A weighty pile of fresh and archival arrivals from Rose City Band, Mücha, Paul Cousins, Josephine Foster, Antietam and more face assessment

Notwithstanding Record Store Day crowding-up the audio economy, the period from late-March to early-May has always been heavily replete with releases, both new and retrospective. This year is certainly no exception, as the floodgates at this Concrete Islands satellite outpost have barely held back the incoming sonic torrents. Time then, to wade in and see what has floated up for some ear time…

Whilst 2021’s Earth Trip from Rose City Band was still a charming enough third outing from Ripley Johnson’s self-described ‘porch music’ project, there were some indications that the laidback cordiality was leaning a little too much into horizontal lethargy. However, with the freshly grown Garden Party (Thrill Jockey), the ante has been re-upped somewhat, facilitated by a wider ensemble set-up, featuring now well-travelled touring members and some guest spots from Johnson’s Moon Duo bandmates.

Whilst these internal modifications aren’t particularly overstated across the serviceable opening quartet of “Chasing Rainbows”, “Slow Burn”, “Garden Song” and “Porch Boogie” – which collectively join some hirsute hazy dots between Clarence White-era Byrds, The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival – things reach into more cosmic Americana realms around the melted pedal steel-led mid-point of “Saturday’s Gone”, which opens the way to a transcendent near-side-long triumvirate.

In this portion of the album, we are brought gorgeous gospel keyboards and twirling Tom Verlaine-meets-Sea and Cake guitar figures (“Mariposa”); twangy space-funk fluidity (“Moonlight Highway”); and a combination of glistening electronics, balmy organs, lithe jazzy drums and snaking six-strings conjuring up Califone remaking Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way (“El Rio”).

So gratifying is this sprawling trio of tracks, that had the same spirit of adventure been the mirrored in the first half of proceedings, we could have found the Rose City Band sound truly liberated from its cosier comfort zones. Hopefully though, the baton from the closing laps of Garden Party can be picked up and run with even further next time around. Until then, this is still another decent Ripley Johnson-led record to explore.

Whilst ‘immersive’ is a frequent go-to descriptor for those with electronica-attuned tastebuds, it certainly feels like the right overall designation for Hello Caller, Amanda Butterworth’s latest album as Mücha for Frequency Domain. Following on from 2021’s rather fine Fall, for the same cassette/digital release micro outlet, this less ostensibly song-based sequel is even more of a self-made sound world to be swallowed up in.

Assembled apparently only around “a single piano loop, a single vocal loop and a small number of ‘store cupboard’ ingredients” Butterworth has forged a six-part suite, appended by three outsider commissioned remixes, of sublime submersive soundscaping.

Although best considered as a whole, you can piece together the sonic mosaic through eerie yet inviting tones and drones (“A Travelling Voice” and “Coiled-Uncoiled”); throbbing neon-lit ambient-techno (“Lines of Force” and “From Pulses to Sound”); glitchy ghostliness with nods to the sinister ‘smoke monster’ sounds from Lost (“Spectral Interference”); and airy backwards swirliness envisioning Kelly Lee Owens in cahoots with The Home Current (“A Receiver”).

With the aforementioned remixes – from Jo Johnson, Datasette and Southfacing – pleasingly refracting elements of the album back on to itself, rather than feeling like distracting add-ons, the complete Hello Caller experience makes for nearly an hour of mesmeric magnetism.

With another release for Frequency Domain already in the pipeline for later in 2023, this should be the year that Mücha deservedly makes some waves beyond just Bandcamp-snorkelling connoisseurs.

Also lost inside his own musical mind palace is Paul Cousins, who makes his first appearance on Castles in Space via Vanishing Artefacts. Constructing sound collages full of snug ambience as well as avant-symphonic grandeur, through an array of analogue tape loops and manipulations, this really is a captivating collection ripe for the affection of those already in thrall to Brian Eno’s early-70s works with Robert Fripp and Delia Derbyshire’s most serene Radiophonic Workshop scores. Those with top-end turntables will, however, be easily troubled about the health of their kit, by the woozy warping and speed treatments which stretch and bend the gathered tracks into such evocative shapes.

On slightly more familiar kosmische terrain – though satisfyingly kaleidoscopic in scope – is the return of Patrick R Pärk under his Kösmonaut alias, with Contagion Vapours, also on Castles in Space. Whilst being yet another creative concoction from a DIY artist devised under the stay-at-home shadow of the pandemic, the album is not just a diversion exercise from domestic quarantining.

In fact, the tremendous opening title track is worth the admission fee alone, due to its close-to-twelve-minute multi-layered lushness, bursting with Cluster-laced artificial drum track underpinnings and shimmering synth strata. Across the remaining cuts, Pärk unfurls further fecund tapestries, abundant with electro-organic textures (“Liquid Veil”), Rupert Lally-meets-Cornershop exotica (“Spirit Gates”), Snow Palms-like percussive workouts (“Kinetic Sand”) and the dubby richness Adrian Sherwood applied to his Echo Dek reworking of Primal Scream’s underrated Vanishing Point LP (“Dream Windows”). A variegated treat all told.

No stranger either of course, to home-built productivity before, during and after lockdown living, are artists in the orbit of Woodford Halse and sibling enterprise Preston Capes.

