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.

Tim Hecker, Radio Amor (side C)

Tim Hecker's core palette of grainy, down-sampled sounds that border on noise provides a foundation for Radio Amor.  Tremolo and other subtle effects often provide immediate variations, and the sounds often shift in timbre as a piece evolves.  10 discrete tracks spread over four sides, and most of them retain a consistent volume through the individual track.  The loud pieces tend to remain more distorted and at a higher volume, while the quieter pieces fall further in the background and utilize less harshness.  Hecker also occasionally employs a simple analog synth to create clicks and splatters.  These more defined sounds naturally land in front of the crushed, sustained sounds, and they're sometimes often mixed loudly as well.  The tracks evolve in ways that feel unobvious — busy tracks might be shorter, and the pieces with less activity last longer.  The intention here is not always clear, as the slowly-evolving tracks don't exactly fall into the background as ambient music, but they instead just seem to be waiting a long time for the next event.  The sequence between tracks also follows no logical progression — many pieces have similarities in palette, but there's no additional clear relationship between adjacent tracks.  Hecker clearly has remarkable control over the crushed textures that he utilizes, and sometimes they evolve in magical and engaging ways.  At other times, the decisions on Radio Amor seem so arbitrary that it fails to sustain its magic through a long double-album.  The blurry silhouette in the front photo fits with the blurry monotone of much of Hecker's palette, and the handwritten font nicely matches the intimacy of his approach.

Out Hud / !!!, Lab Series vol. 2 split 12" (side A)

Out Hud and !!! branched out of the same family tree, and this 1999 split 12" captures both bands when they were still based in Sacramento, before their move to Brooklyn.  While the Out Hud side is split into 3 tracks and the !!! side is one long track, both sides evolve from capturing the band's live sound into a more abstract rhythmic groove.  Out Hud provide two tracks of dub-informed instrumentals, with tight electric guitar and clean cello over their awkward but coherent rhythm section.  Like their 7"s of this era, which was my favorite chapter of their output, the group sounds like a bizarre 90s update of records like the Basement 5 In Dub or XTC Go +.  While both of those records were one-offs for the band, this approach, complete with extreme use of simple processing, provided Out Hud's primary sound for years.  The final track on the side, "JGNXTC", consists purely of a mechanical groove with weird analog noises — it's hard to determine how many band members were involved with its creation.  !!! had not yet evolved the melodic or structural coherence that shone through their debut LP.  For most of "Instinct", they focus purely on creating a rhythmic groove, and any melodic or lyrical content from the conventionally-structured rock band is purely secondary.  The last part of the track gradually devolves and abandons the rock-oriented parts of the group.  What remains are drumming and heavily-effected grunting, almost as if Cromagnon had mutated itself into a new wave dance band.  Lab Series Vol. 2 employs primitive packaging design and recording qualities to emphasize both groups' overt punk rock roots, even as their music had moved so far from their origins.

Chris Knox, Not Given Lightly (10" EP)

Somehow, the American "Not Given Lightly" 10" is completely different from the New Zealand 12" single release of the same song.  Where the New Zealand 12" uses the same version of "Not Given Lightly" from Seizure, the US 10" uses an alternate mix, with very prominent backing vocals that I did not recognize.  The front cover, which uses the same image from the New Zealand 12" but in a slightly different design, mentions "Media Mix" at the bottom, but I'm not sure how extra backing vocals constitute a "Media Mix"?  There are five tracks on the B-side, which plays at 33 RPM while the front goes at 45.  The tracks come from either Croaker or Seizure, and the only notable quality is that the high-end from the lo-fi recordings leads to some rough sibilance coming through on the vinyl — it's not a great mastering job.  These are amazing songs and inspired performances, but the only unique thing on this EP is an inferior version of "Not Given Lightly".

Souled American, Around the Horn (side A)

Chicago's Souled American owe an obvious debt to the Meat Puppets.  The Meat Puppets' shambling hybrid of country and punk on records like Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun was incredibly well-respected in the mid-80s, but few bands found a way to borrow from it and create something equally distinctive.  Souled American kept the punk-rock irreverence of the Meat Puppets, but by 1990's Around the Horn, they'd shed all vestiges of energy or confrontation.  The songs range from mid-tempo down to slow, and even at their punchiest moments on songs like "Rise Above It", the rhythm section provides little impact or drive.  The references to country have also grown increasingly faint, though the idea of country music still seems to be somewhere in Around the Horn's DNA.  While Spot's engineering of the old SST albums has grown less fashionable as affordable technology is more readily available and recording feels less like a black art, Around the Horn dates from a time when imitating it still seemed appropriate.  Like the old SST albums, the Around the Horn mixes translate well, even if some of the odd efforts at "clean sounds" might be perceived as dated compared to today's trends.  The front cover design, especially the block-y fonts, makes little sense, but it's great that they thanked Gary Schepers on the back.

Crawlspace, God-Zee (10" EP)

From what I've heard of Crawlspace, my favorite parts of their work sound far from rock music.  While they still use distorted guitars, propulsive drums, and blues riffs, their music has more emotional impact when it transforms these elements into an amorphous ooze for Eddie Flowers's vocals to ride.  1992's God-Zee 10" seems to predate their having refined this approach — while in places their create their dark magic, at other times the group sometimes still sounds like they're playing rock music, not just utilizing its elements.  While Flowers is the group's best-known member, God-Zee begins without his vocals — side A begins with an instrumental arrangement of Ornette and Prime Time's "Dancing in Your Head" before falling into original material.  Crawlspace handle the cover with the dignity that it deserves.  Flowers shines the rest of the way, especially when the music meshes with his odd vision.  The low point for me is the beginning of side B's "Move -> Up ^", where bassist Joe Dean's busy playing grows distracting.  The recording is simple and somewhat lo-fi, from a time before this style became a purposeful referent, and the odd cover gives no hint of the music inside.  Listening to God-Zee reminded me that I'm about 15 years behind on hearing Crawlspace's current work.

Miles Davis, On the Corner (side A)

1972's On the Corner is of course best remembered for its funk rhythms.  The cover, with its populist imagery, reinforces the idea that Davis has taken a step toward a mainstream audience.  On listening now, On the Corner is far, far stranger than the pulsing bass that provides its groove.  The drums, even, are too stripped-down to effectively reinforce the rhythmic bass lines.  They're also sometimes augmented with percussion playing counter-rhythms, which often work against any sense of dance music that's been created.  The guitars and trumpet that move against the rhythm generally play freely, also without reinforcing any sense of propulsion — these parts tie the album more closely to Miles's other albums of this era, like 1971's Live Evil or 1974's Get Up with It.  The extended, slowly-evolving pieces relate, in structure at least, to dance music from later eras than anything happening in 1972 — even something like the Temptations' 1973 oddity "Masterpiece" has far more song structure than any of On the Corner's free-flowing tracks.  The sound is impressively even and well-balanced, with the bass guitar sitting perfectly and the treble frequencies clear but never shrill.