Take Half an Hour and Chill with Carl Bartlett Jr.

Did you know that August 15 is National Relaxation Day? In a year where what’s left of our liberties are increasingly under fire in every waking moment, it’s hard to think about relaxing. That’s where Carl Bartlett Jr.’s new mega-single Serene New You Sax – streaming at the project’s music page – comes in.

The alto saxophonist is best known as a fiery, articulate player in the Coltrane tradition, so this is a radical departure for him. It’s a balmy, hypnotically atmospheric album-length solo piece conceived and produced during the early days of the lockdown, perfect for meditation or just chilling.

Diehard jazz fans will notice how artfully Bartlett slows down and deconstructs the kind of phrases he would ordinarily play at maybe eight times the speed. The light ambient electronics and minimalist resonance will remind others of Brian Eno, and Bartlett develops a soothing ballad at the end. Ultimately, this is about finding a calm center, something we definitely need more of these days.

Noveller Puts Out Yet Another Epic, Picturesque Album

Nobody writes epic, cinematic, stormy loopmusic more expertly or vividly than guitarist Sarah Lipstate, a.k.a. Noveller. Her latest album Arrow is streaming at Bandcamp. As usual, Lipstate’s sonic palette runs the gamut from blustery to soothing to distantly menacing. In general, this is one of her calmer releases so far.

Even considering the ridiculous number of digital sounds that a guitarist can get through one effect or another, the vastness of Lipstate’s orchestration is breathtaking. The album’s first track, Rune, has what could be distant cannon fire behind a simple, rising three-chord riff, minimalist jangle contrasting with blustery digital strings.

Effectology is a study in echoey, atmospheric washes with hints of Renaissance polyphony. The album’s most expansive epic is Zeaxanthin, a galaxy of somber waves, deep-space twinkle and echoey Kraftwerk loops,

In Pattern Recognition, Lipstate builds symphonic variations on a series of ringing, melancholy phrases. Canyons, with its staggered series of wave phrases, is the closest thing to a rock ballad here. From here the album grows more ambient, with the cocooning, lushly oscillating nocturne Pre-Fabled and then the slow, tectonically shifting Thorns. Lipstate introduces the album’s closing diptych, Remainder, with a poignant, Gilmouresque spaciousness, the music receding to a slow, orchestral pastiche running through what must be an immense pedalboard.

A Rare, Turbulent Pauline Oliveros Online Concert Rescued From the Archives

The great Pauline Oliveros played her last New York concert in the spring of 2015, trading soulful accordion riffs and subtly sly musical banter with members of International Contemporary Ensemble at a since-relocated radical theatre space in Fort Greene. The inventor of the concept of deep listening had been such a force in the world of improvisation and the avant garde for so long that it seemed she’d be around forever.

She left behind an enormous body of work. Decades before locked-down musicians desperately turned to Zoom to serenade their fans or make records, Oliveros coined the term “telematic” and participated in innumerable online collaborations. One welcome rediscovery is the new vinyl album Telematic Concert, a duo performance with Argentine electronic musician Alan Courtis, originally webcast in the fall of 2009. It hasn’t hit the web yet, but as Oliveros would be quick to tell you, her work sounds best on vinyl.

This joint improvisation is divided into just two tracks, their long upward drives, swells and sustain mingling to the point where it’s impossible to tell who’s playing what. Much of this brings to mind early industrial acts like Suicide. The treble is really gaining in the mix early on: you may want to bring down the highs, especially if you’re listening on earbuds.

Courtis introduces flitting poltergeist accents, sudden, menacingly responsive drones, sounds of water and wind. A hammering interlude subsumes the accordion, but Oliveros returns resolutely to the mix. The music takes on a decidedly assaultive, disquieting edge from this point, Oliveros choosing her spots amid the looming, toxic whirlpool. The second part of the improvisation begins with its most grim interlude, rising and falling more spaciously and basically falling apart at the end: with a single coy flourish, Oliveros lets it be known she’s done.

It would be nice to hear more of her here in general, although it’s also extremely instructive to see how spaciously and methodically she approaches music this overtly dystopic. With her puckish sense of humor and finely honed improvisational reflexes matched by an unassailable calm, her own music was often dead serious, and the very definition of immersive, but seldom so macabre.

Epic, Sweeping, Gothic Nocturnes From the Moon and the Nightspirit

Don’t let the Moon and the Nightspirit’s name, or the title of their new album, Aether, lead you to think that this is hippie-dippy new age bullshit. Gothic psychedelia would be a more accurate way to describe the Hungarian band’s sound. They sing in their native language. The record is a suite, more or less; it comes with lyrics and English translations, which have a mystical focus. They like long, hypnotic, slowly crescendoing tableaux with both folk and classical influences.

Stately piano and frontwoman ‘Agnes Toth’s misty vocals blend with a whirl of white noise as the album’s opening, title track gets underway. From there Mihály Szabó takes over the mic, rising from a whisper to a roar as this one-chord jam hits a pummeling, imaginatively orchestrated sway. It comes full circle at the end.

