(This album review originally appeared in The Boston Phoenix. It was also reprinted in both The Providence Phoenix and The Portland Phoenix.)

It’s long been said that Southerners perceive time differently, that because the industrial clock never crept below the Mason-Dixon Line, time down there is less regimented, more relaxed. This could explain the delicious blend of electronic ambient music and drifting pastoralism unique to Rachel Evans’s Motion Sickness of Time Travel project. In the last three years, the (rural) Georgia artist has peeled off a string of limited cassettes and vinyl records, becoming one of experimental drone’s best-kept secrets in the process. Yet no previous title (not even the excellent Luminaries & Synastry from last year) can prepare listeners for the Kosmische-stained grandeur of her new double LP off the Spectrum Spools label. Talk about epic: over the course of its four extended compositions, she constructs a sprawl of lamenting melodies and synth-generated arpeggios that is delicately enveloped by all manner of multi-dimensional reverb and stereo manipulation. The music’s compass — but not always its primary focus — is Evans’s church-trained voice. On “One Perfect Moment,” as well as the reflective “Summer of the Cat’s Eye,” the singer proves just how adept she’s become at retaining that voice’s bodily weight while sounding celestial and free of gravity. It’s a refined sense of balance that sets her apart from Grouper and Julia Holter, artists to whom Evans is too often compared.

(This show preview originally appeared in Cleveland’s Scene magazine.)

Chris Corsano has established himself as one of the avant-garde’s most prolific artists over the past decade. His list of achievements reads like a who’s-who of underground cool. There’s Björk and Thurston Moore, but also Jim O’Rourke and Jandek. The percussionist is all over the map, as comfortable exploring free jazz as he is psychedelic rock. His collaborations with saxophonist Paul Flaherty are uncompromisingly raw and electrifying. If you’re a fan of groove exploration, Corsano’s work with guitarist Heather Leigh Murray under the Jailbreak moniker produced a noise-rock beast in The Rocker. And every now and then, Corsano flies solo. This might seem like a peculiar configuration for a drummer, but he boasts the uncanny ability to transform his flailing into what sounds like a full-blown ensemble. He’s a real octopus behind the kit. What’s more, his liberal definition of percussion – he plays everything from butter knives to plastic funnels — produces a dizzying breadth of textures and timbres.

(This feature / profile originally appeared in the Seattle Weekly.)

The mediasphere is abuzz over America’s embrace of electronic dance music. The signs are all around us. Nü-metal lunkheads rage to brostep. Billboard dance pop sounds like Euro-trance. Snoop’s SoundCloud page even boasts a track titled “Tekno Euro Mixx.” If you’re a trend gawker, these stories make for great pop-culture gossip. But the music associated with them is, to paraphrase those great polemicists the Gnostics, a waterless canal. I mean, have you heard Skrillex?

Nevertheless, our country’s current fascination with EDM is very real. Numerous are the musicians who nowadays have their ears tilted toward techno, house, and beyond. But to find its truly interesting outgrowths, it’s best to navigate away from the mainstream and poke around its myriad feeder streams and concealed tributaries—where the bandwagon vagaries of commercial pop give way to more sustainable visions of genre fusion and cross-pollination.

One of the more vital examples is based right here in Seattle: Further Records, established in 2009 by Eastsiders Chloe Harris and Mark Cul. Not unlike fellow imprints Spectrum Spools and Type, the Further aesthetic mirrors its founders’ disparate roots in everything from techno and house to post-punk and industrial music. For them, label curation is a means of erasing borders and transcending boundaries. Consequently, they don’t totally subscribe to the “EDM is conquering America” meme; it’s too one-sided. “I think people are just more eager and ready to explore different sounds than they are used to,” Harris counters. “It definitely helps that scenes are colliding, with musicians coming from all sorts of backgrounds.”

A longtime DJ (often under the moniker Raica), Harris used to spin on Groovetech, the now-defunct local Internet radio station. Visiting London in the early 2000s, she met Cul, a hard-core record nerd obsessed with the dub techno styles of Basic Channel, Chain Reaction, and Rhythm & Sound.

Shortly after relocating to Seattle, Cul had a chance encounter with drone metal that cracked open his skull. “I was in Zion’s Gate Records in 2003,” he explains in a thick English accent suffused with enthusiasm. “They were playing Sunn O))), with those extra-low frequencies. I was like, ‘Holy fuck, what is this?’ So I started to get into that stuff. Then I saw the way Brad Rose at Digitalis Recordings would allow noise and weird electronic musicians to express themselves in the tape realm. That kind of freedom didn’t seem to happen much in house and techno. There wasn’t that sort of avenue. At the time, things were much more regimented by BPM and the dance floor.”

