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dustedmagazine · 2 years

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Bill Callahan – YTI⅃AƎЯ (Drag City)

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The initially frustrating title of Bill Callahan's new album YTI⅃AƎЯ suggests that the songwriter holds up some kind of mirror to the world. The dozen songs themselves do nothing so direct. Callahan has his own way of processing the world, and while that way might be different than it was in his Smog days, it still has as much to do with refraction as it does reflection. On YTI⅃AƎЯ, Callahan looks at domestic life – among other topics – with this bent, in-and-out-of-a-dream world as he inscribes an imperfect but wondrous actuality.

“First Bird” begins the album with a few languid guitar chords before Callahan provides the album's setting. “And we're coming out of dreams,” he sings, “as we're coming back to dreams.” Callahan's awakening leads to glimmers of a hoped-for reality: two healthy kids, one flying above the ground because “everybody wants to carry her around.” There's a beauty here, siblings connected, real life not dissimilar to a good dream. We can't relax, though, as the following track, “Everyway,” begins with Callahan singing, “I feel something coming on / A disease or a song.” The mirroring and the dreaming provide only loose anchors in an unsteady world.

That instability shows up in “Naked Souls,” one of the album's longest and most disorienting tracks. The track starts calmly, sleepily. The lyrics track people who isolate themselves to avoid encountering other people in true and revealing ways. That approach to life tends toward disfigured thinking and ultimately to violence. The song starts to become more unhinged with the introduction of more instruments and more aggressive percussion as Callahan sings, “God destroy these naked souls.” The tension rises when his characters clamor for destruction; the one thing people can come together on is the need to kill others.

Threat continues in “Coyotes,” in which predators creep at the edge of a domestic scene. The family dog, a descendant of wild canines, sleeps unaware of the risk, in a nesting-doll part of Callahan's dream world (reality spun around yet again, but not exactly mirrored). Callahan recognizes the danger but can't quite get out a signal. The best he can do is to remain a “loverman,” not just now but throughout time, somehow holding the pack together with the power of heart.

Callahan won't settle on a clear line; the message isn't something trite about domestic bliss or familial love, as much as those themes color the album. He's still taking in information (“Two million years of data / Humans still in mode beta”) and still wary of crises. In sorting through this mess of life, he finds very meticulous arrangements to embody these waking dreams. The album seems like a simple, straightforward work, yet every song carries fitting surprises within its construction.

By the time the disc closes, Callahan accomplishes the strange feat of sounding comforting and unsettling at the same time. You can settle into these numbers and think about a bright future even while he pictures burning buildings and terrible situations. It's the singer's own version of reality, but it probably isn't that far from whatever's actually out there. If it's a little bent and a little brighter at the same time, it somehow only feels truer.

Justin Cober-Lake

#dusted magazine #justin cober-lake #albumreview #bill callahan #YTI⅃AƎЯ #drag city records #singer songwriter #rock and roll

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sinceileftyoublog · 5 months

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Six Organs of Admittance Interview: More Than a Couple Chairs

Photo by Kami Chasny

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When Ben Chasny dives into something, he usually dives deep. Upon answering the phone in February, when I called him to talk about his new Six Organs of Admittance album Time Is Glass (out today on Drag City), he seemed a bit scattered. Despite mentally preparing himself all day for the interview, he got distracted by a "What are you digging lately?" Bandcamper compilation Drag City asked him to put together to advertise his record release. (A music fan with a voracious appetite, Chasny was rediscovering music he had purchased a couple years prior and forgot about.) Six Organs records often occupy the same dedicated headspace, Chasny setting aside blocks of time to think about nothing else. That is, until Time Is Glass. On his latest, Chasny blurs the lines between his outside-of-music life and the music itself, the album a batch of songs that reflects on the magical minutiae that sprout during a period of needed stasis.

