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.