That pretty much sets the stage for the rest of the record – streaming at Bandcamp and available on both purple and black limited-edition vinyl. The second track, Kaputlan Kapukon At (Through the Gateless Gates) has spare, circling twelve-string guitar and eerily tinkling piano over the slowly swaying neoromantic angst.

Toth moves back to lead vocals as the drifting minor-key vamp of Égi Messzeegek (Celestial Distances) gathers force; that bagpipe guitar is a tasty touch. Ringing twelve-string poignancy returns along with graceful, incisive harp above the oscillating loops and disquieting close harmonies in A Szarny (The Wing): it’s the album’s best and most majestic track.

With a deep-space twinkle from the harp and the keys, the album’s most hypnotic soundscape is Logos. The group follow a slow series of layers rich with somberly picked guitars, spare piano, keening microtonal violin and a wash of vocals in A Mindenseg Hivasa (Call of the Infinite). The suite ends with Asha, its Balkan folk illusions and a loop receding to the edge of the universe. Turn on, tune in, you know the rest.

A Thoughtfully Enveloping Debut Album From Innovative Composer/Organist Molly Joyce

Composer Molly Joyce performs on the rarest of vintage instruments: the toy electric organ. She accumulated a serious collection in the wake of a horrific car accident that left her with limited mobility in her left hand – so she switched from piano to an instrument with easier action but an unexpectedly rich sonic palette, especially in the high midrange and above. Her debut album Breaking and Entering is streaming at Bandcamp. At low volume, this is soothing, enveloping music: played louder, its edges reveal themselves.

The first track, Body and Being, begins with twinkling, Terry Riley-ish loops and grows denser as Simon sends tectonic sheets from across the sonic spectrum through the mix, “Do you react to me, do you contract from me?” Joyce asks.

Her airy high soprano rises to stratospheric heights in Form and Flee: “You’re not normality, but you’re mortality,” she intones over an increasingly tense, circling pulse. Stereolab seems to be an influence on that track and also the title track, which she builds around a simple accordionish blues riff,

A fluttering, oscillating interlude leads into Who Are You, the album’s most anxious vocal contrasting with a calm undercurrent and some keening new wave riffage. Joyce brings the album full circle with Front and Center: “Try to remember your truest nature,” she reminds. Words of wisdom in an interminable season of alienation and atomization. Joyce is playing a webcast to celebrate the album’s release this Friday June 26, at 5 PM at youube.

A Fun, Playful Solo Percussion Album by Adam Holmes

Percussionist Adam Holmes has a very entertaining short solo album, Compartments, streaming at Bandcamp. To an extent, it’s ambient, but there’s a lot going on here. Holmes’ music has a welcome sense of humor, so often missing from the indie classical scene he comes out of: he validates the argument that drummers by nature tend to be funny people.

The album’s opening, title track is is a very playful, hypnotic seven-minute piece for small metal gongs, Holmes working subtle variations on a racewalking, steady rhythm. If this isn’t loopmusic, Holmes has the steadiest hands on the planet. The dynamics, and the overtones ringing out as he varies his attack, are very cool.

Track two, Deluge, is an electroacoustic piece, an echoey circling-the-drainpipe loop punctuated by what sounds like a crazed plumber trying to get a handle on what’s going on down there. Hypnotic, blippy muted polythythms on what could be a glass marimba spiral around backward masked loops in the third track, Cambium. Holmes winds up the record with All-American, those metal gongs again creating an increasingly complex web akin to a music box approximating the sound of dripping stalactites.

Who is the audience for this? Anyone who likes drifty music, wherever your mind might be drifting to.

A Lush, Sweeping Debut Album From the String Orchestra of Brooklyn

Although the String Orchestra of Brooklyn have been championing new composers for more than ten years, their debut album – streaming at Bandcamp – only came out late last year. It has two spacious, rather horizontal contemporary pieces alongside a couple of unselfconsciously vigorous Italian Renaissance works, The dynamics and range of the ensemble, as well as the singers, really shine here.

The first piece is Christopher Cerrone‘s High Windows, beginning with shivery sixteenth-notes behind sudden doppler bursts and a low drone. A sudden airy horizontality slowly gains momentum with terse moodiness rising from the low strings, the violins finally descending and joining the lattice. A muted loopiness in the return of the opening theme has icy echoes of electronic music; it ends in a long, somber series of waves.

Jacob Cooper‘s Stabat Mater Dolarosa unfolds at a glacial pace, sheets of sound drifting through the mix, akin to watching cirrus clouds on the horizon on a relatively windless day. Uneasy close harmonies rise and then fade away. The composer’s use of implied melody as the sound rises with an allusive ominousness from the low strings is very clever, especially as a choir enter wordlessly. With the singers sometimes adding harmony, sometimes doubling the violin lines, the atmosphere grows more somber, leading to a long descent into the abyss led by the basses. The rise to density afterward is much more disquieting, with a series of slow, massed glissandos. The effect where the singers have to pause for a breath is, well, breathtaking. Soprano Mellissa Hughes adds stark, plainchant-inspired lines over the waves of the concluding movement

Paganini’s Caprice No. 6 in G minor is actually more of a canon, also built around slowly shifting sustained lines, but with rapidfire, tremoloing violin. The ensemble close the album with a steadfastly marching interpretation of the first movement of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, the choir enhancing a gothic undercurrent.

