastefully augmenting the songs and playing.  The horns play a prominent role on the cover of "Don't Do it", which opens the album and was released as its memorable single.  Garth Hudson also gets a feature here, with his extended solo on "The Genetic Method".  Rock of Ages shows off the group's incredible ensemble playing, and their ability to execute it consistently in live concerts.  While the vocal harmonies are impressively strong, the lead vocals sometimes lack the narrative quality that makes the studio album performances so special — it's obviously difficult to sing with that level of thespian personality while playing.  The recordings lack the magical feeling of the first two Band albums that almost seem found — they sound instead more like a conventional concert recording.  The gold-leaf inlay on the cover and the triple-gatefold give the package a nice majesty, which the music obviously lives up to.

T. Rex, Electric Warrior (side A)

Canonical and iconic albums can sometimes be the hardest to write about, and everyone has listened countless times to 1971's Electric Warrior, so it's hard to add new perspective.  The biggest thing that surprised me, on this listen, was just how little drive and energy the performances really have.  The drums tend to lag slightly, and the snare sounds soft and friendly with little punch.  String arrangements on songs like "Tiny Dancer" add a lyrical sentimentality that blends into the background only because it sounds so familiar.  Marc Bolan's vocals are full of charisma and personality, but they also sound like he's whispering.  Sometimes Bolan's guitars bring attitude, and they can employ exaggerated distortion, but they're also often smeared into the canvas of a subtler and more spacious mix.  Even the Hipgnosis cover design is immediately recognizable, and adds to the album's canonical and almost unapproachable air — it also looks great, and emphasizes the attitude that's sometimes buried in the mixes.

Colder, Again (side A)

In 2002, slick commercial rock acts like LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture updated post-punk aesthetics with a cleanliness reminiscent of Radiohead or Massive Attack to score sizable hits and lasting careers.  Their work, however, lacked the dark austerity that gave power to the canonical post-punk bands that they loosely aped.  In comparison, on 2003's Again, Colder combined the darkness of post-punk with an even more extreme austerity that referenced then-contemporary minimal techno.  While less friendly than his hitmaking peers, his songwriting and vocal performances are both fantastically executed, and the rhythm programs rivaling acts like M15 and Jetone, who focused solely on the programming.  Again also sounds beautiful and clean but never sterile, and a particularly great vinyl cut helps the quality really shine.  The simple but impressive package, designed by Colder's Marc Nguyen Tan, fits the music and his overall vision seamlessly. 

The Dead C, Eusa Kills (side A)

The Dead C have developed such a refined and recognizable style that it's hard to imagine them as a young band seeking an identity.  In 1989, when they released Eusa Kills, the Dead C were far removed from the style with which they're associated today.  "Bad Politics" is a memorable classic from 1988's The Sun Stabbed EP.  "Bad Politics" features some recognizable traits of the group, like a heavily distorted guitar sound and vocals that are more spoken than sung, but it's also one of the group's most conventionally-structured songs, with consistent vocal melodies and clearly recognizable verses and choruses.  Eusa Kills backs off of the distortion a bit, which feels like a step away from the band's mature sound.  While vocals still are a focal element, they're now being used to move away from conventional verses and choruses, and into gradually more abstract structures.  While "Phantom Power" is friendly and engaging compared to later Dead C music, its six-plus minute duration explores structural experiments that would quickly grow central to the band's style.  The primitive recording quality is another trait that has remained consistent through the Dead C's 25 years of evolution, and the murky cover photo and coarse design hint at the more iconic images for which they're best remembered.

Caboladies, Live Anywhere (side A)

2010's Live Anywhere captures the duo incarnation of this Chicago electronic group.  The band members seem to be young, so it's somewhat unsurprising that they draw influences from current electronic music.  There's an element of chaotic noise from the Wolf Eyes school, and an element of synth freakiness reminiscent of artists like Keith Fullerton Whitman or Ben Vida.  The surprising part is when historical referents sneak in — their approach to sound also reveals obvious traces of Bruce Gilbert and early Cabaret Voltaire.  Where those artists used simple, repetitive structures, Caboladies blend the early-80s influences into more modern, freer structures.  Each track explores a relatively constrained set of sonic ideas, in what appears to be a loose improvisation developing this palette.  Sounds from their different sonic realms coexist within each track.  The structures of the pieces, and even the interplay between the musicians, seem less important than the open-ended exploration of sounds for the joy of finding what can exist.  The lack of evolution, despite the constant movement, is both an obvious limitation, and also a simple charm.  The simple black-and-white cover design fits closely with other current electronic works, moreso than referencing the contents in a meaningful way.  The austere, direct recording feels slightly rough, but draws little attention to itself.

Pumice, Puny (side A)

Pumice is New Zealand's Stefan Neville, and his coupling of lo-fi recording techniques with melodic songs places him squarely in a tradition of Kiwi songwriters.  The liner notes thank Chris Knox, and Neville drummed for Knox, but his work here as Pumice is far less overtly catchy than Knox's typical creations.  The vocals do follow lilting pop melodies vaguely reminiscent of Donovan, but the backing instrumentation does not follow the harmonic arc of the melody, and instead creates a more messy foundation.  Pumice keeps these slightly-chaotic arrangements simple, with enough space for his often-distorted palette.  Diverging from the vocal songs is the extended instrumental "Trophy", with a simple droning keyboard melody that loosely recalls Donovan's "Peregrine", only without the vocals.  The professional mastering thins the dense midrange of the lo-fi recording, and makes 2012's Puny sound a bit more like a commercial indie rock release.  The slightly blurry black-and-white cover photo nicely meshes with the music's smeary content.

Fat, Hit (side A)

The combination of a heavy rock instrumental palette with traditional compositional technique was a common idiom in New York in the 80s.  Prominent practitioners of this idiom, including Elliot Sharp and the members of Borbetomagus, make contributions to Fat's 1989 album Hit.  While Fat are one of the less-remembered acts working in the style, their music is as well-executed in the idiom as their more well-known peers.  Fat utilized a traditional rock power trio line-up, with Eric Rosenzveig's electric guitar providing the foreground melodic content.  As was typical in this idiom, despite the electric instrumentation, the rhythm section played with the precision typically found in classical and orchestral music, rather than the swing or groove traditionally associated with rock music.  Funnily, both rhythm players are also credited on the cover with "delay" in addition to their instruments, but Rosenzveig is only credited with guitar.  Fat's songs focused on the exploration of an idea, with a timbral and harmonic approach defining their space — there's rarely signs of linear evolution within a piece.  While Hit was recorded in an expensive studio, the final album sounds somewhat primitive and lo-fi.  While the music can transcend the idiom of its era, the primitive cover design feels more trapped in the past.

Leroy Jenkins, Solo Concert (side A)

Leroy Jenkins is best-remembered for his work with the Revolutionary Ensemble and Anthony Braxton, but his solo concerts were also always impressive and memorable.  1977's Solo Concert is the only released document of his solo performance, and it's quite impressive.  My favorite part of Jenkins's playing was when he would find an interesting texture on the violin and explore how it evolved as it changed frequency.  He demonstrates this technique in several places, including an extended section on side B.  More frequently on Solo Concert, Jenkins explores complicated melodic lines, where he radically exaggerates the timbres of different notes based on the overtone series the violin can create.  The melodic evolution and textural variation combined to create the lines on which he builds.  Liner notes also discuss themes and improvisations, though his playing often blurs these boundaries.  The live recording reflects some of the boxy room where Jenkins performed — I'm assuming "the washington square church" mentioned in the liner notes is in fact Judson Memorial Church.  The cover design couples an amazing font with a beautiful portrait of Jenkins holding his violin — its subtlety matches that of his playing.

