each song a cacophony crafted from the sounds we so often ignore or phase out. Kohl isn’t so much crafting a soundscape for us to hear as rewiring our brains so that our attention might be heightened. What we encounter in such a state is sometimes playful, sometimes strange, occasionally unnerving and melancholic in the way the slow passage of life always is. The human world in granular detail. What it sounds like to live here and now.

After a collaboration with Whitney Johnson earlier this year, Lia Kohl is now returning with Various Small Whistles and a Song, a new record released via the Belgian label Dauw. As the artistically-inclined might deduce from the title, the album takes inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, a book released in 1964 which featured fifteen photographs of fires and one of a glass of milk, Kohl matching not only the structure of Ruscha’s work (the album offers fifteen whistles and one song) but also its playfulness and deceptive depth.

The result is an attempt to convey the subtle textures of life in a way that feels at once incidental and carefully curated, and one that ultimately adds up to something far greater than the sum of its parts. The humble whistle, it turns out, is the ideal medium around which to build such a mission. “I’ve always been captivated by whistling,” as Kohl explains. “It’s musical but often a bit unconscious; usually solo but often done in public places. There’s something tender and human about hearing someone whistle, a socially acceptable version of hearing their mind wander.”

With the release set for next month, Lia Kohl has shared three tracks to introduce the style, each clocking in at exactly a humble minute yet able to transport listeners across the world. Recorded in 2017 while Kohl was touring with a theatre company, ‘Penny Whistle Seller, Guangzhou’ takes places within the bustling streets of China, while ‘My Kitchen, Chicago’ is located, you guessed it, within Kohl’s own home. The ever-excellent claire rousay recorded the whistles for ‘Home, Los Angeles’, an example of the thread of collaboration which runs through the record too (artists like Macie Stewart and Patrick Shiroishi also took field recordings for different songs). Each track serves as its own slice of life, a singular moment captured on tape, then accentuated in a way unique to Lia Kohl, but the result is strangely familiar. As though within the impossible diversity of experience present across the world, some common force remains. Something as mundane as it is magic, human and universal.

Various Small Whistles and a Song will be released on the 14th November via Dauw and you can pre-order it now.

Photo by Leah Wendzinski, album design by Jelle Martens

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With Echo of Being / Grace in Rot set for release next week, Neti-Neti have returned with the second title track as a new single. Offering another dimension to the album, the song is far more patient and restrained than the previous one, its slower, less frantic style evoking a different form of grief. The background tone, ever-present, across which the more pressing, volatile forms will spark and fade. Droning drum samples and textured electronics are joined by washes of Kidambi’s vocals and dappled bells, pulling the listener into a world strange, ethereal and potentially bottomless. One which mirrors the experience of grief in how it collapses the distinction between reality, memory and dreams.

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With the release of Columbia Deluxe fast approaching, Fuubutsushi are back with ‘Light In The Annex’, a song with something of an unorthodox origin story for the outfit. “This was a really fun and rare opportunity for us to play a song live before releasing a recording of said song,” the band explain. “We were just starting to put together ideas for some of the songs that would become [2024 full-length] Meridians and ‘Light in the Annex’ was an early contender.” Not that the live version lines up with what would eventually be recorded, with the nature of the live performance and moreover the spirit of Fuubutsushi project meaning that nothing is ever static or set in stone. “This version feels a little more wily compared to the studio/album version,” as they continue. “We find some pockets to push moments of disorder or tension/release pretty far, which was certainly part of the experience for everyone… anticipation and tension and wonder and relief and joy all mixed up together.”

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To celebrate the year anniversary of the release, Dickson is sharing ‘Skin of Words’ as a single, and anyone who missed The Beholder first time around would be advised to take notice. Crafted from characteristically dreamlike sounds, the song submerges the listener within an ambiguous, unanchored atmosphere. One where the mood is never static, the sound always moving but never within the neat arc of narrative. Instead, differing sensations are juxtaposed so that tension might be achieved, not least the pairing of granular textures with sweeping movement. “I was interested in the contrast and coexistence of high drama, drops, big sounds, and lush textures, with delicate, close, subtle, sensorial sounds,” Dickson continues. “It felt important for moments to have the tactility that comes from a sample of the rain or a bell or some rocks being jostled together. To me, reality has this quality; moments of sensory blending and cohesion punctuated by the hyperreal. The archetype of the beholder is fascinated by this way of being—unmoored from the trappings of actuality.”

