New Music From Albert/Day/Kreimer, Low
Albert/Day/Kreimer
Mutations
(Public Eyesore)
There are two completely different ways this writer considered approaching the new album Mutations created by Marco Albert (from Oaxaca, Mexico), Bryan Day (from San Francisco) and Jay Kreimer (from Lincoln, Neb.): 1) find out as much information as possible about the musicians and sound-making processes, or 2) just “accept the mystery” (to borrow a quote from the Coen Brothers’ film A Serious Man).
Day and Kreimer are both instrument inventors and improvisers, while Albert is a vocalist and electronics wiz, and the trio came together for a performance at the 2017 Festival Internacional de Improvisación y Música Extrema in Mexico and subsequently embarked on a long-distance collaboration involving passing around recordings that were edited and mixed together.
Gleaning a few hints from video footage from the Festival—the entire 20-minute set is on YouTube—we see Day and Kreimer striking and scraping their inventions, primarily staying the realm of percussion, while Albert’s words and wordless outbursts are wild and sometimes harrowing.
Kreimer seems to hit a sort of amplified hammered dulcimer-esque instrument mounted on a tripod, while Day has an entire table full of his creations, including antennas, effects processors, a wooden trapezoid and one instrument that uses five tape measures each extended to a different length. Some similar sounds seem to re-appear on Mutations, but the details are fuzzy.
While the Festival performance was a live improvisation, Mutations is a carefully assembled recording, and without delving into background information, one could imagine this music being some kind of fascinating invocation for an arcane, modern ritual with physical and electronic sound-making.
Eerie and sinister spell-casting is evoked from windy sounds, while metal bits are rubbed and plucked, resembling kalimba tones. Each track dwells on its own sound-realm; “Mutation 5” has an obsession with springy “boing” noises, while “Mutation 6” offers aquatic gurgling amid the impulses of synthetic calculations.
Albert’s vocals are as enigmatic as the sounds, with both Spanish and English words that are sometimes distorted and sometimes whispered, suggesting secrets that are revealed without giving it all away.
Low
Double Negative
(Sub Pop)
Low is a band that often chooses its words carefully, knowing how a few words can be devastatingly powerful or tragic or provide clever double meanings. The title of the Duluth, Minn. group’s 1995 album, Long Division, ostensibly refers to the math term, but knowing Low’s m.o., there’s an implied melancholia in its second meaning—a lengthy separation.
Now in its 25th year, Low has released a revelatory highlight in its catalog—its new album entitled Double Negative, which perhaps refers to both the grammatical term and a double-dose of despair.
These are strange times. One rough week full of outrage is followed by another, seemingly interminably, and one can’t help but feel like Double Negative is a reflection of the troubled zeitgeist, with lyrics like “It’s not the end, it’s just the end of hope” in the track “Dancing and Fire.”
In an interview with The Guardian, Alan Sparhawk—one of the two key members, along with wife Mimi Parker—pointed out that the recording of Double Negative spanned the year following the 2016 Presidential election; he also said, “My reaction to a more chaotic world is to fight back with something more chaotic.”
Low’s first few albums were simultaneously gorgeous yet unrelentingly somber with a distinctively slow, minimal style using just a guitar, a bass and a stripped-down drum kit.
The group has branched out considerably since then, experimenting with intensity, song structures and instrumentation (including electronics and drum machines), and some latter songs are downright upbeat, although Low’s underlying characteristics are typically present: two-part vocal harmonies, a patient slowburn and impeccable production.
On Double Negative, the production is so audaciously intrusive and so strongly tied to the songs, beyond mere notes and words, that this writer wondered, “How are they going to perform this live?”
The opener, “Quorum,” immediately takes the listener to the album’s distant plane of existence, with its pulse being a crackly explosion that seems to suck the energy and volume out of the vocals and synth tones, with the regularity of a heartbeat.
Producer BJ Burton, who worked on Low’s previous album Ones and Sixes, was a vital contributor to the album’s sound, characterized by a crumbling fidelity and distortion effects that crawl like insects over everything; timbres shift subtly and vocals are sometimes warped, like on “Always Trying to Work It Out.”
“Rome (Always in the Dark)” offers a dramatic death march with ardent singing and low frequencies that hang in the air like humidity, but the album’s closer, “Disarray,” offers an escape hatch in its lyrics: “Before it falls into total disarray, you’ll have to learn to live a different way.”
It’s an outstanding and striking album that’s a far cry from the band’s sound 25 years ago, but desperate times call for desperate measures.