For a Westerner like myself, the sounds of Russia and Algeria are (no pun intended) completely foreign. They use non traditional scales and key signatures, making Vinculum feel deeper and more mysterious than it might to people who are already deeply familiar with the regions’ music.

But were I to guess, I’d assume Vinculum would even be surprising for folks who are already aware of Bartok and Tchaikovsky. The album mixes original Bartok recordings from Algeria, new orchestral recordings, and electronics and unique performances from Ellis Cage. It’s a heady brew.

In many ways, I am reminded of mid-century jazz music. Daring and inspired, but certainly not for everybody, Vinculum is all about exploration. It’s about pushing the boundaries, while remaining conceptually bound to the original songs and sounds.

Similarly, jazz was trying to expand the vocabulary of the music without entirely abandoning the traditional work that came before. Jazz players wanted to introduce the genre to new people without totally abandoning their existing audience.

Ellis Cage’s Vinculum is playing along these lines. It’s at once familiar: classical compositions surrounded by electronic ambience. Today, this isn’t an unfamiliar sound. But Ellis brings it, thanks to the unique sounds of Russia and Algeria, to a new level of creativity.

There is something fundamentally uneasy going on throughout Vinculum, a constant point of tension that makes the music both discomforting and enthralling. It grabs you and doesn’t let you go. There are no standout tracks because they flow together. Without iTunes notifications telling me when the track had changed, I’m not sure I’d be aware the track had changed at all. So it’s impossible to recommend a single track, but it is easy to recommend the album as a whole.

Vinculum isn’t for everybody. It might not be to your taste; I’m somewhat surprised it’s to mine. It’s dark, ambitious, and sometimes difficult to approach. But there’s a majesty and mystery to it that few other independent composers are able to put on display.

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The entire soundtrack is in a similar vein to the Ghosts record from Nine Inch Nails. Some tracks are longer than others, but when they are, they feel like four or five songs pieced together from a single nebulous idea. “Monolith”, the first track, is the perfect example of that: the song twists and turns for over six minutes, but it never feels like it abandons its premise.

In other ways, No Man’s Sky is as exploratory as the game it’s based on. No Man’s Sky, the game, is an exploratory game that challenges the player to move from the outer rim of the galaxy towards the centre, exploring potentially billions of planets on the way, cobbling together better spacecrafts, learning alien languages, and fighting for survival in harsh planetary conditions. No Man’s Sky, the soundtrack, asks a simple question: “How can music capture the same feeling of exploration?”

In that sense, the soundtrack’s greatest success is that it doesn’t feel like it repeats itself. Obviously, there are basic themes and motifs that often carry from one song to the next. Some tracks sound like they run into each other — the rhythms, in particular, often feel similar from one song to the next. But like any great soundtrack, these familiar notes don’t dominate the record. They’re used as catchphrases. They allow the listener to feel rooted in something familiar, even when the explored territory is alien or novel.

At many points throughout the soundtrack, I’ve wondered how this music would fit in a video game. The music is bombastic and calls attention to itself, and would feel out of place even in a superhero flick.

As a result, the soundtrack for No Man’s Sky stands alone. Experience with the video game isn’t a prerequisite for enjoyment. It’s what makes the music work.

No Man’s Sky: Music for an Infinite Universe is the perfect music for those of us who like ambient music that we can sink our teeth into when we want, or need, to think. It’s one of the best soundtrack releases of 2016.

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In other words, the track titles force us to talk about the album as a whole.

And as a cohesive whole, 22, A Million is worth talking about. Remember how weird it was when Bon Iver started singing on Kanye West tracks? It didn’t make sense then, but it does with 22, A Million. The transition is now complete. Bon Iver, Bon Iver was a stepping stone towards this, and in retrospect, it feels like an awkward sophomore attempt. This was always the future.

Justin Vernon interest in fusing electronic music and folk goes back to the beginning. And can you blame him? He recorded For Emma, Forever Ago on his laptop. Electronic sounds are an obvious direction to pursue.

Many of the tracks on 22, A Million exemplify this change. “10 d E A T h b R E a s T “, “33 ‘GOD’”, and “715 – CREEKS” are easy examples. What’s incredible about the tracks isn’t just Vernon’s unbridled creativity, but the fact that he actually pulled it all together. He made something beautiful out of all of this.

In a lot of ways, it’s fitting that we first got hints of this new Bon Iver sound from his performances with Kanye West. With 22, A Million, it feels like Bon Iver is trying to make a similar statement of creativity and power. This is Bon Iver’s 808s & Heartbreak. People might revile the record now, but we’ll look back on it with fondness as the turning of a corner.

