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THE RECORD EXCHANGE REVIEW: REM ON SWEET TRIP’S ‘VELOCITY: DESIGN: COMFORT’

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February 17, 2025 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

Artist: Sweet Trip
Album: Velocity: Design: Comfort
Reviewer: Rem Jensen

Somewhere between the buttery sweet noise-pop ballads of Swirlies and the dense, digital abstractions of Autechre lay “Velocity: Design: Comfort.” the sophomore effort from San Fran cyber-slacker pop duo Sweet Trip. Unbridled by an expectation of predictability, the group found a sound that few have truly blissed out in such originality; an act like Seefeel – and their record Quique from 1993 – were functionally the touchstone group that veered in the direction of such a combination, until the late-90s where acts like Scala and Polykroma began to take note of the concoction of techno and shoegaze, only to meander a bit more into ambient territory rather than take it full hooky pop.

In 2003, however, VDC threw this concept of dipping their toes out the window and into an intimate and frenetic wastebasket that seeped from atop the architectural limits of variegated dumpsters; or rather, they embraced such priorly disparallel genres and fused said blend together in a harmonious conjoined-twin potion of illustrious fuzz and meltingly plotted glitch.

The juxtaposition of the first two tracks, “Tekka” and “Dsco,” jump immediately into this hodgepodge of styles, if not separate from each other here at the start of the record: the former track barraging the listener with splayed out breakbeaty sparkling mishmashes that bring to mind predecessors of this IDM shrapnel sound, like some of the more energetic tracks from Mouse on Mars, or a vision from Jega’s Geometry, which predates VDC by just three years; the latter song snapping us back from chaos and steeping us sugarly into a bath of pert, floaty, catchy-chockful jams, not without that disco (ergo the name of the track) hi-hat backbeat driving the course as the groop’s dream-pop vocals swell around the upbeat, single-begging appeal of just the second song on this 73-minute album.

Yet, the tracks that make that length necessitating the CD’s durational ability are some of the strongest cuts on the album: despite half of these 12 songs being over six minutes, the heavy hitters like “International,” “Sept” and “Velocity” absolutely deserve their runtime, filled to the brim with creative flourishes in the rhythms, tone and progressions that are rarely found as consistent on an album that is trying “new” things. Combining the general languid sprawls of electronic tracks – particularly during the prime CD era – I’m looking at you again, drukqs – with that always sweet under-four-minute-radio-ready hit, would frankly beckon a struggle uphill against the differences in pace and implied generical conventions, yet by virtue of depth and gall, this concept gets annihilatingly smashed out of the park. 

One of the lengthier cuts – and a long-time favorite of mine – “Fruitcake and Cookies,” sees itself oscillate in theme between Fennesz-level microglitchiness, mid-career Animal Collective strummed, fragmented pop softness, and a bold, turbulent foray into crayon-etched drill-and-bass balladry, all combining before the track’s true explosion in the second half. At 4:25 we suddenly predate the DIY indiegaze scene by a decade and a half; I hear so much of the future in these next minutes, where the limiter-smashed mixed walls of earwormable psychy-noise from artists like Parannoul, Weatherday or Spirit of the Beehive are captured through an oblique, crystalline fisheye lens, picking up the wicked tracers of the bright, fluttery synthesizers, ascensionous group oohs and ahhs and the wetly chorused mixing of all of these elements, mellifluously pouncing out from the speakers and into an amalgamation much unkin to the music before it – and I’d reckon, most of the music that succeeded it – save for thee Fishmans.

To pivot from the extra, the more subdued cuts on VDC flow like the sun-reflected dripping floe of heated sliding glaciers; smooth, resilient to obtuseness and rich with chilled-out nuance. The most obvious example being another monolith “International”: an exceptionally glitchy, busy, yet completely entrancing stroll down a much-needed relaxing pathway. Behind the sweet, Flaming Lips-esque beginning to the track and the Slowdivean dream-pop westernish twang that ends it, the middle bulk contains Valerie’s philtering vocals syncopating in and out, cut and clicked apart as blippy lackadaisical synths fill the world, all the while the beat behind flashes with IDM downtempo programming, giving sight to a snow-trodden bubblegum meadow, with sweet tulips and stem-fast dandelions that totter gracefully in the fantastical gusts that breeze through the track’s plains of beauty and palatable coziness. 

