Idea Fire Company - 'The Island of Taste' (Swill Radio)

The Island of Taste is beautiful, gentle, and mysterious. Within the passages of its rotation lie rippling currents of sensation, shuddering rumbles, and delicate accents. In the hop, skip and jump through their discography that's represented in the sample that I own, this is where it feels like a summation. The relentless probing of Anti-Natural, the spacious negotiations of Stranded and the slabs of laminal elegance of Beauty School are perfectly balanced, supporting each other by only their own weight, which is actually nothing. The title and cover already take you to a place that keeps lifting, much like the way 'Heroes' on the previous album does (and that track is revisited with great fanfare here, not so much covered but extended as 'Heroes of the Last Barricade', substituting absence for the warmth of the voices, though they remain here, faintly, as a tease). The title track is simplistic in construction (extremely minimal sampler hiss, field recordings of birds, and a few carefully reverberating piano notes) but utterly fucking transcendental in execution. There's conventional aesthetic moves at play, for sure; dramatic movement, cautious interplay, phenomenal details (the scrapes of Tibetan bowl in 'Land Ho!'; the occasional garbled lighting in 'Heroes of the Last Barricade') and closure. I don't usually look online for secondary material while listening or writing this stuff, except when I do, but I found a blurb from Swill Radio's own press release, where Foust (I assume) declares this the third part of a trilogy with the two previous records I covered here. I can see (hear?) that – that these three records work together as a larger whole – but what jumps out even more from the blurb is the line 'perhaps the first LP to make explicit a certain nostalgia for itself'. This clever turn of phrase does wonders to recast the copious static and artificial antiquarian vibes saturating these tracks, and this is 2008 when this tendency in electronic music was just starting to peak. Now there's entire books written about 'hauntology' and the sound of artists like the Caretaker, that one Black to Comm album, etc; that's postmodern nostalgia where there's an implicit acknowledgement that the future isn't happening anymore, or maybe that our idea of the future was better in the past. The Island of Taste sidesteps that by distancing itself from any cultural touchstones; static itself is just a tool, one that's been on Idea Fire Company records before and since, and that would just be a shortcut to generating cheap nostalgia-effects anyway. No, I think what Borecky and Foust (and others - Frans de Waard, Graham Lambkin, Richard Rupenus and Dr. Timothy Shortell guest in addition to the expanded Swenson/O'Reilly lineup as heard on Stranded) have achieved here is the creation of a totally idiosyncratic and individual soundworld that (despite its often stark n' spare palette) is so complete in its vision that an infinite number of possible permutations is not only imaginable, but almost forcefully shoved into my imagination, purely by what's NOT heard on this record. 'Bitter Victories', for example, is a solo Foust synth track of a searing, circular drone that is elliptical yet mostly horizontal, unceasing in its intensity, and relatively dense compared to the rest of the record. Yet somehow, in less than three minutes, it conjures a universe of possibilities and then rests on its brief, sampled representation. There's a beautiful set of postcards inside with another stunning manifesto, but I'll leave that for you to discover on your own - $16 can still get you a copy of this from Swill Radio.

Gordy Horn ‎- 'The Glue That Holds The Kids Together' (What The...?)

Four tracks spanning five years of Gordy Horn, a chaotic Cincinnati ensemble that has a bit of a kitchen-sink 'anything goes' approach to sound and membership, yet anchored by Scott Hisey and Tim Schwallie. These four tracks have a vaguely jazzy/swing feel to them, but the headscratchers is 'Aimee's Dream' (the earliest cut, from 2000) which exists in its own singularity entirely. This has a bizarrely sung female vocal line over a hypnotic string part (a harp!), but it sounds more like the outtake of a video made for some workplace seminar than any sort of identifiable art-rock tradition. It's mesmerising and unsettling, yet somehow still feels logical with the other three tracks. Two of them involve Clayton Gunnells, formerly of Funkadelic circa America Eats Its Young, which makes this an odd crossover with What The...? label head C. Spencer Yeh, who appears on 'Put the Rascal in the Pudding', contributing some of his distinct violin playing circa the era (2003). The horn is in Gordy Horn, not that explicitly in terms of there being actual horns (though there is sax and trumpet) but just feeling like this is from the free jazz lineage. But this reminds me more of parts of Smegma's Glamour Girl 1941 than anything from ESP-disk; it's an outsider aesthetic, for sure, as well as the sense that anything could be possible. One-sided LPs are sometimes frustrating; these four tracks fill out a side nicely, but why not more? Given that Gordy Horn has been active forever, one thinks there could have been more selected, though maybe economical concerns limited this to one-side. Their released discography is pretty sparse besides this and a tape set, on Yeh's other label Dronedisco, suggesting that maybe they were recorded less than one expected. In nearby Louisville there's a band called Sapat that I think is rather similar - a long-running institution, anchored by a few key members, that have had oodles of weirdos and freaks passing in and out of, and rarely recorded (or rather, those recordings rarely massaged into actual releases). Not sure if the Horn is still active these days but I would love to hear more.

