Cristián Alvear Montecino - Quatre Pièces Pour Guitare & Ondes Sinusoïdales (Rhizome.s)

Hear excerpts from the album here
Purchase Quatre Pièces Pour Guitare & Ondes Sinusoïdales here
 

As if one record from Alvear wasn’t enough, Rhizome.s released a collection of tracks for guitar and sine waves that further proves the Chilean musician’s versatility and refined playing style (check his bandcamp for even more). The first piece is one composed by Alvin Lucier entitled “on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, for guitar and pure wave oscillator”. The composition itself is straightforward: a sine tone plays throughout the entire piece as a string instrument (Ryuko Mizutani’s koto on the Lucier recording, a guitar here) interjects with a single note every few seconds. The result is another one of Lucier’s exploration in the physicality of sound. We hear how each note affects the sine wave and how this process also differs with pitch. The main difference between these two pieces lies in the panning of its instruments. Lucier’s piece has the sine wave and koto mixed strictly in the left and right channel, respectively, forcing the listener to mentally follow this cause-and-effect path. Alvear’s realization isn’t as extreme in its mixing but the collision of sound is just as perceptible, making it a bit more palatable.

The following tracks are decidedly less austere. The sine tones on Ryoko Akama’s ”line.ar.me, for guitar and sinewaves” are lively and ripple in an almost whimsical fashion while those on Bruno Duplant’s “premières et dernières pensées (avant de s’endormir)” stay at a relatively low volume. The latter is especially great; the sine tones function as a bed of sound for the emotive guitar playing to build upon but the comfort of their presence never feels as strong as when they’re removed and we hear complete silence. In those moments, the song feels intensely lonely. Sine waves eventually return but it’s only with the thoughtful structure of this composition that they can continually increase in frequency yet feel so soothing. Santiago Astaburuaga’s “pieza de escucha III” closes the record on a high note. It’s a lush 23 minute epic that features Alvear creatively “playing” his guitar, drawing out interesting sonic qualities in the instrument’s body and strings. Actually seeing him perform the composition is thrilling and insightful but being restricted to an aural experience proves just as enthralling because of the song’s unique sound palette.

Michael Pisaro (performed by Cristián Alvear Montecino) - Melody, Silence (Potlatch)

Purchase Melody, Silence here

About four minutes into Melody, Silence, Cristián Alvear plays a chord on his guitar and it resonates accordingly. What isn’t immediately perceptible, however, is that the resulting hum is from both the guitar and a sine tone. The tone then extends for nine minutes before leading into another passage of sparse guitar plucks. What once seemed clear in the record’s first passage is now ambiguous: are there sine tones here? Is this going to be the final note of the section? That there exists any sense of mystery within this skeletal composition comprised of sine tones, guitar, and silence is a testament to its understated beauty. Funny enough, this five minute piece only segues into one with silence. But in the careful examination of each plucked note comes a larger appreciation for them and an understanding of their weight. Sure enough, the final chord in this portion of the recording is dissonant and it feels potent.

I was initially disappointed that Melody, Silence was a single track; that I couldn’t participate in the reordering of its twelve parts seemed less than ideal. Now, that notion seems silly. Pisaro composed these twelve parts such that they “allow for various transformations, cuts, extensions and silences” so not only is Alvear’s realization wholly unique but the recording is specifically edited and sequenced to allow the listener to engage with it in the way Alvear sees fit. Case in point: a sine tone plays for six minutes around 26 minutes into the record. This time, there’s a deeper warmth and serenity to it and it can clearly be attributed to 1) the fact it’s simply played for a shorter period of time than the first 2) is at a relatively lower frequency and 3) is bookended by periods of silence. As with other Wandelweiser compositions, silence is understood as both “material and a disturbance of material”. These passages of silence function as more than repose; there’s a depth to them and they interact with the listener as well as the other instrumentation. Because of this, each guitar pluck and sine tone is sensed to their fullest capacity.