The aftershocks of Cul’s epiphany ripple through the Further Records catalog, a swiftly expanding mishmash of wax, cassettes, and compact discs that serves as a bridge linking the raw and freewheeling nature of American experimental music with the tightly focused propulsion endemic to cutting-edge techno. Hieroglyphic Being’s The Urantia Project and Ekoplekz’s Live at Dubloaded, released last year, are telling reflections of this trajectory: The former’s radical throb falls between the jarring technoise of Container and Detroit badass Omar-S, while the latter melts post-dubstep something-or-other into nihilistically squelching goop.

Another excellent example is Donato Dozzy’s K. Cul and Harris approached the Italian techno producer to create a record that specifically embodied their label’s aesthetic. What they got was an arresting fusion of dubby beats and reverb-soaked atmospherics—softly purring ambient meditations that can be enjoyed by both fans of club music and the post-Emeralds synthesizer movement.

Further accentuating this sublime synthesis is the cleverly sympathetic packaging. The cover, fax-like smears of green and black, resembles the kind of DIY abstractions usually associated with noise cassettes (K was, naturally, released in that format as well). The couple applied the same aesthetic to John Daly’s Sea Level: Though released on vinyl only, its outer sleeve of garishly psychedelic neon totally flies in the face of techno’s love for ultra-tidy modern design.

“We sit down and think about how we can make it not look like a dance-music cover,” admits Harris. “With John Daly’s trance record, we wanted just that—something you’d look at and find a hypnotic element to space out to while stoned. And I definitely think the hand-screen-printed covers add to the idea that it feels more indie and punk.”

Arguably Further’s highest-profile release to date is Live ’72, a lovely double-LP gatefold compilation of early recordings of the late Conrad Schnitzler (who sadly passed away last August). At first blush, an archival document from one of the pioneers of Kosmische Musik and ambient music might seem like an oddity for a label so intensely focused on present sounds. Yet it’s quite fitting. If the numerous permutations of EDM and America’s underground electronic scene have a common ancestor, it surely is Schnitzler and the krautrock tradition he belongs to.

“Conrad was one of the most inspiring people we’ve ever encountered, and his passion for tape was unparalleled,” says Harris. “If there is anyone out there techno people and everyone else should listen to, it’s him. He was wise beyond what we could dream, and he did it before all of us.”

(This album review originally appeared in Cleveland’s Scene magazine.)

Since coming together in 1997, Black Dice have passed through three phases: hardcore noise mongers, cosmic tribalists, and, most recently, underground vets unleashing damaged electronic music. The garish and screechy Mr. Impossible serves as a violent rebuke of the hypnotic sounds that characterize their most beloved work. Many songs crackle, zap, and squelch like brown-acid remixes of vintage arcade-game soundtracks (e.g., “Shit House Drifter,” which sounds like Frogger). Because so much of Mr. Impossible is smeared in ’80s nostalgia, it’s tempting to say Black Dice have jumped aboard the hypnagogic pop train. But that ignores the music’s maniacally spazzoid core, which has more in common with low-fi electro freaks.

The Village Voice just published its Pazz & Jop critics’ poll for 2011. My ballot can be found HERE. I’m also posting it below.

Albums
1. BNJMN, Plastic World (Rush Hour)
2. Morphosis, What Have We Learned (Delsin)
3. Container, LP (Spectrum Spools)
4. Key of Shame, Key of Shame (Planam)
5 Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Horizontal Structures (Honest Jon’s)
6. Perc, Wicker & Steel (Perc Trax)
7. Andy Stott, Passed Me By / We Stay Together (Modern Love)
8. Mike Dehnert, Framework (Delsin Points)
9. Panabrite, Omni Center (Sturmundrugs Records)
10. Skudge, Phantom (Skudge Records)

Singles
1. Mark E, “Belvide Beat” (Spectral Sound)
2. Mark Ernestus, “Version 2″ (Honest Jon’s)
3. Delta Funktionen, “Minds Into Meltdown” (Ann Aimee)
4. Shackleton, “Deadman (Death Dub Remix)” (Honest Jon’s)
5. Recloose, “Parquet” (Rush Hour)
6. Milton Bradley, “A Sky Full of Numbers” (Do Not Resist the Beat!)
7. Farben, “Parada” (Faitiche)
8. Wandler, “La Petite Mort Pt. 2″ (And Then…)
9. Tommy Four Seven, “G (Regis Remix)” (CLR)
10. Cassegrain, “Luban” (Prologue)

This piece originally appeared on Rhapsody’s The Mix.

For this Cheat Sheet, I adopted a non-canonical view of No Wave, that wonderfully short-lived music and art movement that coughed up some of the most daring and extreme groups of the post-punk era.

