Acrobatic Thoughts

Pseudolove

Akari is the third album from Tokyo duo Illuha. Following 2011’s debut Shizuku (12k1067) and 2013’s Interstices (12k2028), Akari takes the next artistic step for the band. While Shizuku was recorded in the US and completed separately by the artists, Interstices captured the duo creating their exceptionally detailed music together live during a Japaneses tour. Akari, in turn, is the first studio album where Illuha recorded and mixed together, throughout the entire process. The beautiful st-robo studio in Tokyo put a collection of amazing equipment at their fingertips, from vintage mics and outboard gear to a vast collection of instruments, both acoustic and electronic. Their writing sessions were numerous and long with details meticulously obsessed over for nearly a year. The result is the most bewildering music Illuha have created to date. An album swimming with the most delicately tactile sounds and instrumentation that draws the listener in with hushed, motionless attention.

While Illuha’s Corey Fuller and Tomoyoshi Date are often drawn to the most sparse notes of Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, acoustic grand piano and guitar, the breadth of instrumentation is partially what makes Akari so abosrbing. They have succeeded in creating their own universe of sound, so beautifully recorded, where each element not only has its own space but connects and interacts so fluidly with the other sounds. It is as if they are placed perfectly by nature, the compositions are fluid and organic, a far cry from anything calculated or structured. It is this open space that the music exists in which in turn defines the music itself. There is ample room to breathe within this forest of gentle tines, bubbling analogue synthesizers, clicking percussion and quiet field recordings. This is subtlety at its most refined; hushed without being saccharine, distant without being morose.

Akari is the Japanese word for light. Conceputally the duo used this word as a guide, as if they were searching through the dark, trying to keep the light alive, as if one is cradling a candle doing everything in their power to keep it alight in a storm. It is this almost visceral sense of sheltering, of protection, that gives Akari a very human and personal sound whose intensely deep focus is as impressive as it is arresting.

Akari

Structures Based on the Plasticity of Sphere Surface Tension

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Structures Based On The Plasticity Of Sphere Surface Tension

M. Geddes Gengras - "Ishi" June 24th
180g 12" tip-on _ CD & digital include 40min bonus 'Vigil'
http://www.stonesthrow.com/store/album/mgg/ishi

“No dream, no wildest nightmare, prefigured for Ishi a city crowd, its clamor, its endless hurrying past to be endlessly replaced by others of its kind, face indistinguishable from face.”

- Theodora Kroeber, from Ishi: In Two Worlds


M. Geddes Gengras has inhabited the Los Angeles experimental music scene for the last 7 years, bouncing through various bands, monikers, and a critically acclaimed collaboration with Sun Araw and The Congos. The producer perhaps shines most brightly, however, when left to his own bespoke devices. His solo work is largely based in modular synthesis, comfortably straddling a variety of forms while remaining rooted in a deep affinity for the limitations of analog electronics and a keen ear for timbral manipulation.


Ishi finds the producer diving headlong into beautiful, sprawling ambient explorations and deep, mystical drone. Its title is the name given to “the last wild Indian” in North America, who emerged in 1911 at the age of 49. Hidden all his life in the wilderness of northern California, Ishi spent most of his life completely unexposed to the modern world lurking just beyond his own timeless reality. His only exposure to the “civilized” world came from Gold Rush settlers, whom he watched massacre and disease each and every member of his family and tribe, until he alone remained. When he was found, communication between the miraculous survivor and this strange new world was understandably difficult and frightening— but the knowledge gained through the process proved invaluable.


Sometimes the most effective and direct means of communication and understanding exist outside of human language. Gengras’ highly expressive instrumental record reveals itself via sweeping tonal gestures and striking, intensely colorful washes of heavily processed electronic sound. “Ambient” is insufficient to describe the uniquely evocative soundtrack presented here, a lushly nuanced sound world generated directly from the deeply personal relationship between one man and his meticulously cultivated machines.


“The record is about the schism that exists between the world we live in and those stuck on the margins of it— perpetual outsiders and their quest to understand the torrent of information they are constantly subjected to. I was directly inspired to these pieces by two people in my orbit who died this year, one accidentally and one not, both of whom suffered this affliction and eventually lost their lives to it. The music was a reaction to these losses and a sort of offering of something peaceful but at the same time respectful of the conflict and dissonance of life, with movement always in the distance. I look at it as music for passage between different realms, conscious & un, this world & another, layers of reality... ISHI is a metaphor for that— the man who walks into our world understanding none of it but forced to live in it regardless. This is somewhere in between a prayer and a lullaby for him and for the rest of them, but also something for those of us left behind.” - M. Geddes Gengras

M. Geddes Gengras - Passage

Bing & Ruth - Reflector

Video: https://youtu.be/2xgcnaqKxoI

Purchase from RVNG: http://smarturl.it/bing-twtga-rvng
Purchase from Bandcamp: http://smarturl.it/bing-twtga-bcamp
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From the album Tomorrow Was the Golden Age

© and Ⓟ 2015 RVNG Intl. / www.igetrvng.com

Buy from RVNG 

Bing & Ruth - Reflector

Solo Kurzweil.  Created in Real-Time in my home studio.

Photo by Richard Carr.

Year of Music: October 26, 2025

Visible Cloaks - Terrazzo (Ft. Motion Graphics)

Learn more at RVNG: http://smarturl.it/rvngnl37-rvng
Add to your collection at Bandcamp: http://smarturl.it/rvngnl37-bcamp
Download + stream everywhere else here: http://smarturl.it/rvngnl37-digi

Video by Brenna Murphy. From Reassemblage
©2016 RVNG Intl. // www.igetrvng.com

Reassemblage

Visible Cloaks - Terrazzo (ft. Motion Graphics)

A track from the album 'UV Sea' out 02/13/16 on Constellation Tatsu.

Forest Walker - Desert Lighthouse

I. 2c 
II. Flutter
III. Moments in Love

out 04.28.17 https://boomkat.com/products/grafts

GRAFTS

First track from the new Jon Hassell album 'Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)' - Out now:
http://smarturl.it/listeningtopictures

pen·ti·men·to / noun
Reappearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over.

Forty years since its creation, Jon Hassell's Fourth World aesthetic remains a powerful influence on modern electronic music. Continuing his lifelong exploration of the possibilities of recombination and musical gene-splicing, fragments of performance are sampled, looped, overdubbed and re-arranged into beguiling unexpected shapes. Hassell applies the painterly technique of ‘pentimento’ to the arrangements, teasing out texture by the overlaying of sound upon sound, or a carefully timed reveal of the delicate bones pinning the frame of a track together.

The release of this new album also sees the launch of Jon’s own label, Ndeya (pronounced “in-day-ya”), which will be a home for new work as well as well as selected archival releases, including re-presses of classic sides and some astonishing unreleased music.

FURTHER READING ON JON HASSELL:

Fourth World in the 21st century: https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/2984
Brian Eno on Jon Hassell: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/nov/09/jazz.urban
https://www.jonhassell.com/