The last time I spoke to Chasny, he and his partner [Elisa Ambrogio of Magik Markers] were still settling in from their move to Humboldt County in Northern California. "When Elisa and I first moved here, we didn't have any friends," Chasny said. "But there's a group of us that live in Humboldt now. A bunch of my friends moved up since the last time I talked to you." That includes fellow Comets on Fire bandmate Ethan Miller and his partner, fellow New Bums musical partner Donovan Quinn, and folk singer Meg Baird and her partner. "Every New Year's Day, if it's not pouring rain, we take a walk on the beach," said Chasny. One such photoshoot on January 1, 2023 yielded the album cover for Time Is Glass: That's Miller and his poodle, along with Baird's Heron Oblivion bandmate Charlie Saufley. This unintentional artistic collective meets up often, whether for coffee or as Winter Band, a rotating cast of area musicians who form to open up for musician friends when they come through town, like Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls. As such, according to Chasny, Time Is Glass is a celebration of community.

Perhaps the supportive strength of his artistic family gave Chasny the willpower to incorporate elements of his daily life into Time Is Glass, something he couldn't avoid. He didn't share with me exactly what in his personal life made it impossible to separate the two, though he mentioned his dog, a difficult-to-train puppy that was a mix of three traditionally stubborn breeds. Said dog inspired "My Familiar", a song that uses occult language to inhabit the mind of his obstinate canine companion. "And we'll burn this whole town / No one says there's good," Chasny sings, alternating between his quintessential hushed delivery and falsetto, his layered vocals atop circular picking exuding a sense of sparseness. Indeed, you wouldn't expect a Six Organs record about home life to sound totally blissful; Time Is Glass is at once gentle and menacing. The devotional "Spinning In A River" portrays the titular carefree act as lightly as the prickle of Chasny's guitar or as doomily as the song's distortion. "Hephaestus" and "Theophany Song" imagine their respective mythological characters as gruff and voyeuristic. "Summer's Last Rays" indeed captures a sense of finality, Chasny's processed guitar and warbling harmonium providing the instantly hazy nostalgia before the fade-out. The album is bookended by songs more straightforwardly hopeful, the opener "The Mission" a dedication to friends falling in love with their new place of residence, the closer "New Year's Song" a twangy ode to dreaming. But it's the moments in between that Chasny was forced to capture on Time Is Glass. And thankfully, what was born out of necessity yielded, for him, new ways to interpret the same old, same old.

Read my conversation with Chasny below, edited for length and clarity. He speaks on domesticity, mythology, playing live, and Arthur Russell.

SILY: You've lived in Humboldt County for a bit. Is Time Is Glass the first Six Organs record in a while you made while situated in one place?

Ben Chasny: I did do a couple records here before. The first one, I was in the process of moving here, so I wasn't really settled. The second was at the beginning of lockdown. This is the first one I felt like was recorded at a home. Everything was settled, I have a schedule. When I was doing the first one, I didn't even have furniture in the house. I had a couple chairs. [laughs]

SILY: Do you think the feeling of being recorded at a home manifests in any specific way on the album?

BC: I started to incorporate daily domestic routines into the record, more often. A lot of the melodies were written while taking the dog for a walk, which I've never done before. There was always stuff to do as I moved in. The times weren't as separate. Before, it was, "Now I'm recording, now I'm doing life stuff." There was a merging of everything here. I would listen to it on my earbuds while taking walks and constantly work on it for six months.

SILY: It definitely has that homeward bound feel in terms of the lyrics and the sound, like you've been somewhere forever. There are a lot of lyrics about the absence of time, and there's a circular nature to the rhythms and the guitars. Does the title of the album refer to this phenomenon?

BC: A little bit. Time does seem, in general, post-lockdowns and COVID, different. The lyrics on the record have a bit more domesticity. It always seems like there was something that had to be done, that would normally keep me from doing music, that I tried to incorporate here. Maybe I'm just getting older, too. I'm getting more sensitive towards time. I'm running out. [laughs]

SILY: Was there anything specific about your domestic life that made you want to include it in your music?

BC: Just that I had to include it in order to do anything. It was no longer separate. The way life ended up working out, I could no longer separate my artistic life from other life. I had to put the artistic aspect into it in order to work. Instead of getting frustrated, I brought [music] more into the house.

