Institutional Music #1: Eleven Tens

You are reading Institutional Music, my publication with 1 million paid subscribers. No, this is not just a personal blog, that'd be preposterous. Here are some things I liked lately. Some from this year some from long ago. You may find repeated mentions of Ari Aster movies and black metal vocals. 

 

 This is a picture of my dog. And this is the following:

 

 

The Elder by Kai Whiston (out just now, today). I recommend you read the screenplay that comes with it; had to adjust my eyes to the archaic churchy abbreviations of certain words, but it is funny in a very Greek myth-y sort of way. Orating your way through and expecting certain doom, you know, like Apuleius who talked his way out of being charged with black magic. I haven't played the game yet. I seem to be averse to investing my focus into RPGs, sorry Mr. Whiston. This means I haven't made heads nor tails of the family inheritance yet. The music itself is pretty excellent Midsommar-core (pardon my self-coined buzzword): traditional, overly ecstatic Slavic polyphony (white voice! Polesia is also where my ancestors are from), terror free improv horn sections, as if a Balkan brass band dissolving in molten lava, surprise neurofunk drops (sorry); in the case of track 12 profoundly uncomfortable frequency shifted, overcompressed vocals with breath deeply accented by the brick wall comp job (this is a compliment) - truly feels like transforming into the eldritch grandfather. Worse (better), it's cyclical! The vocal passage at the bookends is the same passage! Avoid comparisons to Shaking the Habitual or Deep England by Gazelle Twin. Also holy shit he can do some black metal screams - the album's a very good vocal workout.

 

 

Live in Berlin [Reunion Show] by The Kilmanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble. There's a bit of something here for everyone. There certainly had to be something here for me because I got my girlfriend to gamble 15 euros on it so we could hear it in full while certain tracks were paywalled (by the way, the show footage that got emailed to her as an early buyer looks fucking gorgeous). Ultravisitor-esque drill 'n' bass passages with giant climactic drums (sometimes following entire tracks of Haino-esque noise jazz improv!), Coil-y timestretched electronic drums keeping up a mysterious backbeat, 1st wave post-rock style wanderings on the guitar (think Bark Psychosis), tasteful Nordic euro jazz female vocals in the post-Diamanda tradition. Really gracious and spacious; or really confrontational and claustrophobic, both at turns. The high delirium of the better Edgar Allan Poe stories. This is the real goth shit.

 

 

 jj's Prayer by jj18. One half of brutalist architectural R&B duo 18+, whose discography stays on rotation at the clubs that exist inside Actress' Ghettoville (who can suddenly turn to gentle, fully acoustic folk ballads with wispy dream vocals and blindside you), and on most of this half a man (look up the lyrics to better days!) and sometimes half a presence, made absent by thundering dark ambient pianos and borrowed snatches of mantraic speech or lo-fi hip hop style bitcrushed rhodes loops with anguished, muffled black metal screams in the back (a juxtaposition the metaphor for which does not need to be stated - but it is brilliant). He is in a sense sometimes stuck in the same fantasyland that Volcanic Bird Enemy by LUM would inhabit later (or Coin locker kid has for a while) - game1 begins with the PS1 startup and suspends him inside a locked groove microsample with gentle FM pipes and (I think) Mario 64 soundfont steel drums. He is in a land of intrusive contrasts. "It's so right it's so wrong". The album ends, frankly poetically, with him singing an ode to miscommunication and misplaced expectations over a chamber rendition of Erik Satie's first Gymnopedie with a bouncy, vaguely skittery trap beat behind it. "So why you acting so aggressive / I thought you knew I was depressive".