To being with, the majority of the movement’s progenitors are featured. These include James Chance & the Contortions (who also recorded under the name James White & the Blacks), Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, Beirut Slump, DNA, Bush Tetras, 8 Eyed Spy and Glenn Branca’s outfits Theoretical Girls and The Static. Primarily performing in D.I.Y. art spaces and galleries in Manhattan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these groups shared a love for ruthlessly atonal textures, razor-sharp anti-rhythms and short bursts of sonic aggression.

No Wave at the time was often framed as pure sonic nihilism: the end of rock, the end of punk, the end of culture, really. The music is definitely harsh and radical, but in hindsight, it’s also startlingly original, a creature of bold synthesis. These bands totally rocked, despite the fact that they discarded just about every accepted notion of what rock music should sound like up to that point. Hell, most of them couldn’t even play “Louie, Louie”!

At the same time, they weren’t truly anti-history. They had their fair share of influences and idols. Captain Beefheart and The Velvet Underground were key, but so were mid-1970s Miles Davis (On the Corner, Get Up With It, Agharta, Pangaea); minimalist composers such as Rhys Chatham and Tony Conrad; the great James Brown; and of course Suicide, who were probably No Wave’s most direct ancestors.

I also spotlight several releases that help chart the ways in which No Wave fragmented and seeped into the larger culture. Early solo titles from DNA’s Arto Lindsay (Envy) and Teenage Jesus’ Lydia Lunch (Queen of Siam) find the artists filtering key elements of No Wave through synth pop, exotica, jazz and even Tropicália. Another vital musician was the wonderful Lizzy Mercier Descloux. The French singer operated on the movement’s fringes, yet her debut album, Press Color, is an exemplary marriage of No Wave’s agitated zeal and arty discoid funk. Sonic Youth’s early records, especially their debut EP, were wildly important as well. They can be seen as the main bridge from No Wave to post-punk and (later) noise rock.

Finally, I mention several artists who aren’t No Wave, but whose respective orbits weren’t too far off. Operating at the same time as many of the artists mentioned above were fellow New Yorkers ESG and Liquid Liquid. Their respective permutations of stripped-down funk and punkish potency speak to the incredible stew of sounds swirling about the Big Apple in the early 1980s. Then there are England’s The Pop Group and Neue Deutsche Welle pioneers D.A.F. They had little contact with No Wave, but both produced powerfully forceful music that embodied many of the same traits.

Note: The now-iconic No New York compilation, produced by Brian Eno and released in 1978 on the Antilles label, is considered No Wave’s primary document. Unfortunately, it is not available digitally, thus the reason for its absence below.

James Chance & the Contortions
Buy
Everything about Buy is outrageous: the half-naked art chick on the front cover, James Chance’s punker-than-thou brashness, The Contortions’ prickly herky-jerky rhythms. But it’s also truly bold and unique. Rather than bringing about the destruction of music (as No Wave promised us), the group’s debut full-length represented a new and potently cacophonous fusion of art rock, hard funk and avant-garde groove exploration à la Beefheart, Miles and Ornette. Check out the last 50 seconds of “Contort Yourself,” which makes for some of the most exhilarating and dramatic listening of the post-punk era. [J.F.]

Teenage Jesus and the Jerks / Beirut Slump
Shut Up and Bleed
Shut Up and Bleed compiles tracks from two of Lydia Lunch’s earliest projects: No Wave icons Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and their lesser-known predecessors Beirut Slump. The former’s brutish simplicity is still astonishing. Guitar, bass and drums cough up nails and glass, while a wailing Lunch rips back the veil on the hideousness lurking inside her. Beirut Slump are equally sinister, if more atmospheric. You’d think such an anti-everything sound would’ve crawled into a sarcophagus encased in obscurity, yet it wound up inspiring waves of young musicians who went on to invent noise rock. [J.F.

Theoretical Girls
Theoretical Record
This anthology, released in 2002 on the archival imprint Acute Records, was way overdue. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, Glenn Branca's Theoretical Girls were not included on the Brian Eno-produced No New York compilation, despite the fact that they were one of No Wave's essential outfits. Their sound veered between pointillist repetition, clanging garage punk, and atonal maximalism overwhelming in its power and density. "Contrary Motion" and tracks like it exerted a big influence on the next generation of N.Y.C. noisemakers: Sonic Youth, Live Skull, Band of Susans and others. [J.F.

N.Y No Wave
N.Y No Wave (why the second period is missing is anybody's guess) is what one No Wave historian calls a "non-canonical" overview. It spotlights many of the movement's central figures, among them James Chance & the Contortions, Mars, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. It also highlights artists who eventually moved beyond the genre's aesthetic (Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay), as well as musicians who were, however talented, only tangentially associated. These include the great Lizzy Mercier Descloux and her art project Rosa Yemen, along with notable No Wave forefathers Suicide. [J.F.]