SILY: Did working on the record give you a new perspective on domesticity?

BC: I don't know. A little bit. I was just trying to come to terms with basic life things. Let me look at the record, I forgot what songs are on it. [laughs] The song "My Familiar" is about my dog. I got this book called Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, which was sort of taken from transcriptions of witch trials from Scotland in the 1500's. A lot of dealing with things like witches' familiars and demon familiars. I found a very strong similarity between that and my dog, which seemed like it was maybe a demon. She's a Husky-German Shepherd-Australian Shepherd mix, so as a puppy, she needed a lot of work. So that became a song. That's a more humorous way everyday life made its way into the music.

[With regard to] the last song, "New Years Song", Elisa and I have a contest on New Year's Eve when we're hanging out where we go in separate rooms and have one hour to write a song. We come out at 11 or 11:30 and play the song for each other. We've done it for a few years now. This was the song I wrote for New Year's Eve going into 2022.

SILY: You talk about God on Time Is Glass and delve a little bit into mythology. Was that something you were thinking about on a day to day basis when writing?

BC: The “Hephaestus” song was just a character. That was a rare song for me in that I was trying to make sounds that particularly evoked a mythological figure. I've made nods to mythology in the past, but the titles were almost an afterthought. This particular song, I was trying to make the sounds of that character in their workshop with the fire and anvils. I was trying to evoke that feeling. That was kind of a new one for me.

SILY: Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but you also seem to talk a bit about your state of mind on "Slip Away".

BC: It's funny you caught onto that, because I wasn't really expecting to bring it up during interviews. I wouldn't say that I came close at times in the past couple years to schizophrenia, but I could see way off in the distance and horizon what that would be like. I...was trying to write about that. At the same time, the lyrics that have to do with two minds and the splitting of the mind are also somewhat of a reference to the idea of a celestial twin or Valentinian gnosis, how you have a celestial counterpart. That idea [is behind the concept of] someone's guardian angel.

SILY: On a couple songs, you sing to someone or something else. "The Mission" you've mentioned is for a friend and their new partner. What about on "Spinning in a River"?

BC: Maybe it was more of a general idea. It wasn't so much to a person as to a general concept of Amory.

SILY: What were all the instruments used on the record?

BC: I had some guitar, I was singing, and there's some harmonium on it, which I did a lot of processing on, lowering it octaves. I've got some really basic Korg synths. Electronic-wise, there's a program called Reactor I like to use a lot. I do it a little bit more subtly than electronic artists. I use it more for background.

SILY: I picked up the harmonium on "Summer's Last Rays"! I feel like you never truly know when you're hearing a harmonium unless it's in the album credits. Sometimes, that sound is just effects.

BC: There are two different harmoniums. When the bass comes in, that's also a harmonium, but I knocked it down a couple octaves and put it through some phaser. It has a grinding bass tone to it. This is actually one of the few Six Organs records with bass guitar on it. Unless it's an electric record with a band, there's never really been bass guitar. I was really inspired by Naomi Yang's bass playing in Galaxie 500 and how it's more melodic. I told her that, too.

SILY: On "Theophany Song", are you playing piano?

BC: Yeah, that's at my friend's house. I just wanted to play a little melody.

SILY: Was this your first time using JJ Golden for mastering?

BC: I've worked with JJ before. He did Ascent and a few others. I particularly wanted to work with him this time because I had just gotten that Masayuki Takayanagi box set on Black Editions and saw he had done that. I have the original CDs, and I thought he did such an amazing job that I wanted to work with him again.

SILY: Is that common for you, that you think of people to work with and you dig a record they just worked on and it clicks for you?

BC: That's the first time I had just heard something and thought, "Oh, I gotta work with this person." I usually have a few mastering engineers I work with and think, "What would be good for them?" or, "What does this sound like?" I usually like to send the more rock-oriented stuff to JJ, but I was just feeling it this time.

SILY: Have you played these songs live?