Dynamic, Intense String Themes From One-Man Orchestra Christopher Tignor

Violinist Christopher Tignor occupies a unique place in the New York music scene, where the worlds of new classical music, improvisation and ambient psychedelia intersect. For a guy who plays a lot of brooding, overcast music, he’s a very entertaining performer, often doing the one-man band thing with a kickdrum and his trusty loop pedal. His latest album A Light Below is streaming at Bandcamp.

What’s new about this is that it’s hardly all grey skies and moody atmospherics. The first number, Flood Cycles has warmly drifting, coccoony sheets of sound, Tignor gradually brightening the picture

Loopy, shivery strings and a dramatic, thumping beat make their entrance in Your Slowly Moving Shadow, My Inevitable Night: the majesty and drama rise as Tignor overdubs himself into a one-man symphonic ensemble.

Known By Heart is closer to his earlier work, alternating between hazy unease and ominously crescendoing cumulo-nimbus ambience: imagine a Noveller piece for string orchestra instead of guitar loops. Tignor builds A Mirrored Reliquary from steady, spare overlays to an elegant, plaintive, baroque-tinged theme and arresting swirls – and then brings it back down.

I, Autocorrelations (that’s the title) is a bracingly lush, loopily syncopated dance in 12/4 time. The dancing pulse continues, for awhile at least, in the album’s most epic track, The Resonance Canons, a partita. Echoey pizzicato loops leap beneath shimmery metal gongs, then an enveloping atmosphere return, followed by an oscillating, gamelanesque interlude. Tignor runs an otherworldly, pinging, microtone-spiced riff over organ textures as the looming lows rise; the ending is unexpected.

He winds up the album with the only slightly less expansive What You Must Make of Me, an increasingly disorienting web of simple, translucent motives mingling over a muted piledriver beat; then they filter out, leaving the most anthemic ones in place. The coda seems to be a guarded benediction. Good to see this rugged individualist expanding his sound into new terrain.

Darkly Drifting, Reverb-Drenched Soundscapes From Sonar Atmosfera

Since the late  zeros, guitarist Thomas Simon has worked a darkly cinematic, swirling sound that veers from anthemic post-Bauhaus rock, to ominously epic instrumental tableaux, to hypnotic loopmusic. His latest project, appropriately titled Sonar Atmosfera – streaming at Bandcamp – is a collaboration with psychedelic tropical band Baianasystem‘s João Milet Meirelles. In a lot of ways it’s one long, brooding theme, but the subtle variations are very psychedelic. It’s a great late-night, lights-out listen.

Simon’s guitar flickers and crackles, awash in reverb and smoky atmospherics as the album’s first track, Feel the Hope gathers steam. A drumbeat enters the picture and suddenly this one-chord jam takes on a swaying insistence, akin to a trip-hop take on Pink Floyd’s Run Like Hell.

The second track, Resist is completely different, a lot closer to Baianasystem’s woozy, loopy dub: halfway through, Simon’s spare, resonant phrases add a distant ominousness. The guitar snarling in Live For the Run subsides for a couple of momentary, Bauhaus-like lulls. The two segue from there into The Trip, with its spacious, low-register, bell-like accents and steady, syncopated drum loops.

Blippy, motorik beats and Space Invaders sonics contrast with Simon’s allusive chordlets and menacing chromatics in A Dream. Fight With Love, a brief postapocalyptic scenario, has snippets of movie dialogue. The eleven-minute epic My Story slowly rises from atmospheric minimalsm: Brian Eno’s Apollo comes to mind.

The album’s most hypnotic, loopy number, Condor Jam is built around a simple 1-4-5 reverb guitar riff spiced with gritty, distorted motives. Manic World finally reaches that point, a chilly dancelfloor thud pushing Simon’s spacious, cumulo-nimbus phrasing out of the picture. Simon’s forlorn, desolate, clanging phrases and chords ring out over shifting textures in the album’s final epic, On Land.

Relentlessly Uneasy, Dystopic Soundscapes From Austin Rockman

Today’s pick for music here is cold, mechanical, dystopic…and trippy as hell. There’s a lot going on in electronic composer Austin Rockman‘s new maxi-single Sonde Aim/Seek No End – streaming at Bandcamp – so it’s more persistently uneasy than it is desolate. If you need about thirteen minutes to get lost in, this will work.

The rhythmic center of the first track is a loop of what sounds like the needle on a turntable bouncing off the face of a weatherbeaten record. Fleeting doppler smears pass through the sonic picture in a split second, echoed by low rumbles; eventually, keening, minimal highs and fragmentary backward masked effects begin to take centerstage.

The second is a more grimly hazy, echoey tableau, with slowly shifting sheets of sound in place of dopplers: as with the A-side, Rockman eventually brings the highs up in the mix. Neither piece offers any kind of resolution: life is like that.