Fred Frith / Bob Ostertag / Phil Minton, Voice of America (side A)

1982's Voice of America contains two very different side-long tracks.  The album title hints at political content, and side A overtly delivers.  A duet between Frith and Ostertag, "Voice of America (Part 1)" places long, narrative samples in the foreground.  All of the samples are credited, including "Chronology of the Chilean Coup, 1973."  Extended use of political folk songs also brings programmatic meaning to the foreground.  These samples are surrounded by textural improvisation, to create a flowing and extended piece.  The palette is thick and slightly aggressive, without reaching the purposeful harshness of the industrial idiom.  Side B employs a fuller sound, with the addition of Phil Minton's experimental vocals.  Minton fits his voice nicely into the palette, and on "Voice of America (Part 2)", the textural improvisation moves into the foreground.  While the liner notes again credit samples, they're employed more subtly, and draw less attention to themselves — the music has now overtaken the content, without abandoning it.  Voice of America nicely manages to work with its message within an equally radical context, without losing interest in either the art or the meaning.  The cover image of the melted radio reflects the distortions contained in the music, and the recording is simple, competent, and slightly primitive.

Roscoe Mitchell Creative Orchestra, Sketches from Bamboo (side A)

On 1979's Sketches from Bamboo, Mitchell leads a huge group through three of his pieces.  The ensemble leans heavily on brass, and features notable players like Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Kenny Wheeler, Leo Smith, and Marilyn Crispell.  In the two longer pieces, "Sketches from Bamboo", parts one and two, Mitchell appears to have been influenced by György Ligeti — fields of sounds float by, with highlights peaking out over the top.  Where Ligeti often achieves these fields with masses of strings, Mitchell uses a more modest set of brass.  Bobby Naughton's vibraphone often creates the high-frequency movement over the top.  The shorter piece, "Linefineyon Seven" feels less special — a simple and repetitive drum beat, which loosely references jazz, creates a foundation over which the waves of sound pass.  This constrained structure pulls the piece back from its floaty feeling, and creates an unresolved contradiction in the work.  The recording sounds great, apart from an unnecessarily exaggerated treble on the cymbals, and the unmemorable cover design matches Leo Smith's conceptually similar Budding of a Rose LP.

Joe McPhee. The Willisau Concert (side A)

I'm a big fan of McPhee's 1974 contemplative and widely-respected collaboration with John Snyder, Pieces of Light.  While 1976's The Willisau Concert came only two years later, and again features Snyder, this time with drummer Makaya Ntshoko, I expected a similar chemistry.  Instead, perhaps because it was performed in front of a live audience (with a murkier recording as a result), The Willisau Concert is both less-focused and more propulsive.  Side A includes what appear to be two duets.  "Touchstone", between McPhee and Ntshoko, alternates between FMP-style call / response and a jazzier, more fluid style.  Its energy remains consistently high, even in the less overtly-propulsive sections.  "Voices", between McPhee and Snyder, includes processed voices which slowly give way to analog synth sounds.  Both pieces on side B clearly feature all three musicians.  "Bahamian Folksong" has little relation to its title — McPhee and Ntshoko follow the flow of a modular synth improvisation from Snyder.  "Harriet" returns to the call / response elements of the opening track, now in a trio format.  The Willisau Concert features excellent collaborative playing from these great musicians, but it definitely lacks the magic that makes Pieces of Light so memorable.  The packaging fits the tasteful style of a series, with messy cursive fonts standing out in the design.

New Music for Piano(s) (side A)

1970's New Music for Piano(s) collects then-recent pieces where Yuji Takahashi's piano is the sole instrument.  The first three pieces are performed by solo piano, while Takahashi layers three pianos on the final Earle Brown piece using overdubs.  Xenakis's "Hérma" features his typical use of densely-layered fields, differentiated here by its simple instrumentation.  It's nice to see Roger Reynolds included here, as he sometimes seems to have been overlooked.  His "Fantasy for Pianist" impressively combines genuinely sentimental passages with a more jarring and inventive structural vision.  Takahashi's piece nicely emphasizes his remarkable piano technique, but it's hard to follow and easily the weakest of the four pieces here.  Brown's piece moves furthest from harmonic constructs, and Takahashi's use of technology to create its layering, rather than live performance, captures the piece's character nicely.  The idea of an overdubbed creation, while seeming obvious today, feels ahead-of-its-time when created in 1970.  The piano recordings nicely use the space, and the austere cover design of the series nicely fits the music here.

Siegfried Palm, Violoncello (side A)

This album collects five pieces, written between 1914 and 1966, which all prominently feature the cello — Siegfried Palm performs the lead role on all five pieces.  Side A collects two longer pieces where the cello is accompanied by an orchestra.  György Ligeti's "Concerto for violoncello and Orchestra" feels typical of Ligeti's work — the cello weaves beautifully among fields of sound created by the orchestra.  Krzysztof' Penderecki's "Sonata for Violincello and Orchestra" evolves impressively from a relatively conventional feel with slow tonal evolution, into a chaotic and jarring field of percussive movement.  Side B contains three shorter and sparser pieces.  Anton Webern's "Three small pieces for Violoncello and Piano, Op. 11" quickly moves through three jarring pieces that emphasizes his rigorous technical approach.  Paul Hindemith's "Sonata for Violoncello, Op. 25, No. 3" is the least inventive piece on the album, with an emphasis on classic tonality and linearity — certain points do draw attention to the physicality of the cello.  Bernd Alois Zimmermann may be the least well-known composer here, but his "Sonata for Cello solo" impressively explores the sonorities of the cello within a lyrical piece — it reminds me of Varèse's "Density 21.5", which it impressively predates by six years.  The body of the cello resonates clearly on the solo pieces, and it sits perfectly in front of a more spacious orchestra sound on side A.  My reissue copy blends into a series design tastefully, but it seems odd to me that it emphasizes such a blurry, poor-quality photograph of Palm.

Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air (side A)

I had always assumed that Riley sequenced analog synthesizers on 1969's A Rainbow in Curved Air.  I surprised myself when I looked at the back cover and saw the list of keyboards used on "A Rainbow in Curved Air".  On listening back, I could recognize both the electric harpischord and RMI Rock-si-chord when they jumped loudly out of the mix.  I'm now amazed by how accurately Riley played the layered sequences.  The electric harpsichord sounds more distorted than similar instruments on songs like "Because" and "Burning the Midnight Lamp" — it's not clear to me how it was recorded or whether this was on purpose.  The sparkly detailed tambourine also sounds especially remarkable.  Riley's soprano saxophone playing on side B also sounds amazingly like a synth — it directly foreshadows much of Jon Gibson's work.  The front cover collage design looks dated, and it also does not closely relate to the music.

Aribert Reimann, Konzert für Klavier und 19 Spieler / Engführung für Tenor und Klavier (side A)

This 1974 LP collects two relatively dissimilar pieces by Aribert Reimann.  Side A contains an instrumental piece for a sizable chamber group, while side B is a duo piece for vocal and piano.  Both pieces feature a piano defining the structure and tonal evolution, and both pieces use a complex, modern approach to tonality.  "Konzert für Klavier und 19 Spieler" surrounds the piano with drastic dynamics from the chamber group.  The textural variety and exaggerated use of dynamics fit nicely with the contemporary tonality of the piano part, to create a contemporary and inventive piece.  The traditional operatic vocals on "Engführung für Tenor und Klavier", which perform as a duo with the piano, pull the piece into a more traditional territory.  The structural and tonal innovations clash with the arrangement and the texture of the voice.  The recording here is remarkable, with impressive details of both the instruments and space of the room — the close-mics never seem exaggerated, and they blend perfectly with the room.  The simple, modern cover design is part of a uniform series, so it has no direct relationship with the pieces here.

