Molchat Doma's "Belaya Polosa" & North American Tour with Sextile: Jan 25 - Mar 7

Inspired by the goth and early electro-industrial sounds of the 1980s and 1990s, a new generation of darkwave and synthwave producers have found novel variations and generated a music of 21st century nuance to its particulars. The balancing act of its particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak is presented by The Guardian in, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”. A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, She Wants Revenge, Xeno & Oaklander, The Soft Moon, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Drab Majesty, TR/ST, Kite, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables pivot and deviate around. An overview of these concurrent, interrelated, and offshoot genres, and their contemporary revival was mapped by Vice in their, "A Brief History of Musical Waves from New to Next". Compilations like the now-classic, “The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume One” focused on the coldwave and minimal wave strains, while the recent “No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock, and Coldwave 1981-1990”, present an all-inclusive cornucopia of variables within the subgenre.

Taken together, these compilations offer an overarching map of a sound that was born of the settling dust of the tumult of post-punk's upending of the topography of rock and noise music. Expressed through a more uneasy, existential, often edgier and sexually charged sound than their more commercial compatriots, darkwave retained its post-punk values while utilizing the same technology, and dancier, more upbeat tempos of new wave. Few contemporary artists embody this intersection of new wave and harder-edged sonic aesthetics than Belarusian artists, Molchat Doma. Their sound is a concoction of the recognizable components of synth-driven new wave, staccato drum machine, angular guitar and plodding bass of post-punk, with the additional reflection of a hauntological looking back to the monumental ruins of the Soviet era. In more senses than one, "Molchat Doma: Is Caught in the Crosshairs". Social media, relocating from Belarus to the United States, and signing to Sacred Bones the domestic haven of all things neo-goth, have contributed significantly to their rise in prominence within this scene. In doing so, they have also made new compatriots of labelmates like Sextile, and their electro-industrial sound as heard on "Push". On tour beginning this month in support of last year's "Belaya Polosa", Molchat Doma and Sextile will be channeling post-Soviet melancholia and fetishistically energized Los Angeles electro when they intersect for a night at The Showbox, Seattle.

TR/ST's "Performance" & US Tour with Provoker: Oct 31 - Nov 23 | Modernwav Festival at Music Box San Diego: Nov 22 - 23

While a relatively narrow aspect of the bandwidth of music within the goth and early electro-industrial sounds of the 1980s and 1990s, darkwave and synthwave express novel variations and nuance to its particulars. An overview of these concurrent, interrelated, and offshoot genres, and their contemporary revival was mapped by Vice in their, "A Brief History of Musical Waves from New to Next". Compilations like the now-classic, “The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume One” focused on the coldwave and minimal wave strains, while the recent “No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock, and Coldwave 1981-1990”, present an all-inclusive cornucopia of variables within the subgenre. Taken together, these compilations offer an overarching map of a sound that was born of the settling dust of the tumult of post-punk's upending of the topography of rock and noise music. Utilizing technology which would become a central component of the concurrent new wave movement, these artists applied the rhythmic dance structures and synthesizer-focused songwriting to a knowingly distant, colder aesthetic. While much of the transitional state of post-punk toward new wave began to be focused around commercially-minded outsider pop, a darker undercurrent did survive. Expressed through a more uneasy, existential, often edgier and sexually charged sound than their more commercial compatriots, darkwave retained its post-punk values while utilizing the same technology, and dancier, more upbeat tempos of new wave.

Inspired by this era, and the balancing act of its particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak, a new generation of producers have come to the fore, presented by The Guardian in, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”. A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, She Wants Revenge, Xeno & Oaklander, The Soft Moon, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Drab Majesty, TR/ST, Kite, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables pivot and deviate around. One of the more distinct deviations of the sound can be found in the fiery synthwave of Robert Alfons' TR/ST. Initially working as a duo with Maya Postepski of Austra on a series of albums for Arts & Crafts, Alfons' project is now largely a solo enterprise. This series of changes he explored with Interview Magazine, and in conversation with the San Francisco Chronicle, "TR/ST Pushes Past Fear to Create New Atmospheric Soundscapes". Now with his new home of shared compatriots on the Dais label, “Performance” brings the sound Pitchfork described as, "the sonic equivalent of a fashion show put on by depressive pill abusers; malevolent, but mightily sexy" on tour across the country with the Bay Area's Provoker. Following a date in Seattle, the tour's final destination will be at Modernwav the "Two-Day Industrial Darkwave Event in San Diego", an all-inclusive showcase of darkwave, synthwave, dark gothic and post-punk electronic club music.