BC: The instrumental "Pilar" I have been playing since 2019. That's the oldest song on the record. I did do one show last September where I played a couple of these songs live. I have some ideas on how to work it out. It will be a solo acoustic show, but I [hope] to make some new sounds so it's not so straightforward. One thing about this record is I tried to write songs in the same tuning. On previous records, I used a lot of tunings, and it was a real pain to try to play the songs live. I did write this record with the idea that most of these songs would be able to be done live.

SILY: What have you been listening to, watching, or reading lately?

BC: I just got the Emily Robb-Bill Nace split LP. I just saw her live a couple nights ago. The latest one on Freedom To Spend from Danielle Boutet, which is awesome. Freedom To Spend is a go-to label for me. Also, this split with Karen Constance and Dylan Nyoukis.

I've been reading Buddhist Bubblegum by Matt Marble, about Arthur Russell and the systems he developed, which I knew nothing about. His compositional systems have almost a Fluxus influence. The subtitle is Esotericism in the Creative Process of Arthur Russell, so it's also about his Buddhism as well. When I first heard about the book, I didn't know if I needed to get it, but I heard an interview with Matt about the detailed systems Arthur Russell came up with. It gives me a whole new level of appreciation for him. It's so good.

SILY: Did you listen to Picture of Bunny Rabbit?

BC: It's so good, especially the title track. It seems like when he has us plugged into some kind of effects or delay, he's switching the different sounds on it, but it makes the instrument go in so many different areas. To me, the title track is worth the price of the entire record, even though the whole thing is good.

SILY: What else is next for you? Are you constantly writing?

BC: This is gonna be a very busy year release-wise. I have a couple more things coming out. It's hard to write stuff because I always think it'll take so long for it to come out. I'm halfway working on something, but I have no idea when it will come out.

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teoriacritica · 8 months

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#DRINKS #hippo lite #mp3 #drag city records

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affairesasuivre · 2 years

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People Helping People / No Age (Drag City, 2022)

No Age’s breakthrough release, Weirdo Rippers, came out 15 years ago, when Billie Eilish was five years old and people could still afford to live in Los Angeles. The compilation of early lo-fi singles shifted guitarist Randy Randall and drummer-singer Dean Spunt into indie rock’s low-watt spotlight; stories tended to focus on their deep involvement in L.A. performance art venue and community space The Smell, a hub for the city’s burgeoning bohemia. The Smell is still kicking. And so are No Age, thankfully, even though their hazy, propulsive, and blissful skate-punk hasn’t changed substantially since 2007.

Between 2008’s universally acclaimed Nouns and 2020’s Goons Be Gone, Randall and Spunt have remained committed to their foundational sound—wielding whirls of guitar effects to smear three- or four-chord punk songs—but tend to differentiate each release through mixing and tweaking. They’ll lower the levels of distortion or accentuate Spunt’s slurred, slacker vocals; they’ll cut out the drums, or anything resembling a song, entirely; they’ll thrash away or chill out. But on People Helping People, No Age’s sixth album, Randall and Spunt break from their template with music that’s more abstract and eccentric. For the first time since their early releases, they’re playing with a renewed sense of possibility.

Of all No Age’s LPs, People Helping People has the most in common with the jagged arrangements of 2013’s An Object. Yet that album was still primarily song-based, whereas People Helping People emphasizes sound and texture. It’s bookended by two ambient pieces, and the first track resembling classic No Age—the squelchy, nervy, and unexpectedly poignant “Plastic (You Want It)”—doesn’t arrive until nearly a third of the way in. Seven of the 13 cuts have no vocals; five have no drums. The most straightforward songs are an unusual hybrid of IDM and post-punk. No Age draw lots of comparisons to Hüsker Dü, but People Helping People is more like Mouse on Mars trying to make The Flowers of Romance.