Yannick Dauby - 廠 (chǎng, factory) (Kalerne)

Purchase 廠 (chǎng, factory) here

Regardless of the source material, a field recording artist’s goal is always to capture the distinct qualities of a certain location or species. What separates the good from the great, then, is whether or not they’re able to make such a distinction clear and exciting to the listener. The French-born, Taiwan-residing Yannick Dauby has always been particularly good at taking his recordings and compiling them in a way to maximize their intensity. With the ethnographically-minded Taî-pak thiaⁿ saⁿ piàn, Dauby guided us through the gorgeous sounds in and around Taipei. On Arches, he placed listeners inside a distressing landscape filled with the incessant howling of wolves. And then on Wā Jiè Méng Xūn, he wove modular synths and a choir of croaking frogs together into a playful and lively collage. Most of Dauby’s works aren’t “pure” field recordings but his editing is always purposeful and allows for an immersive experience.

Factory is no different; it starts with a simple drone that establishes the album’s ghastly atmosphere but what begins as a monochromatic fog subtly fleshes out into something more sinister. And in its first third, Factory is genuinely terrifying. The faint sounds of machinery suddenly take center stage and the tumbling, stomping, and rattling of various mechanical processes reverberate forcefully. However, there initially isn’t a rhythmic consistency to these noises and it only amplifies the record’s unsettling atmosphere. As a result, the industrial complex of Factory is decidedly different from the printing press of Pali Meursault’s Offset. Dauby isn’t pointing towards the innate musical qualities of the sounds here. Instead, he utilizes a sound design-focused approach with the varying source material to capture the lifeless place he considers this factory, as made clear in the album’s accompanying poem. This mood is so distinctly captured that halfway through the record, the constant rhythm we eventually hear from these machines is as bleak as the human voices alongside them.

With the numerous recordings that Dauby has made throughout his career, it’s clear that he’s immensely interested in exploring the richness of Taiwan’s culture. However, Factory feels more than just a simple constructing of a soundscape; the way he utilizes these recordings from the Xinzhuang district seem like a political statement, or at least a portrayal of his grief regarding the specific effects of industrialization in this region. The record concludes with an extended ambient passage that functions as a meditative postlude. Its static field recordings soon fade out and we’re left with the lonely echoes of a mallet instrument, a sort of acceptance of the current state of things.

Rie Nakajima - Four Forms (Consumer Waste)

Stream a sample of the first track and purchase Four Forms here

I grinned throughout all thirty minutes of Rie Nakajima’s Four Forms. And this wasn’t just on the first or second listen; with each subsequent revisit, it’s become clear to me that Four Forms is imbued with the sort of life-affirming pleasantness that’s rarely seen in music. In fact, the most immediate comparison that came to mind was Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat. Like that film, Four Forms is very much an album whose appeal comes largely from sound design; each minute detail is magnified and feels precisely placed such that every tick and vibration can be appreciated. And its humble premise and presentation—four relatively straightforward recordings of Nakajima’s various automatons—only make the timbral qualities of her sculptures more delightful.

What’s really astounding though about Four Forms is the quality of these compositions. What could easily become tedious in its repetition instead transforms into something hypnotic and soothing. The swirling of a ball opens the first track but never feels oppressive or tiring during the four minutes it’s heard. One could easily accredit that to the inherent lightness of the sound but a lot is certainly owed to the mixing and how well Nakajima pairs her contraptions. The most amusing of these comes in the form of intermittent clanging on track four. The track’s scraping and rattling is generally tranquil but these loud and metallic interjections are frankly amusing, even comical.

The wonderful thing about art is that while an artist may have a say in how it can be interpreted or engaged with, it still has a certain life of its own. With Four Forms, that notion is almost literally presented. While Nakajima was the one who constructed these eighteen machines, these recordings don’t necessarily point towards her involvement. Instead, we’re forced to recognize the sounds as is and relish in the compositions that they seemingly made themselves. On the back of the LP, there’s a blurb from David Toop that mentions how the way we perceive music is a result of where and how we listen to it. Four Forms directly addresses that to us as listeners. While we’re not directly in the room witnessing these automatons function in real time, we’re able “to be closer still, almost inside but seeing nothing, hearing the microaudial detail”, as Toop puts it. Consumer Waste’s previous releases were all published as CDs but Nakajima wanted to have Four Forms pressed on vinyl. It’s an appropriate wish; the process of getting ready to engage with a record only takes us one step closer to engaging with the hyperspecificity of the sounds that are present herein.

