British composer Hannah Kendall (b. 1984) has received a number of high profile performances and recognition as a rising star in the field of contemporary classical music. Indeed, her portrait CD on NMC,  “shouting forever into the receiver,” documents a collection of pieces that reveal Kendall as a creator of powerful and memorable works.

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“More Like Space” takes shape out of hovering ambiences, a shivering, undulating texture dotted with trebly clicks. It has its own beauty like that, but the cut comes to life when a bass nudges up from the bottom, carving a hypnotic path through the uncanny valley. Later, high, descanting vocals eddy through serene but ever moving calm. This is the title cut from Seefeel’s 1993 debut EP, and it threads the needle between ambient electronics, dub and shoegaze with the deepest kind of groove.

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Sheer Lunacy may not be the best title for this new LP by Finnish black/death outfit Gravetaker, unless we bear in mind a throwback meaning of “lunacy.” Through the 17th century, lunacy denoted profound forms of psychological disturbance that were thought to wax and wane with the cycles of the moon (NB, your reviewer is relying upon semantic history of “lunacy” in English; Gravetaker are based in Oulu, a Finnish coastal city at the northern end of the Gulf of Bothnia, but they present song titles and other info on Sheer Lunacy in English). The dudes — presumably — in Gravetaker identify themselves with the stage names “Lunatik” and “Atavistic Mouth,” monikers that invoke fly-agaric- inflected views through creepy moonlight reflected off ancient glaciers. The music? It’s a pretty good soundtrack for exactly that sort of headspace.

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Cian Nugent

For the latest volume in its long-running Imaginational Anthem (IA) guitar series, Tompkins Square has enlisted Irish guitarist Cian Nugent as curator. The tracks provide a concise overview of the state of guitar-based music in that country.

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Photo by Diane Sagnier

Melody’s Echo Chamber’s Melody Prochet resurrects the swinging 1960s in this fourth psych pop album. Her airy, denatured vocals float effortlessly over swaggering syncopations of drum and bass like Vashti Bunyan under the tutelage of Andrew Loog Oldham. Her pop anthems vibrate with the buzzing glow of Stereolab, a full orchestra with strings and xylophone massing in the crevices of these driving, kinetic songs.

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Wadada Leo Smith & Sylvie Courvoisier—Angel Falls (Intakt)

When trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith’s 84th birthday comes up on December 18, he’ll be able to look back on a pretty good year. He’s just finished his final European tour, helped the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians to celebrate its 60th anniversary, and released four records. Among them is Angel Falls, which is also the third in a sequence of recent recordings featuring Smith and a pianist. He and Amina Claudine Myers first crossed paths when both were new to the AACM, which gives them quite a bit of personal and cultural history to consider. And he and Vijay Iyer are quite consciously responding to the surging forces of reaction in this time. On both occasions, solemnity seems appropriate.

Angel Falls, on the other hand, balances passages of deliberate reflection with moments of mercurial change. It is the culmination of nearly a decade of work by the Smith and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier. During that time, they have played periodic duo concerts, and Smith has also recorded as a guest with Courvoisier’s band Chimaera, whose self-titled debut I characterized in another Dusted review as “a sequence of dissolutions, reconstitutions, and surprising elaborations.”

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Guided by Voices doesn’t spend a lot of time looking in the rear view mirror. Sure, the band will break out an old favorite in the live setting, but for the records, they move on relentlessly, song after song after song after song. And so it’s a bit of a surprise, late in the excellent Thick Rich and Delicious, to recognize a scrap of “Ester’s Day” wrapped into “The Lighthouse Resurrection.”

The song, as you may recall, originally appeared towards the end of the landmark Bee Thousand, still arguably the best of GBV’s 30-odd full lengths. There the brief, mysterious cut shuddered with reverbed keyboards and cryptic lyrics (“Jimmy was a fly, got sucked in by an actor/And wrapped in a cocoon and skin-tight buffoonery/Now, here’s the plan…) but ended in a lovely melody. It flickered gracefully between sci-fi oddity and fuzzy pop as GBV songs are wont to do. Now, 30 years later, its framed in more boisterous terms, a wall of rock guitars banging on behind the no longer fragile melody, the pop ending elided in favor of sheer force and volume. It is, as the title suggests, Thick Rich and Delicious.

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The nature of a long-running project like Jon DeRosa’s Aarktica (in existence for over 25 years) is such that most listeners of the new Ecstatic Lightsongs are likely to be those who’ve been following his work for some time now. It’s the eternal struggle of the long-term working artist, but in this case also offers a lovely silver lining; those same listeners are the ones most likely to both notice and appreciate what makes this record stand out from the many ambient classics released under the Aarktica name (as opposed to his other endeavours). For one thing, here DeRosa’s vocals take center stage on nearly every track as opposed to just a few; but what might be even more striking to long-term fans can be summed up in one word. Drums.

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Salt Collective is a power pop band with a deep rolodex. This second full-length from the Paris-based trio features contributions from many of melodic rock’s best-known artists, including 1980s college rock icons Chris Stamey (who also produced), Mitch Easter (whose North Carolina studio birthed this album) and Let’s Active’s Lynn Blakely who sings lead or back-up on nearly half the tracks. Other bold-faced contributors include Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws, Lemonjelly’s Jason Falkner, Aimee Mann, Mike Mills and Andy Partridge.

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