New Music from London (side A)

1970's New Music from London collects four fairly quiet and introverted pieces.  Two of the pieces feature vocals, while the other two are instrumental.  Both vocalists sing in a traditional classical style, with lyrics from text poems.  While Harrison Birtwistle's "Ring a Dumb Carillon" has an excellent title, the foreground vocals do not neatly integrate to the more contemporary approach to tonality.  David Bedford's "Come in Here Child", with lyrics from a Kenneth Patchen poem, uses electronic amplification of John Tilbury's piano to create a more contemporary setting, where the vocals do not leap out.  While the liner notes explain that the speaker was far from the piano in a concert setting, it's hard to perceive resonance on this recording.  Of the instrumental pieces, Peter Maxwell Davies's "Antechrist" is the most dynamic piece on the album, using volume and propulsion at the beginning and end, from the largest ensemble featured here.  Richard Orton's "Cycle, for 2 or 4 Players" emphasizes its structural precision, with discrete changes happening against the flow of the performance.  The very simple cover design emphasizes both the seriousness assigned to the music and also the modernity of the contents.

Luigi Nono, Como una ola de fuerza y luz / Y entonees comprendió (side A)

As the Western classical tradition grew increasingly experimental and open-minded in the 20th Century, instruments were used in creative ways to explore texture and space.  Vocals, however, often proved a greater challenge for composers, who would sometimes revert to using the human voice in a more conservative fashion.  Luigi Nono's interest in using vocals seems tied with his interest in narrative — his pieces often convey pointed political messages (from what I can tell without understanding the words), and he uses lyrics to help convey the meaning.  His vocalists borrow from classical traditions and at times pull toward musical theater to communicate meaning, and his pieces' structure follows the drama of the vocal lines.  "Como una ola de fuerza y luz" uses a series of repeated dynamic builds to create its narrative arc, and the instruments follow the arc of the vocal lines.  On "Y entonces comprendió", the live vocalists interweave with processed recordings of singing.  Sometimes it's confusing to discern where the recording ends and the live performance begins.  While the content is again political, the piece creates a more atmospheric bed with less Western sense of drama.  The sound quality of this 1974 LP is slightly muffled, in part because 60 minutes of music were fit on a single LP.  The album cover seems to be trying to fit in too many ideas: a drawing of Nono, a traditional font listing details of pieces and performers, and an image of guns that references the lyrics' political content.

Cristóbal Halffter, Symposion / Secuencias / Lineas y Puntos (side A)

My reissue copy of this 1969 LP is one of few albums that I own where the artist's name is spelled incorrectly on the cover — somehow an "H" was added to Halffter's Spanish first name.  Spelling error aside, the album collects three excellent pieces of Halffter's.  A strong, extroverted personality links the three disparate pieces.  All three employ stark dynamic shifts within the pieces to create evolution over time.  When the pieces grow loud, Halffter nicely manages to create propulsion and energy without ever feeling dramatic or heavy-handed, and without drawing attention to himself.  "Symposion" is also impressive for how it manages to integrate vocals in a style that sounds original, rather than pulling the music back to earlier reference points.  The vocals initially come in with a speech-singing style that feels dated and detached from the very contemporary music.  They quickly shift, though, to fitting in perfectly with the piece, and contributing to the impressive builds.  I find "Secuencias" to be the album's highlight, as Halffter utilizes texturally and rhythmically inventive percussion to emphasize his proficient use of dynamics.  The recording is competent, if quite dark by modern standards, and the geometric pattern on the cover follows the standards of the series without particularly reflecting the pieces' personality or uniqueness.

Computer Music (side A)

The 1970 compilation Computer Music groups three composers making music with computers at a time when they were not simple or convenient tools for programming sound.  The liner notes point out that the three composers all used different software to create their pieces, which is impressive, given how hard any of these programs would have been to write.  Perhaps because of the difficulty of generating the music, or perhaps because of expectations within the academic world (all three composers had ties to the Columbia / Princeton Electronic Music axis), the results are remarkably similar.  The whole album exhibits an obvious debt to Varèse's ideas about music as shifting plates.  Traditional notions of tonality, harmony, and rhythm are de-emphasized here, as sounds float through space without any central referent.  The timbres used are quite conservative by modern standards — these sounds clearly predate the popularity of harsh noise that has now pervaded so much electronic music.  J.K. Randall contributes three short pieces, one of which nicely integrates operatic vocals without their standing out from the sound space.  Barry Vercoe provides a single short piece, which limits him to 4 minutes on the album.  Charles Dodge's long piece "Changes" fills side B — as the title indicates, it moves rapidly through a series of ideas without a clear, unifying idea.  Computer Music employs a standard cover design from a series of classical LPs, with text surrounding a square image.  In this case, the image and title font break from the series's usual aspiration to beauty — they instead draw attention to the computer technology used to make the music.  On the other hand, the analog technology used to create the recording de-emphasizes the digital qualities of their sources.

New Music from Japan (side A)

New Music from Japan, which seems to date from 1967, collects pieces from Akira Miyoshi, Toru Takemitsu, and Toshiro Mayuzumi, with all three pieces performed by the NHK Symphony in Japan.  The pieces, which date from 1962 and 1964, fit together nicely — they all combine a classical tradition of tonality with a more modern emphasis on texture, and they're all slightly understated and introverted.  A loose comparison would be the French spectralists, though Murail and Grisey started composing slightly later.  All three composers also introduce a distinctly Japanese character to their work.  Miyoshi's piece uses percussion sounds that harken back to Japanese traditions, while Takemitsu's piece references earlier Japanese music through its tonality.  Mayuzumi's piece, which fills side B and feels the most ambitious of the three, uses both approaches to create a sense of Japanese identity.  The recording is clean and tasteful if slightly lacking in high-end.  The cover design includes an abstract image, which seems to indicate the record's modernity, in a more traditional design layout that could be used for a more traditional orchestral album.  The exaggerated serifs on the main font provide a dignity that designers, even in a conservative musical idiom, would rarely employ today.

Alastair Galbraith, Mass (side A)

2010's Mass is Galbraith's first widely-available solo album since 2000's Cry — a self-released 2007 CD called Orb disappeared before I even noticed that it existed.  Galbraith began releasing solo albums with 1993's Morse, which at the time seemed stark, personal, and introverted.  Each record since then has grown more withdrawn, with ever subtler vocal performances singing less memorable melodies.  The distorted guitars that brought a rock-like drive to parts of Morse have gradually disappeared as well.  Mass feels like a logical next step in Galbraith's evolution.  It retains the beauty of his songs and fragile vocal performances, while presenting referents that will only be familiar and reassuring to those already steeped in his catalog.  Mass feels slightly less murky than some of his other releases, but it retains their distinctive lo-fi charm.  Occasionally an instrument in one song is much louder than everything else on the album, and the obvious clumsiness feels appropriate for his work.  The cover image too is slightly crisper, while retaining the austere design style that's another constant in Galbraith's ouevre.