Another terrific, slower breath of fresh air – more in a sense of tempo and assiduousness, rather than compositionally same-y, which this record lacks none of – is the effervescent gazey head nodder “To All The Dancers of the World, A Round Form of Fantasy,” whose swayable lull captures the taste of a hypnotically emblazoned pop cocktail. Its propulsive back half of near-cloying fuzz, swinging from side to side – literally with strong textures panning across the spectrum as the song ends – is not without the warm programmed opulence that occurs in its first half; some parts Stereloab fed through a microsound transmitter, some parts nearly emo in its bittersweet keys, with some tasteful flourishes of drum-break spatters and Casino Versus Japan-quality bitcrushing to boot.

Speaking of programmed drum breaks, this Darla Records behemoth fails not at sketching some wonderfully interesting rhythms, and rather congruent to this record’s ability in balance, both devastate the listener – like on “Dedicated” with its flashcore scattershot goodness – and console the vibe from its hectic moments with gentle yet captivating grooves – like on “Dedicated” again, whose opening and closing moments – relative to the voltaic two-minute middle section of the track – synthesize an alluring atmosphere with still secundum intricate and engaging beats, kept afloat by the rubbery, almost nursery rhyme level vocals here from Valerie.

It’s peculiar, however, because despite my focus on the electronic aspects on VDC, this is still quite an indie record; it’s a reason why this album stands out so much among its – if comparable even exist – contemporaries, because despite the Postal Service-praising indietronica craze in the mid-00s, Sweet Trip here bridged some sort of gap between those shoegaze ambient techno roots of the 90s and the maximum loud, poppy, digitized mastering jobs of the late-10s to now. Although the beats and production scream Warp, and the timbre weeping to be acknowledged by Topshelf, it again falls with incredibly firm alacrity in the middle, not without its impact – at least to this one reviewer. 

An overt aspect of this record I’ve yet to mention – and perchance why the record has boatloads of staying power, relistenability-wise and approachability – are the lyrics; complementing the bright and upbeat guitars surrounding it, tracks like “Dsco” are undeniable love songs, charming and uplifting in nature and arguably cordial at times, and other cuts such as the shorter “Chocolate Matter” are downright inspirational in message and cathartically convincing of such a mood, much to be credited its pairing with the sheer Shieldean sonance and fantastic Mascisian use of the tremolo arm that guide one section to another. Looping back to “International,” this track’s gutturally self-destructible phrasing implies a breakup of intercontinental magnitudes – least to thee singer – and my previously defined bright melodic harvest of its instruments gain a much different sensation when coinciding with lyrics that elicit an image much like gnawing through your cheek at the thought of separation, and the apathetic acceptance and crusade of having hope in the presence of an undisputable end result. Simply: electronic + indie + happy + sad + lyrics that don’t feel haphazardly heavy-handed in their elucidation become a mighty combo when done with such intention here on VDC.

The final missing piece of that equation could be the undeniably fun distraction that it is: “Pro: Love: Ad” is pure dance fuel; “Dedicated” scratches all the itches that your brain may have and lets you bask in its fulfilling nature; “Velocity” is a pure illumine, summertime, shirt-over-your-shoulder-no-looking-back soundtrack, and the healthy, bright, prismatic, cartoon-heyday, shimmeringly carefree but cereal-full nostalgia factor hits like a screaming electric turbocharged bulldozer on songs like “Sept,” “International” or “Tekka.”

It’s almost as if this glinting rainbow monolith, somehow casting no penumbra across the glowing, mind-numbing x-y chart of the ground, nor under the static, screensaver wallpaper sky, sits in this perfect little space in our plane, inscrutable in its concept, stymie in its intention, floating in a brutalist bubble, with windows in every direction so that you could see thee ever-never-changing environment from a different direction than the day before. In the face of the bombastic Americanized technocracy, I’d err in the direction of the massive chromatic wall of striped candy chunks, but here’s to times future, able to present themselves as need be, with some needed steroids at standby in the form of the virtuosity-laden, taffy stretched and blindingly glucotoxic project Velocity: Comfort: Design.