Seattle Independent Music Venue Reopenings Part II: Mar 3 - Apr 24

After a year and a half of navigating the complexities of the pandemic restrictions and closures, in-person programming largely returned in August and September to many of the regional arts venues. Early fall saw the first major steps towards reopening after nearly eighteen months of closure for the regional independent music venues, and Seattle's independent cinemas. In many cases, their future remained uncertain until as recently as February 2021 when the federal stimulus bill was approved and the funding for arts and culture that came with it. Relief funding became available with the benefits of the Save Our Stages Act finally beginning to arrive, alongside the newly implemented Shuttered Venues Grant. The benefits of the various pandemic relief bills, alongside regional infrastructure like the 4Culture Relief Fund, awareness efforts like the Washington Nightlife Music Association, crowdfunding and philanthropy like the ArtistRelief, ArtsFund grant, and GiveBig Washington have come in the 11th hour for many of these venues and institutions. This spring sees what is akin to a second wave of programming, after the setbacks of this past winter and plateauing vaccination rates alongside widespread pandemic variants causing many tours to be postponed or cancelled outright.

March and April particularly herald the arrival of larger national and international acts, seemingly picking up where programming left off this past fall, beginning with the sludge and progressive metal of SUMAC at Substation. This same first week of March also sees the Canadian collective around Godspeed! You Black Emperor bring their particular brand of orchestral noiserock to The Showbox. The newly opened and expanded theater setting of The Crocodile will host more indie rock and post-black metal and hardcore with Midwife and Deafheaven. The week before, the venue also presents what will bound to be the surreal juxtaposition of French baroque breakcore combo Igorrr alongside the punk oriented noiserock of Japan's Melt Banana. The end of March sees Nick Cave and Warren Ellis making good on their "Carnage" tour at The Paramount, African keyboardist and electro-soul artist Ata Kak appears at the recently reopened The Sunset Tavern, the long-delayed Lightning Bolt show takes place at Vera Project, and synth-pop and new wave legend Gary Numan's postponed tour of last year will finally arrives at The Neptune. April begins with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble performing the compositions of Jóhann Jóhannsson at The Moore Theatre, and Seattle Symphony's presentation of Gustav Mahler's massive 6th Symphony, the institution rebounding from a series of setbacks at the beginning of the year with a 2022 calendar that promises classics and innovation in equal measure. Returning two years since the final pre-pandemic show of March 2020 at Columbia City Theater, Fennesz will this time be hosted in the intimate setting of the Ballard Homestead. After editions in New York, Chicago and Portland, the Ambient Church series will be bringing Kranky recording artist Chihei Hatakeyama to Seattle for its own edition at the First Baptist Church. Guides to the expanse between neo-soul and spacerock don't get more capable than Spiritualized who return to The Neptune the first week of April, and the Shabaka Hutchings-led Sons of Kemet are back at Neumos after two rather legendary hardbop free-jazz shows in 2018 and 2019 at sister venue Barboza. Barboza will be hosting neo-folk and psychedelic drone artist Ben Chasny and his Six Organs of Admittance project, and the following night at The Crocodile, postpunk electro act Boy Harsher will be playing with PAN recordings artist Hiro Kone. Much later in the year, The Paramount will play home to a night of the ritualistic pagan folk of Heilung. Legendary industrial rock band Ministry will be taking to the stage at The Showbox alongside stoner rock behemoths Melvins and metal stalwarts Corrosion of Conformity. A different variation of heavy will be heard at the Showbox the following night with Gloasgow's post-rock goliaths Mogwai. The following month, there is post-punk inspired synthwave from Molchat Doma at Neumos, and shoegaze and noiserock round out the season with Ringo Deathstarr at The Sunset Tavern. Japan's Mono return to their ceaseless world touring, playing from their two albums released over the course of the pandemic with a show at Neumos.

