Pitchfork's Best New Album -- GAS: Narkopop

GAS: Narkopop In the year 2000, Wolfgang Voigt released Pop, his fourth album of ambient music under the name GAS. At the time, it wasn't entirely clear that there needed to be a fifth. It's not that Voigt had run out of ideas. The three prior GAS full-lengths Voigt had released since 1996 had focused mostly on drone-laden synth washes, dark and swirling samples of Wagnerian strings, and a deep, insistent, and often disconcertingly fast 4/4 kick drum that did nothing to signify "relaxation." Pop's sonic universe—a natural world rendered in an eerily synthetic manner—was actually the outlier of his discography at that time, a sharp left turn after four years of steady, incremental progression. The fact that GAS seemingly ended on such a strong and radically different note lent the record the feeling of punctuation: It seemed as though there could be nothing else on the other side of the Pop's hard stop. But here we are 17 years later, and Voigt has returned with a fifth GAS full-length, Narkopop. Like so many musical projects that seem to end on a high note, GAS has only grown in stature in its absence. In the years since Pop, GAS has become an ambient touchstone, and Voigt has become one of a small handful modern artists—see Fennesz, Oval, Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker—who put a personal stamp on the music as distinctive as Brian Eno's. Though Voigt has kept busy releasing various solo and collaborative projects and running Kompakt (the label he owns Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape), GAS never quite left the frame, and Voigt seems to recognize its iconic stature, given the release of two box sets and a the well-received GAS shows he's put on over the last decade. Perhaps there was, after all, a sense of unfinished business. Narkopop doesn't precisely pick up where things left off (there's nothing here that sounds like Pop's alternative Earth), but it does add another chapter to the story, with deeper, richer, and more luxurious sound that feel appropriate given GAS' place in the ambient firmament. Narkopop's textural range approaches 1998's Königsforst, as it mixes pure drone, symphonic grandeur, and industrial clang, but it goes even further into the realm of evocative film music. Angelo Badalamenti's score to Mulholland Drive seems to be a particular inspiration, and the tense crawl of Narkopop's opening track (as with almost all GAS tracks, these are distinguished only with numbers) almost has to be a direct reference to the film's main theme. Narkopop is also the most "live"-feeling of the GAS records—not because it seems like the result of improvisation but because, no matter where you are hearing it, you imagine these tracks playing in a vast room, or maybe an airplane hangar. Cavernous reverb is a constant, and the tracks are layered with the kind of hiss and electronic noise that bring to mind the frighteningly high noise floor of a massive sound system waiting to explode. Where the kick drum appears, it becomes a tool for sketching out the dimensions of the imaginary space. "Narkopop 5"'s rhythm is alarmingly martial, like it comes from a sinister marching band circling around the interior edges of a warehouse. "Narkopop 9" adds an extra octave to the lower end, giving the anchor beat a deep physicality to contrast with the deeply romantic string melodies. And sometimes the space is inverted, but it takes you on a trip just the same: The bass pulse on the more muted "Narkopop 2" brings to mind not walls but a rib cage, suggesting an interior journey. There's no major reinvention here, but the sheer scale of Narkopop feels bigger and richer than what came before. GAS' origins can be traced to the raw dub techno coming out of Berlin in the early and mid-'90s. Basic Channel were taking dance music and stripping it bare, to where a bass drum and a bit of echo might be all that's left of a given track. Voigt rebuilt dub techno from the ground up, filling in the empty spaces with drones and classical touches but keeping the tension of the pulse. If early GAS felt homemade, a snapshot of where bedroom production was in the '90s, this record sounds expensive, the product of someone with the time and resources to get every sound just so. It takes the basic grainy GAS approach and blows up the crude raw materials to a sparkling 70mm, an epic ready to be projected onto the wall of a canyon. But despite its grand gestures, the great triumph is GAS is that the feelings it evokes are hard to name. The music of Narkopop can be meditative, but there's always something unsettling lingering beneath—it's about shaking something loose rather than easing us into serenity. The arrangements imply "drama," but it's all of a nonspecific type, a blurry scene those details are just out of reach. So while a given track might feel ominous or uplifting, it always stops just short of manipulation. The music carves out a space that always leaves plenty of room for the music's most important component, the one that, in this artistic sphere, ultimately determines what it all means: the listener. April 21, 2017 at 12:00PM via Best New Albums - Pitchfork http://ift.tt/2pJq3gX Email me Pitchfork's Best New Albums, bro

Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Kendrick Lamar: Damn.