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REM DIGS INTO THE NEW MOUNT EERIE ALBUM ‘NIGHT PALACE’

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November 21, 2024 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

By Rem Jensen

Over the course of a near 30-year tenure, the work of Phil Elverum has long stayed consistent in its themes of nature, emotion and vicariousness. Shadowed poetic phrases, fuzzy uncanny landscapes and questionable fidelity choices seeped from the delicate vocals, lo-fi guitars and bombastically mixed records put out via the Microphones project and the second phase of his work under the Mount Eerie name. Two records stand out among most listeners’ memory: the blown-out psychedelic folk masterpiece the Glow pt. 2 – released under the Microphones moniker in 2001 – and the emblazingly sorrowful lamentations and depressing grieving machinations of Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me from 2017.

Besides these two significant records, most others also stand out as important in the discography, such as the transformative 2003 record Mount Eerie by the Microphones, which cannot be understated in its formative impact as the momentum shift between the two projects, with long, expansive songs in many separate parts where the atmosphere is brooding, the narrative is gripping and the instrumentation even more palpably hypnotic. Another addition that’s worth mentioning is 2009’s Wind’s Poem, which the witch’s cauldron it was brewed from stewed a dizzyingly entertaining mix of post-rock, folk, ambient, nature sounds and even some flourishes of black metal thrown about. We would also be keen to mention The Microphones in 2020, the only other full-album return to the Microphones’ name, which acted as a reflective moment for Elverum, archiving in culminative prose the trajectory of his musical career and the changes in his life within and around the music. Which brings us to 2024 and his first record in four years, Night Palace.

After a handful of listens, it’s clear this is one of Phil’s strongest, most realized projects to date, with some different and capturing takes on old classic tropes found in the Anacortes artist’s audio arsenal. As a rite of passage of being an album in the Elverum discography, we have at least a nod or two toward previously established moments in his catalog: “The Gleam, Pt. 3” being a continuation of the Gleam series featured on 2000’s It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water and on the previously mentioned the Glow pt. 2 and a small inclusion of the words “my roots were strong and deep” on the goliathian penultimate track on Night Palace, “Demolition,” referencing another track on the Glow pt. 2.

Not only are countless of these songwriting moments some of Phil’s most comprehensively structured and self-referential works to date, but Night Palace juggles adjacently familiar, yet eye-catching shifts in genres and sound compositions, an un-shy muscle undeniably flexed before by the K Records veteran.

At an 80-minute-long runtime, Night Palace keeps the listener glued to their speakers by way of Elverum’s chiaroscuro methods of compiling this 26-song adventure into a cohesive, effective and to this reviewer’s best definition, evocative exploration of the sonic expressions of life in the Pacific Northwest and introspective, content adulthood and the miasma of multitudes one harnesses at a developed, experienced age, with Phil nearing 46 – an age that he lyrically includes on the previously mentioned cut, “Demolition.”

An example of the breadth displayed on Night Palace are the multiple tracks that utilize the motorik beat, like on “Empty Paper Towel Roll,” where Phil illustrates viewing the sky through a narrow circular field, eliciting the feeling of a tangible slice of the universe, much more digestible and disassociable than the vehement world that bears down on all who live inside it, by way of the foresty approximation of its Yo La Tengo-like sugary noise-pop remnants. Another krautish track, “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization,” the final single for the record itself, immediately engages the listener with its robotically precise rhythms and droning shoegazey tone that call to mind some work by Radiohead or My Bloody Valentine, of which it lays somewhere in the middle of the former’s driving drum patterns and the latter’s wall-of-sound washed, crunchy chords, not before culminating into a true Elverum solo acoustic fresh breath in, before exasperatedly breathing out into a large yet intimate full-band ending.

Some little quirks within the confines of this double LP that I feel worth noting are as follows: the short stint of free-improvisational blastbeats and screams à la Naked City on “Swallowed Alive;” the obliquely introduced trap triplet drum machine hi-hats on “I Spoke with A Fish” that emerge only for five bars; the massive, cacophonous drone walls appearing on the back half on “Co-Owner of Trees” that sound more Sunn O))) than the Stereolab adjacent kosmische jams that appear on the first half of the track; the watery walls of white noise on “I Heard Whales (I Think)” that harken back to the transitional moments between tracks on the aforementioned Mount Eerie record from ’03; the thudding production of the drums and the discordant harmonies on “Breaths” that remind me of the resonant reverberations shown on records produced by The Body or This Heat.