Robert Calvert, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters (side A)

Robert Calvert was in Hawkwind, and 1974's Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters borrows some qualities from that stay.  The album tells a story involving a failed German fighter plane and a megalomaniacal military official, with spoken narrative sections performed by performed by musical figures like Viv Stanshall and Jim Capaldi.  The short spoken sections alternate with longer songs that relate to the military tale.  The unifying trait of the songs is Lemmy's unmistakable driving bass, which ties neatly to Calvert's time with Hawkwind.  The songs are structurally and harmonically simpler, with more direct references to rock music, than Hawkwind's often-sprawling explorations.  Calvert had obviously developed an impressive social circle during his time on tour — Twink, Paul Rudolph, Arthur Brown, and even an awkwardly-credited Brian Eno turn up to help out.  The rock songs sound pretty typical of 70s English rock, and an impressive amount of time was spent crafting foley and effects for the dramatic sections.  The cover painting and font give an iconic character (neatly referenced by the Hey Drag City compilation 20 years later), but the large sticker on my 1977 US copy unattractively interrupts the cover.

Tall Dwarfs, Throw a Sickie (12" EP)

Levity has always played a prominent role in the Tall Dwarfs' work.  While 1986's Throw a Sickie still oozes with charm and humor, its dark and unsettling side is more prominent than on any other Tall Dwarfs release.  The very short songs move from conventional pop song structure, a bit further than usual.  Where the textures surrounding the simple melodies are usually light and airy, here they bring a bit starker undercurrent below the foreground tunes.  Even "Road & Hedgehog", which is probably the friendliest and most memorable track here, submerges the vocals some in a dense palette.  Chris Knox tells a story of physical sickness enveloping the sessions where Throw a Sickie was created, and the Dwarfs can be seen sweating and grimacing in the cartoon-y cover drawing.  The duo's usual lo-fi tendencies remain here — apart from slightly quieter vocals, the sonic imprint departs little from the Dwarfs' usual blueprint.

Faust, Faust Tapes (side A)

Where most Faust albums had discrete songs, including memorable ones like "It's a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl", each side of 1973's Faust Tapes is a continuously-playing collage.  Short tracks collide with each other in arbitrary and perhaps random edits.  Some segments featuring driving rock music with strangely-distorted guitars that must have been recorded direct.  Other segments are purely interstitial, in a way that presages the work of indie-rock bands in the 90s like Thinking Fellers Union Local 282.  While it's easy to think of Faust Tapes as a chaotic and unapproachable mess, the driving rock songs are surprisingly accessible and engaging — the only caveat is that they get interrupted before reaching their logical end.  While the rock songs employ perceptibly odd approaches to recording, they also sound purposeful and not rushed, and the compositional character is preserved.  The cover design collecting record reviews of earlier Faust albums, while hard to look at, is as conceptual as the collage approach of the music.

Morotn Subotnick, Until Spring (side A)

The current explosion of modular synth performers has left Subotnick's music sounding slightly less surprising, if no less impressive, on return listens.  On 1975's Until Spring, he created a constantly evolving piece out of a generally narrow palette.   The primary textural element is a series of pulses created by an LFO, which fade out of space and back in.  Until Spring is very dynamic, and it has long stretches of quiet or even silence.  Sometimes, a tonal and slightly distorted sound interweaves with the pulses, where other times the simple pulsing sounds define the piece.  While this palette has grown common with current electronic music, Subotnick's austerity and compositional vision remain impressive when listening anew.  It's also interesting hearing analog circuits in the recording process losing so much high-end and transient detail — this signal path gives Until Spring a weirdly retro feel, which I doubt Subotnick would have intended.  The cover painting, with flowers growing out of Subotnick's modular synth, also would not fit a current electronic record, and it doesn't entirely make sense on this one.

Steven R. Smith, Kohl (side A)

Steven R. Smith may be best known for his work with the large Jeweled Antler ensembles Mirza and Thuja, but he's also been making diverse solo albums consistently since 1996.  2002's Kohl features Smith on solo guitar, with occasional use of layering.  While fingerpicked acoustic guitar has been fashionable for many years now, Smith relies primarily on strummed electric here.  It's neither really extroverted nor introverted — the strumming is often fast and dense, but rarely heavy or aggressive.  Kohl consists of a series of short tracks that are differentiated by strumming pattern and tonality.  A notable exception is a short and sparse arrangement of Roscoe Mitchell's "Odwalla".  Sonically, Kohl references 90s lo-fi recordings — the guitar recordings are fairly murky.  The packaging is especially nice, with a letterpressed cover, a hand-assembled booklet with stapled inserts, and an additional cardstock insert — it fits the simple, personal music nicely.

Patrcik Portella & Joseph Racaille, Les Flots Bleus (side A)

I'm familiar with Joseph Racaille's remarkable work with ZNR, but Patrick Portella's background apart from this album remains mysterious to me.  ZNR's albums stand out for their juxtaposition of austere simplicity with an unusual and damaged creative vision.  1983's Les Flots Bleus retains these qualities, but feels a lot easier to parse.  The results are weirdly less engaging, because the absurd lack of reference is what makes ZNR so special.  While some of the sounds here are hard to identify, others seem like an acoustic piano.  The keyboards play repeating rhythms that vaguely reference ragtime, even as the melodies float over them.  When human voices emerge on side B, they're clear and purposely well-recorded and mixed.  The structures are again simple, stating one coherent idea and quickly moving on.  There are definitely keyboards used — other sounds seem to come from reed instruments, but it often feels hard to discern.  Where the ZNR records look austere and challenging, Les Flots Bleus uses an absurd and ironic package that masks any intentions of the album's creation.  The sound quality is clear, if slightly undifferentiated — the use of a 45 RPM release does not noticeably add low or high frequency detail.

Christmas Decorations, Oomycota (side A)

It's confusing enough to listen to albums from my own band — it's even more confusing to write about them on this blog.  2009's Oomycota extends the palette and improvisational character of Far Flung Hum, while emphasizing the textural palette over melodic content.  Each of 10 short tracks introduces a variation of the wheeze-and-clatter, and navigates through it for several minutes, before the next one quickly begins.  When placed front and center, the subtle, interesting details of the sounds shine, and the variations from track-to-track become the central story of the album.  Acoustic sound sources interweave with electronic ones, to a point where even in the foreground, the textures give few hints as to their creation.  The group interplay remains tasteful — it succeeds at serving the pieces, without drawing attention to itself.  The simple line-drawing and handmade package fit the music nicely, and the technical clarity lets the sonic details shine through.

Flying Saucer Attack / Roy Montgomery, Goodbye (12" EP)

In 1996, Flying Saucer Attack and Roy Montgomery were both known primarily for gentle ambient pieces with slowly evolving guitar drones.  At the time, it was surprising when "Goodbye", their only collaboration, featured a diverse palette with few droning guitars.  The stronger personality here is Flying Saucer Attack.  A common textural element is a set of noisy, distorted loops — these resemble FSA's "Since When" on the Harmony of the Spheres compilation, and also foreshadow the more sophisticated use of this palette on New Lands.  The most surprising sound to show up is a conventionally-played acoustic piano, which is not typically associated with either artist.  Structurally, the pieces feature some drastic cuts, which were not commonly used by FSA or Montgomery.  In retrospect, "Goodbye" feels more like a set of interesting experiments than a particularly focused release from either artist.  The blurry cover photo emphasizes the low-key nature of the release, as both artists have used more careful designs on many of their releases.  The mastering emphasizes the lo-fi nature of the recordings — this approach was more common for Montgomery's work, as FSA's proper albums often employed efforts at commercial mastering.

