Tracks of the Week 14.01.23

Capping a long association with Peter Rehberg and Editions Mego, which stretches all the way back to the release of her melodic breakthrough Shojo Toshi in 2001, this week Tujiko Noriko labours in crepuscule over a series of silvery synth fantasies which manifest her shift into the cinematic form, evoking everything from the Eduard Artemyev score to Tarkovsky’s furtive sci-fi art film Stalker to surrealist staples like Eraserhead and Carnival of Souls. In two parts with Crépuscule I reaching a bristling climax on ‘Bronze Shore’ and ‘Rear View’, the record also serves as a physical homage to Rehberg, released as a double cassette ‘by request of Noriko as it was this format she flung her debut Mego demo onto Peter into Tokyo many moons ago’.

For Superpang the creative coder and sound artist Scott Cazan dabbles in psychoacoustic experiments and auditory distortion products in the manner of the pioneering installation artist Maryanne Amacher. Commonly referred to as combination tones, sound synthesis based on auditory distortion products encourages the ears themselves to produce audible sound, generating backwards-travelling waves which vibrate along the basilar membrane within the cochlea. The tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis sends seraphic beings alongside Chris Hoffman and Max Jaffe on the latest offering from the upcoming Eye Of I, while the composer Gaia Wilmer summons a large ensemble to honour the work of her friend and mentor Egberto Gismonti, drawing especially from early eighties albums like Circense and Em Família while featuring Gabriel Gross on the harmonica, Jaques Morelenbaum on the cello, and Gismonti himself on the piano as special guests.

While the Spektral Quartet laid down their bows and strings last year, drawing the curtain on more than a decade of live performance, the violinists Clara Lyon and Theo Espy, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen still have three recording projects on a stately afterburn. First up on New Amsterdam Records, the quartet join up with Julia Holter for Behind the Wallpaper, a song cycle by the composer Alex Temple which embodies themes of alienation and transformation through disparate scenes. Blending elements of indie pop, Weimar cabaret, Elizabethan music, and 19th-century Romanticism while set between such disparate locales as an eerie science park and masquerade ball, the first song from the album ‘Tiny Holes’ is about memetic phobias and imaginary diseases, with Temple adding that ‘Julia Holter’s music has a stylistic fluidity and vulnerability that made her the perfect choice for this dreamy, unsettling story. The piece tells the tale of someone undergoing a mysterious transformation and ultimately finding a home in another world’.

Lætitia Tamka as Vagabon follows up her critically acclaimed debut album with an earworm about knowledge accretion and delayed gratification, while Avey Tare realises the fruits of pandemic-laden trips to his friend Adam McDaniel’s Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville with a set of songs described as ‘overstuffed jelly jars, cracking so that the sweetness oozes out into unexpected shapes’. Embracing the theme of collaboration, John Cale settles on the love song as the channel for gentle reflections and hopeful ruminations alongside Laurel Halo, Actress, Weyes Blood, Sylvan Esso, Tei Shi, Fat White Family, the late Tony Allen, and the members of Animal Collective on the Welsh icon’s first full album in a decade, while the cosmic southerner Lonnie Holley is joined by Michael Stipe, Sharon Van Etten, Moor Mother, Justin Vernon, and Rokia Koné for the soulful vibrations of Oh Me Oh My. Tracks by Purling Hiss, Rarelyalways, and Why Bonnie also feature in the latest roundup of best new music.

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Purling Hiss – ‘Yer All In My Dreams’