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But, despite being made with the same ethos and general techniques, the new record offers something of a change of focus. The thick and verdant soundscapes remain, as do Principato’s use of manipulated field recordings and preoccupation with the intersection of place and memory, but the locations called forth are more nebulous. Somewhere Else “is a little different in that the space is not as physical as previous releases,” as we described in our preview of the title track, “though no less real and familiar.”

This style is typified by ‘Fool’s Empyrean’, a slow-moving almost ten-minute piece which rises from the grounded ribbiting of frogs towards an almost transcendental bed of sound. Though as the song unfurls and the environmental elements reappear, any sense of linear progression is diminished. Instead, as the title might suggest, the earthly and the cosmic appear in tandem, which in turn greys the distinction between the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, the familiar and the foreign. As Principato describes:

“[This] is a song that seeks to depict a series of intangible yet intimately personal psychic spaces that we all have inside our heads; foggy rooms from our childhoods, familiar smells, misrememberings, dreams, seasons, and routines all blurring together to become our own continuous mental perception of ‘now’.”

The strange environment which emerges is best described by the album’s title. Somewhere else is an assumedly real place, though one whose only certain feature is that of not being here. A place potentially recognisable but foreign by definition, forever straddling the line between expectation and experience. Somewhere, as ‘This Place Ever Changing’ suggests, which can never be nailed down in the world. No matter where you find yourself wandering, there will always be somewhere else.

Somewhere Else is out now. Get it digitally from the Saapato Bandcamp page, or grab a cassette tape from Aural Canyon.

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Consisting of music, videos, sculpture and photography, The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air bases itself within those days, where the impossibility of grief meets the reality of illness, both cruel and mundane. “This is, at its core, what it is like to know and love someone with dementia,” Collin Thomas explains. “Repetition. Surprise. Repetition. Shock. Repetition. Fatigue. Endless repetition.”

The main body of the project is formed by what Thomas describes as “an album of music in the form of a book,” which is split into sixteen parts and exceeds four hours of music in total. The immersive result—which owes an equal debt to his father’s ambivalence and his mother’s certitude—isn’t so much an encapsulation of its themes as a direct experience for the audience, demanding patience and effort no matter how difficult any passing moment might be. Listen to ‘The Wrong Banquet’, just one of the mammoth project’s sixteen pieces, below.

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“Using homebrewed code, I sonified this data, mapping toxic release, revenue, federal contracts, etc. to audio elements like distortion, pitch, and waveform to build noisy soundscapes,” Dumas explains. “I composed piano melodies atop those soundbeds while viewing images of the affected towns and waterways.” But against this more abstract artistic endeavour stands the forthright nature of the labelling. Each track takes a specific case, with the title stating the story behind the song plainly. ‘PBF Energy released 8 million lbs of toxic chemicals into US waterways,’ ‘Koch Industries released 7 million lbs of toxic chemicals into US waterways’, ‘DuPont released 17 million lbs of toxic chemicals into US waterways’ and so on, with JBS Foods, Cargill, Phillips 66 and others all implicated. The result is marked in both its fury and sorrow, bringing to life the full malignant greed of corporate America and the loss inherent in the devastation it has wrought.

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Out this April via Whatever’s Clever Records, Taste Like Labor functions in a similar manner. An album aiming to describe sentiments as they are lived and felt, but not beholden to the moment. As though at some degree of detail, a studied feeling comes to exist on its own terms, lifted free from the context in which it was experienced. Dave Scanlon mines such a phenomenon for all of its disembodied strangeness, be it to confront voyeuristic tendencies or the chemical realties underpinning the emotional world. But moreover, he does so to undo the preconceptions bound up in every signifier. To take the familiar and show it back to us different, and thus allow some deeper essence to drift in free from the the black matter baggage of words.