Boy Harsher's "Careful" & Mechanismus: Resistance at The Highline and Mercury at Machinewerks: Jun 11 - 14

Seattle goth and industrial music culture has had a number of locus points over the decades of its existence as an urban-centralized subculture in the city. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, at the apogee of the genre's ascension, clubs like Re-Bar, The Monastery, The Vogue, The Catwalk and Fenix Underground had regular nights dedicated to the bondage, fetish, leather and BDSM scenes that offered alternative lifestyles to the crass commercialism of the Reagan and later Bush eras. These were booked concurrently alongside nights specifically dedicated to post-punk, gothic rock, and industrial music and the interweaving of these two subcultures, and offered physical spaces for these like-minded communities to convene. Foremost among them was the speakeasy known as Machinewerks, which traversed the city in a series of changing locations to avoid detection by various local authorities. Seeking a stable location, the speakeasy then became incorporated as a legitimate, licensed, private club. Now decades later, there are only a few remaining goth and industrial nights in Seattle. Those that remain are at Kremwerk, The Rendezvous, Clockout Lounge, and the long-lived home for this culture, at Machinewerks, which continues on in its newest iteration as Mercury at Machinewerks. Along with these daily and weekly DJ and dance nights, there are also monthly and seasonal bookings of live music by Musicwerks and Mechanismus at the two venues of El Corazon and The Highline respectively. Mechanismus also plays host to an annual festival, largely culled specifically from the domestic United States electro-industrial and EBM styles, and what the international press is now calling darkwave, as covered in recent features in the pages of The Guardian.

These subgenres, which came after the initial European and United Kingdom scenes of the earliest part of the decade, instead began to manifest with the technological developments of the mid-to-late 1980s. Following in the wake of techno in Detroit, the American continent saw its own electro-industrial variation on the form, harnessed largely by label's like Nettwerk and Chicago's Wax Trax! Records. Their legacy, beyond just releasing a body of music that bred the more commercially successful acts of the 1990s, like Nine Inch Nails and Prodigy, is that Wax Trax! were defined by a then-radical business model. Acting as more than just the setting of a retail record store, and label with an atypical contract process, the environment its founders created was a cultural locus of related aesthetics, sounds, values and lifestyles. This year's Mechanismus festival, titled Resistance, features a three day lineup of DJs and established names at The Highline and Mercury at Machinewerks, encompassing both of these electro-industrial and Darkwave sounds. In Resistance’s three nights of showcases, the lineup of live acts include; Clan of Xymox, Boy Harsher, Funker Vogt, Stabbing Westward, Velvet Acid Christ, and a as-yet-announced secret headliner on the second night. In the case of the foremost two acts, theirs is a relationship of early European progenitors from the 1980s, and a new American contemporary 21st century neo-gothic variation. Initially signed to the influential 4AD label four decades ago, Clan of Xymox have returned in recent years with new albums to find audiences at gothic culture events like Wave-Gotik-Treffen festival in their current home of Leipzig, Germany. This has been alongside the new generation of darkwave artists like Molchat Doma, The KVB, TR/ST, Kite, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, and Boy Harsher. The latter releasing their "Careful" album last year on their own Nude Club Records, a sound once described as a "Moving Choker-Collar Muscle Mash", which NME's review suggests; "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull" ...and that listeners should simply, "Give in to their bad romance".

:::: ALBUMS OF 2019 ::::