In typical Phil fashion, however, the majority of Night Palace washes with his predictable – yet not overindulged – combinations of guitar distortion, cozy vocal swells, dry acoustic drum kits and delicate, shrugging, introspective writings that would not be out of place in a skunk-swallowed, sweat-dripping dark cabaret. These tracks are cumulative of that ’90s indie sleaze sound of Dinosaur Jr., Pavement, Elliott Smith and other groups of which Phil has shown some outward appreciation; “I Saw Another Bird” spurs the thought of the Smog song “Cold-Blooded Old Times,” and “Broom of Wind” itself conjures the Silver Jews track “People.” Even more so, both external group frontmen Bill Callahan and David Berman have been seen at one point in time in the same room with Phil, as if their similarly fleeting tunes and mutually mundane invitations felt the gravity of one another and pulled each other into an amber-lit, quartz-surrounded box, and prospered a discussion I imagine involved innocuous discussions about pollution, milk substitutes, guitar tunings and dialogues that stitched together Hemingway, highway patterns and Hellmann’s mayonnaise.

Returning thrice to the track “Demolition,” the sprawling 12-minute song has its sails gusted by continuously whirring wind sounds, as Phil wanders about like a held-hand child showing the adults the world it lives in; with the tasteful verbiage of McCarthy, the introspection of Camus and the tempo of Plath, it’s a track where the length allows the listener to step into a murky, Twin Peaksean dreamscape, beckoned by the narrator’s orations of cabin life tucked away in copses within copses, nihilistic ruminations on the nosediving state of the world’s climate, optimistic outlooks of a far-away future that’s healed from the self-inflicted scars of human wreckage and the power of a islandic meditation retreat that left him a shell of a skeptic. The insularly alienating multi-tracked vocals speak as a hipster worm burrowed in your brain, the instruments sparse as wind chimes swung by sea breeze and the effervescently airy drones and minimal ritualistic percussion that bookend this song, all add up to an effort that deservingly envelops much of the D side of Night Palace.

As the 21st studio effort in Elverum’s catalog, it’s indicative of the prowess of the Washington native, and how able he is to tap into repetitiously routinized, well-established and fundamentally simple writing predilections and expectations, yet still with the ability to say something new, write something new or even conjure new images of still-life paintings that have been gathering dust somewhere in the labyrinthian confines of a House of Leaves-esque overgrown mansion, breathing with life forces inherited from eons’ worth of civilization, evolution, growth, destruction, rehabilitation, resplendent forests, weathered hearts, slimy inlet stones and the pulsating creaks of wood that outlive many of our own lives, ever alive and animated by the souls that have been birthed and swallowed by the bear hugs of time.

Night Palace serves as a beautiful, competent confluence of little sprinkles of artistic variability, sandwiched between the conventional Elverum writings that again feel like continuations of his well-established singer-songwriter sound, but achieved through a much more mature, intentional and calculated approach to a style that at its core in both initial writings and final products are commonly nothing more than a man with six strings and a hollow body, crooning away soft écritures of lovers, expeditions, analogies and a continual underlying connection with thee Mother Earth. 

I hope you’ll be as excited as I was to learn of a Mount Eerie performance coming to town in February of 2025, one of which I’ll be at the front row of, with eyes as wet as a Sauna, pupils as large as the Moon and neurons that fire at near the temperature of the Sun.

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THE RECORD EXCHANGE REVIEW: REM ON SQUAREPUSHER’S ‘ULTRAVISITOR 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION’

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November 4, 2024 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

Artist: Squarepusher
Album: Ultravisitor 20th Anniversary Edition
Reviewer: Rem Jensen

Toxic, Bush’s second term, Facebook; 2004 brought a selection of events and moments that shaped and sneak-peeked the post-Y2K world as it was developing. There was a general sense of culture, with the boom of the Von Dutch multi-layered fashion archetype and the timeless classic of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie being released, countered by rising disdain for the jingoistic stubbornness of the US’s strong-handed involvement in the Iraq War, which imploded after our two attacks on Fallujah. The year brought many tug-of-war battles between citizens and their surroundings, muddying up the rocky but palatable ground that media, global politics and life was hurriedly shaping into.

However, gone from the notions of cultural relevance was the fringe, and while the indie rock of the Strokes, Interpol and Arcade Fire was taking shape and forming the new norm that still runs into today’s music landscape, the ever-creeping impact of electronic music was becoming less easy to ignore. Daft Punk, Gorillaz, Radiohead; pop was being digitized, but what was going on with the music that had already been digital?

