Boris—NO

The only consistency among Boris’ studio output is the band's refusal of categorisation. Blending doom, noise, and even J-pop, Boris push boundaries in so many different directions it’s hard to believe they’re only one band. Their most recent album NO has been described by fans as a “back-to-basics” album; riff-driven, chugging, volatile and relentless. But it’s disingenuous to suggest there was ever anything basic to go back to.

Instead, NO resurrects the wild fury absent from their phoned-in recent releases. From beginning to end, the record is apoplectic, venomous and loud to the threshold of physical injury. It’s the sonic equivalent of having fireworks pushed up your bum and then being shoved down a steep hill.

NO is as defiant as suggested by its title. It's as non-specific, too. Takeshi and Wata’s vocals and guitar tones are more anguished and extreme than ever, but no message is audible over the album’s hopeless scream. Words cannot supplicate what it has to say; so it says nothing instead, but very loudly. I’m reminded of Werner Herzog’s The White Diamond, in which an interviewee paraphrases Emerson: “I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.” In its sublime anger, NO transcends reason to touch something beyond words.

According to self-described ‘Boris slut’ Henry Rollins, NO is a violent and acidic expulsion of the last few years of bullshit we've been forced to eat. The stinking foundations of the 1980s have begun swallowing the precarious structures sat atop them. Coolheadedness and passivity got everyone into this mess. No means exist to criticise a corrupt system from within—the only recourse becomes to disrupt from outside.

Consequently, NO favours noise over melody, setting out a manifesto of animalistic snarls, shredded rhythm guitar, pounding drums and some of the band’s heaviest and most memorable riffs. You can tell times are strange when the most prescient and contemporary-feeling art speaks in the language of cavemen. NO is something which speaks to the state of the world on a fundamental level. It is the sound of abandoning polite discourse to tell everyone to go fuck themselves.

NO is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Art Feynman—Half Price at 3:30

Half Price at 3:30 is ostensibly a neo-psych album, but incorporates a multitude of interesting and inventive flavours. Its opening track ‘Dtime’ formally resembles Cocteau Twins; scuzzy, washed-out, affirmative and ecstatic. Compositions have the feel of Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez. Everything seems geared in service of vocal melodies which climb and collapse, delivered in a gentle vibrato. Shuffle beats and finger-picked guitar further strengthen the association. But Art Feynman combines these myriad influences into a wholly unique package.

Feynman’s vocals are autotuned and post-processed almost without exception. In the early 2000s, these production techniques accrued status as cheesy or maximalist. In years since, they have undergone a shedding process. Now they signify a plaintive, delicate work—and Feynman plays these two roles against one another. Half Price at 3:30 positions itself at the unnerving intersection between goofy and truthful.

Vocals sit at the forefront of mixes, and a tension results from their simultaneous clarity and obfuscation. Feynman also distorts his voice though natural means. His delivery and timbre switches up between tracks. For instance, on ‘Physical Life of Marilyn’, he adopts the eccentricity of Ashes to Ashes era Bowie.

This wilful fragmentation of identity defines Feynman’s album as something both intimate and guarded. It is as though a truth is being laid bare or confessed, but only partially.

Songs’ structures similarly conceal intentions, defy themselves, unravel and transform. Often they act as lures, disarming with chilled first halves which develop into an ambitious jams or crescendos. ‘Ideal Drama’ and ‘Night Flower’ are both stunning examples. They're infectious and unpredictable tracks which could have sustained their length twice over. As a whole the album conceals itself—its generosity comes track by track. Feynman keeps you chasing a stick while feeding you carrots.

Half Price at 3:30 seems disinterested in the idea of ‘cohesion’ in an album. Songs share only loose commonalities. This permits a greater sense of freedom and unpredictability than many other neo-psych offerings, which eventually collapse under their own lack of experimentation. Too few acts in the genre recognise the irony of imitating a genre defined by its journeys into uncharted territory. Feynman allows this album, again and again, to unpeel a layer from itself to reveal more beneath—but never reaches the core. His reticence and guardedness, then, serves a vital purpose. It preserves the sense that this album is a gift which can never be exhausted.

Half Price at 3:30 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

тпсб—Whities 031

тпсб provide Whities’ swansong with this three-track EP. The label will rename to AD 93 from their next release onwards, shedding an identity which had become cumbersome under the yoke of recently-transformed conversations and social attitudes. A kind of musical ecdysis, Whities 031 doesn’t disappoint—it’s as transitional and transformative for тпсб as it is for AD 93. Those familiar with тпсб’s Sekundenschlaf will have been anticipating Whities 031 eagerly. The happy surprise is that it spits in the face of these expectations to carve an entirely new path.

Sekundenschlaf felt like unattributed, authorless tracks recovered from an Eastern European tar pit. The album was dark, mysterious, sludgy and partially-decayed; the jungle equivalent of a snuff film. тпсб’s full-length Blackest Ever Black release was a microcosm of that label’s whole vibe.

Since Blackest Ever Black’s death, тпсб have burst from their cocoon with a far brighter collection of tracks. There’s still an endemic spookiness, but drums are crisp and luminous; treble-heavy and loaded with feather-light snares. The EP has a clean, spacious mix. It's the polar opposite to the “through-next-door’s-wall” muddiness of Sekundenschlaf. We’re hearing the same beast, using one of its other heads; as vigorous and inventive but with a rejigged vocabulary. It’s neat that тпсб’s two releases come from labels whose names contrast each other so absolutely, in what feels like a case of art imitating life.