Eyeless in Gaza - 'Photographs as Memories' (Edigsa/Cherry Red)

This first (second?) Eyeless in Gaza record is relatively simple, built around the drumless two-man band of Martyn Bates and Peter Becker. Over the years they picked up a cult following, but I've never been part; these two records I have are a pleasure every time I listen to them, which is rarely. Bates's vocals are the tough sell here - very dramatic, somewhere between David Sylvian and the Cure, they take what would be otherwise somber, moody songs and inject them with a bit of rock pyrotechnics. Yet it somehow doesn't have any element of glam; the synth beats, if anything, recall early Tuxedomoon or even Too Pure label stuff which of course was to come in the future. 'Speech Rapid Fire' takes on a romanticism in the chorus, but other songs are pure black eyeliner ('Looking Daggers'). Bates's vocalisations occasionally render the lyrics unintelligible, stretched out to an over-enunciated wail. I keep thinking of Tuxedomoon despite all attempts for anything else to emerge; the broken sax/synth interplay of 'John of Patmos' or the twisted rhythms of 'No Noise' really would situate this on Ralph Records as much as it makes sense to be on Cherry Red. But hey, it was 1981, and anything was possible. "Post-"punk in the truest sense, Eyeless in Gaza maintain a rhythmic and melodic experimentation throughout that is based more on textural effects than jazz-influenced improvisation, thus showing they chose a different path at what may have been the same forked road that, say, This Heat stood at around the same time. As to why we're still listening to this 30 years later, I can only blame my own dinosaur tastes -- yet if this record was re-released tomorrow on Not Not Fun, under a different name, I don't think anyone would suspect a thing.

Eno - 'Another Green World' (Island)

I think this was the first Eno record I heard, and I came from the ambient side, not the Roxy Music side. Another Green World was perfect - it was a mix of instrumentals that were futuristic, yet organic; heavily studio-based, yet didn't sound like music made by computers; and a few pop songs that were just so perfect that it didn't need any more singing. Years later I feel mostly the same way about it. 'I'll Come Running' feels a bit too rock-based to fit, though it's a great song; otherwise I wouldn't change a thing. What's funny is that for a record I think of as "half-ambient", it's surprisingly punchy throughout. The electroacoustic processing of the various guitars, keyboards, and drums don't shy away from sharp edges - 'Sky Saw', the opening cut, is aptly named. But the world painted here isn't so much a science-fiction vision as it's an alternate reality, rooted in an ethereal surrealism. This is truly music for the techno-hippies of today, for people who are into organic farming but use Twitter to talk about it. And yet, it was made 38 years ago. There's a few bonafide classics here, mostly 'St. Elmo's Fire', which is almost like a "benchmark" song you can play for someone to see if they are a good person or not. (If they like it, they're cool; if not, find better friends). Fripp's solo there is somehow the wankiest-Yngvie thing ever, yet doesn't feel gratuitous. Certain sounds on here, such as the pulsing organs of 'Golden Hours', are now inseparable in my mind from their placement in some of Peter Greenaway's early films, and The Falls in particular, which is about as cinematically precise of a depiction of 'Another Green World' as is possible. I know I just finished writing about how Taking Tiger Mountain was such a landmark record to me, but this would be the one I'd probably have to choose as Eno's most total and complete statement.

Don Dietrich/Ben Hall - 'Spitfire' (What The--?)

Three blistering tracks of free-skronk fury, allowing Dietrich to rip it up without the Borbetosoup around him (I've seen it live but think this is the only recording I've grokked). Ben Hall plays the drums real well, on the first track actually propelling things melodically and on the flipside being an absolute fury of the racktoms. It's a plundering of Sunny Murray's legacy, but I mean that in a good way - the beat is always falling through the centre, like a cylinder spinning so fast you don't know the bottom drops out (remember that amusement park ride?). Dietrich's tone is absolutely sick; on the second track it starts to mellow slightly, but the side-long second half of Spitfire is firmly in the upper scratch channels. Ayler's the obvious comparison because of the tone and construction, though this surprises me a bit - Dietrich always struck me as one step further away from the jazz tradition, though maybe this is Hall's influence. The tempo never drops, not even for a second, and while I often would cite that as a criticism, in this case I'm quite satisfied with the fury. The recording is just the perfect level of fidelity and I like to think of the three planes on the cover as representing three tracks.