James Chance & the Contortions
Paris 1980: Live Aux Bains Douches
James Chance was a key figure in No Wave, yet as a musician he harbored aspirations that were anathema to the movement’s insistence on destroying all music. This live document from 1980 might capture the Contortions at their most manic and chaotic, but after a few listens, Chance’s unique vision of merging hard funk, free jazz and avant-rock weirdness begins to emerge. The most striking example of that just might be the opening rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough”; despite the song’s disheveled appearance, the groove underneath is wiry and dangerously disciplined. [J.F.]

Glenn Branca
Songs ’77-’79
Songs ’77-’79 compiles selections from Glenn Branca’s two major late ’70s projects: The Static and Theoretical Girls. This archival approach makes a lot of sense, seeing as how both were pivotal in the evolution of the short-lived No Wave movement. The sonic differences between the groups are interesting to note. Theoretical Girls (tracks three through eight) came first and were more rooted in punk and garage rock. The Static, in contrast, find the composer creating a sound that’s far less in debt to accepted notions of rock music. “My Relationship” sounds like late 1980s goth, really. [J.F.]

8 Eyed Spy
8 Eyed Spy
Founded by Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ Lydia Lunch and Jim Sclavunos, 8 Eyed Spy were one of post-punk’s first outfits to apply No Wave’s atonal screech and jagged anti-groovery to more traditional rock ‘n’ roll styles: surf, garage, R&B. On such tracks as “Dead Me You B Side” and “Run Through the Jungle” (yes, the Creedence tune), the band sounds like a cross between The Cramps, The Birthday Party and Captain Beefheart. It proved to be a prescient concept that would exert an enormous influence on Jon Spencer and Pussy Galore, as well as the bluesier manifestations of scum rock. [J.F.]

Bush Tetras
Boom in the Night: Original Studio Recordings 1980-1983
With primitive post-punk angularity forever in favor amid hip rock circles, it’s always the perfect time to reevaluate the dance-punk drive of the Bush Tetras. These recordings date from 1980 to 1983 and showcase the group’s meshing of disco basslines, 4/4 beats and punk-rock paranoia. Try “Cowboys in Africa” or “Too Many Creeps.” [Jon Pruett]

Lizzy Mercier Descloux
Press Color
Lizzy Mercier Descloux relocated to New York in the late ’70s. The Parisian musician’s distinctive fusion of Yoko Ono-inspired vocal weirdness, punkish moxie, sonic experimentation and a love for killer dance grooves meant she fit right in with the city’s No Wave and cutting-edge disco contingencies. Though her vision would grow only more ambitious throughout the following decade, 1979′s Press Color is one potent studio debut. It reflects the music and art of her new metropolis, but at the same time, a rabid eccentricity courses through her music that feels wonderfully personal and private. [J.F.]

Glenn Branca
The Ascension
The Ascension is Glenn Branca’s second album after forming/disbanding short-lived projects The Static and Theoretical Girls. Much like its predecessor, the equally visionary Lesson No. 1, it’s a product of the composer fusing No Wave’s monochromatic dissonance/brutalism, sweaty rock ‘n’ roll propulsion, and the densely layered “texturalism” of the minimalism movement. It makes sense that a young Lee Ranaldo played guitar in Branca’s ensemble at the time: such pieces as “Structure” and the anthemic “Lightfield (In Consonance)” totally influenced Confusion Is Sex-era Sonic Youth. [J.F.]

Further listening:

Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Pre Teen-Age Jesus
Rosa Yemen, Rosa Yemen
Rhys Chatham, Guitar Trio Is My Life!
Glenn Branca, Lesson No. 1
Arto Lindsay, Envy
Lydia Lunch, Queen of Siam
Raybeats, Guitar Beat
Ut, In Gut’s House
Sonic Youth, Sonic Youth
Various Artists, ZE Sound of N.Y.C.
Various Artists, Downtown 81
ESG, A South Bronx Story
Liquid Liquid, Liquid Liquid
D.A.F., Die Kleinen Und Die Bösen
The Pop Group, Y

This piece originally appeared on Rhapsody’s The Mix.

Hopefully, the release of the five-disc Smile Sessions box set lays to rest the “pop masterpiece that never was” mythology that has sprouted up over the last five decades, gradually wrapping itself around these profoundly misunderstood recordings like impenetrable kudzu. I say “misunderstood” because I’ve long held the belief that Smile is a far more radical statement as a mishmash of demos, snippets and fragments than it would’ve been had Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and the rest of The Beach Boys completed the album in 1967.