In the latest batches of material to arrive courtesy of the latter enterprise, you can find the industrial drone-dominated gloomscapes of Autumna’s quite aptly anointed My Heart is a Chainsaw and Allan Murphy’s more measured Slow Life, with its atmospheric miniatures that steer through the irradiated vibes of Threads, the more minimalistic modes of Tangerine Dream, the antiquarian-modern hybridisations of Ghostwriter and Bernard Grancher’s most tranquil electro corners.

Over on elder sibling imprint Woodford Halse, the genre-blending continues, with Panamint Manse’s lathe-cut “Umber” b/w “Turquoise” 7” offering up some brittle and brooding synthetics and Yestereven, the third tape/download album from Peter Gofton’s The All Golden, that carries on from where two previous releases on Modern Aviation left-off.

As with 2021’s Pagodas, the former Kenickie drummer revisits and expands upon home-baked recordings from as far back as the 1990s, now with added thematic elements centred around endings, both small and apocalyptic.

The net results are as eclectic and as eccentric as before. This means being taken through – amongst other things – bustling primitive beatscapes (“The Mandate of the Kingdom of Heaven” and “Bully Pulpit”), electro-acoustic shoegaze (“The Weekend”), Sebadoh’s earliest DIY doodlings (“The Wild Future”) and pretty pastoral psychedelia (“Yer Wings”). Fans of the already cited Pagodas and 2018’s Harmonograph will feel well-catered for again.

In a completely different record label ecosystem, Josephine Foster continues to be an artist who is not easily definable and who makes records that are not always straightforward to love. With her circuitous range that runs from the rustic to the theatrical and from the stark to the heavily conceptual, this latest for Fire Records, entitled Domestic Sphere, reads on paper as one of her more difficult propositions, compared to say the rousing panoramic folk balm of 2012’s Blood Rushing or the lulling countrified charms of 2020’s No Harm Done.

Being a collection of skeletal solo electric guitar meditations, topped by her shapeshifting soprano and field recordings of everything from ‘cats and crickets’ to ‘Nashville frogs’, suggests that this might only be for the most devout of Josephine Foster followers.

Yet, for all of its oblique building blocks, Domestic Sphere reveals itself as a convivial, intimate and hypnotic affair. Listening to the record feels very much like spending a lazy hot Sunday afternoon in Foster’s back garden, as she delicately and loosely sketch-outs ethereal pieces, that take in tenderly meandering moods (“Burnt Offering”); wonkiness and warmth (“Gentlemen & Ladies”); the up-close and serene (“Birthday Song for the Dead”), the gently hymnal (“Reminiscence”); and comforting loveliness (“Haunted House” and “Sanctuary”).

Even if it might not be an easy-point into the Josephine Foster song kingdom, it’s definitely a nice nook to linger in, once you have made it through the entry gate.

As long-running friends and fellow-travellers of Eleventh Dream Day and Yo La Tengo, Antietam have long been overdue some archival attention. Enter then at last, the first ever digital editions – self-released on Bandcamp – of the band’s first two long-players, for the benefit of curious late-comers and those too scared to keep dropping a needle on their rare vinyl copies.

And what a joyously inventive and raw mash of songs are to be found gathered across 1985’s Antietam and 1986’s Music for Elba, from the New York-based band of Louisville natives.

As only co-founding vocalist/guitarist Tara Key and bass/vocalist Tim Harris have carried on subsequently until the present day, with other accomplices, these are the only albums to document the line-up co-led by vocalist/bassist/guitarist Wolf Knapp, and which also featured passing-through drummers Mike Weinert (on Antietam) and Sean Mulhall (for Music for Elba) as well as violinist Danna Pentes (inside Music for Elba). It pretty much goes without saying that both are must-hear chapters in Antietam’s aural history.

The eponymous debut is the faster, nervier and wirier of the two, sounding like four-way brawl between members of Throwing Muses, The Gun Club, The Velvet Underground and X. Treasures include the propulsive noise-pop of “Orange Song” (as later covered by Yo La Tengo); the garage-racket of “BMW”; the White Light / White Heat scorched “Red, Black, and Blue”; the cowpunk hiccupping of “Don’t Go Back to Greenville”; the hyper-jerky call-and-response laden “Mikey”; and the amorphous oddness of “Unhappiness Diminishes Intelligence”.

Music for Elba is an even more diverse affair, that reuses as well as adds to the volatile mix of ingredients, with slightly more musical finesse but still plenty of frenetic pacing. It finds the group galloping through Patti Smith-meets-Thalia Zedek sprinting (“San Diego” and “Gordian-Love Knot”); an imagined hook-up between Violent Femmes and Kristin Hersh (“Concord” and “Until Now”); surf-punk interluding (“Fontaine Ferry”); country-folk hoedowning (“Camp Folk”); and art-rock skronk (“The Haunting of Rocky Face Ridge”).

With such flammable and sparky material, it’s perhaps not surprising that the early version of Antietam behind Music for Elba combusted soon after. To wrap things up nicely on this new redemptively remastered edition, is a ragged but soaringly tuneful take on The Beatles’ “Rain” from the same sessions, which was formerly released as a B-side to “Until Now”.

In short, there should be absolutely no hesitation in clicking up both of these excavated Antietam long-players pronto.

Adrian
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