 

 

A Ruse of Power by VIOLENCE. I lied, this is the real goth shit. Think the unable to self-restrain theatrics of JG Thirlwell or NIN with moody PE style synth loops and high unison witch house/trance supersaws (a much rawer, more aggressive HEALTH - Things Fall Apart's drum programming and enunciation are a dead-on Trent). If black metal vocals are starting to look like a theme, this is clearly the best example on this list (Theia Collides with Earth sounds about as catastrophic and effort-penetrated as the event it is metaphorically named for - the song is one long midtempo breakdown still charged with kinetic energy because of the unpredictable hi-hat programming). Of course there is a lot of pure, literal RnB and soul in the accelerating fragility of it all, reaching the same sort of breakpoints that you would get out of a good Prince scream. Everything here is at breakpoint. A lot of the sounds are very simple, clean synthesis and the drum machines clunk, but the melodies whirl and skip steps - getting a running start to jump off a cliff to the reach a cliff on the other shore.

 

 

Metamorfosis by Nnux. A pretty exceptional piece of materials-science music (and the many transformations of gods and heroes into trees and mountains and the laments of the winds that hover over them and the spew-desperations of geysers and calderas; I suggest translating the lyrics if you don't speak Spanish, which I don't - but they have a very strong and very convincingly ancient prophetic tenor to them). Deep love for the human voice is clearly felt here with all of the extended technique and still more with the magic trick these songs play with being instrumentally founded often upon continuing 'events' rather than (well, with often many exceptions) conventional melodic material (upward and downward arpeggios unresolving, drones, accelerating and disappearing percussion, inflating and deflating tone rows of chords, as if doing breathing exercises of their own) but vocally overlaid with sweeping choral material in an almost Gregorian chant style which then directs the motion and thus metamorphosis of these events into their most dense and active selves. Feels like a true 'event album' (sorry, sorry). As big in scope as any IMAX movie.

 

 

 Paradise lost by jhl. I am paraphrasing myself from elsewhere on the Internet here. To demonstrate the game this plays: the ego crash between

Sippin' on my limoncello
Let you talk, I let you hello
The club just starts to mellow
But my bubbles stayin' yellow

and

I dream that you bewitched me into bed
I think I made you up inside my head
I shut my eyes and the world drops dead
 

Really powerful, vulnerable hedonic anxiety also expressed by the differing vocal styles between the verses vs the chorus & outro. Outward projected confidence (which is fully monophonic and thus 'curated') vs inner fragility (which is expressed by all of the harmonies, literally one thought being pulled all sorts of places, both in the way it's sung on the individual layers and across the stereo field). This crash factor is also felt on the segue between Everything you want's complete breakdown outro into the sonorist (almost) intro on I give up which has its aftershocks in the super aggressive gating on the vocals and the unquantized, 'shrapnel-y' percussion as the song stabilizes. Would also like to shoutout the almost classic "art song" approach to the vocals on Need, the slippery vibrato and all the drawn breath feels like an old recording of an operatic aria (those primeval emotions). Snow feels like Penderecki's Actions (or I guess it feels more like Schnittke because of the sudden return to a neoclassical consonance towards the end - I think i spotted some leitmotifs from the prior album in there but I'd have to go back and check; Schnittke would make sense because his 1st was a work of essentially cultural timelapse, with him still so enamored with the purity of Western Classical Music before him despite his urge to attempt to desecrate it and make it fall away - talk about a swansong connection, kill everything that you love, I suppose). Really strong engagement with the prior tradition here, all the hallmarks of a serious composer, and frankly quite self-assured despite the record always showing that the self-assurance it feels in its libretto is feigned. Where's the Pulitzer? Give jhl the Pulitzer.

 

A Lot of Sorrow by The National (seek your soul for this one). I had never listened to them before this. Why not or why this I could not tell you. Well, sorrow finally found me while I'm still young. A compelling exercise in unity. In my estimation the best individual renditions are #35 (with the feedback unrestrained giving this song a strange no-wave feel),  #45, #81, #86 (these 3 probably the best for sheer pacing and dramatism, allowing the band more space to jam and develop on the very simple foundation of the song using their FX pedals and chops; a bit of AnCo psych creeps in), #94 (with the backup singers joining in to help Matt who cannot do it anymore) and #99 (with the crowd joining in for one last encore of the one song on the stated one item setlist - a really good bit of humor and self-awareness about the whole thing). A beautiful work of process music. The exhaustion involved on both the side of the band and the audience gives it a camaraderie that even the most utopian of communes probably wouldn't be able to achieve. Completely worth your time. If the communicative aim of the artistic pursuit (because it is limited by the barrier of abstraction to never be able to replicate nature or worse, consciousness) is to try present viewing angles of an emotion through everything that can possibly refract it, the format here simply forces it to succeed. Maybe I should watch the concert film at some point?