What has always struck me about this music (I purchased the bootleg version many years ago) is how its logic and structure predict the evolution of electronica, ambient pop and myriad other forms of electronic-based modern music. This is most evident on Discs 1 and 3. Though Wilson and Parks are working with live musicians (The Beach Boys’ sublime voices married to the Wrecking Crew’s uncanny precision), that sound is configured into clusters, lattices, pixels and fractals. Not unlike basic sampling technology, these building blocks are then used and re-used to erect polymer-like formations. Indeed, a piece such as “Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock),” found on Disc 1, contains an astonishing amount of repetition and layering of a decidedly vertical nature. It’s a sonic collage, one with extremely well-etched geometry. When it came to studio experimentation, very few artists at the time were as prophetic as Wilson and Parks; electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and Miles Davis producer Teo Macero are the first that come to mind.

But where did these novel structures come from? In terms of artistic creation, Wilson and Parks were operating on an elevated plain. They are geniuses, obviously. But I’m quite certain psychedelic experimentation — which both have opened up about in interviews over the years — aided in this process. The fundamental effect of lysergic acid diethylamide is to give human perception the ability to “see” past the structures comprising everyday reality and to envision new ways of rebuilding them. In the case of Wilson and Parks, this entailed utilizing the studio to take apart the traditional pop song and reconstruct it from the bottom up. Only problem is, they hit a wall: they were incapable of piecing together these wonderful fragments into a full album.

As the history of rock ‘n’ roll tells us, this failure can be attributed to Wilson’s psychological instability and abuse of psychedelic chemicals. I don’t argue with that. Like a decent number of psychonauts in the 1960s, he most certainly lacked a framework for responsible use. (For more on these critical ideas, check out Dr. James Fadiman’s The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys.)

Yet this explanation overlooks the technical aspects of the duo’s failure, which is germane to the discussion at hand. It’s not that Wilson and Parks simply couldn’t produce a finished product; it’s that they couldn’t do it without ultimately slipping back into the traditional pop song format, the very thing they were attempting to move beyond. Comparing the versions of “Cabin Essence, “Heroes and Villains,” and “Vega-Tables” to those that emerged on subsequent albums helps prove this point (the 2004 version of Smile is also relevant here). I love these later versions, but outside the proto-ambient “Cool, Cool Water” on 1970′s Sunflower, all of them feel less visionary and way more tethered to accepted notions about what makes good pop. In defense of the other Beach Boys, who were forced to fend for themselves after Wilson’s psychic derailment, they did what they had to do to salvage some amazing music. Moreover, they did an excellent job. In my opinion, The Beach Boys are the greatest pop band of the 1960s, even better than The Beatles.

But to return to my main point, the versions produced by the remaining Beach Boys offer a glimpse into what Wilson and Parks might’ve been forced to do to get Smile ready for release in 1967. Under incredible pressure, and in desperate need of a way around that wall, they would’ve resorted to molding these fragments into music that was significantly more traditional. And this is why there’s really no need to ruminate on the “pop masterpiece that never was,” because The Smile Sessions — in all its disjointed, way-ahead-of-its-time glory — is the real masterpiece.

This piece originally appeared in Western North Carolina’s Mountain Xpress as part of the paper’s Moogfest 2011 coverage. Each participating music writer covered a different stylistic component to the festival. Mine was Krautrock and Kosmische Musik.

The story of Krautrock — a story that is largely the product of English and American mythologizing rather than insider historical knowledge — has been told and retold. But at its core sits a handful of vitals who are worth revisiting. In the late ‘60s, Germany gave birth to a generation of underground musicians whose bold innovations in post-psychedelic sound exploration, synthesizer manipulation and groove research would go on to exert a deep and broad impact on the evolution of modern music. Post-punk, techno and house, indie, the ambient movement, hip-hop, even new age, have all been touched by the movement.

Kosmische Musik, a less commonly used moniker, is considered more or less interchangeable with Krautrock. But as culture critic Erik Davis points out in Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy, the phrase’s more refined utterances tend to encompass those German musicians who were preoccupied with “an alternately meditative and ferocious dissolution of boundaries that invoked, through sound or function or packaging, the unearthly otherworlds that link outer and inner space.” Though it’s up for debate, the group most closely associated with this heady mission has long been Tangerine Dream. Since achieving lift-off with the 1967 opus Electronic Meditation, the ensemble has undergone countless personnel changes and shifts in style, yet founder Edgar Froese’s interest in interstellar drift continues to be the primary focus.

Another veteran proponent of Kosmische Musik is Hans-Joachim Roedelius. In addition to his sprawling solo discography, Roedelius’ work with Cluster and Harmonia (the latter of which also featured fellow Moogfest performer Brian Eno for a spell) has proven to be wildly prescient in the way it blends rock music with elements of avant garde electronics, free improv and minimalism.