The kitchen-sink sound design is likely a byproduct of the recording process. People Helping People is the first No Age album created without an outside producer, in their own studio in Randall’s garage. Some songs feel like experiments with new tools. A motorik-paced synth-drum beat is the sole backing on “Compact Flashes,” with clipped guitar scrapes and drum hits entering at random. “Interdependence” is a phased-out passage of psychedelic guitar shredding that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Six Organs of Admittance LP. The ceremonial and downright dreamy “Blueberry Barefoot,” backed by orchestral synth chords, could be a Disintegration demo, a punk church wedding, or hold music for androids.

Spanning just over half an hour, People Helping People requires a few listens before its logic begins to click, but eventually the fractured music overlaps with their catalog, even suggesting new directions for their work to come. No Age’s music always felt like it was equally at home in a gallery or a basement show, but now they seem to be inching further toward the art world. That holds true for Spunt’s lyrics, which are still too cryptic to be sloganeering (“I don’t like the obvious, I made you my man,” he sings on the single “Tripped Out Before Scott”). The video for closing track “Andy Helping Andy,” directed by noted L.A. photographer and experimental filmmaker Kersti Jan Werdal, shares a similar sensibility, with a montage of found footage of Andy Warhol. None of these gestures are pretentious or off-putting. In fact, they’re in line with No Age’s persistent virtue: to inspire and energize through ambiguity and without resorting to cheap sentiment.

#People Helping People #No Age #drag city records #2022 #rock #affas #affairesasuivre #affaires a suivre #Youtube

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sorrymomband · 4 months

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the music video for But I'm a Quarterback came out a week ago! we had so much fun making this music video with our friends, the super talented crew, and some awesome fans who came out to be extras! thanks for all the love and support so far on the single, it means so much to us :) go check out the video on youtube! its actually really good and they filmed it on a really fancy camera

Directed by The Bloomquist Brothers

Produced by Mainframe Pictures

Director of Photography Mike Magilnick

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mywifeleftme · 1 year

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92: Aquariana // Aquariana

Aquariana Aquariana 2013, Drag City (Website)

The Source Family were one of the more successful new religions (read: cults) operating in Southern California during the early 1970s. Founded by Father Yod (pronounced “Yoad”; né Jim Baker), a towering, bearded figure with a few alleged murders (via karate chop!) and bank robberies under his robes, the Source Family operated a popular health food restaurant in L.A. and cut dozens of brainstewing psych rock records that have become holy grails to men who physically resemble late period Jerry Garcia. Yod assigned one of his 13 wives (Isis Aquarian, née Charlene Peters) to document the cult’s journey over the years, resulting in an incredible trove of video recordings, some of which were used to assemble 2012’s The Source Family documentary. The footage, much of it eerie and gauzily beautiful, gives us a good idea of what day-to-day life in the Family was like, from its origins to Yod’s corporeal demise in Hawaii following a hang-gliding accident (!).

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The Source Family were as close to a prototypical cult of the era as you can get: white robes, buffet approach to Eastern and Western spiritual concepts, illiberal attitudes toward “personal possessions,” semi-involuntary polygamy, institutionalized drug use, etc. If you’ve ever listened to recordings of the sermons of Jim Jones or David Berg, Baker’s hep gibberish will sound strikingly familiar, and indeed, the Source Family followed the standard trajectory—from monogamy to a form of free love that mostly allowed the leader to fuck all the hot girls; from soft notions about kindness and peace to dark mutterings about an imminent apocalypse; from vegetarianism to moral loopholes that sanctioned the killing of dangerous outsiders. The Source Family never went the way of the Peoples Temple because, when faced with a mounting crisis (the cult’s disastrous move to Hawaii), Baker decided to disclaim his godhood instead of doubling down on it. No one knows why he eventually told his followers he was only a man, but I have a hunch: he wasn’t a sawed-off little gnome, and he wasn’t crazy. Unlike his murderous peers, Baker didn’t have much to overcompensate for; he was a huge, built guy who didn’t need a cult to get laid, impose his will, or feel important (though he got off on all of the above). In the end, no one died, and so it feels a little less vulturine to nibble at this particular cult’s artistic output than it does, say, the Manson Family’s.