When I think of electronic, I think of three names, predictably: Aphex Twin, Autechre and Squarepusher. These three Warped artists nailed down and progressed electronic music to a realized form, which in the evolution from Kraftwerk and Silver Apples continued a legacy of driving, inventive rhythms and textures brought on by the mangling of circuits and capacitors: Aphex with his ambient techno sound that encapsulated almost all of the ‘90s; Autechre with their cold, glitchy, cerebral generative programming; and Squarepusher, thee Tom Jenkinson, who stood out by inserting more of a human touch into his take on electronic music, much to be attributed to his imperfect, unpolished-sounding experimentational playing of his bass guitar.

This is a long way of establishing that Squarepusher’s work felt more alive and less robotic than his surrounding cast, and his 2004 record Ultravisitor threw caution to the wind and took a few swings at electro that were broad, bold, daring and super weird, but sounded less like it was cooked and stewed in the drab, concrete, dank rooms that home-recorded electronic had been establishing.

The album gets a lot of credit for me in the Squarepusher catalog as an interesting symbiosis of live and studio recordings; Tom Jenkinson’s work had always had a feel of realism to it, with those plucky bass lines, vocal samples and some tongue-in-cheek quirks that didn’t take themselves too seriously, but had plenty of room to do so. On Ultravisitor, there are our familiar conventional Warp quirks of corybantic drum and bass cuts, but splashed within and around that ‘90s sound are many strange tone shifts, with some downtempo jazzy tracks back to back with cacophonous musique concrète experimentations, not to mention the breakbeat cuts.

Our three-track run of “Telluric Piece,” “District Line II” and “Circlewave” hits all these benchmarks, and is a shining example of what the record set out to do; we go from screeching, vengeful improvisations, to coked-out, murky ragga jungle, to almost post-rocky, entrancing nu-jazz beats, all within one side of an LP. 

“An Arched Pathway” I might describe as the soundtrack to a cybernetic vampire tripping down an escalator, regaining their footing, only to eventually have a repeated battle with a banana peel they keep slipping on. Jenkinson’s bass here really steals the show; fed through strange, computerized effects, struck and thwapped with the vigor of a psychopathic deviant obsessed with the banjo.

Here on Jenkinson’s seventh record, the bass work is some of his most straightforward and focused yet, like the closer “Every Day I Love,” whose ambient meditative loops might remind one of Loren Mazzacane Connors or “Andrei” with its almost classical music or modal jazz way of progressions done with so much emotional intention. These tracks stand in evident opposition against songs like the sadistic mangled beat discombobulation of “50 Cycles,” or one of my favorite cuts on the record, “Steinbolt,” which has these insanely ear-splitting resonances that collude and conspire with the malicious coupling of harrowing synth pads and some undeniably diabolical breaks.

Predictably, the drum-and-bass feel to this record is what lulls me in, but the obtuse Pollock splattering of genres keeps me listening. It’s not enough to just have the breakbeat acid worship of “Menelec” – it must be bookended by very strange, ominous synthesizer drones and sinister noise walls, mutilating the drum cuts into fragmented, twisted remnants of the track’s rhythms heard just earlier.

A fan favorite – also, a continuation of one of the tracks off of his 1999 release Budakhan Mindphone – titled “Iambic 9 Poetry” couldn’t be more different from the previously mentioned track; despite it not having the live audience cheers and room mic mixing of some of the other cuts on Ultravisitor – “I Fulcrum” and “C-Town Smash,” for example – this feels like the most alive track on the record. Between its Four Tet-like sampled drum swings, the Boards of Canada brooding synth plucks and the gigantic big band sound the last quarter of the track explodes into, it’s just really neat to have a straightforward and irrefutably upbeat track on such an ominously culminated and explosively varied album.

My heavy-handed introduction to this review may have been fueled by my fantasization with music evolving in a time of evolution, and electronic music specifically was hitting an advantageous stride in the mid-‘00s: Autechre had their own explosion of experimentation with the flashcore shrapnel of Untilted, Venetian Snares struck a chord with his modern-classical drum and bass amalgamate record Rossz Csillag Alatt Született; and the glitch music of ‘90s forefathers Oval and Pan Sonic was finally being expanded upon and formulated by now-cemented genre staples such as Fennesz, Ryoji Ikeda, Jan Jelinek and Vladislav Delay. 