TOP ALBUMS OF 2019 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
--------------------------------------------------------------
Various Artists  “Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-90”  (Japan Archive)
Zonal   “Wrecked”  (Relapse)
Swans  “Leaving Meaning.”  (Young God)
Lingua Ignota  "Caligula"  (Profound Lore)
Heilung  "Futha"  (Season of Mist)
Chelsea Wolfe  "Birth of Violence"  (Sargent House)
Philip Thomas  "Morton Feldman Piano"  (Another Timbre)
Kali Malone  "The Sacrificial Code"  (Ideal)
Julius Eastman  “Crazy Nigger / Gay Guerrilla ”  Reissues (Blume)
David Sylvian  "Brilliant Trees" / "Gone to Earth" / "Secrets of the Beehive"  Reissues (Virgin)
Various Artists   "Space Funk: Afro Futurist Electro Funk in Space 1976-84"  (Soul Jazz)
JK Flesh ‎& Orphx  “Light Bringer”  (Hospital Productions)
TR/ST   “The Destroyer: Part One”  (Grouch)
Boy Harsher   “Careful”  (Nude Club Records)
The Comet Is Coming  “Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery”  (Impulse!)
Coil  “Stolen & Contaminated Songs”  Reissue (Cold Spring)
Mats Eilertsen, Harmen Fraanje & Thomas Strønen  "And Then Comes The Night"  (ECM)
Various Artists  “Spiritual Jazz Vol.8: Esoteric, Modal and Progressive Jazz from Japan 1961-83"  (Jazzman)
Various Artists  “Strain, Crack & Break: Music from the Nurse With Wound List Volume 1”  (Finders Keepers)
Various Artists  "Kreaturen Der Nacht: Deutsch Post-Punk Subkultur 1980-85"  (Strut)
Various ‎Artists  "Outro Tempo II: Electronic and Contemporary Music from Brazil 1984-96"  (Music from Memory)
Die Tödliche Doris   "Gänsefüßchen" / "7 Tödliche Unfälle Im Haushalt"  Reissues (Suezan Studio)
Joshua Abrams Natural Information Society  "Mandatory Reality"  (Eremite)
Various ‎Artists  "We Out Here: New British Jazz"  (Brownswood Recordings)
Jaimie Branch  "Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise"  (International Anthem)
75 Dollar Bill  "I Was Real"  (Thin Wrist)
Masahiro Sugaya  "Horizon Volume 1"  (Empire of Signs)
Duke  "Uingizaji Hewa"  (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah  “Ancestral Recall”  (RopeADope)
Hiro Kone  "A Fossil Begins to Bray"  (Dais)

Three years have now passed since favorable ratings, and public appetite for spectacle, motivated both liberal and conservative media to marginalize more viable options and instead elevate a reality TV celebrity, media mogul and real estate magnate to one of the most influential positions of power in the world. We are now living in the times that Aldous Huxley described, and America may never be the same. Consequently we find ourselves in in an environment in which high and low-level attacks have been leveled at the remaining journalistic press and even the First Amendment itself. These effects amplified by the net overabundance of the 21st Century, in which media sources are decentralized, but not necessarily diversified, presenting a new set of dangers to the less digitally savvy. Between the polarization of the commercial news sources and the erosion of institutions of true investigative journalism, social media has found itself in the role of the most influential editor in the world. Subsequently, America not only receives different information, as a divided nation, we've come to perceive different realities. From the mid-2000's to present, the role of technology in our lives, and the sculpting of the very content acted as an polarizing amplifier throughout “The Decade Tech Lost Its Way", with the populace following along, "From Obama to Trump". All the while wealth becomes further stratified, the effect being that fewer and fewer institutions owning a larger slice of the domestic economy, with their influence increasingly felt in government and law enforcement.

In the midst of it all, it was a great relief to find memorable performances, festivals and exhibitions domestically. Gallery-going and the cinema played an even more prominent role this year. Hitting the mark of 400 films seen, it was another record setting twelve months in catching cinema in the theater. A worrisome trend seen in recent years continued though, as no small number of significant films were only available for viewing online or at home (more on that later). Shifting gears, the most notable visual art event witnessed this year was the fifth-annual Paul Allen funded Seattle Art Fair. Initial speculation on it's inaugural launch as to the fair being another tech money vanity project has long since been dispelled. Again proving to be significantly more than a elaborate philanthropy endeavor, this year's fair saw an expanded body of galleries, over 100 in total, along with it's program of talks, on-and-off site performances and collateral events. This year's Projects offering a platform for presentations beyond the art fair booth under the premise of "exploring identity, modes of play, and technology" in and around adjacent neighborhoods of the city, framed by Artistic Director Nato Thompson's curatorial statement, "Here Explodes the Wunderkammer". 2018 marked a major year for Art Fair and its parent institution, with the future of Allen's founding of numerous cultural and arts institutions, and significant philanthropic contribution to the city, made less certain with his passing in October of last year.