If that comparison doesn’t resonate for you, it’d be fair to compare the album to Radiohead’s Kid A. It’s as if Justin Vernon said that too much of the folk scene sounds the same, that he didn’t want to add to the noise, and he wanted to make a change.

That change ripples through every track no this record. It’s almost impossible to talk about them individually. Lyrically, Vernon continues to be somewhat cryptic. But despite the distance that the electronics introduces, his voice feels more intimate and earthy than ever.

“8 (circle)” is a great example. Vernon’s voice makes it feel like the song is a private performance, but the electronics give the song a spacious depth it would otherwise lack.

It’s all so fitting for Justin Vernon, a man who seems bound to his neurosis of musical self-doubt, uncertainty, and reinvention. 22, A Million is a record about the ripples new sounds introduce, and the butterfly effects they create. It’s a beautiful record that’s reminiscent of watershed moments of the past, but only time will tell how we remember it.

As for me, I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history. 22, A Million could go down as Bon Iver’s first masterpiece.

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Oliva Tremor Control

Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle

This album is a psychedelic -pop masterpiece. Overflowing with ideas, this record found a way to marry sound collage and concise songwriting without every seeming forced or laboured. It is like Badfinger and Karlheinz Stockhausen rolled into one.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Amazon / Spotify

David Sylvian

Manafon

I have been on a kick with these later David Sylvian records. This and Blemish are my current favourites. I adore the atmosphere he creates with the musicians (Christian Fennesz, Evan Parker, Toshimaru Nakamura, etc.) and how brave he is in leaving space and letting sounds hang. This isn’t an easy record to listen to. The subject matter is quite dark, but for some reason I find myself drawn to it. In a way, it is so bleak that it makes me feel better about the world.

Listen: Amazon

OLD

The Musical Dimensions of Sleastak

In 1993 I was listening to a lot of death metal and indie rock and nothing sounded as strange and otherworldly as this record. I think James Plotkin is consistently brilliant and I love Alan Dubin’s vocals/lyrics. It is constantly morphing. It is a harsh, organic, and truly psychedelic listening experience. The final track, “Backwards Through the Greedo Compressor” is a real mind-melter of studio mix improvisation.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Amazon / Spotify

Andy J. Lloyd (bass)

Julianna Barwick

Nepenthe

The most beautiful vocals imaginable, structured into perfect topographical dreamscapes.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Amazon / Spotify

Max Richter

From Sleep

A master composer creating endlessly simple and beautiful sounds, masterfully.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Amazon / Spotify

Nailbiter

Formats

Punishing awesomeness, delivered without apology, but with style.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Spotify

Jon Maki (drums)

Flower-Corsano Duo

You'll Never Work In This Town Again

I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing the Flower-Corsano Duo live twice. Once in Toronto and again in Helsinki. Both shows were absolutely blistering. Being a drummer, Chris Corsano blows my mind every time I see him. This self-released live recording is a really good representation of what you should expect from the aural magic created by just a Bulbul tarang (Indian banjo) and drums/percussion.

Bola Sete

Ocean Memories

Bola Sete is one of my favourite unsung artists and one of my favourite artists in general. John Fahey originally put this album out on his Takoma label in 1975, but this 2 CD reissue has an additional disc of unreleased recordings. Some of the most beautiful guitar work you’ll ever hear in your life.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Amazon

Laura Spiegel

The Expanding Universe

One of the earliest and most compelling computer based albums to reach my ears. Composed from 1974–1976. Her ambient music truly does lead to expansion of your mind’s universe.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Amazon / Spotify

Tim Condon (keys, guitar)

The Necks

Drive By

I discovered The Necks by seeing them at the Spitz in London (UK), one of the most conducive-to-a-good-show venues anywhere in the world. They were extraordinary. The next time I saw them was at the Corner Hotel, in Melbourne, on a hot January night (I think it was 44c), and the air conditioning had broken down. Not conducive to listening to an at times small, quiet, slow and building improvised musical experience. But yet they were equally as extraordinary. They are the best band in the world at making you forget where you, and they are, and being held, immersed in their world of texture, melody and space. Every album of theirs is incredible, but Drive By is a great starting point, especially when traveling long distances.