The Tinklers, Casserole (side A)

My first association with the Tinklers is always the word naïve.  Simply structured songs that sound like lullabyes, played on homemade toy instruments, helps to conjure an association of naïveté.  Most of all, though, lyrics from songs like "Mom Cooks Inside, Dad Cooks Outside" or "Don't Put Your Finger in the Fan" emphasize the group's childlike quality.  I was amazed, on a renewed listen to their 1989 debut Casserole, when I heard "Norman Mayer".  It's an incredibly serious song about a radical anti-war protestor named Norman Mayer, whose aggressive threats led to his being murdered by police.  While the lyrics and music still employ a child-like tone, the content is clearly targeted at adults.  On closer listen, the maturity hiding beneath the surface pokes through in other areas, with overdubs and production tricks existing alongside some clever arrangement decisions.  The Tinklers' odd juxtaposition of these elements is executed impressively here, with an abundance of short songs that illustrate their distinct vision.  The cover image and lettering match the concept with an appropriate visual analog.

Mudhoney, The Lucky Ones (side A)

In some ways, it feels crazy that Mudhoney have continued to make records, much less relevant ones.  While they did not neatly fit into the Seattle buzz explosion that surrounded them, it also feels difficult to separate their music from its environs.  2008's The Lucky Ones manages to capture the band's classic sound and also to bring just enough modernity to avoid nostalgia or parody.  While early recordings like "Touch Me I'm Sick" magically capture Mudhoney's raw energy, their incredibly primitive technical qualities also tie them to a specific era.  The Lucky Ones does a nice job using a contemporary and very professional recording to emphasize the group's impact and roughness.  The drums sound bigger and the guitars sound rougher, but at the same time, the mixes and mastering sit perfectly.  The performances feel a bit more technically competent, without ever falling into an overly-sterile area that would detract from their energy.  The hardest aspect of Mudhoney to update might be the lyrics.  While Mark Arm has some success at tastefully balancing his mature life experiences with the group's primitive emotional posture, the challenge at times seems too daunting, and the lyrics might be the most fragile element of The Lucky Ones.  While the cover painting and design are nondescript, they're at least appropriate and tasteful.

Essential Logic, Beat Rhythm News (side A)

Because of Lora Logic's connection to X-Ray Spex's straightforward bluntness, Essential Logic will always be loosely associated with the most primitive musical elements of punk rock.  While Essential Logic were capable of duplicating the manic energy of "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!", their songs painted with a broader palette.  Dynamic and tempo shifts were common in their through-composed songs, and overtly catchy sections alternated with subtler melodies.  1979's Beat Rhythm News still fits into the punk era with pulsing energy and often-frantic drums, but the song structures have grown even more fragmented than on some of the group's singles.  Where other arty bands of the punk and post-punk world, especially in England, relied heavily on effects like chorus and delay in their mixes, Essential Logic largely eschewed these timbres for a simpler mix aesthetic.  The simplistic but jarring cover nicely illustrates the musical combination of chaos with an autodictat's approach to musicianship.

Hybrid Kids — A Collection of Classic Mutants (side A)

From reading the liner notes, the Hybrid Kids LP appears to collect 13 different bands from a small midwestern city, as if it were a cousin to Red Snerts.  Unlike Red Snerts, all 13 songs are clearly covers of well-known songs, ranging from the Stranglers to Eurovision winners Brotherhood of Man, with Kate Bush thrown in for good measure.  In fact, all 13 bands featured here consist solely of longtime English session keyboardist Morgan Fisher, who is only credited as producer.  The styles vary some from song to song, but consistent elements include heavily pitch-shifted vocals, drum machines, and distorted rock sounds that I think originate with keyboards.  The slightly lo-fi recording quality is also very consistent between tracks.  Morgan Fisher's performances here are charming and excellent, and I prefer Hybrid Kids to Daniel Miller's similarly-conceived LP as Silicon Teens.  The fake bands also have excellent names, like Combo Satori and  The Incestors!

Herbie Hancock, Sextant (side A)

As Hancock worked with Miles Davis on some of his classic electric records like Live-Evil, On the Corner, and Get Up with It, it's not surprising that Hancock's 1973 album Sextant resembles the albums on which he worked as side-man.  Sextant features other Davis collaborators from this era: drummer Billy Hart and reed player Benny Maupin, and their extended groove-based performances would barely be out of place on an electric Davis album.  Sextant feels a bit less aggressive and harsh than some of Davis's work — there is no distorted electric guitar, and the horns both sound less brash and play a less prominent role.  Hancock's more muted keyboard sounds move to the front, and the timbral space of the music moves with them.  The biggest departure from Davis's work happens at the end of "Rain Dance".  Modular synth squiggles from an ARP 2600 move to the front, and they temporarily displace the grooves that are central to the rest of Sextant.  Patrick Gleeson, who would later work with Devo, is credited as Hancock's ARP guru.  The liner notes here also misspell the Mellotoron (with only one "L"), but it's hard to pick it out among the many keyboards that Hancock employs.  The cover image looks like a cross between a Miles Davis and a Sun Ra album from this era, and those references feel appropriate.  My 90s reissue is overly bright, with a bit of harshness in the hi-hat, and I can't tell if the weird, beater-heavy kick drum sound was also in the original mixes, or if it too is an artifact of the modern mastering job.

Nicolas Collins, Devil's Music (side A)

The back cover notes on 1985's Devil's Music explicitly describe the process used creating it.  "All the material is taken from FM and AM transmissions occurring at the time of the performance."  At one level, listening to the album can be easily tied to this process.  Some sounds reflect their origins, especially when they play for a recognizable duration.  In other ways, the process is irrelevant to the work here.  Long sections of the album, especially side A, are just too jarring and percussive and explosive to give any hint of their origin.  Collins clearly creates a new compositional vocabulary here, one that alternates appropriation, vaguely in the vein of John Oswald, with a more pure noise aesthetic as jarring as that of Merzbow.  The juxtaposition places Devil's Music outside of either tradition, both embracing and rejecting its historical context.  The simple, iconic cover image hints a bit at both elements — the street-sign-like image has some tie to the language of appropriation, while the jarring image inside grapples with the music's ugly harshness.

Die Doraus und die Marinas, Blumen und Narzissen (side A)

Andreas Dorau released two singles in 1981.  While "Der Lachende Papst" has been largely forgotten,  "Fred Vom Jupiter" became such a club hit in Berlin that German friends wince at a mere mention of the title.  "Fred" documents a visit from a spaceman, using analog synths, drum machines, and chirpy pitch-shifted vocals.  The rest of Dorau's debut album, with Die Doraus und die Marinas, surrounds "Fred Vom Jupiter" with songs that are similar but do not entirely repeat its formula.  While most songs seem to have narrative lyrics (without speaking German, I can't confirm), they do not rely on programmatic sound effects in the same fashion.  Some sounds here appear to come from instruments like melodica and bass guitar, accompanying the memorable drum machines and analog synthesizers from the hit single.  While Dorau relies on overt, major-key melodies, they tend to be a bit less exaggerated, as are the pitch-shifted vocals which appear occasionally.  The recording is consistently simple and competent, neither purposely lo-fi nor audibly refined.  Using a cover portrait of the musician seemed common on this era, even for impersonal albums where it seemed inappropriate, like Blumen und Narzissen or Henry Badowski's Life is a Gas.  The use of gold leaf lettering here at least distracts a little bit from the focus on Dorau's face.