Krautrock’s chromosome is nestled deep inside Moogfest DNA. From The Field’s icy, motorik-flavored techno to The Flaming Lips’ discordantly peculiar permutation of space rock, there’s probably not a single musician in Asheville this weekend who isn’t familiar with Kraftwerk or Can or Faust. That said, the two artists who embody the Kosmische spark are the ambient-drone voyagers Tim Hecker and Oneohtrix Point Never.

Tangerine Dream
To fully understand just how far out T.D. ventured at the peak of its powers, Lester Bangs’ 1977 concert review “I Saw God And/Or Tangerine Dream” is mandatory reading. Amazingly, less than a decade later the group had shifted its attention to Hollywood soundtracks, among them Risky Business, Legend and the most underrated vampire movie of all time, Near Dark. Recent releases, including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki series, are decidedly new age. But hey, all deep-space explorers need to return to Earth some time, right?

Hans-Joachim Roedelius
Roedelius the solo artist began producing music in the late 1970s, not long before Cluster’s first split. He’s intensely prolific, with a back catalog of more than 30 titles. His aesthetic, a mix of abstruse studio experimentation and chamber-like piano music, has grown increasingly more refined and contemplative with time. The German label Bureau B has reissued many of Roedelius’ early records, including the first volumes in the Selbstportrait series — amazing stuff.

Lunz
One of the more curious, but not totally unexpected, developments in the evolution of Krautrock and Kosmische Musik is how many of the movement’s original proponents now create what can only be tagged “new age music.” The Lunz project is a collaboration featuring Hans-Joachim Roedelius and keyboardist and Windham Hill alumnus Tim Story. The pair have dropped a string of albums since 2000, all of them documenting their delicate and muted take on modern ambient music. Despite the new age vibes, not all this music is “feel good.” The 2008 record Inlandish, for example, is marked by a kind of existential barrenness.

Tim Hecker
Tim Hecker’s music has been called a lot of things over the last decade. Drone, ambient, noise and microsound are just a few of them. But when you spend time with a record like Ravedeath, 1972, released earlier this year, the composer’s connections to classic Kosmische Musik make themselves as plain as the Milky Way on a brilliantly clear night in the Smoky Mountains. Hecker, much like Cluster, is a true synthesist, one who possesses an uncanny knack for blending electronic and acoustic sound sources. This, in turn, leads to an exquisite fusion of inner and outer space.

This piece originally appeared on Rhapsody’s The Mix.

“Living in the Shadows” is a deep cut from 1995′s When the Circus Comes to Town, one of the very best records of Bert Jansch’s long (and at time tumultuous) career, which ended on October 5th, the day lung cancer claimed his life. Augmented by a muted rhythm section and Mark Ramsden’s vaporous saxophone, Jansch’s thick Scottish accent, all moody and temperamental, garbles most of the lyrics, save cutting little phrases such as “for the whole damn world to see” and “you got to run through the city with your head down, don’t be seen.”

It’s not considered one of his repertoire’s finest hours by any means, yet the song’s title, as well as those lines I just mentioned, say something about Jansch’s stature, or lack thereof, in America. A Scottish-folk legend in the United Kingdom, the singer, songwriter and deeply skilled picker has always been one of these artists we Yanks tie to more familiar names when he pops up during the course of conversation: “Have you heard Bert Jansch?” “No, I don’t think so.” “Oh, he’s great. Neil Young and Eric Clapton totally worshipped him.” Then there’s Donovan and Led Zeppelin, both of whom apparently worshipped him as well.

These validations are, of course, true, yet in the end they are superfluous, really. Jansch is, in many respects, one of the modern titans of folk music and folk-rock. Hitting the British scene in the mid 1960s, he helped construct the “singer-songwriter” persona by taking traditional folk music and acoustic blues, and raking them over the white-hot coals of existential desperation, restlessness and melancholy typical of twentysomething bohemia. The classics came fast and hard during this period, among them “Strolling Down the Highway,” “Oh How Your Love Is Strong” and “Needle of Death” (a tune so profoundly distressing I can barely listen to the thing anymore).

After having established himself as one of the most gifted troubadours and guitarists on the planet, Jansch teamed-up with fellow six-string virtuoso John Renbourn. Together, they assembled The Pentangle (later just Pentangle). Over the course of a half-dozen albums — Sweet Child and Basket Of Light are particularly, utterly brilliant — the ensemble explored a experimental blend of folk, jazz, Celtic music and any other tradition they could lay their hands on. Though they weren’t hippie rockers like Fairport Convention, Pentangle played a pivotal role in the development of progressive rock, folk-rock and, decades later, the modern indie-folk movement (a/k/a freak folk, or the New Weird America).

