Weirdo Rippers #10

It only feels like yesterday since penning the first Weirdo Rippers feature of 2023 through the blistering heat of an Australian summer. Now, as we delve into the final frontier (this time from the other side of the world), it has been another year that has seen a fine array of releases deep from left field.

Many of which have featured over the past six weeks, with the likes of François J. Bonnet & Stephen O’Malley showcasing the kind of dark atmospheres that fiercely echo these times on their last release, Cylene II.

Elsewhere, the likes of Yuko Araki once again brought her A game on her latest, IV, while for those not familiar around these parts, experimental sounds of the hard-nosed variety have also experienced a recent upsurge in the arena of new releases (read of our experimetal feature here).

There will be more as the year draws to a close, because, well… that is the new music hamster wheel. And, as always, we will do our best to bring you us much of it as possible.

As the silly season of lists and so forth fast approaches, in the meantime here are 13 albums that have been on heavy rotation over the past month or so. We hope you enjoy and find something new, and as far as this feature is concerned, we will see you back here in January.

Sound Coalition: An Interview with Trio Not Trio

Astrïd: Always Digging the Same Hole
False Walls

Having been around for over 20 years, Nantes, France’s Astrïd have been making the kind of meticulously crafted orchestral post-rock fit for abandoned theatres.

With a slew of releases over the last four decades (including a collaboration with Rachel Grimes), the fact that their music hasn’t reached more ears is yet another mind-boggling event that is sadly becoming all too familiar across the underground landscape.

The band’s latest release, Always Digging the Same Hole, is a fitting tribute to clarinetist, Gullame Wickel, who sadly passed away last year. A release heavy with emotive, sullen atmospheres and tempo shifts that echo the likes of Chris Abrahams and The Necks, those who fell in love with Danny Paul Grody’s Arc of Day earlier in the year can do it all again with Astrïd’s Always Digging the Same Hole.

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Aidan Baker & hyacinth.: Parapluie
Broken Spine

While Nadja ready the release of their split with Fawn Limbs next week, the latest Aidan Baker collaboration will be more than enough to keep you sated for the time being.

Alongside Portland gold dust providers, hyacinth.,the artists combine for Parapluie. 44 minutes of pure sonic bliss, Parapluie contains four cascading tracks that could just as easily be the soundtrack for high altitudes as much as they could be a bleak winter companion.

Yes, Parapluie cuts both ways, and what is a lovely contrast of light and dark sonic exploration, so dynamic all across the board, this is an album that hits the same way whichever mood you’re in.

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Lisa Butel & Brent Cross: Last Mountain
Elektramusic Berlin

Vancouver experimentalists Lisa Butel and Brent Cross have spent the last five years producing the kind of drones that vibrate along fault lines.

On their latest release, Last Mountain, Butel and Cross oscillate between eerie electroacoustics and decayed vocals that feed into the duo’s themes of colonisation and resettlement. Sonically, think of the Bowery Electric and Windy & Carl excavating deeper through the soils of psychedelia and you may get a better picture of what is at play here.

In many ways, Last Mountain is an album fit for these times. A cruel, brutal world and with their latest release, inadvertently Butel and Cross provide the morbid soundtrack to it.

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Jayve Montgomery: Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 3)

Niecy Blues: Exit Simulation
Kranky

Charlestown-based produced, Niecy Blues marks her Kranky debut with the kind of blurred blues that enhances your dreams.

13 songs clocking in at 42 two minutes, Exit Simulation is a record that simply transports you to another world with a myriad of slow-motion spectre ballads. Pulling from the worlds of blues, jazz, psychedelia and ambient composition, Niecy’s creations occupy the space between accessibility and experimentation, and the results are excellent.

Exit Simulation is a record that will draw in listeners from totally different orbits. A kind of spatial, sci-fi gospel record that breaks the boundaries of conventionality. It’s a record every music lover needs in their collection, and already I can’t wait for the next instalment Niecy Blues has to offer us all.

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Tashi Dorji: Tashi Dorji
Drag City

While reissues aren’t something that gain a lot of traction throughout these climes, some exceptions have to be made. Enter Tashi Dorji.

At the turn of the century, the Bhutanese experimentalist moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where he explored the world of anarcho-punk and guitar improvisation, influencing everyone from Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny to the artists occupying the darkest frontiers of alternative metal (i.e., Dorji’s collaboration with Aaron Turner).

Improvised acid folk dripping with punk ethos, Dorji’s sound world is one of the most esoteric out there, and for those new to his work, this initial cassette-only self-titled release should be your first port of call.

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Carlos Ferreira: Isolationism
AKP Recordings

Brazilian experimental guitarist, Carlos Ferreira, is another purveyor of the beautiful noise. A constant in the sphere of new music, Umbilical, the excellent collaboration release alongside Japanese vocalist Ayami Suzuki earlier this year, sent us down a variety of rabbit holes, and it’s timely that Ferreira rounds out 2023 with Isolationism.

An album that sees Ferreira wrestling with the past in a bid to push forward, here we see a series of collage sonics that showcase the artist best’s work. While An Extension of Beath (featuring Echo Ho) is a beautiful ambient lullaby, Ferreira mixes it up throughout Isolationism, with Quietude II the pick of the songs – a towering drone inspired by new-era Sunn O))).

For those new to the world of Carlos Ferreira, Isolationism isn’t the worst place to start your journey.