Then here lies our record in question. Sitting at an important time of the aughts, electronic music was reaching its general maturity while stick-to-itively kicking at air trying to obliterate anything in its sight, and Earthly living was hitting a genesis moment of technological advancements, and soon to be all too familiar seeds being sown in our tendencies to want, and have and feel, and as a result become stronger in an increasingly overstimulating, disjointed, frenetic and accelerated world. 

With its bastardizations of goofy jazzy bass solos, maniacal and unrelenting drum breaks and wildly experimental electroacoustic noise tangents, you can catch all of these songs and MORE – notably on the bonus LP, which includes the Venus and Tundra EP cuts – on the 3LP 20th anniversary edition of Ultravisitor, where you can stage yourself in a time not too different from ours now, and settle into an intricate and distracting break from your everyday crusade of momentum versus time.

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THE RECORD EXCHANGE REVIEW: REM ON BARK PSYCHOSIS’ POST-ROCK CLASSIC ‘HEX’

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September 23, 2024 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

Artist: Bark Psychosis
Album: Hex
Reviewer: Rem Jensen

It’s a snowed-over, glowing night in Moscow, Idaho, 2017, where the streetlights shatter the glint of falling flakes and flesh-whitening winds. My car stretches along the thin streets, narrowly dodging jilted, drunkenly parked bicycles and jaywalking lopsided shadows. I’m running my A/C, and it warms me up; my windows are fogging and freezing from the inside-out; it’s 10pm with essays due at midnight, yet things felt slower, and the little things didn’t add up. Stuff just felt, okay, despite all the obstacles, but I’d probably point that relief in the direction of Bark Psychosis’ Hex.  

Amidst the early-’90s boom of post-rock – spearheaded by the titans of Talk Talk, the Durutti Column and Slint – the genre’s convention was built around these big, peaceful, somber plateaus of atmosphere and tension, not yet completely swallowed by the sour, angsty tinge of existentialism brought on by bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Swans; there was still much in the way of infancy with the genre. Things still felt serene, relaxed, melancholy, but in a way that wasn’t too oppressive, yet distinct from the rock zeitgeist at the time – whose big bands like Radiohead, Nirvana and R.E.M. were upbeat, catchy and certainly radio-marketable. 

In the beginning, the term “post-rock” generally meant the familiar rock sounds of then, fusing with new, exciting, yet nuanced and slow-paced alterations to the norm, and British writer Simon Reynolds consistently gets the credit for first coining this phrase, which funnily enough, appeared inside his review of “Hex,” written originally for the record’s release back in March of 1994. 

The record leaned into the sparse, art-rock jazziness that Talk Talk used on those monumental albums Laughing Stock and Spirit of Eden, but introduced brilliant – yet not overindulged – tinges of dub, ambient and dream pop. 

If I were to believe my delusions, then the effect of Hex was seen pretty immediately: tracks like “Big Shot,” with its reggae-adjacent mid-bass gallops, breathy vocals and almost trip-hop drum rhythms, sound incredibly like the beats and ambiance of Bowery Electric’s Beat, released two years later in ’96. Pygmalion by shoegaze patient zeros Slowdive came only a year later in ‘95, but its sound leans like a nearing magnet to the steel pole of Hex, with its wide-open spaces of guitar fuzz, washed out, echoey singing and feathery, dry drums. 

Post-rock and shoegaze aside, thee slowcore bands – Duster, Codeine, Bluetile Lounge, Red House Painters – had much to grab hold of with Hex; also, its sound seems like the precursor for the scape of online hypnagogia – Dean Blunt, James Ferraro, Oneohtrix Point Never – and the resurgence – by way of TikTok – with the phenomenal viralability of slacker-rock-adjacent doomer tunes – like again: Slint, Slowdive and Duster in addition to Have a Nice Life.  

Far reaching, perhaps, yet Hex tapped into some bodily devotion in the form of the future of post-rock – perhaps ambient altogether. Though it was very obscure, and potentially hadn’t reached the aforementioned groups’ hands until after they released their opuses, the tonality and mood of Hex is just so personal, delicate, lonely and undeniably comforting. It feels like company, like a companion, something very real and alive without ever overstaying its welcome, open and welcoming itself. 