In the mid 1970s, with the singer-songwriter movement hitting a peak in terms of popularity, Jansch re-focused on his solo career and released a string of albums — Moonshine, L.A. Turnaround and Santa Barbara Honeymoon — that felt like conscious attempts at climbing said peak. And why not? He was 10 times the talent of a saccharine clown like James Taylor (who surely counted Jansch among his early influences). Sadly, these albums failed to deliver him out of those shadows here in the States — but not for lacking in excellent music. This period in his career has become my favorite in recent years; L.A. Turnaround in particular is amazing. Produced by ex-Monkee and country-rock pioneer Michael Nesmith, the music is bluesy, prickly, rickety, rustic and boozy.

Speaking of booze, it was one of Jansch’s most pernicious demons. It exacted a toll for sure. He released some very good records throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, yet he also dropped a few clunkers along the way. In 1987 the bottle very nearly killed the guy. Amazingly, he cleaned up and by 1995 was recordings albums like the aforementioned When The Circus Comes to Town. In his last few years, Jansch, an “elder statesman” by now, had been enjoying something of a renaissance. In addition to a new generation of folkies, from Espers to Devendra Banhart, professing their love for him and Pentangle, he released the thoroughly enjoyable Black Swan album on the Drag City label. He also went out on tour, opening for Neil Young and Eric Clapton, no less.

America never embraced Jansch quite like those two classic rockers, but no matter. He will be missed by those who belong to his intensely loyal cult.

R.I.P.

This piece originally appeared on Rhapsody’s The Mix.

Since releasing its first strange transmissions in 2004 and ’05, Los Angeles-based Not Not Fun Records has become one of the underground’s most exciting, prolific and influential labels. Their aesthetic is commonly described as “hypnagogic pop,” a tag that does a nice job of capturing the gooey and decayed fusion of synthesizer music, psychedelia, dub, lo-fi rock, exotica and ’80s dance pop favored by much of the label’s roster. We’re talking freaky heavies with names like Sun Araw, Peaking Lights, Robedoor, Maria Minerva, LA Vampires, High Wolf, Sex Worker, Dylan Ettinger and Psychic Reality.

What’s interesting is how every one of these artists feels like a honeybee clone working together to construct a deliciously eccentric hive, yet never at the expense of individual expression. On initial spins, Too Down to Die, Robedoor’s neo-Spectrum descent into the phantom zone, sounds dimensions removed from Peaking Lights’ narcotic-disco masterpiece 936, not to mention Maria Minerva’s Cabaret Cixous, a collection of bedroom-diva grooves mired in solitude and loneliness. Spend enough time with them, however, and shared patterns and sensibilities emerge: the meticulously layered productions that feel like Third World salvage jobs built from discarded technology, the shuddering reverb cascading into negative infinity and, most importantly, the knack for bridging extreme avant-garde rock and dance music. This last quality really is key. No matter how out there any one of these musicians venture, always underpinning the music is a firm, if at times oddball, belief in the importance of communal body movement to (deranged) sound.

Sun Araw
On Patrol
Sun Araw are one of Not Not Fun’s most appealing groups and also one of the label’s most adventurous. The ensemble, claiming a chunk of strange terrain halfway between Jaybird-era Sunburned Hand of the Man and The Slits, filters 21st-century psychedelic rock through a dubby future primitivism heavily informed by musty African funk. On Patrol is packed full of delicious highlights, but its absolute best tracks, like “Beat Cop,” “Conga Mind” and “Deep Cover,” contain an extra element: a veil of lo-fi electronics and deep bass that cajole the grooves into a woozy and hypnotic liminality.

Maria Minerva
Cabaret Cixous
The intriguingly mysterious Maria Minerva hails from Estonia, but her low-tech, avant diva-pop — all dubby, grubby and dreamy — very much mirrors what her Not Not Fun labelmates are up to here in the United States. More than a few tracks on Cabaret Cixous sound as if Minerva took a blowtorch to Phil Collins’ “This Must Be Love,” looped it several times, then added a handful of synth runs and broken beats. To say this music is the sonic equivalent of consuming horse tranquilizers before reclining on a waterbed and gazing into a color wheel for an hour just about nails its overall feel.

Robedoor
Too Down to Die
The Spacemen 3-inspired title says it all. This expansive slab of drone is all about downer space-blues drowning in a wall-of-sound ecstasy that’s both titanic and uncontrollable. Unlike previous releases, however, Too Down to Die doesn’t contain a whole lot of murk. It’s gorgeous and sublime in a decidedly streamlined manner. What’s more, the synthesizer and electronic components have been pushed to the fore, as if the band intended for the sphere on the album cover to be mistaken for a disco ball. After the 22-minute opener, the tracks get progressively shorter — but no less psychedelic.