As is the case with many of the cultural and economic epicenters in the United States, in the last decade Seattle has gone through a series of notable changes to its urban, communal, and arts identity. Reflecting the still stratifying economic and cultural landscape of the city, two of the most influential regional festivals had closing years in 2015. These two institutions previously brought an underground, international scope to the city's music programming, and cumulatively tens of thousands of attendees. That year saw the final installments of the Seattle's two dominant festivals of electronic, neoclassical and experimental music in the final editions of Rafael Anton Irisarri's Substrata Festival, and the discontinuation of Decibel. In an open letter Decibel Festival's 13th year closed with programming director Sean Horton's farewell to the city. In the four years since the closing of these international forums, Seattle's monthly showcases of electronic and experimental sounds, Elevator, Secondnature, MOTOR, Patchwerks, False Prophet, and Wayward Music Series stepped up to filled the void. Elevator and MOTOR have since ceased monthly programming as of 2018, the former also discontinuing their annual Corridor Festival just this year. The result is an increasingly impoverished music culture landscape, where popular indie rock, pop, electronic dance music, and commercial bands are touring and playing Seattle, along with a not small corpus of local musics, but there is little to be had in between.

In such a subtractive cultural landscape as the last decade in Seattle, the bold venture of Casey Moore and Tommy Swenson's launching of a, "New Single-Screen Cinema that Flies in the Face of Netflix", in the outlying neighborhood of Columbia City has been a almost singular revelation. In just the half year since its opening, The Beacon has proved itself a locus for the two founders' experience and knowledge having worked in marketing for the Criterion Collection and programming the Alamo Drafhouse cinemas. Bringing something not unlike the world class film-going and programming experience of New York's Metograph to our less cosmopolitan burg. While the one-off performance by Digable Planets was probably the most unexpected show of the last twelve months, Bryan Ferry and band performing “Avalon” alongside a set of notable Roxy Music and solo hits at The Moore, was the incontestable live music highlight of the year. The city also saw substantial servings from the jazz and classical music world, as well as the particular lowlit territory branching out from the global offshoots of black and doom metal. After a successful set of years, Northwest Terror Fest returned this past May with a lineup exploring these metal hinterlands. The expansive programming of the festival's three days and nights at Seattle's Neumos, Barboza and The Highline, encompass everything from the gloaming atmospheric ambiance of doom metal, blistering thrash and hardcore, and heavy psych rock, dark pagan, experimental synthesizer and neofolk explorations. On the other end of the dial, music director and conductor Ludovic Morlot's final season with Seattle Symphony had no small amount of fanfare programmed around his departure. The threefold coup de grâce of Morlot's decade at Seattle symphony would be the realization of "John Luther Adams Pulitzer Prize Winning 'Become Ocean'", Olivier Messiaen's massive symphonic work, "Turangalîla", and the inauguration of the Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center with a 24 hour Contemporary Music Marathon. And nothing expressed the temperature of contemporary jazz more than Makaya McCraven at The Royal Room, and Shabaka Hutchings appearing stateside again with his The Comet is Coming ensemble.

Coming up on the close of the decade, access and distribution have become the real revelations and stumbling blocks of the second decade of the 21st Century. In his "Streaming Has Killed the Mainstream: The Decade that Broke Popular Culture", The Guardian's Simon Reynolds plumbs the deep complexities of the scattered and shattered effects of both the disintegrating of the popular monoculture of the past, and the sensation of living with the overload of options in the present. For The New Yorker, Richard Brody tackles the most significant after-effect of this abundance and the convenience of what's on offer through the dominant streaming platforms and commercial cinemas. He argues that; “It has been a banner year for movies, but you’d never know it from a trip to a local multiplex, or from a glimpse at the Oscarizables. The gap between what’s good and what’s widely available in theatres - between the cinema of resistance and the cinema of consensus - is wider than ever". Brody continues in his films of the decade selection; "Not only do a small number of blockbuster movies dominate the industry’s economy, but the sheer fact of popularity is multiplied and amplified online. Crowding out coverage of less-popular yet ultimately more significant movies at precisely the moment when, because these movies get scant distribution and are often virtually hidden on streaming sites, critical attention is all the more essential to their recognition." This gulf is also reflected online. The digital age is still proving to be at a narrow impasse rather than the promised plateau of abundance, which many are learning to navigate. Particularly evident in the world of film distribution, though footing is being found on the growing independent streaming platforms like Mubi, Fandor, and the recently founded, Criterion Channel.