Art Bears, Winter Songs (side A)

It's easy to find 1979's Winter Songs confusing, as I did many years ago on first listen.  The songs are stylistically diverse, and it's purposely sequenced to emphasize the variations.  Tracks rarely flow neatly together, with each track newly demanding attention as it leaps from the last.  Some elements reference rock music, like the guitar / drum heavy arrangements, short song lengths, and repeating drum patterns.  These elements are juxtaposed with very incongruous ideas from other musical traditions, especially Dagmar Krause's vocal melodies, which loosely borrow from Eastern European folk and Western classical forms, but mostly create a unique musical language of their own.  Neither the melodies nor Krause's style draw a listener in — they also do not create any purposeful emotional arc.  Winter Songs expects repeated listens to reconcile its conflicting tendencies and ideas.  The songs are purposely well-crafted, and the musicianship is excellent.  The cover painting and design somehow manage to reflect the range of ideas captured here, without seeming inappropriately chaotic.  The slightly bright and lo-fi quality of the recording and mastering does not match or flatter the work, even as the variety of approaches and sounds captured is impressive.

Azita, Disturbing the Air (side A)

Azita's musical work took a sharp turn in 2003 when she released Enantiodromia.  After years of creating punk / no-wave chaos with the Scissor Girls and Bride of No-No (plus the dense and harsh solo electronic effort Music for Scattered Brains), she made an album of quiet, contemplative piano / vocal songs.  For nearly a decade, she's consistently maintained this aesthetic.  But, in a way, 2011's Disturbing the Air begins to integrate some of her earlier ideas more recognizably into her new work.  Where her early piano songs tended to follow conventional verse-chorus structures, she's now moved into more open-ended and through-composed compositional structures.  This approach recalls especially Bride of No-No, whose songs also explored more narrative and less tidily repetitive forms.  Azita also relies more heavily on extremes of her vocal range that draw attention to her autodidact background, and that de-emphasize her ability to sound polished.  The arrangements on Disturbing the Air usually rely only on piano and vocals, with an occasional and simple synthesizer overdub adding texture.  The piano here sounds particularly rich, great, and timeless — it seems to surround and engulf Azita's voice.  The beautiful, slightly-blurry cover photo and hand-written font look amazing and reflect the subtle, smeary beauty and hushed intimacy of the album.

OMD, Telegraph (12" single)

The OMD song "Telegraph" appears on their fourth album, 1983's diverse and memorable Dazzle Ships.  The A-side of this 12" single is an extended version of the single.  While "Telegraph" features catchy synthesizer and vocal melodies, the extended version brings emphasis to the percussion loop.  The snare's pop feels exaggerated, either through mix or mastering, and the pattern is allowed more room to breathe in the extended version.  It's unclear whether this 12" was meant as a dance single, but the arrangement pulls lightly in that direction.  The B-side is a particularly odd juxtaposition with this reworking.  "66 and Fading" features no percussion, vocals, or melody.  It's an ambient piece, loosely in the tradition of On Land, with synthesizer notes stretching major chords across time.  The odd thing about "66 and Fading" within that genre, is that it's played using fake string patches, on an old analog string synthesizer.  The timbres would certainly be out of place on an early Eno Ambient album.  "66 and Fading" is also drastically quieter in volume than "Telegraph".  The austere packaging design here is cool and appropriate, if less distinctive than the die-cut gatefold layout of Dazzle Ships.

Tall Dwarfs, Three Songs (12" EP)

1981's Three Songs defines the Tall Dwarfs' model that the duo of Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate sustained for over 20 years.  Song structures are very simple, drawing from classic pop history.  All three songs on this EP proved memorable ones in Tall Dwarfs' catalog, especially the A-side "Nothing's Going to Happen" — their intuitive sensibilities were already fully-formed.  The arrangements' simplicity, however, draws far less from history.  Instead, the duo rely on their own limited resources to define their palette.  Songs are built with tape loops, acoustic and electric guitars, toy keyboards, and vocals, with only some of these elements in each song.  No particular effort was made to flatter any of the sounds, but the mixes fit together intuitively.  This extremely austere approach to home recording defined a prototype for the "lo-fi" sensibility that grew popular more than a decade later.  The treble sounds nice and clean here (on my 1985 reissue pressing), but there's no low-end in the arrangements.  My reissue preserves the funny set of faces drawn on the front cover, but replaced the original back with a much simpler design.

Mission of Burma, Mission of Burma (12" EP)

1988's Mission of Burma EP, which was released during the band's dormant years, collects 5 disparate songs from different points in Burma's career.  The small sample set exaggerates the group's evolution toward slightly more sophisticated songs — the EP includes both the more straightforward pop structure of 1979's "Peking Spring" and the more compositionally inventive "Sing-a-Long".  As early as 1980's "Forget", Peter Prescott has begun his distinctive use of cymbals as drones that sustain against the song's rhythm.  And with 1982's "Sing-a-Long", Martin Swope's tape loops move to the foreground.  The seemingly-arbitrary cross-section of songs on this EP feels even more confusing when a CD release from the same time includes six additional unreleased tracks, but omits "Forget".  Mission of Burma has unimpressive sound quality for a 45 RPM 12", perhaps because of the slightly primitive and dated qualities of the recordings — the bass has the plucky quality of a cheap direct feed, and the drums also reflect the limitations of the inexpensive but popular gear of this era.  The slightly-modified photograph on the front cover nicely captures the band's personality, though it has not grown as iconic as the photograph chosen for the accompanying CD.

Leonard Cohen, Songs of Love and Hate (side A)

1971's Songs of Love and Hate pulls Leonard Cohen's songs in a few extremes, in comparison to the two records that preceded it.  The most surprising extreme might be "Diamonds in the Mine", with a straightforward country-rock arrangement that falls closer to John Prine or Townes Van Zandt than anything usually associated with Cohen.  It also has little in common with the rest of the album, and feels like an afterthought at the end of side A.  Another leap for Cohen is how aggressive the sneer in his voice reaches in parts of the album.  While his music often emphasizes dark emotions, the arrangements never emphasize anger one of these dark sentiments, and his vocal takes on albums usually mesh more closely with the arrangements.  In several points of Songs of Love and Hate, Cohen's sneering anger leaps out in his vocal takes.  While Paul Buckmaster is known for working on lighter pop throughout his career, from Elton John to Taylor Swift, here he contributes dark, foreboding string arrangements that feel heavy even alongside Cohen's lyrical content.  Against these dark arrangements, Cohen's guitar sounds bright and clean and modern, emphasizing the transformations in recording technology in the early-70s.  The front cover's use of a portrait borrows from the vocabulary of a songwriter album, but then buries it under gigantic fonts, and the solid black inner sleeve nicely extends the mood of this cover.

Joan of Arc, Presents Pine Cone (side A)

With 2012's release of Presents Pine Cone, the range of albums under the Joan of Arc moniker continued to expand.  2007's Field Recordings of Dreams found central Joan of Arc figure Tim Kinsella working in a purely abstract realm far from song structure or rock referents, but he released that album under his own name.  Pine Cone feels a bit less indulgent than Field Recordings of Dreams, but still much further from rock music than anything Kinsella had released under the Joan of Arc name.  Perhaps brief contributions from a few regular band associates identify this album as a band endeavor.  Pine Cone moves through a series of short and diverse instrumental ideas, with each cross-fading into the next.  The structure reminds me vaguely of albums like Faust Tapes or Eyeless in Gaza's Pale Hands I Loved so Well.  Like Eyeless in Gaza, Joan of Arc use this experimental side to stay lighter in emotional presentation than on their more structured albums.  The generally airy sound and floaty feel keeps Pine Cone from ever hinting at darkness.  Most of the short sketch sections are electronic, with drones and tones filling space.  Acoustic guitars, a badly-recorded live drummer, and an oddly cut-up drum machine program turn up too.  While concepts occasionally repeat through the album, they always fall far apart, with unrelated parts between them, so it's hard to remember how similar a part is to the last related one that came up.  Sonically, most of Pine Cone has the bright and slightly sterile feel of early Joan of Arc albums like Live in Chicago 1999, but it's contrasted with a couple of very primitive sounds that make brief appearances.  The impressive packaging features multiple layers and inserts, and clearly received a lot of attention — the foldover outer cover is especially beautiful and impressive.