Today sees the release of the album’s second single, ‘Crystals’, which serves as the ideal introduction to Scanlon’s intentions. With a patient sound warmed through with fondness, the track digs into our worries and fears to reveal the hopes which underpin them. A mindful experience where everything is held at arm’s length, losing none of the intimacy but providing just enough distance to gain a sense of perspective. So when Scanlon sings “Crystals, fractions of prayer, and my emotions cresting,” it is the final word which is key. “The cresting provides the reassurance,” as he puts it, “that this too shall pass.”

The moment marks a change in the track, with piano from Shannon Fields (of Stars Like Fleas, Leverage Models and Helado Negro, and who also produced the record) further leavening the sound as it moves towards a humble epiphany. “When an abundance of prey crashes the Snowy Owl flies south,” Scanlon sings, “that’s beautiful / I love you for being beautiful.” Lines delivered with tender assurance, as though after a period of blinkered living, he is snapping to the majesty of things as though waking from a dream.

We have the pleasure of sharing a video for the track. Co-directed by Ro(b)//ert Lundberg and  Dave Scanlon himself, with text and post-production from Benedict Kupstas, the film blurs the line between still life and stop motion, leaving you guessing whether it is the motion or lack thereof in the composition which proves the most striking.

Taste Like Labor is out on the 14th April via Whatever’s Clever and you can pre-order it now.

Photo by Robert Lundberg

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jesus is the path to heaven are back with a brand new release, Book of Moths. Written and performed at Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina, the EP takes its lyrics from the King James Version and the Mepkin Abbey Psalter, and marries the minimalist folk of hell verses with the more ambitious drone styles of later releases. The result is what the band describe as “a dark devotional for the mothgod,” a collection of solemn and often unsettling songs grounded in the profound weight of its surroundings. Songs, that is, fitting of their titular creature: fragile and vulnerable, capable of great destruction, ultimately drawn to the light.

Sung by Caroline O’Neil, opener ‘job 4:12-19’ is an acapella rendition of the title’s verses, the only other sounds that of ambient textures and the retreating footfall of the conclusion. “How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay,” go the final lines, “whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?” The obscure image blurs the line between the destroyer and destroyed and elucidates the competing themes of devotion and corruption across the record. A place where the flesh and the spirit meet.

It is the tension between these concepts which fuels the release, from the way the bright faith of ‘length of my days’ distorts into peculiar noise to the cloistered ‘psalm 39 (mepkin psalter)’, its poignant hush slowly infiltrated by outside sound. But nowhere is it clearer than the striking ‘YMMBCALTM’. A plaintive hymn turned horror film soundtrack, its gentle atmosphere interrupted by disturbing sawing repetitions as though some malign force has announced itself. Something insectile or mechanical brought forth from a gloom world to torment us, even the most searching and willing in the end consumed. “Lord, what have I to wait for?” Hoban asks. “”hen you correct me / you make my beauty to consume away like the moth.”

art by jph

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The first chapter of a forthcoming EP Work in Progress, latest single ‘Glory Glory’ further hones this style, challenging the line between song and short film with its evocative and abstract style. Again directed by Kempe-Bergman, the video opens with near-silence for the first minutes, its eerie, surreal imagery populated by staccato bursts of panicked voices, confusion caused by the appearance of some strange entity, although the picture only shows a figure edging around a cat on the road. The effect is somewhere between Lars von Trier and David Lynch, where stillness belies some darkness below the surface which threatens to spill out. The foundation upon which the rest of the EP will build.

The song itself consists of an almost acapella version of the classic hymn, the sounds of the video bleeding into the track as its characters continue their journey along the road (to Hollywood, in true Lynchian style). “Often when I make Cult of Y music I’m looking for contrasts but in this case there wasn’t any need to do so because of the story in the video,” explains August Vinberg. “Knowing where the girls are heading and what’s to come there’s already a dissonance between the beauty in the music and the horrors to come in the story.”

‘Glory Glory’ is out now and available from all the usual places.

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