On that note, let’s turn to the music. Record nerds are always on the lookout for cult music because it often goes extremely hard, be it Manson’s acoustic freak folk, Scientology space jazz, or “Veteran of the Psychic Wars.” The albums the Source Family are known for (released under a variety of names like Ya Ho Wha 13 and Father Yod and the Spirit of ’76) are out-there freeform acid jams in which the cult’s more experienced musicians try to work around frontman Yod’s untrained drumming and bellowing—a member of the No-Neck Blues Band pops up on the 2012 documentary to gush about their records, and you can see why acts like NNCK and Jackie O Motherfucker would lose it for this stuff.

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The album we’re looking at today, by contrast, is a solo piano recording from the mid-‘70s by Aquariana, another of Yod’s wives, that went unissued till 2013. Aquariana had a Queen Guinevere-type look, and the liners note that she would frequently spin her own long golden hair into thread to sew and embroider with. A capable pianist with a multi-octave voice, Aquariana’s music could broadly be called folky, but it feels a little more theatrical than that, influenced by show tunes and AM soft rock. Her songs are mostly about love (-ing Father Yod), bearing children (of Father Yod), and the magnificence of Father Yod. It’s midway between devotional music and the type of stuff a medieval bard would be retained to write in praise of an egotistical baron. You can practically see Baker being fed grapes in the producer’s chair while she plays. Though it’s not as overtly weird as Ya Ho Wha 13, there’s still a lot of stuff on Aquariana that no sane producer would’ve allowed, like the way she tunelessly holds and holds and holds her notes on “Oh My Love” and “One Love” until you start to think your record is skipping. That strangeness is why it exerts the particular appeal it does, and it does have a particular downbeat intensity that holds my interest, despite its rudimentary songcraft.

Chicago’s Drag City label was behind the documentary and mid-2010s series of Source Family music reissues. Unlike reissues of, say, Manson-adjacent music, the label was able to work with surviving Family members like Isis Aquarian. This meant of course that they couldn’t dress up the reissues too salaciously (see LIE: The Love & Terror Cult), but Baker’s group already had such a strongly creepy aesthetic that there wasn’t much need to. A designer would be hard-pressed to come up with a more uncanny cover than Aquariana got: the singer at the piano in her ruffled gown with an unreadable expression, the head and shoulders of her husband-father visible behind the instrument, the portrait framed in ornate white fabric. It feels like the work of an outsider trying to underline the cult’s depravity in red pen—yet the composition and cover design were by Yod himself. Make of that what you will.

92/365

#aquariana #the source family #father yod #jim baker #cults #cult music #drag city #'70s music #female singer #vinyl record #music review #freak folk #hang gliding

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passengerpigeons · 1 year

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So back in the day i followed someone who was posting about how this gay porno called The Drifter had a really good soundtrack but there wasn't an official release. This was one of the songs she ripped where she could filter out most noise besides some rain and stuff i think.

anyway this song from an obscure gay porn is the song that got me into six organs

#and of course as artists i get into recently often are #he is (or at least was at some point) on drag city records #Bandcamp

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musicollage · 1 year

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Bill Callahan — YTI⅃AƎЯ. 2022 : Drag City.

! enjoy the album ★ provide a coffee !

#rock music #folk rock #bill callahan #2022 #drag city records #singer songwriter #2020s #2020s rock

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zaphmann · 2 years

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In Memory of John Peel Show 221007 Podcast & Playlist

Bill, Ben and Weed (not Loretta Lynn) “A coruscatingly brilliant show“ >> the best new music, independent of the industry system – back this show on patreon Paypal to [email protected] heard in over 90 countries via independent stations (RSS)Pod-Subscribe for free here or Embed/listen at podomatic – itunes Apple, Audacity, Google Podcasts, Gaana, Boomplay, Amazon Music. Audible, Player FM,…

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bandcampsnoop · 2 years

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10/4/22.

The Artist in Residence series for Joyful Noise Recordings this year features Yonatan Gat, who has seen his fair share of mentions over the years. There are five artists in the series - Yonatan Gat's American Quartet, Medicine Singers, Maalem Hassan BenJaafar, Mamady Kouyaté, and Monotonix (originally from Tel Aviv, Israel).