Pharoah Sanders, Thembi (side A)

The cover images of Pharoah Sanders on 1971's Thembi emphasize his Afro-centric identity (and his excellent hat collection), but the album presents a more diverse cross-section of Sanders's vision.  While the individual tracks are consistently strong, Thembi lacks any unifying vision or coherent sequence.  The Afro-centric personality of the cover permeates two introspective horn driven tunes, "Morning Prayer" and the memorable title track, and also the complex percussion layering of "Bailophone Dance", with Sanders on bailophone.  The other three tracks do not fit neatly into this unifying narrative, but also have nothing in common with each other.  "Red, Black & Green" stands out to me — its heavy wailing reminds me in many ways of Peter Brötzmann's records of this time, though Clifford Jarvis's drumming provides a jazzy background pulse rather than leaping into the foreground.  Combining two different sessions, with different drummers and instrumentation, further emphasizes Thembi's disjointedness.  The recording has a modern brightness which flatters the performances and material without sounding illogical or exaggerated.

Archie Shepp, Mama Too Tight (side A)

Among Archie Shepp's vast discography, Mama Too Tight definitely stands out.  Both "A Portrait of Robert Thompson (as a Young Man)", which fills side A, and the long "Basheer" capture so many of the talents that make Shepp special.  Both of these tracks couple the free-blowing spirit of New York's late-60s energy jazz with Shepp's methodical compositon talents.  They weave nicely in and out of chaos, as melodies emerge and disappear and tempos sometimes change abruptly.  "A Portrait of Robert" even manages to incorporate appropriated melodies without interrupting its overarching structure.  The group here is rich in talent and somewhat odd in its configuration — I'm not sure if I'm more surprised by the presence of two trombones (Rudd and Moncur) or a tuba (Howard Johnson).  Beaver Harris's syncopated tendencies seem especially prominent here, perhaps because the ride cymbal leaps out of the mix more than his skins — he's also oddly panned hard-right.  While the group's playing still sounds impressive on the remaining two short tracks, they're a lot simpler structurally and conceptually.  Including two more conventional pieces breaks the magical flow of the album without noticeably expanding the conceptual scope.  The reeds and horns fit together well sonically — the interplay of great musicians is captured with care, and with an emphasis on the rich midrange color that these instruments produce.  The beautiful silhouette photograph of Shepp on the cover is complemented nicely by great fonts, color selection, and layout.

Hi Sheriffs of Blue, Hi Sheriffs of Blue (12" EP)

Mark Dagley is known in the visual art world for his active work as an abstract painter.  In music, his best-remembered project may be the Girls, the late-70s Boston band for whom he played guitar.  In the early-80s, roughly between these two, he moved to New York and fronted the Hi Sheriffs of Blue.  They released two 12" EPs: a collection of their 7" singles, followed by this self-titled 1982 set of four songs.  While no one else from the band's original line-up is a recognizable name, but Elliot Sharp had joined for this EP.  Side A is the more uniform, with two songs combining simplistic structures, reminiscent of the Hi Sheriffs' no wave contemporaries, with fragmented blues riffs that reference garage rock and the earliest Rolling Stones albums.  At times, a slight similarity to MX-80 Sound emerges, but the drums are mixed much louder here, and they fill a more rock-oriented role in creating propulsion.  Side B has two very different tracks. "War Between the States" is built around an acoustic rhythm guitar part, while "12 Gates" features a female backing vocal drenched in reverb for a vaguely goth feel.  Having only heard this EP, it's unclear to me how these four tracks relate to the band's, or perhaps Dagley's, core vision.  The recording is excessively clean and sterile, in a way that had come into fashion by 1982.  The low-budget design on the packaging is more dated than charming, and really doesn't flatter Hi Sheriffs of Blue's relevant contents.

David Kilgour, Here Come the Cars (side A)

Here Come the Cars, Kilgour's 1991 debut solo LP, was reissued on vinyl in 2012.  As on the Clean's Vehicle, which preceded it by a year, the songwriting here pays more attention to its craftsmanship than did the early Clean classics, which were more punk-informed and simple.  Kilgour's performance here is distinctly more laid-back than anything he'd done up until this point — tempos tend to be slower, and many songs are built on an acoustic guitar's rhythm parts.  The opener and title track emphasizes a complex arrangement of subtly layered guitars and piano, with plenty of open space.  Other songs, like "Shivering" and "Spins You Round" are built on a rhythm guitar and vocal melody in a fashion somewhat closer to Kilgour's writing for the Clean.  While Here Come the Cars has always sounded soft and midrange-y, some songs on this reissue nicely emphasize detail in the high frequencies.  The electric guitars on the opening title track, for example, sound impressively spacious.  Some of the sparser tracks sound closer to the original release, as perhaps there was less high-end energy to emphasize — the resulting album feels a bit uneven sonically.  The cover portrait of Kilgour provides an intense close-up, when expanded to fill 12 inches for vinyl.

Ornette Coleman, Friends and Neighbors: Ornette Live at Prince Street (side A)

The most memorable point of 1970's Friends and Neighbors may be its opening track, where a chorus chants a simple melody as the group pulses and squeals behind them — Ornette's violin squeals particularly noticeably.  The rest of the album takes a sharp turn back toward Ornette's earlier years.  In many ways it sounds like an obvious successor to Ornette! and Ornette on Tenor from the early 60s.  The years in between saw Ornette exploring ideas from the austerity of the Golden Circle live records to the overwhelming chaos of Crisis.  Here, he reins in his explorations, and his group sounds like an updated version of the early records that created his reputation.  The configuration is a quartet, with Haden and Blackwell on drums, Dewey Redman on tenor, and Ornette on either alto or trumpet (after his opening shrieks on violin).  By 1970, fashions had caught up with Blackwell's recognizable style, and, especially compared to Denardo's primitive pulse on Ornette's late-60s albums, Blackwell seems like a uniting and grounding force.  My pressing of Friends and Neighbors, which may be a reissue or bootleg (it was new when I bought it) sounds great, without the exaggerated treble that often plagues new pressings.  The 131 Prince Street address in the iconic cover image is now across from a Lacoste boutique.

Steve Lacy, Soprano Sax (side A)

Steve Lacy released his debut Soprano Sax in 1958.  It features his first recording of a Monk tune (the obscurity "Work") and his first collaboration with drummer Denis Charles.  In many other ways, though, Lacy is still constrained here by the idiom of his time.  While Charles was already a forward-thinking drummer, who also worked with Cecil Taylor on Looking Ahead! a year later, here he predominantly provides a swinging ride-cymbal-based beat.  Lacy and Charles's collaboration here fits the style of the times and only hints at the magic that they'd find together years later, on records like NY Capers.  While the Monk tune gives Lacy some room to stretch, the rest of Soprano Sax finds him working in more conventional tonal and structural confines.  Wynton Kelly, while a fine pianist, rarely seems to grasp Lacy's exploratory side.  My vinyl reissue sounds pretty good, but the exaggerated treble on the ride cymbal feels a bit out of place.  The green tint on the cover photo of Lacy nicely captures the character of its era — the conventional portrait illustrates how much Lacy began working within the jazz system of this era.