Hidros 9 Mirrors by Mats Gustafsson. To give an institutional answer to the Kai Whiston album above (and in some senses the jhl album) and return again to Nordic jazz and even further make Schnittke proud, here is this big fucking thing, with the tortured, rhythmic accordion and the loudest Colin Stetson has ever played (and in my opinion the best context he has ever been deployed in and I think the moment he is finally placed into context as, in the end, still a jazz player; ever heard Fifteen Saxophones by Dickie Landry? Anyway, this is certifiably scarier than his final turn in Hereditary). This is in a sense a true futurist composition - anything which can be reduced to percussion for sport is in fact reduced to percussion. Slap your computer tower until your fans shut up. This makes all avant-prog cower in fear. Fucking hell, there's a microtonal flamenco guitar! This is what Carla Bley would have wanted. If this hammer strikes you perhaps as too much of a sledgehammer and not enough of a hammer (and you would prefer it still be able to miss its hits whenever it shuts down the moments of gestures towards conventionality), I will point you here to the similarly devilish Live at Moldejazz from Amalie Dahn's Dafnie EXTENDED. It involves the frets of a double bass being masturbatorily slapped and exists at the intersection of Charlie Haden (just too obviously sincere and ceremonial in its deconstructions, this is a good thing obviously) and Roland Kirk (think the covers on Volunteered Slavery) whenever the band is playing full brass cartoony spy jazz only for it to get injured and drop after many attempts to swat it down to the ground (so, Otomo Yoshihide, basically.)

 

Exo by Gatekeeper. Dark Aero. Insanely ahead of its time for 2012 - one of the year’s greatest victims, really. A Pitchfork review & general reception so bad these guys lost their damn booking agent! (Please listen to their lovely comeback from 2025, also). Aesthetically forwardlooking in both its visual language & musical adoption of shitty late 90s aesthetics (cyberpunk 303, strong use of WAVESTATION rompler, Hollywood film sound design libraries) - at the time universally rejected by the press for resurrecting ‘lame’ aesthetics. Comes with own proprietary font (only press release in my life I’ve seen where you have to hover over alien hieroglyphs to decipher the English text), a full length album music video that’s a playthrough of the album’s tie-in video game and obviously said video game. List of people who owe Gatekeeper money: me, Vylet Pony probably (really everyone who's ever tried to sublimate/approximate the only-approximatable experience of cartoon-feeling-logic), Tek lintowe, not OPN (ADR, ½ of Gatekeeper, was in the MYRIAD tour band), everyone trying to document ‘Frutiger Aero aesthetics’, Harmony Korine, every single person making ‘deconstructed trance’ these days. Really maybe the most beautiful album of cyborg laments ever made. I really do feel the strong Stonehedge influence on this. Also check out the followup 20 minute EP Young Chronos which goes in even harder on the Hollywood/triple A game aspect with corny voiceovers and…. Minecraft sound effects! In 2013! Sound my Xbox 720 makes when it boots up. Post-Coil. Soundtrack for the 2012 end times. Hard trance and Gregorian chant. Exo itself: a great work of conceptual art that presages many of the things on this very list, frankly, with its philosophy of widescreen reification that presages 'Epic Collage' becoming more of a philosophy and a feeling. There is a great variety of things now that take their existence as a cinematic surface and inherent impossible bigness as a given. This is their granddad.