Award winning films from festivals in New York, Berlin, Vienna, Venice, Hong Kong, Seoul, Cannes, Paris, London, Toronto and Cannes topping Film Comment, The Guardian, Cinema-Scope, and the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound annual overviews, have yet to receive distribution in the United States outside of festival programming or a savvy urban arthouse. Or, for that matter, even show up streaming online. So count yourself fortunate that you live in an urban cultural center if you do, as more and more of the world's greatest film aren't to be found for purchase, rent, streaming or even download (legal or otherwise). The value that Scarecrow Video brings to Seattle in this regard can't be overstated. With 130,000 titles on offer they now represent the largest privately owned collection of film in the world. Cinephiles, and even the simply movie quality-curious, should take note. No online streaming resource can even begin to approach their breadth and diversity available to be seen between their four walls. In music it was another year of taking circuitous and unexpected paths to the year's more memorable sounds. Streaming and digital distribution has incontestably freed channels of access and stages of separation between producer and audience. It has also brought to the fore the issue of accepting poor royalties for the benefit of expansive exposure. In the midst of this digital era of over abundance, there are whole forms and centuries of music that are not being served by the dominant streaming platforms. But if this almost singular foray of independent labels and artists in the market, it reveals much in, "Drip.FM's Closing and The Challenging Future of Sustainable Creative Technologies". Conversely streaming and direct digital distribution has also made what was in the past the locus of curatorial vision; the record label, less of a less singular go-to. Self releasing platforms like the growing audience direct community of Bandcamp, have made the record label less central.

Yet it remains the case that the record label can often be a superior path toward discovering new cultures and artists amid the over-abundance of the online world. The well curated label is still the best bet at finding more of related sounds when you're attuned to their programming trajectory. In the way of cutting edge electronic and experimental sounds, Raster-Media, Tri-Angle, Blackest Ever Black, PAN, Editions Mego, and RVNG have all delivered catalogs of quality, often groundbreaking work this year. Experimental, black and doom metal continued it's influential hybridization on labels like Southern Lord, Sargent House, 20 Buck Spin, Flenser, Season of Mist, Relapse, and Profound Lore. Neoclassical and modern chamber music were served by labels like Erased Tapes, and Denovali, with gorgeous and long overdue reissues of under-appreciated masterworks of American minimalism from Blume. Centuries-spanning institutions like Deutsche Grammophon have also expanded into the territory of young contemporary composers like Max Richter, and Jóhann Jóhannsson. American indies like Sacred Bones, Captured Tracks, Kranky, Thrill Jockey, Dead Oceans, and Temporary Residence continued to step up their game, with ever expanding diversification and discovery of new talent. In the world of modern jazz, Scandinavia continues to dominate the field of innovation. The influence of labels like Rune Grammofon and ECM and their embracing of classical, jazz, improvisation and experimentation, can't be stressed enough. The year also saw existing and new American imprints releasing work pushing at the boundaries of the very definition of jazz. Vanguard forays into form and style were heard on Eremite and Chicago's International Anthem. The standard-bearers of American jazz, Impulse! and Verve, also proving that they make the cut with one of the great new jazz albums of the decade. Straight from the burgeoning "British Jazz Explosion" as The Guardian called it, gathered together on anthologies by Giles Peterson and his Brownswood Recordings.

In the way of other notable reissues, San Francisco Bay Area label, Superior Viaduct reached further into he discographies of post-punk, modern composition, out-rock and free jazz, and UK-based Soul Jazz continues to plumb the depths of Afro-rock, disco and soul, with multiple brilliant compilations this year. From the far fringes of the Japanese underground, labels like Palto Flats, WeWantSounds, Empire of Signs, and WRWTFWW have unearthed some rare and much sought-after gems in the form of Yasuaki Shimizu's "Kakashi", Hiroshi Yoshimura's "Music for Nine Postcards", and Midori Takada's lost minimalist masterpiece, "Through the Looking Glass". Also in this vein, Light in the Attic released their document of "The Hidden History of Japan’s Folk-Rock Boom", as the first volume of the Japan Archive. The second and third volumes arrived this spring and summer with a sublime assembly of Japanese "interior music" on, "Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990", and the rarefied city pop sound was collected together on the "Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1975-1985". In the excellent liner notes supplied by Visible Claoks' Spencer Doran for the edition, he rightly sites that ambient music in Japan started, much as it did elsewhere, with Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, John Cage and their 20th century contemporaries being taught in university courses attended by these then-young electronic pioneers. By bridging modernist and postmodern modes of composition with the then-concurrent forays into "musical furnishings" supplied by Brian Eno, their ideas about background, modes of attention, functionality, and the abstracting of authorship came to the fore. The arrival in the west of this assembly of "Lullabies for Air Conditioners: The Corporate Bliss of Japanese Ambient", as Simon Reynolds points out, couldn't be more satisfying in the timeliness of its arrival.