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Video Premiere: Christopher Willits reworks Kenneth James Gibson’s ‘Poured Semi Silently Upon You’

Gates / Dunn / Fox: Deliriant Modifier
Riverworm Records

Featuring three musicians that you previously wouldn’t have envisage getting in a room together, Sally Gates (Titan to Tachyons), Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle)and Greg Fox (Liturgy, Man Forever, Anti-God Hand et al), combine for the excellently titled (and sounding) Deliriant Modifier.

Said to be inspired by the inner worlds of consciousness and the subjective nature of reality, Deliriant Modifier sees the trio dispense the kind of primal, no-wave improv’ jazz that could only be produced by musicians that have aligned from totally different orbits. The comfort zones are non-existent and the creative planes are vast, and it’s these instances that often produce the best results.

As Fox controls the tempo from behind the kit, Deliriant Modifier is album that possesses a sinister sense of movement that few in the experimental space will replicate.

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Mary Lattimore: Goodbye, Hotel Arkada
Ghostly International

A year across the new music calendar without Mary Lattimore is just about unheard of, and the L.A. harpist doesn’t buck the trend in 2023, with her latest release, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada.

Following her wonderful 2022 collaboration album alongside guitarist Paul Sukeena, West Kensington, the experimentalist returns with a series of compositions that would even bring a tear to an angel’s eye. With more collaborations throughout, including appearances from Walt McClements, Mega Baird, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery and Samara Lubelski, once again Lattimore welcomes all and sundry into her splendid sound world.

Like always, on Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, Lattimore ensures that her compositions remain entwined with that vital emotional intensity. There’s no better example than the track, Music for Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow – perhaps the moment that encapsulates the Mary Lattimore experience best of all.

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Markus Floats: Fourth Album
Constellation

Following his 2020 Constellation debut, Third Album, mind-bending exponent, Markus Floats, returns with Fourth Album.

A caffeine rush of abstract soundscapes calling upon the origins of blues and jazz, through a haze of modern-day electronica, each composition bleeds into the next in what is multi-coloured patchwork that provides an exceptional amount of warmth.

In the lead up to Fourth Album’s release, Floats talked about these compositions being “about trust, exploration and the effort of letting go”. It rings true, as this is an album of welcoming, and in a world that feels so opposed to that, Fourth Album is like a borderless journey that explores psychedelia in interesting ways.

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Karen Vogt Interview: “I always try and just trust my ears and find the feeling in it all”

Rrose Defoix: Idiot Wind
Strange Mono

Rrose Defoix is the brainchild of Philadelphia’s Sophie McGilloway (formerly of Greg Electric), and if ever there was an album fit to feature within the Weirdo Rippers pantheon, it’s this.

On her debut album, Idiot Wind (the Dylan reference is the only remote similarity), trying to wrap your head around McGilloway’s compositions is almost like trying to speedread Nietzsche. While Idiot Wind’s bookends provide the most accessibility (think post-jazz musings loosely inspired by Bill Frisell), the guts of it are mind-bending to its core.

Taking the remnants of industrial-based noise and running it through the angle grinder, Idiot Wind is like a collage of your weirdest dreams that keep recurring and become clearer each time.

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Setting: Shone a Rainbow Light On
Paradise of Bachelors

There have been several great collaborations to emerge from the ambient post-country haze this year (notably Black Duck and Gunn Truscinski Nace), and here’s another to add to the list. Setting.

Featuring percussionist Nathan Bowles (Pelt, Black Twig Pickers), harmonium /synths /pianist Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye) and drummer Slyvan Esso (Jake Xerxes Fussell) on their debut LP, Shone a Rainbow Light On, Setting create the kind of noise that feed through the tunnels leading to the throne of deep listening.

If you take the outer world sonics of, say, Jayve Montgomery, and pit them against the more experimental wanderings of Blake Conley’s droneroom, then it may sound something like Shone a Rainbow Light On. Here’s hoping this is the first of many for the trio who seems to have found an instant groove.

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Uriel: Divinity Reset
PNEUMATIC

Sometimes all it takes to capture a vibe is a quick glance at an album cover, and Uriel’s Divinity Reset is a bit like that.

The project of San Francisco electro oddity, Jonathan Benz, Divinity Reset is 16 minutes of futuristic synth madness. In fact, it’s filled with so much urgency that anymore of it would reduce its impact. Just imagine Fennesz on the uppers and you won’t be far off the mark.

While it could be considered an EP, Divinity Reset is seven songs that are essential in any crate digger’s sonic arsenal. Here, Benz produces the kind of sinewy psychedelia that is simply future proof, because, well… it is the future! I can’t wait to hear what comes next.  

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Winterwood: Caelestis
Bathysphere Records

The husband and wife duo, Zac and Holly Winterwood, have crafted some of the best experimental guitar records this year, with Exploratory Guitar: Cavelands and Exploratory Guitar: The Source.

Also releasing the Harakeke album as well as the collaboration LP, Arriving in the Oceans with Different Views with Neil Johnston, the duo return for one last hurrah in 2023 with Caelestis. Consisting of two long-form compositions, Caelestis also marks the first international release for Los Angeles label, Bathysphere Records.

Caelestis sees the duo taking us through an alternative universe of electroacoustics, transpiring with a series of soothing hymnal drones and subtle field recordings. It’s one of those freeing records that keeps you entrenched in Winterwood’s beguiling sound world. Essentially, it’s one you never want to leave.

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Previous Weirdo Rippers features:

#9
#8
#7
#6
#5
#4
#3
#2
#1