Kendrick Lamar: Damn. Life is one funny motherfucker, it's true. "DUCKWORTH.," the last song on Kendrick Lamar's fourth studio album DAMN., tells a winding story about Anthony from Compton and Ducky from Chicago, whose paths cross first over KFC biscuits, and again, 20 years later, when Ducky's son records a song about the encounter for Anthony's record label. It's a precious origin story, the stuff of rock docs and hood DVDs, and it's delivered with such precision, vivid detail, and masterful pacing that it can't possibly be true. But it's a tale too strange to be fiction, and too powerful not to believe in—just like its author. Kendrick Lamar has proven he's a master storyteller, but he's been saving his best plot twist this whole time, waiting until he was ready, or able, to pull it off. Storytelling has been Lamar's greatest skill and most primary mission, to put into (lots of) words what it's like to grow up as he did—to articulate, in human terms, the intimate specifics of daily self-defense from your surroundings. Somehow, he's gotten better. The raps on his fourth studio album DAMN. jab mercilessly like a sewing machine. His boyish nasal instrument is distinct and inimitable as it slithers up and down in pitch on "PRIDE." Even when Lamar sounds like Eminem, or Drake, or OutKast, he sounds like himself, and he arguably outpaces them all as a writer. On "FEAR.," he relays daily threats from his mom ("I'll beat your ass, keep talking back/I'll beat your ass, who bought you that? You stole it") and from his neighbors ("I'll probably die because I ain't know Demarcus was snitching/I'll probably die at these house parties fucking with bitches") over low-slung blues stirred by The Alchemist. Lamar's recitation is so effortless you wonder where he breathes, or if he does at all. Kendrick is a relic of the mid-aughts rap blog era, where bedroom WordPress pages would post .zips of albums by amateurs. After years of such releases, Kendrick dropped a self-titled EP in 2009 that featured Big Pooh from Little Brother and elicited such Nah Right comments as "I like the beats on this" and "who da fuk?" Accolades swelled with each project; by 2011, he was considering signing with Dr. Dre; by 2013, he was playing SNL and touring with Kanye West. He came of age with his fans, and by 2015's To Pimp a Butterfly, he put to music their chest-clenched frustrations. Ever the curtain-puller, he released an album of untitled and unmastered drafts and grew his hair out. His short absence, even after lending Taylor Swift a verse, has been made to feel longer by his media shyness and a surging tide of new rappers shuttled out daily. Throughout it all, he's avoided the boxed-in fates of predecessors like Nas and peers like J. Cole through an electric originality and curiosity. He mastered rap not for mastery's sake, but to use it as a form, undeterred by slow-eared fans who'll only highlight his "simplest lines." His best new trick is repetition; it offsets his density and drills his ideas, as enthralling as a Sunday sermon or pre-fight chirp session. There have been few threats committed to record as sincere as, "Let somebody touch my mama, touch my sister, touch my woman/Touch my daddy, touch my niece, touch my nephew, touch my brother"—you tick down the list along with him, slot in your own lifelong bonds with loved ones. Such internal processing plays out through the album's Greek chorus, via the singer Bēkon, who speaks in riddles of balance throughout: "Is it wickedness, is it weakness;" "Love's gonna get you killed, but pride's gonna be the death of you;" "It was always me versus the world/Until I found it's me versus me." DAMN. is best in these philosophical spaces. It lags slightly around the center, where the concept loosens: "LOYALTY.," with Rihanna, has all the makings of a radio mainstay this summer, and is as low-stakes as the platform demands; it's always fun to hear Rih rap, and her presence is its most interesting aspect. "LUST." would sound better if it weren't next to an ear-worm as tender as "LOVE.," which slow-dances between Zacari falsettos and Lamar's sheepish read of the girl who fills him up. Between the two tracks, it's easy to tell which force is tugging at him harder. The record's few lulls succumb to what surrounds them. The springboard bounce of "HUMBLE.," the war chant of "DNA.," and hot steel of "XXX." show Kendrick in his element, fast and lucid, like Eazy-E with college credits and Mike WiLL beats. The production is taut and clean, but schizophrenic, often splicing two or three loops into a track and swaying between tempos, closer in kin to good kid's siren-synths than Butterfly's brass solos. If he was "black as the moon" on his last album, he's an "Israelite" here, refusing to identify himself by the shade of his skin but fluent in the contents of his D.N.A. Butterfly floated along to soften its scathing stance—"We hate po-po" sounds better over a smooth saxophone—but with so many "wack artists" in play, what's the reward for upliftment? Kendrick is so alone at his altitude that when he acknowledges Fox News, let alone Donald Trump, it feels like a favor to them both. Still, the album exists for "DUCKWORTH." It's the final piece of the TDE puzzle, a homegrown label of Compton natives that happened to deliver the best rapper of his generation. If we're to believe the song's last gunshot—and its seamless loop back to track one—much of DAMN. is written from the perspective of a Kendrick Lamar who grew up without a father to guide him away from the sinful temptations outside his home. He bobs in and out of this perspective, but the repeated pledges to loyalty and martyrdom evoke the life and mind of a young gang member who carries his neighborhood flag because no one's proved to him that he shouldn't. These choices, Lamar suggests, aren't pre-determined or innate, but in constant dialogue with and in reaction to their surrounding circumstances. They aren't above or beneath anyone who can hear his voice. Success and failure choose their subjects at their whim; we're as grateful as Kendrick for his fate. April 18, 2017 at 12:00PM via Best New Albums - Pitchfork http://ift.tt/2nXxy6A Email me Pitchfork's Best New Albums, bro