To pivot briefly, in an incredibly disconnected world, I find myself always returning to the ’90s; something about the last remnants of analog, and the budding age of digital, it feels almost like a memory I never quite got to have, but not as separated as the ’80s and back where I can’t quite imagine myself in those times. The ’90s are believably familiar. So, those ambient techno, post-rock, trip-hop firebombs that were the ’90s felt incredibly intentional, built-upon and curated, traits of which are some of my most predisposed predispositions. 

This nauseously reiterated ’90s era of post-rock I find to be quite human; it’s rich with this idea of staying up late and cranking out lush, druggy tunes, free of commitment or implication. For a taste of this on Hex, you should only have to listen to the glistening harmonica and soothing bass tones of “Absent Friend,” the delicate Eno and Frippian soundscapes of “Pendulum Man,” or the angsty, commiserating, cavernous ruminations on “Fingerspit.” 

Somehow, I have yet to mention “A Street Scene,” which I guess is apt to loop back on the earlier scene of snowed-over streets. It’s a visual record, much like a painting; it unfolds around you, in swath landscapes of roping avenues, dark alleys and murky puddles flashed by the reflection of neon and halide; this is a very transportation-worthy record, best enjoyed on your commute, but particularly something where you’re not in control. It’s a fantastic soundtrack for the bus, train, a flight or even walking; illustrating the world around you – so sure of itself, vivid, cathartic and transportive in its own regard. 

Genres, descriptions and decades aside, it’s a grateful thing to have, because you feel safe in the hands of Hex – which is receiving a very appreciated affordable repress this October. It’s simply a poignant release, and if you haven’t heard it yet, you’re in for a treat!  

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SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME II (EXPANDED EDITION): A 30TH ANNIVERSARY REVIEW

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August 15, 2024 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

By Rem Jensen

Before 1994, the intersection of microtonality, ambient and dissonance came together masterfully only a handful of times – see: Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes or Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy for Lilith, to name a few. Visionaries like Jim O’Rourke, AMM and La Monte Young intertwined the idea of discreet and oppressive, but the dark ambient experimentalism wasn’t the only emotion being crafted. On the other side of the spectrum, Brian Eno was having a field day with his warm, gleeful repetitions, which in the company of seismic pieces like In C and Music for 18 Musicians, gave way to the concept of luminous yet endless crescendos in minimalism. 

Before 1994, few who attempted to combine this idea of the joyous, the horror, the everlasting, the emotional and the encapsulating rarely found ease in it, but the record that would was made quite seemingly with no effort, and quite literally without sleep.

Richard D. James, the Aphex Twin, from his DIY raving days in Cornwall to combining the sound of blenders and turntable styluses on sandpaper at DJ sets, loved to do things differently, and his 1994 record Selected Ambient Works Volume II surprised most listeners, if not for a few different reasons.

Coming off the home run of Selected Ambient Works 85-92, James had grown weary of the fame, a man who by his own admission wants to make music until he dies, and never have to work a job. He didn’t see those legendary tips of the hat to techno icons like the KLF or Baby Ford as anything career defining or groundbreaking, it simply got him paid. This isn’t to say he was greedy; if anything, he was exhausted by this very concept of success.

What transpired following the release of SAW1 were series of lucid dreams, machine tinkering and James hinting that he had yet to actually “make” a record, all while self-flagellating himself by sleeping as little as his body could stand. He would go on to etch in stone – or more aptly, a leather bag, such as the cover art of the album – at the ripe, unbelievable age of 22 a Herculean effort in making the electronic…organic? undeniable? timeless?

This far in I should describe the sounds of the aforementioned – and colloquially referred to as – SAW2; its cryptic track titles not helping the ease of descriptions bear the need for the unofficial yet culturally accepted fan titles. Rhubarb (#3), the crowning achievement in ambient music, blankets the listener in timestretched, reverbed and heart-wrenching synthesizer tones. This, likely the enigmatic track of the record, despite its seemingly unavoidable sound of malaise and defeat, is inherently indescribable in what emotions it elicits, depending on the person.

Which really is the lynchpin for describing Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It effortlessly siphons the psyche out of you and spits your sentience back in over 150 minutes of bizarre, truly alien-like vignettes of intangibility. You’re caught in some sort of fever dream tango between the solar flare romance of ascension and desolation, tumbling in limbo, inseparable in their bond. Any one listener may feel inspiration or hope, wherein another person may find the record to be eerie, foreboding or just downright creepy.