Listen: iTunes / Amazon

Alessandro Cortini

Sonno

I find it insulting to call this “experimental” – this album is filled with musical experiences that are familiar to anyone who has experienced heartbreak, sadness, loneliness or isolation. This is not experimental – upon first listen it is instantly familiar and innate. The saddest, most fractured and gorgeous of melodies, all tripped up by noise, static and orchestrated by a mechanical sequence. The opening track, “Rovine” says a million words in seven and a half minutes. Sadly gorgeous throughout.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Amazon / Spotify

Fire! With Jim O'Rourke

Are You Still Both Unreleased?

Fire! just use Mats Gustafsson’s atonal, nagging, persistent, pained and screaming saxophone to blast forward, destroying any hesitation over what the fuck is going on. It’s just happening. Try putting this on (in particular opening track “Are You Both Still Unreleased?”) at a decent volume and watching how many people are physically repelled by how blunt, brutal and difficult this music is.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Amazon / Spotify

Oren Ambarchi

Sagittarian Domain

Ambarchi continues to astound and astound (in particular in 2012, when this album was released, alongside 9 other releases he put out that year) uses repetition and layers to push forward, moving past any contemporaries with grace.

Elsewhere in 2012, Oren Ambarchi teamed up with Fire! for their album In The Mouth – A Hand. 2012 was a pretty great year.

Listen: iTunes / Apple Music / Amazon / Spotify

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It doesn’t take long for The Comet Is Coming to begin to deliver on their promises of unique jazz. “Space Carnival”, the album’s second track, feels almost like a dance track — with moments that feel lifted from dance and electronic records, it certainly doesn’t sound like the jazz of old.

I don’t think that’s a problem, though. You can hear in their stylings that The Comet Is Coming has a reverence for what came before. The way they handle time signatures and solos, as well as the large batch of musical ideas that may be in one song, speak to their understanding of jazz’s heritage and its creativity.

That’s not to say that the group is never recognizable as a jazz outfit. On tracks like “Journey Through the Asteroid Belt”, they wear their label proudly — even if they’re mixing it with a percussion setup that would make most DJs jealous. “Slam Dunk in a Black Hole” understands the weird side of jazz that Miles Davis explored on Bitches’ Brew, but mixes it with a techno-inspired backbeat that somehow makes the whole thing feel modern and contextual for our times.

And, of course, the solos throughout this album are amazing. The group is made up of three guys, if you aren’t familiar, and each are gifted at what they do. It’s worth mentioning their names — they’re treasures in and of themselves: “Danalogue the Conequeror” is their synthesizer. “Betamax Killer” plays drums. “King Shabaka” is the saxophonist. All three are impeccably talented. It’s hard to believe Danalogue the Conqueror is handling synth duties solo, and the sounds King Shabaka gets out of his sax are incredible.

Tracks like “Cosmic Dust” make it clear this isn’t the first record you’d want to show to your friends who are merely interested in jazz, though. This record is for people who are interested in concepts. This is jazz for fans of psychedelic music — or vice versa.

“Channel the Spirits”, the album’s titular track, sounds like a jazz track played overtop of a pummelling rock riff. It’s the fully-fleshed equivalent of a Mastodon record on mushrooms. (It’s also my favourite track on the record.) The album is all over the map, but conceptually, it’s all bound together by an idea.

I think the idea is simple: jazz still has new places to explore, new cosmos to go. The comet may be coming, and when it hits, it might wipe out jazz as we know it. But the genre is beginning its formation into something new.

The Comet is Coming’s debut record is an unmissable delight for fans of challenging, complex music that plays with form and challenges the identity of genre. The band has earned a new fan in me, and I look forward to spending much more time with their music over upcoming years.

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The results are oddly memorable, and perhaps one of the year’s strongest efforts yet from any artist in any genre. It’s only five tracks long, but it’s around fifty minutes. The group takes their time exploring ideas.

And exploration is certainly want the album is about. Rather than giving each track a name, Nisennenmondai simply give them a number. A part of me wonders if a number would have given away too much about their intentions, because each track is remarkably dense and refuses to easily give away meaning. The loops are long and intricate — not unlike The Field. Nisennenmondai, though, are more interested in the slow deconstruction of the loop.

I will note that I have a particular interest in the way #N/A uses drum tracks. The album pulses with them. High hats are in almost constant motion, and the album sounds jazz-like as a result. The first time you hear it, in #1, it catches you off guard.

These drums are consistent throughout stylistically, and are more important than the loop itself. As the trio takes apart each loop and breaks it down into a minimalistic arrangement, everything except the drums are largely open to experimentation. But each rhythm remains a constant.