I'd obviously never listened to Monotonix. If I had they certainly would have garnered several posts and mentions. This is punk in the vein of Sonic Youth crossed with The Stooges. They have a couple of releases on Drag City, but haven't released new music in 12 years. Yonatan Gat is a member of the band, but this music is much more raw and energetic than his solo or collaborative work.

Yonatan Gat seems to now be based in New York.

#Monotonix #Tel Aviv #Israel #Yonatan Gat #Joyful Noise Recordings #Drag City #Sonic Youth #The Stooges #Yonatan Gat's American Quartet #Mamady Kouyaté #Maalem Hassan BenJaafar #Medicine Singers #New York #Bandcamp

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sinceileftyoublog · 5 months

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Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin Interview: Winning Concepts

Photo by Thobias Fäldt

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Well, that didn't take nearly as long. A mere two years after releasing the once dormant and eventually critically acclaimed Ghosted, Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, and Andreas Werliin are releasing its follow-up on Friday via Drag City. The trio returned to Studio Rymden in Stockholm last June, with years of performing together under their belt, and laid down the tracks for Ghosted II in a mere two days. Like its predecessor, Ghosted II delves into jazz and drone music, has numerical track titles, and features guitar from Ambarchi that sounds like an organ, album art by Pål Dybwik, and video art by Cédrick Eymenier. Less like its predecessor (though not wholly unlike it), Ghosted II plays with dynamics, is more improvised with minimal overdubs, and roots itself in everything from ambient music to funk. Oh, and its numerical track titles are in Swedish instead of Roman numerals.

Seriously, Ambarchi, Berthling, and Werliin could follow the same four-track formula with the same featured artists every time and I would be more excited with every release. That's how potent Ghosted II is. “en” sports brilliant textural contrasts, pattering drums, scraggly guitar, and barely-there bass, but nonetheless wears a zesty groove. “två” I can most aptly describe as chrome lounge jazz, rife with repeated bass, slow hand percussion, and cold, warbling guitars that pulsate at constantly changing speeds. “tre” is where we first truly hear those inexorable Ambarchi guitar sounds, whirring and shapeshifting with a light chirp and glitch as Werliin's percussion circumvents Berthling's bass. The song sounds like it's traveling through a prickly continuum. And “fyra” ends the set with shimmering ambiance, syncopated bass and drums steady until Werliin jumps into a clattering groove, eventually letting Ambarchi take front and center before the three descend into silence. Ghosted II is the type of album as easy to listen to as it is heady and complex, an achievement that should further this trio's welcome emergence in the experimental music realm.

Oh, and I forgot to mention another similarity to Ghosted: Ambarchi, Berthling, and Werliin once again were willing to answer some questions from me over email about the album. Read their responses below, edited for clarity, including some can't-miss music recommendations.

Since I Left You: How would you say Ghosted II is different from the first record, and how is it a continuation of what you were doing on Ghosted? Oren Ambarchi: I would say that it's a continuation from the first one. The approach in the studio was very similar: We simply got together and improvised with little discussion beforehand. It was recorded very quickly--from memory, all the pieces are first takes, and there was minimal overdubbing.

SILY: How did playing live as a trio inform Ghosted II? When you went in to the recording, did you think of it like a live concert with no audience? OA: Playing live has been really great, as we've been developing our language as a trio from show to show, and this definitely impacted the new one. Like the first trio recording, the vibe in the studio was very relaxed. It was like playing together in someone's lounge room. Personally I tried to approach the new one with newer guitar sounds, many of which I discovered in real-time whilst we were recording. I was hoping my playing would be a little different to the playing on the first record. I didn't want to repeat myself, and I'm sure the others felt the same way regarding how they approached the recording. So the new album is, on the one hand, a continuation from the first album, but on the other hand, it's an exciting new development for all of us. Johan Berthling: I think playing live has merged our sounds together quite a bit. We know each other's playing a lot better. When recording the first album, we had nothing. Now, we have a sound and a foundation we can continue to build on. For me, the studio (could be) a magical environment where all is possible. The live situation has so many parameters that are not controllable, so I want to keep them apart. I never look at recording as a live performance. Andreas Werliin: Playing live in front of an audience is very different from being in a studio recording session.[It has] different energy. It’s weird: The great live shows rarely transform into a good recording. It’s usually too much information. What we experienced when playing live was that we could use much more dynamics than on our albums. In a studio recording, you can use the room and vibe to play less and still keep it interesting, making small changes instead of the big movements we do live.