Whities 031, in some sense, feels like a descendant of Orbital’s In Sides or Matthew Herbert’s Bodily Functions. Its sound is not only organic but interior. The EP has a peculiar wetness. In its delays, and echoes which pan from left to right, 031 sounds like blood flowing through ears. The cellular chatter that livens veins. It provokes a journey within oneself, inspecting the mechanical status of the human body; oscillating and oily.

‘If This Is I Don’t Know What Isn’t’ is the apex of this exploration, wisely situated slap-bang in the EP’s centre. The track breathes a soft fluidity into its own very angular and geometric landscape—it’s both the dock and the waves. Burial infamously sampled bullet casings and excerpts of the soundtrack of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2 on Untrue. тпсб here suggest that game’s setting, the Big Shell, with a quasi-ambient industrial beat that’s sure to remind many listeners of happy hours spend slipping on bird shit and soaking up the pale PS2 sun.

The nostalgia doesn’t end there, though, courtesy of тпсб’s confrontational old-schoolism. This was present on their last release, too. But where Sekundenschlaf felt like an exercise in nostalgia—an almost sardonic resurrection of long-dead aesthetics—Whities 031 is a joyous remixing of the glory days of jungle and footwork.

Whities 031 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Mong Tong 夢東—Mystery 秘神

Mong Tong 夢東 are a sample-based psychedelic trio operating in Taiwan. They are an instrumental act whose sound is broad, compelling, and tricky to pin down. In its production, their new LP Mystery 秘神 churns post-punk, dub and synthpop elements into its charming whole, suspended with a precarious effectiveness between the genres. It uses modern techniques to explore elements of Taiwanese folklore, blending horror with dark humour, futurism with tradition.

Post-punk can largely be found in lower registers; in the album’s rolling bass grooves and the ultra-precision of its drums. Its minimalistic composition and arrangement bears the standard, too—most audibly in the Baltic ‘717’. The genre and its practitioners obviously made an impression. At this point, artists seem to be paying homage to this sound almost compulsively, but in the right hands (as here) it’s still effective.

These lower registers also fill their vast spaces with a syrup-thick mugginess; this is where the dub comes in. Drums are vast and reverberant—not so much giving Mystery 秘神 foundation as they ballast it into deep, dark spaces. ‘Ancient Mars’ recalls Kenji Kawai’s Ghost in the Shell soundtrack, mimicking the composer’s employment of an insistent heartbeat of Indian percussion.

The compositional simplicity and use of traditional instruments helps bolster Mystery 秘神 as what Mong Tong 夢東 describe as “a psychedelic journey to the east.” The trio wear Taiwanese culture with pride and, for an electronic act, are remarkably unswerving from their traditional approach. The most notable exceptions are the album’s heavy use of sampling and synths. Sometimes samples are downright eccentric. Mystery 秘神 at one point uses sounds from Space Cadet 3D, which many of a certain age will remember as that pinball game that came pre-installed on machines running Windows XP. Such goofiness secures the album’s success; Mong Tong 夢東 are more aware than most that tradition and fun aren’t mutually exclusive.

Mystery 秘神 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

TENGGER—Nomad

The aptly titled Nomad, fifth album from South Korean/Japanese new age act TENGGER, moves with measured pace. There is something of the Tuareg guitar style in its hypnotic repetition; an inexorable march in which its short phrases loop relentlessly above a thick drone, like footsteps across an infinite plane. High-decay synths intermingle with lush vocal elements to provide a unique soundscape. The only sufficient description is ‘ringtones of angels’.  

Nomad welcomes the UK in the midst of a purging rain. This shredding of the stolid air provides a perfect backdrop for Nomad’s release. As suggested by its cover, the album brings a sense of expiation from above—a spiritual drenching. On ‘Water’, the album’s third track, sequenced synth blips fall with the messy musicality of raindrops. Synth work is so adept, and concepts so fully realised, that flow and movement fill every second of Nomad.

That TENGGER have been compared to Popol Vuh—as well as some less obvious touchstones like Neu—shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s easy to hear why. Nomad produces the sublime thrill of Aguirre’s men descending from cloud to valley in Herzog’s Popol Vuh-scored masterpiece, Aguirre, The Wrath of God. It’s the soundtrack to an utterly unfamiliar landscape; too abstract, too alien, to be lumped into that dreadful category: ‘world music’. Aguirre’s mountains topped the caps of clouds, from above which you could be in any country. This is celestial music, in which worldly affairs have sense not to meddle.

In fact, ‘Eurasia’, the only track on Nomad with a geographical (rather than conceptual) title, is markedly different to its peers. It’s grander and broader, with hyper-metallic synthesised brass—but comes too with a rigid and artificial quality. It’s the only track on Nomad to feature a drum beat—a bold thing to introduce half-way through an album—and instrumentation percolates amongst itself less, with taut bass and an expansive mix. ‘Eurasia’ is no less hypnotic for these qualities, and shakes Nomad up at just the right time. It’s a shame that it comes at the expense of such delicately-constructed ambience.  

‘Flow’ reprises the melody of ‘Water’—with a rich and sonorous downshift in pitch—for a strong finale to the album. We slip in and out of the trickle and rush of a stream. This fading and fluidity represents new age music at its best; inducing a feeling of dispersal, and disintegration of boundaries. If you follow Nomad, you will arrive somewhere unmapped, far from home with a beautiful view and miles of clean, quiet space.

Nomad is available for pre-order here (releasing Jun 12th).

Words: Andrew O’Keefe