On #5, as the final loops are breaking down, there’s a sound that reminds me of a broken guitar string being amplified through an old Marshall amp. It’s the complete des truncation of instrumentation, but it’s not unpleasant. If anything, it’s intoxicating. I’ve seen some comparisons to Giorgio Moroder, but I’m not sure you could compare #N/A to anything. It’s a dense wall of electronic rhythm and soundscapes, and it doesn’t offer any answers beyond itself. It’s the year’s most involved electronic soundscape, and perhaps one of its best.

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Perhaps it’s easiest to let Erased Tape Records, the studio behind the collaboration, explain it for us:

Musical instruments are a somewhat technological anomaly in that they are rarely updated after their conception, often only receiving minor tweaks over the course of hundreds of years. As such, each instrument provides us with a snapshot of the cutting edge technologies of a particular time and place – in this sense, the instrumentation used by Immix provides us with snapshots of technologies that can be traced back as far as 1500BC.

Each track is a movement with two parts highlighting the discovery of an instrument, marrying it with the discovery of electronic music and synthesizers. A strange sort of synthesis happens here, when the instruments collide: historical context feels lost in metaphor and draped in allusions, and what might otherwise be simply noise takes on new meaning.

What Hath God Wrought is the most straight-forward track on the album, but it really takes off with De Revolutionibus, a track that begins to collide the electronics and organic instrumentation in a less organic and more oppositional way.

As the album continues, the pairing becomes more violent as the electronic instruments slowly take over, cleverly posing a question about the future of music itself. It comes to a massive head in the appropriately titled Battle Cry.

At twenty-six minutes, you would think there wouldn’t be enough time for serious exploration. But Immix and Vessel are impressively able to mine a lot of depth in that short period of time, to the point where a longer record would perhaps feel overwhelming.

This is not easy listening. This is purely avant-garde electronics at work, married to the sort of frenetic creativity that classical music once prided itself on. Transition is a rewarding listen, but not one that gives itself up easily.

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Odd spelling aside, the second thing you’ll notice is that you can’t place where this music is coming from. Sounding simultaneously like some sort of trip hop experiment and oddly African in its influence, Petite Noir can’t be pigeon-holed into a genre.

Petite Noir is one man from South Africa: Yannick Iluga, who handles all the vocals, music, and production on this debut record. He’s in his mid-twenties, but even now, his music sounds like a definitive take on a genre he calls “Darkwave”, which is like New Wave music put through an African vibe.

His voice sounds soulful, but it’s not soul music. He has loads of influence from music all across the board, but I can’t figure out if he’s de-constructing all of it for some sort of rhetorical thesis, or if he’s building upon their foundations in an attempt to do something new. His music is both sparse and intricate. It’s a stunning, stirring debut reminding you that if you’re willing to look hard enough, truly new music is out there.

Despite all of Petite Noir’s influences — Pitchfork cites his influences as everything from Kanye West to Senses Fail and U2 — Yannick sounds like somebody who’s wholly internalized everything he loves and made something new with it. In today’s musical climate, that’s rare.

At the end of the day, I’m still left with the question of what to call it. Instead of trying to narrow Yannick’s music to a single genre, it’s almost safer to give him a broader brush stroke to play with. For now, I’m going to call Petite Noir experimental pop. Now I’ll just spend the next couple years waiting for pop music to catch up with Yannick’s vision of the future.

The post Petite Noir: La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful appeared first on Unsung Sundays.

Empress Of excels at writing electronic music that is accessible without degrading into pop territory. The lead single, How Do You Do It, is a great example: Empress of makes a song that wouldn’t feel terribly out of place on a dance floor, but she sings it with the grace of a pop star in the makings.

It’s an album that will appease people who love electronic music, and maybe even dream hop or EDM lovers, but it’s also a record that will be loved by the pop mainstream among us. Empress Of finds success in the crossover appeal, and I think she’s got a bright future.

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Soaked in Gold is also unique in that it’s focused a bit more on the riff, albeit a riff surrounded by electronic elements. So it’s a little more familiar for people coming from an indie rock background, but it was clearly put together with a synthesizer.

It’s also focused on letting natural and synthetic instruments breathe and live together organically (quite a mouthful), which puts him into a favourable comparison with Chet Faker again. Altogether, this approach to songwriting mixes and mingles the best of alternative rock with the future of electronic.

The next step for Geoffrey, in my mind, is putting together a band that can make him better. While his music isn’t bad, that element of polish isn’t going to come from meticulously writing to a metronome. Without the ability to run ideas off other people, I get the feeling that Geoffrey is pushing against his own limitations here — and he could greatly benefit from having other band members throw ideas at him.

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