SILY: Is there something unique about Studio Rymden that fosters creative collaboration? OA: It feels super relaxed recording there, which really suits our vibe and somehow enhances what we are going for. I think we are all inspired by the room at Rymden and play off of the space. JB: It has a really nice living room atmosphere and has all the equipment we need. Daniel [Bengtson], who runs it, is also a great and knowledgeable guy making everyone feel at ease. AW: [It's] a good sounding, very relaxed place. [It] feels like being at a home party.

SILY: Why was it important for you to have continuity between the two albums' visual identities (cover art, music videos)? JB: Why change a winning concept? :) AW: These days, things are moving so fast. Everything and everybody has to change all the time to not lose the audience's attention, both visually and musically. We took the opportunity to go against that movement, I guess.

SILY: What inspired the track titles this time around? OA: Laziness. It's 1/2/3/4 in Swedish. Maybe we'll pick another language when we do another release.

SILY: How did the songs on the first record end up evolving live? Do you foresee these songs having a similar live evolution? OA: Absolutely. It's been really fun expanding on the pieces on the first album in a live context. Those pieces have really gone places. Some live versions of the pieces have lasted 30-40 minutes each. We've already been playing some of the new pieces live, too, and they are already morphing into new explorations that are quite different from the recorded versions.

AW: We developed a new form and used more improvisation and a lot more dynamics.

SILY: What's next? OA: We have some shows coming up as a trio which I'm really looking forward to. I really love playing with Johan and Andreas. My next big show...is a new piece titled "Sous Vide" with conductor Ilan Volkov and the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra. I'm also hoping to start on a new solo record later this year. AW: I'm excited to release [Ghosted II]. We’re all pretty busy with other projects and family life, so [I'm] just hoping for peace, love, and understanding in general, I guess.

SILY: Is there anything you've been listening to, watching, or reading lately that you've enjoyed or that's inspired you? AW: I would highly recommend Brighde Chaimbeul's album The Reeling (River Lea). She will play live in our village on the west coast of Sweden on July 7th in an incredible church. Much welcome. JB: Lately, I’ve been listening a lot to Howlin' Wolf's Message to the Young and John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat's Hooker 'n Heat. Live, I recently saw a fantastic performance by Evan Parker and Alexander Hawkins in Germany!

OA: [I've been] listening to plenty non-stop, but here's a few recent things that come to mind:

James Rushford's Turzets

An unreleased 1974 live recording of Salamat Ali Khan from Berlin

ML Buch's Suntub (15 love)

Tyshawn Sorey's Continuing (Pi)

Ahmir Khan's Khayal By Ustad Ahmir Khan

RLW's When freezing air stings like ice I shall breathe again (Drag City)

Lenny Breau's Quietude

Eduardo Mateo

Glenn Gould's version of Brahms: 10 Intermezzi

Mikel Rouse Broken Consort

Tirzah

Weather Report's Live & Unreleased

I also just picked up an amazing new remaster of Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which I've been playing endlessly.

I recently watched Dog Day Afternoon with my 16-year-old last night. It was good to revisit that one. I also recently saw a great UK documentary on Cornelius Cardew with footage of the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. Other than that, it's always Law & Order before bed.

Reading:

Scott McClanahan's The Sarah Book Ian Penman's Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors Adrian Sinclair & Allan Kozinn's The McCartney Legacy Henry Threadgill & Brent Hayes Edwards' Easily Slip Into Another World Dorothy B. Hughes' The Expendable Man

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