 

Push Thru by Magic Fades. An old and still growing favorite. List of people who own Magic Fades money: you, me, Drain Gang. This record had a fate slightly worse than Exo which is coming out to moderate blog and Facebook group noise (I imagine) and then fading into total obscurity with mediocre ratings on all those music rating sites. Trecartinian chrome RnB. Parallel mixture to Exo also of high-gloss sound design and post-Weeknd alt-r&b with comically raunchy lyrics (see 'Ecco' which sounds like something fresh out of the Monkey Island soundtrack but is an extremely emotionally damaged sex song with a 'climactic' power chord guitar solo - also brings to mind what Autre Ne Veut was doing at the time to again mostly critical bafflement). Thrusting into a wireframe. 'I just wanna see a 3D chain.' Mines also from early 00s r&b with gentle faux-acoustic instrumentation of gentle new age pianos and Roland beatboxing sample library backup vocals (see Ford & Lopatin, maybe) and Pitbull era electropop with the tantalizing gated supersaw & soft pad trance edge to the whole thing (actually it's kinda like 2NE1 - makes you wonder if these guys were early adopters & champions of of K-Pop). 'I'll make you wet and then make you mine.' [Roland beatboxing sample library starts back up.] Industry accomplishes maybe the most audacious thing I've heard in my life opening with a quick succession of General MIDI orchestral hits before going into sleek Drake-ish percussion before reintegrating the orchestral hits and bringing reinforcement in the form of even more MIDI horns (think Hudson Mohawke) and several dropouts for rolling 303s (see, there's a reason I compared this to Exo). Accomplishes the perfect 2nd verse mildly threatening escalation: "Quit talking back to me, like ooooh, not in this industry."

Species pluralis by Jarrod Fowler & Taku Unami (seek your soul for this one). Jarrod Fowler is more of a scientist. I’m told he’s great with bees and plants. Taku Unami is a veteran player of instruments in the manner of construction tools, or a landscape designer (Wovenland), or a post-Neubauten found object virtuoso (bot bot boxes - 3 hours of cardboard box improv, baby!), or again literally an observer of the electromechanical, what construction tools actually are - not quite jackhammers, but still (Parazoan Mapping). Taku’s many hats lend him a certain kinship with Fowler as is, I think (I find that a lot of the lazy arguments people fall back on regarding experimental music, the idea of pure sound & things existing for their own sake, is often just a reduction of a kind of personalized multidisciplinary project which doesn’t necessarily have to involve anything outside of recorded sound) - culminating in objet d’art/audio research paper Species pluralis. There’s this damn term: microsound. That thing that's meant to test your speakers (well, this does - this operates at extreme low volume) and your CD player (well, good luck to any display attempting to read out the metadata for these track names which are walls of coordinates & data points and I think matter of factly represent location or the dramatis personae of the recording). But beside the coincidental alignment with what microsound is supposed to mean I’d consider this a literalization: literally microscopic music, microphone handled by an ant or the sound of ambient plant consciousness - although the damn rug gets pulled quick here: every once in a while, when you’re least expecting it, an actual musical instrument will intrude (at this point you’ll start to think of the bugs from Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, which run their own intelligence operations) or we’ll become the ants because a track will then contain the sound of proper sci-fi machinery (we’re ants to aliens!), some kind of nefarious engine room, the sound of speculative processes (if I were to take a hippie environmentalist angle and at the risk of making too many assumptions you could consider these segments rendering environments that don’t really exist a reminder that really our rendering of nature as it objectively exists itself speculative, where things of infinite scale transcending even the wildest ideas like the Dyson sphere occur mostly unobserved, I mean think about bacteria for a second and you’re off to the races, and these moments of machinery are calling into question our hubris re perception). I was about to call this evil and/or more obviously humorous Pisaro but Fowler has worked on an astrological research project record with Pisaro (Pisaura) so that figures. Note to self: don’t call silence Cagean. I guess it is anthropological here though, a turning to the human. This isn't Taku's first engagement with precarious and sudden futurism either: check out Ichimannen, Go (and enjoy the jumpscares!) and look up the movie it's meant to tie into (which I haven't been able to find).

This is all I feel like writing.

All of these records are widely institutionally acclaimed and are acceptable to put on your personal charts. Thank you. Shape your taste responsibly.