Leo Smith Creative Orchestra, Budding of a Rose (side A)

Leo Smith's stark creative vision has remained impressively consistent and focused since his piece "The Bell" appeared on Anthony Braxton's 1968 debut.  1979's Budding of a Rose exploits a huge and impressive group to implement it in a fairly extreme form.  While there are three pieces on the album, the musical vocabulary remains narrow.  The two primary syntactical tools in Smith's arsenal here are short lines played by a single instrument, and large ensemble swells.  These two ideas generally alternate.  Different instruments play these short lines, which rarely draw attention to themselves.  While the ensemble includes marquee players like Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, and Marilyn Crispell, their creative personalities are not given room to shine.  The large group swells feel much more the focus of attention, as they vary in arrangement and tonality.  Two big and noticeable swells appear at the beginning of each album side, and they're the two most noticeable times that Smith calls for the listener's attention.  The pieces more often proceed without distinguished movement from their continuing flow.  When Pheeroan AkLaff's drums come in, they employ a degree of swing that references jazz, but they're relatively subtle in the mix, and the drums never anchor the rest of the group.  The frequency balance exaggerates the highs of the cymbals and lows of the kick drum when AkLaff comes in, which is odd as he's not a center of attention.  The simple and factual front cover employs recognizably 70s fonts and colors. 

Roscoe Mitchell, Live at the Mühle Hunziken (side A)

At a performance of such austere music, it can already be challenging to concentrate.  Listening at home with the same focus requires an even greater commitment.  1987's Live at the Mühle Hunziken captures Roscoe Mitchell's solo concert in Switzerland from the previous year.  As he changes between different saxophones for different pieces (soprano, alto, and bass sax), he explores the properties of the individual instruments, and stretches their palettes to sometimes illogical extremes.  He moves between notes more to exhibit how the timbre of the sax changes at different frequencies than to create a sense of melody.  When these lines move slowly, they emphasize the sound of air and breath moving through the body of the instrument.  Rapid flurries of notes draw more attention to the metallic body of the saxophone.  While Mitchell typically juxtaposes nearby pitches, he occasionally interjects a radical leap to a different register, which almost sounds like an entirely different instrument interrupting the proceedings.  Through the course of a composition, the energy can build, as he moves from slower, sustained tones to series of notes, and then back.  Different sounds can also emphasize the shape of the room where he performed, which the recording captures nicely — certain bass frequencies find the resonant nodes of the space, while loud passages produce a hint of an echo.   The frequency balance of the album has a slight exaggeration in the presence, but bass notes come through clearly.  It's also interesting how much the recording captures the sound of Mitchell's breathing along with the tones from the saxophone.  The liner notes explicitly mention the use of a Sony PCM-F1, which was one of the earliest professional digital recorders.  The front cover painting and design are tasteful but far less distinguished than Mitchell's playing.

John Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (side A)

Coltrane's final phase of his output, beginning roughly with Ascension is often remembered for its explorations of power and aggression on albums like Meditations.  Live at the Village Vanguard Again! dates from 1966, when many of Coltrane's peers were grouped with the description "energy jazz", and his work sometimes tied to that moniker.  Other albums in these years, though, reveal his continued explorations of the spiritual and personal side of A Love Supreme.  Live at the Village Vanguard Again! leans more in the personal and spiritual direction.  Rashied Ali's playing is loose and open as much as propulsive, especially on the long rendition of "Naima" on side A, and he's also surprisingly quiet in the mix.  Either Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders often complements Ali on percussion, and these small instruments are mixed slightly louder than his drums.  This arrangement results in a lot more space than on records where Coltrane and Sanders play consistent duets on their reeds.  Alice Coltrane's piano also often led to sparser and looser interaction than on earlier albums with McCoy Tyner.  Between the two long renditions of older Coltrane tunes, Jimmy Garrison gets a long and very creative solo at the end of side A.  Because this is a live recording, the saxophones were captured with microphones (perhaps Sennheisers) that compromise some of the instruments' richness for better directionality.  The quiet drum placement in the mix makes the details of their recording hard to hear, but the piano and bass sound great.  The funny cover image humorously juxtaposes one casually dressed man (perhaps Jimmy Garrison) with four dapper members of the group — it makes this legendary group feel perhaps a bit more human and approachable.

Eyeless in Gaza, Pale Hands I Loved So Well (side A)

I'm a big fan of Eyeless in Gaza's 1981 debut Photographs as Memories and some of their early singles.  They employ melodic vocals, verse-chorus song structures, and repetitive percussion patterns.  Even at its darkest points, Photographs as Memories draws from an accessible rock tradition.  While the band's work generally progressed toward more polished productions and more overtly melodic songs, they took a huge left turn with 1982's Pale Hands I Loved So Well.  Many songs lack any percussive element, and some have only the slightest hints at melody.  Structures repeat and evolve in structures that never reference rock music.  Simple analog effects are used in surprising places, far from any accepted norms of their time.  Pale Hands I Loved So Well at times reminds me of its precursors, like early Robert Wyatt or Pink Floyd's soundtrack album More.  At other times, it seems to presage the later Talk Talk albums or even lo-fi English eccentrics Woo.  Its frequency distribution is even surprisingly bright for an era when bands tended to use purposely dark balances.  The abstractly-layered images on the cover and surprising orange font give no hint at what the music inside will be.

Shiflet, Merciless (side A)

The back cover of 2011's Merciless claims to contain three songs on side A and two on side B, but each album side is a continuous piece without any pause.  The album sides do evolve in distinct movements, but there is not a clear break between the movements, only between the sides.  The transitions between the movements are technically seamless, but the relationship between the different ideas feels less clear.  The album begins explosively with a series of percussive sounds of electronic but somewhat unclear origin, which lasts a long time, and seems like it might be the only idea on the album.  Instead, it gradually evolves into a later section with some vaguely tonal elements.  The notes do not seem identifiable or important, but the droning sounds have a clear root frequency and extended sustain, which differentiates them from the first section.  After the side flip, the album continues with these sounds, until creatively-edited excerpts of violin and cello, playing mostly in extended techniques, move to the foreground toward the end.  The album until this point had been entirely electronic in origin.  Shiflet clearly has great control of his palette in each section, even as the sources and sounds change.  It's less obvious, to me, how these tracks relate in his head as a finished album.  The sounds fill the midrange and high frequency areas, with the highs brought slightly to the foreground and very little bass frequency content.  The beautiful close-up, black and white photo on the cover of Merciless reflects nicely on the album's abstraction, but it appears to have an organic origin far from most of Shiflet's palette.

Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Motion Sickness of Time Travel (side C)

Rachel Evans has been active for about five years with her solo project Motion Sickness of Time Travel, releasing many cassettes and CD-Rs in addition to a couple of vinyl LPs.  2012 saw the release of her self-titled double-LP, which is divided into four side-long tracks.  While the palette is fairly consistent across Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Evans's approach to the sounds narrows further within each individual track.  The pieces evolve actively, with synth melodies, heavily-processed vocals, and abstract digital sounds changing constantly.  While the individual sounds change rapidly, the structural evolution of the pieces occurs slowly, with the melodic synths losing their movement or a vocal getting introduced only many minutes into a piece.  The processed vocals combine Windy & Carl's buried ambience and the harsh sonic textures of groups like the Skaters.  The sonic elements provide the compositional structures here, and they sound weird and digitally lo-fi.  The high frequencies often leap in front of the mixes — they're loud in volume and slightly brittle and distorted in timbre.  The low frequencies, which tend to act mostly as drones, feel a bit shapeless in both textural and transient details.  The compression that was applied, likely in mastering, to produce a loud vinyl pressing is transparent, yet it makes the transient detail in the mid-range feel particularly unnatural.  While the collages on the cover look particularly great on the thick reverse-stock gatefold, the jarring images feel darker in character than the flowing compositions inside.