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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Arca: Arca

Arca: Arca This album began long before Alejandro Ghersi became Arca. In the nascent stages of his career, Ghersi made dreamy synth pop songs as a teenager in Venezuela under the name Nurro. These love sketches, sung in Spanish and English, showcased an upbeat singing voice and brightly colored electronic landscapes redolent of Postal Service or Passion Pit. What he did as Nurro and what he now does as Arca couldn't seem any more different. Arca's sound is one of chaos and contortions, further defined by the unsettling visuals of morphing bodies suspended in space he made with longtime collaborator Jesse Kanda. But when Ghersi debuted his newfound (or perhaps rediscovered) singing voice on Arca, it felt like a wormhole opened up—one that connected his prehistoric past to his visions of the distant future. "Piel," the first song Arca released from this album, felt shockingly new. He hums at first, intimating the cadence of a bedtime lullaby, easing a listener into the song. Then, seconds later, he sings towards the heavens, and acidic drips of distortion, bass, and chorus rumble in the background. The melody feels worn and romantic, and his voice slinks along to the beat like an old prayer. Finally, the music dissolves into a puddle of oozing beats and jumbled clanks. When you listen to "Piel," there is no question you're hearing an Arca song. And when you go searching for the answer to why that is, you keep digging into Ghersi's timeline, trying to figure out how he could make something that feels so ancient and so otherworldly  The 13-songs on Arca don't represent an about-face for Ghersi, or even a reinvention. Rather, it imagines what would happen if he intermingled the music of his past (the pop songs he made,(the Schumann and Mendelssohn he studied) with the radical noise and boundary-shattering pop he's invented as Arca. Booming organs, mournful pianos, and classical instrumentation share space with a kaleidoscope of outré production. This juxtaposition is made even more clear by his voice, which proudly wears all of its imperfections: every cough, wheeze, and difficult breath is captured. That he's using his voice at all is, for Ghersi, an act of time-travelling in itself. He says that his relationship with his voice on this album felt like "communing with [his] teenage self again." He combines paradoxes and contradictions to create an experience that doesn't feel like it's part of our space-time continuum, but a separate universe he's making on the fly.   The discoveries Ghersi makes on Arca allow him to write his most relaxed and intimate songs. His work is still mysterious, but not as opaque—it doesn't keep you at an arm's length, instead he offers up his pleasures more readily. Take for example the three-song sequence of "Coraje," "Whip," and "Desafío." "Coraje," is the album's simplest song—Ghersi's take on the piano ballad. The keys plink away as Ghersi searches for notes high and low. He even sounds like he's crying at one point—moaning and whispering—his delivery becoming more watery as he reaches the finale. Seconds later, on "Whip," he rips you from this emotional moment with a minute-and-a-half long track that's mostly just the sound of a bullwhip rapidly moving back and forth. Then, on "Desafío," he channels all the pop music he's written for Kanye, FKA twigs, Björk, Kelela, and others into a single point. It's warm, impossibly catchy, but densely detailed. It begins with the sound of an air raid siren, but then it cracks open, and Arca unleashes this joyous synth melody and airy drums. He sounds at ease, dancing between notes as he talks about the touch of lover feeling like the kiss of death ("Tócame de primera vez/Mátame una y otra vez"—"Touch me first time/Kill me again and again"). It's as close to a straightforward pop song Ghersi might write under the name Arca, and it's outstanding. Throughout Arca, Ghersi strings together moments like these, finding beauty in contrast. And it's not just because there is something dazzling about how different each moment feels from one to the next. There's something legible, more direct about all of this. Hearing him castigate a lover on "Fugaces" ("¿Por qué me mentiste?"—"Why did you lie to me?") or just saying something as simple as "I miss you" on "Anoche," is something Ghersi hasn't done before. Some of these songs sound like they were delivered as if he was right there in the room with you. Even if he claims many of the lyrics were improvised, there is still a strong intention—he's reaching out and offering his hand. This close-quarters proximity gives these songs a pulse, a warm human heartbeat that seemed buried in all the noise of his older songs. Ghersi recently revealed that he chose the name Arca because it was an old Spanish word for a "ceremonial container." Arcas are "empty spaces" that can be filled with meaning. He has never been one to believe in anything as concrete as identity or category, but there is a sense on Arca that he's looking back at what he's done in order to reach something else altogether—he's filling up his box with all the best possible versions of himself: past, present, and future. It's all for the sake of imagining a world better than the here and now.  April 05, 2017 at 12:00PM via Best New Albums - Pitchfork http://ift.tt/2o1gWte Email me Pitchfork's Best New Albums, bro

Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Various Artists: Mono No Aware

Various Artists: Mono No Aware Ambient music is always there, but the ways in which it intersects with culture is always shifting. In the 1970s, when the term first emerged thanks to Brian Eno, ambient existed as a corollary to space rock and psychedelia— solitary "head music" for the golden age of post-Dark Side of the Moon headphone listening. In the '80s, as baby-boomers got older and busier, some of it became new age, a lucrative albeit niche market where the music was as crystalline as the rainbow reflected from the underside of a compact disc. In the '90s, thanks to the rave-era chillout space, ambient returned to its druggy roots as collective listening, a sonic environment that facilitated shared consciousness expansion. And as that decade progressed and the millennium turned, ambient music came to be seen as a direct expression of technology's state of the art, showcasing the ability of the newly fast computer to create sounds the likes of which no one had ever heard. Along these paths, ambient music is given meaning by what is happening around it—it's a function of how the sound exists in the always-changing now. Years on from its home hi-fi beginnings, ambient is now most likely to circulate on cassette, CD-R, or via streams on YouTube or Bandcamp. The communities that have grown up around it and nurtured it exist online, so creators and listeners are likely to draw inspiration, create, share, and discuss the music in the digital space. Mono No Aware, a new compilation assembled by the Berlin-based experimental label Pan, situates ambient music in this present moment. The set, assembled by Pan label head Bill Kouligas, is an invigorating survey of what's going on in some of ambient's obscure corners. Mixing selections from artists who come from all over but are mostly little-known outside of experimental music circles, Mono No Aware manages to be simultaneously an introduction to new voices and a deeply satisfying 80-minute mix that hangs together as an album. Where ambient music was once dominated by auteurs—Eno, Richard D. James, GAS, Stars of the Lid—it's now increasingly becoming the province of low-key producers working in relative anonymity who let the work speak for itself. Each track on Mono No Aware is distinctive enough to represent a personal approach, but there are clear connections between them that make the mix feel like a unified whole. A rustling noise lends a given track a kind of "floor," an earthy grounding absent when purely digital tones hang in a silent space. Small scrapes, tape hiss, and hushed knocks and clangs wind through the album, offering a tactile sense of hearing music in a room. In "Exasthrus (Pane)" by M.E.S.H. (Berlin-based artist James Whipple), clouds of synths are mixed with the sound of feet moving across the floor and rain beating against glass, creating an enveloping nocturnal scene with an undercurrent of tension. "Eliminator" by Helm (London's Luke Younger) sounds like music enclosed by a copper pipe, the drones echoing in the distance and escaping in a cloud of mist. Kouligas himself contributes "VXOMEG," which starts with a blast of noise and then transforms into a kind of rusted-out wind chime, the sound of industry meeting the natural world. A strong feeling of space pervades, as tracks function like individual rooms in a sprawling building waiting to be explored. The human voice is another thread winding through the set; we hear bits of conversation in different languages, snippets of song, whispers that hint at secrets but never quite give them away. "Held," from the French producer Malibu, shifts between glowing drones, crunching footsteps, and a voice, soft and even, that sounds like it's coming from someone under hypnosis. Yves Tumor's "Limerence" combines a synth pulse and voices that move from joking and playful to pleading and desperate, evoking an early Harmony Korine film with its vérité power. The voices make Mono No Aware terrestrial, rather than abstract or alien; this isn't music for imaginary worlds, but what surrounds us as we live in the here and now. While the environments are clear and evocative, they always seem populated by the living, and human emotion is never far outside the frame. The music on Mono No Aware tends to amplify the subliminal, rather than evoking easily nameable states like "sadness" or "joy." A given piece might have a tint of low-level anxiety, a sprinkling of menace, hints of relaxation or peace. But the music's subtlety, the record is ultimately a vehicle for exploring feeling, rather than just something nice for the background. The tracks feel like little mysteries to puzzle through, an invitation for active mood engagement. And the fact that so many different artists are brought here to participate in a singular expression of an ever-evolving genre makes it extra rewarding. Earlier this year Pitchfork interviewed Yves Tumor, and he was cagey about the details of his life, including his name and place of residence. "A lot of people are confused about my actual whereabouts, but that's OK," he said. For the duration of Mono No Aware, all that matters is that he found himself here, and he's saying something. April 04, 2017 at 12:00PM via Best New Albums - Pitchfork http://ift.tt/2nVLyfG Email me Pitchfork's Best New Albums, bro