Pocahaunted
Island Diamonds
Pocahaunted’s discography is too all over the place stylistically for the group to boast a definitive recording. But if you’re pressed to pick one, Island Diamonds it is. Released in 2008, just as the group was evolving from noise-drone mediums into groovy rhythm merchants, the album contains the best of both incarnations. It’s genuinely liminal in this sense. Standout tracks such as “Follow I” and “Ghetto Ballet” come shrouded in thick ether, yet they never dissolve, thanks to the throbbing bass that holds them together. Coining genres is a silly exercise, yet “Gothic dub” does make a lot of sense.

Peaking Lights
936
In a parallel universe, one where dub icon Lee “Scratch” Perry, and not ABBA, dominated the pop charts in the late ’70s, Peaking Lights are the Mr. and Mrs. Lady Gaga of the modern age. If you’re not cranking 936 right this second, then that sounds like nothing but crazy talk. So go ahead and explore this wondrous platter — it’s gooey mutant disco at its most luxuriant and spellbinding. Even when the Wisconsin-based duo ventures far out, as on “Marshmellow Yellow,” your body will still demand a glistening parquet floor and softly strobing light patterns. Oh, and crank the bass, too.

High Wolf
Étoile 3030
The Skaters, particularly cofounder James Ferraro, receive quite a lot of credit for kick-starting the hypnagogic pop movement. And rightfully so. At the same time, the Day-Glo séances of High Wolf (as well as those of fellow Not Not Fun freaks Sun Araw) owe just as much to Jaybird-era Sunburned Hand of the Man. Étoile 3030 picks up where the previously released Ascension left off. This is neo-psychedelia stripped to its shimmering essences: wah-wah, organ, drum and bass. Of course, there exists a significant amount of processing, yet it’s amazing just how elemental this music really is.

LA Vampires Featuring Matrix Metals
So Unreal
At first blush, So Unreal is simply a lo-fi reimagining of New Wave. This impression deepens with repeated spins. The beats and synths echo wearily, as if they’re crushed by the weight of their own nostalgia. Amanda Brown, who fronts Pocahaunted as well, sounds genuinely dazed and confused: her voice floats through that echo but fails to find anything real to cling to. On “How Would U Know,” she dismantles the very notion of self through a repeated perversion of the title: “You could be anyone. How would I know? How would I know? How would I know?”

Umberto
Prophecy of the Black Widow
Nearly everything about Prophecy of the Black Widow, from the campy song titles to the creepy textures, reads like an open love letter to ’70s Italian horror. Indeed, an intense Goblin vibe permeates the album. But this isn’t mere nostalgia — more like the delicious confusion of same. A good chunk of Prophecy of the Black Widow, including the stuttering drum machines and synth stabs, sounds influenced by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s soundtrack work. Then there’s the unmistakable Rockwell vibe in “Night Stalking” and “Everything Is Going to Be Okay.” Now that’s really over the top.

Sex Worker
Waving Goodbye
The Not Not Fun roster can be split into two camps: the psychedelic explorers (Sun Araw, High Wolf, Umberto) and the psych-o-delic crooners (LA Vampires, Maria Minerva). Sex Worker (born Daniel Martin-McCormick) belongs to the latter. The title Waving Goodbye could refer to the departure of his sanity. He sounds like a sexually tormented mental patient who happens to own a cheap Yorx sound system and a karaoke machine loaded with synth pop. It’s all very post-James Ferraro weirdness. Nevertheless, the record is one engaging listen, like a war of attrition you can’t seem to walk away from.

Weyes Blood
The Outside Room
The Outside Room is an idiosyncratic album, even for the stridently eccentric label that released it. Weyes Blood (born Natalie Mering) shares with Sun Araw and Peaking Lights a love for analog-rich sounds all decayed and flooded in reverb. Formally, however, she is a genuine progressive-folk singer and songwriter, one whose surging contralto is clearly inspired by Nico and Bridget St. John. Dense and forlorn, this record demands a lot from its listeners, namely copious amounts of time and attention, yet the rewards are many and, most importantly, profound.

Further exploration:
Peaking Lights: Imaginary Falcons
Xander Harris: Urban Gothic
Eternal Tapestry: Mystic Induction
Psychic Reality: Vibrant New Age
Jonas Reinhardt: Music for the Tactile Dome
Dylan Ettinger: New Age Outlaws
Magic Lantern: Platoon
Wet Hair: Glass Fountain
Ensemble Economique: Psychical
Inca Ore: Birthday of Bless You