We stand in awe of the poetic weirdness of David Lynch and mourn his loss.

Matchess uses the moniker Whitney Johnson for the release Hav. It is an ambient album length work that seeks both to represent and heal the human body. Whitney uses both acoustic and synthetic means to express the wounds that accrue during the lifespan, as well as the warmth of repair. Arp Odyssey is the go-to for many who create ambient music, and it provides the harmonic underpinning of Hav. The purity of sine waves juxtaposes against the Arp’s rich tones, affording the electronics varied timbres, which are featured in the opener “Agora.” Whitney also plays the halidorophone, an electric cello, its bowed notes providing non-legato elements. The acoustic component consists of marimba and viola, supplying still more textural contrast.

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IMustBe Leonardo works in charcoal sketches, blocking out melancholy atmospherics in acoustic or fuzzy electric guitar and warbling evocative, occasionally puzzling scraps of poetry in a tender voice slightly warped by German consonants (i.e.“the” is “duh” and w’s become v’s).

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What kind of an album does a band make after making an album about climate crisis (two of them, in fact, called Ignorance from 2021 and How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars? a year later in 2022)? This is a question for the veteran improvisational folk group Weather Station, led by Torontonian Tamara Lindeman, whose Humanhood drops January 17, 2025, following the two albums mentioned above. That release date not only falls squarely within a time frame when Earth’s climate crisis will remain inadequately addressed, but three days before the possibility of meaningful reparative action will be set back much further, perhaps beyond a breaking point, by the second inauguration of Donald Trump.

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Blue Lake’s Weft shimmers and pulses. Its grooves—poised between Americana, drone and ambient music—pile layers of organic sound onto one another without building weight or density. Instead the music functions like a complicated dance, one foot stepping in where another one leaves space.

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Released just in time to really fuck up the holiday season, the debut EP from Horse Butcher grinds, growls and snuffles around the dead animals laying at the side of the road to grandma’s house. There is nothing redeeming about this music — it’s focused on abuse, awfulness and gratuity. But tunes like “Pathogenic Attenuation” and “Compressed Cylinder of Brain Matter” have a variety of historical sensibility undergirding all the blood and thunder. This is Carcass worship of the highest order, conjuring especially the dynamics of that legendary band’s first few records, when the dissonance and impulse toward deformation outweighed any interest in the riff. So the way you’ll feel about Horse Butcher’s record might depend on your response to early Carcass tunes like “Embryonic Necropsy and Devourment” or “Exhume to Consume.” Some of us can’t seem to get enough; some other folks wish the bodies would have stayed buried in the first place.

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Movieland — Then & Now (604)

Early 1990s shoegaze from Vancouver resurfaces in this brief survey of the band Movieland. The outfit was headed by Alan D. Boyd and inspired by genre-shapers like Ride and Slowdive. As such, its music performs that classic late 1980s Britain trick of sounding soft and dreamy while actually busting eardrums.

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Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan : The Lost Live Recordings by Robbie Basho

The rediscovery of the guitarist, composer, and singer who presented himself to the world as Robbie Basho continues with this release of more than four hours of live recordings from his too-brief career (1965-1986). Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan is a major achievement, equally successful as documentation of the underappreciated composer and performer and as vital and beautiful music. Like Song of the Avatars (2020), which gathered unreleased demos and studio recordings, this collection, also released by Tompkins Square, expands significantly the amount of Basho’s music that is available. Packaged with archival photos and images of concert posters, the 30 live tracks (presented over five CDs in the physical release) provide a fascinating perspective on Basho’s music and its context.

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Two, sometimes three guitars slash in unison, their players—two boys and a girl—pulling off the chords in coordinated flourishes of hands.  A bass booms.  Drums clatter.  Mixed gender singing rings out with brash and bratty tunefulness.   Delivery reminds me, first and foremost, of the great, one-album wonder FM Knives, which in its own time sent critics running for their Buzzcocks vinyl. 

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