TR/ST "Destroyer" & US Tour with Lydia Ainsworth: May 1 - Jun 8

In a sound that Pitchfork described as, "the sonic equivalent of a fashion show put on by depressive pill abusers; malevolent, but mightily sexy", one of the more distinctive deviations within the current vogue of synthwave can be found in Robert Alfons' TR/ST. Initially working as a duo with Maya Postepski of Austra on a series of albums for Arts & Crafts, Alfons' project is now largely a solo enterprise. This series of changes he explored with Interview Magazine, and in conversation with the San Francisco Chronicle, "TR/ST Pushes Past Fear to Create New Atmospheric Soundscapes". Like much of this current scene, Alfon's music was born of looking back to a bandwidth of music within the goth and early electro-industrial sounds of the 1980s and 1990s. An overview of these original darkwave and synthwave subgenres from that decade, and their contemporary revival was mapped by Vice in their, "A Brief History of Musical Waves from New to Next". Inspired by this original era, and the balancing act of its particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak, a new generation of producers have come to the fore. A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, Xeno & Oaklander, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Kite, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables of this sound pivot and deviate around. Alfons' own expression of this form on "Destroyer", will be heard in dates across North America this month, including a night at Seattle's Neumos alongside composer Lydia Ainsworth.

Pye Corner Audio's new album "Stasis" and US Tour: May 12 - 20 | Moogfest Durham North Carolina: May 18 - 21

The Head Technician himself, Martin Jenkins, will be appearing in a brief series of domestic settings before arriving at Durham North Carolina's annual tribute to Dr. Robert Moog. The east coast meeting of all things electronic, both historic and contemporary, sees Jenkins' techno-atavistic take on analog process appearing in the lineup alongside Colleen, Suzanne Ciani, SURVIVE, Pharmakon and The Haxan Cloak. Before arriving in Durham to celebrate the legacy of musical synthesis, Jenkins embarks on limited set of domestic dates including the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery Los Angeles, programed by Mount Analog. A San Francisco show follows, with The Head Technician appearing in the unlikeliest of settings for his Seattle date. Local all-female synth, techno, wave, industrial and DJ collective, False Prophet have been enlisted as guest curators for another of Paul Allen's cultural endeavors. Their contribution to Upstream Festival sees both a Boy Harsher and Haunted Horses showcase. Which intersects thematically with Kremwerk's programmed night of music from the Diagonal label's foremost techno-brutalist, Not Waving, and Jenkins, under his Pye Corner Audio moniker. In their review for what many to consider to be masterpiece of Jenkins' prolific catalog, The Quietus review of The Black Mill Tapes touches on the nature of this explicit branch from the world of the Hauntological. The Wire offering the greatest tutorial of the form, hosted by Mark Fisher aka K-Punk, with their "Revenant Forms: The Meaning Of Hauntology". Describing the collective headspace of "Alternative Nostalgia" as Phil Harrison coined it, Pye Corner Audio are perhaps the most purist in their recreation and reclamation of our proto-electronic heritage. While their music fits in nicely with the techno-mystic cult built up by other early practitioners around the likes of J.G. Ballard, M.R. James, Nigel Kneale and the a reverie for all things BBC Radiophonic Workshop it's conceptually less abstruse and sonically more authentic, with the great majority of their output sounding like it could have been recorded pre-1984. What his work shares with Ballard, and some of his 1980s offspring like David Cronenberg and John Carpenter is the fascination for desolate spaces of leaded, weighty tension and a pre-computer era mix of future-fantasy and weary trepidation for our imminent 21st Century technoscape. The Dystopian Modernity that The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography attributes to Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies" most clearly describes the themes of his most recent endeavor, "Stasis" for Julian House's Ghost Box label. House himself being the preeminent Hauntological practitioner in the world of graphic design and aesthetics. Work that should be considered alongside his compatriot, Richard Littler's Scarfolk Council gesamtkunstwerk of paranoid, propagandistic, satiric plumbing of, "Why the 1970s was the Most Terrifying Decade".