Four Forms is a lot of things. With the way the album presents its numerous sounds, it’s effectively an ASMR lover’s dream. It also happens to be an interesting intersection between experimental sound design and twee. And unlike any other piece of music I’ve heard, it distinctly reminds me of the understated domestic humor that characterizes Yasujirō Ozu’s films. But what’s more important is seeing why all these things seem relevant: across its thirty minutes, Four Forms invites us to see how art is living and active, and how it’s possible to experience the same excitement in even the most simple of things we come across in life.

Waxahatchee - Ivy Tripp (Merge / Wichita Recordings)

Purchase Ivy Tripp here

There’s a distinctive sound to each Waxahatchee record that seems to match perfectly with the themes that pervade them. On American Weekend, Katie Crutchfield’s lone guitar strums and clipping vocals echoed the regret, confusion, and listlessness that characterized its songs of heartbreak. With Cerulean Salt, higher production quality and the inclusion of more instruments brought a directness to the varying emotions that she explored through her retrospective observations of people, places, and relationships. Ivy Tripp is a bit different, and she acknowledges it. It still feels indebted to the 90s artists that have always influenced her but it’s also surprisingly poppy and uses this new mode as a way to reframe her astute examinations of others and herself. In an interview with SPIN, Crutchfield stated that this is a record about the “directionlessness of people wandering through life, or trying to find things that make them happy without [conforming to] the structure generations behind us have had”. It seems only natural then that Ivy Tripp finds her expanding her sound palette while sounding more confident than ever.

And it shows immediately. If there’s anything you can expect from a Waxahatchee record, it’s a confrontation of the interpersonal and how that affects oneself. Consequently, it’s not surprising that an album about trying to be happy starts with a song that declares “If I was foolish I would chase a feeling I long age let fade”. Ivy Tripp is Crutchfield at her most self-assured, and it’s even more obvious as the song closes with the proclamation of “I’m not trying to have it all” over a choir of her own coos and la’s. And then anchored by synth pads, a drum machine, and a bouncing bassline, the chipper “La Loose” is just as self-aware. “I don’t hoard faith in us […] I selfishly want you here to stick to” sings Crutchfield. It’s equal parts wry and sincere, using the music to evoke the ostensible bliss of a relationship that’s foreseeably temporary but sustained by a desire for comfort. But the “I’ll try to preserve the routine” of its chorus gets flipped upright by the confessional ”I can imitate some kind of love, or I could see it for what it is and stop kidding myself” in the mellow, keyboard-driven “Stale By Noon”. These songs may be about being directionless but she’s making the most of every part of the journey, doing what she thinks is best for her at any given moment.

There may be a lot of ground covered musically on Ivy Tripp but Crutchfield’s songwriting always shines through. When she’s not making the catchiest songs of her career on “Poison” and “The Dirt”, she’s going back to her relatively simple roots on “Summer of Love” and “Half Moon” with equal nuance. The latter is one of her most somber songs to date, filled with lyrics that are piercing in their candor (“our love tastes like sugar but it pulls all the life out of me”). And they’re made even more devastating from the straightforward piano chords they’re sung over, its consistent rhythm only giving greater emphasis to the dismal state of things. Centerpiece “Air” finds Crutchfield continuing to evaluate her relationships—”I left you out like a carton of milk […] but I wanted you still” she sings in the verse, but all of the tension that’s built up culminates in the final chorus’ ”you were patiently giving me everything that I will never need”. The warm synths and periodic hits of the snare drum work to release that tension but they also reflect the peace of mind that she has by the end of the song. And perhaps most effective is the final half of “Less Than”. She calmly states “you’re less than me, I am nothing” as multiple drums are layered on top of each other in a controlled chaos. It’s a nice representation of who she is throughout the entire record but especially this song; she’s constantly acknowledging her imperfect and messy self but bold enough to confront the things that cause her pain.

Crutchfield’s always had a penchant for recording albums in familiar spaces—her parent’s isolated Alabama lake house for American Weekend, the basement of her home (at the time) in Philadelphia for Cerulean Salt, her new house in Long Island for Ivy Tripp—and it seems to reflect the personal nature of her recordings. Ivy Tripp may be Crutchfield’s first record on Merge, and she’s even stated that it’s the “first record as this person that I am now”, but it’s just as intimate and thoughtful as anything she’s done before.