Tracks like Z-Twig (#17), and the titan that is Lichen (#20), absolutely swallow the listener in uplifting and angelic passages, sweating with reverb, sopping with emotion and drenched in the human condition. Beautiful, peaceful and serene, much like a dream you wish to never wake up from, they lull you into a place in which the concept of pain, panic or paranoia are yet jumbles of letters with no meaning.

Of course, the other shoe must fall, and the majority of the record batters the listener with haunting, repetitious hypnoses that evoke a tribal, evolutionistic sense of danger and unease, by way of distorted and tuned-down field recordings of often indistinguishable dialog, nauseating microtunings and harsh electronic drones – if at many points become more tangential to the musique concrète of Parmegiani, or the gargantuan scale of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Oktophonie.

It seems excessive to compare some of the 20th century’s most influential composers to an acid dropping, techno-junkie, apathetic insomniac such as James, yet it’s a piece of music that still evokes a unique, primal response upon every listen. It’s not the result of tens of thousands of hours and a genius, cut-throat acolyte to production at the wheel; it’s the result of some incoherent, manic, harlequin kid getting lucky and skyrocketing an undanceable triple album to the No. 1 spot in the UK dance charts in 1994.

Or is it?

The belief of the uncertain and unwieldy is something James would go on to experiment with on future albums, like the sprawlingly unbridled savantism found on the prepared piano, hardcore drum ’n’ bass record drukqs. Keeping the listener on their toes is exactly what his music in succession of Selected Ambient Works Volume II strived to achieve, but Volume II opted to keep listeners on the edge of their seats. 

The tracks here, such as the opener Cliffs (#1) – with its glittery, angelic vocal samples – or Parallel Stripes (#14) – a minimally toned, lulling meditation that might deserve a comparison to a similarly monolithic drone album, Coil’s Time Machines – stand in such contrast to Tassels (#22) – brooding with wavering, pulsating FM synthesis, a demandingly occult experiment with timbre – or Domino (#11) – a melting, unnerving, uncanny nightmarish jaunt, conjuring the image of lost, ghostly children, skipping and spinning across a razor-thin highwire. 

When you attempt to split these songs – or rather, the entire project – into one column or another, it becomes clear that this is more of a situation where tracks were firstly chosen to fit an aesthetic, not one intentionally programmed to flow in a typical album fashion. No, front to back this record is not cohesive, or easy to follow, or really gives you a jumping-off point to contextualize the order in the track sequence, but I feel this improves the trance we are nudged into. All but gone are the conventions of hooks, refrains, overtures or reprises, and what remains are these fragmented, monochromatic oases, starved of pop appeal, feral in theme, disturbed by the prospect of marketability, and eager to intimidate the listener into believing the anxious and fearful psychoses their mind illustrates in way of making sense of the “vision” this record might be gunning for.

Above all, SAW2 is not some long, overbearing and laborious experience, despite the mystification of its production and the sheer length of the thing. It marks an important time in electronic music, and frankly, all music. It’s a somehow cut-and-dry selection of just a flake of the brain matter that Aphex Twin held, holds and will hold, an accidental touchstone in creation, innovation and cultural defiance. Without this record, most likely we wouldn’t have the hyper-modern ambient battlefields of Oneohtrix Point Never, the harrowing granulated dreamscapes of Tim Hecker, or any of the internet producers who have been unintentionally inspired to grasp the idea of creation and wring it dry between their scheming fingers, making frugal use of those few spare tools available besides the irreplaceability of their own will and wit. 

Much is the closure that creators aim for: self-satisfaction, confidence and comfortability in the value of their work, and if we the creators – thee listeners – are so lucky, we might live to see the day of a third volume, of which the ensued whiplash between the first two installments forces you to shrug your shoulders, truly unable to predict what confidence James may summon to do his Mephistophelian bidding, whenever he so pleases. What power!

Also, Stone in Focus is now readily available, so, make that a priority listen.

The upcoming reissue of Selected Ambient Works Volume II is set for release October 4, and if the recent Autechre Warp Records reissues are anything to go by, the listeners of this release will be surely satisfied by this keystone album, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

From 1998, but a great photo nonetheless

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