C.A.N.V.A.S. Vinyl, CD & Tape 5 Items

Chrome-plated sound design and bristling textures frame the latest speculative sci-fi experiment from Xao, meshing sonic concepts inspired by Rabit, Visionist and Lotic into the cybernetic scapes of Hyph11E or Algorave proponent Renick Bell.

Xao has been working alongside the C.A.N.V.A.S. label since the beginning, and his second album builds on the promise of 2019's Astral Black-released "Eternal Care Unit", by burying some of his most recognisable inspirations into an algorithmic shimmer of vaporous sound design and cyborg percussion. The roots of ‘Wirehead’ can be traced to the mid 2010s obsession with shaping global club echoes and videogame FX into music that accurately scored our descent into digital dystopia, but Xao makes a clear link between those ideas and the brain-fried cyberpunk vistas of William Gibson. His guiding theme is the idea of the contemporary digital attention economy with its algorithmically-powered tidal wave of content, and the mental states that follows - employing procedural and algorithmic compositional methods to shatter this status quo, reaching in the direction of a proposed "digital spirituality" in the process.

On opening track 'Bone Theory', he burns fragments of death metal into warped airlock club stumbles, welding evocative, clanging sound design to tempered forms of weightless grime and gravel-throated trap. 'Aqua Tofana' is more fucked, sounding like a frosted-glass take on Autechre's latter day post-electro rhythms, or an algorithm-warped AI rendition of Lanark Artefax's 'Touch Absence', while 'Hyperfixate For Me' stutters barely-audible vocals beneath cracked Vladislav delayed percussion and the corrupted data throb of guitar noise and loopy synthesis.

The rest of the album plays like a Johnny Mnemonic-style braindump: the last few years of underground electronic music melted into a frayed patchwork of textures, rhythms and sonic signifiers. It comes to a head on 'I Wed My Shadow', when opera singer Marie Requa Gailey's voice just about cuts through the static like a candle in the dark, making the escape route from the techno dystopia just about visible. Moments later we're exposed to the corrosive 'Ophanim Plushie' - all jazz clatter and anodised rolls, accompanied by drones and squashed breaks that barely make it off the surface. By the time we reach the album's final track 'Threnody for the Child of Omelas', it’s all repair and recovery, twisting beatless echoes from strangled neural networks into blankets of aesthetic warmth.

Wirehead is a smart album that fits well into the deconstructed club/post-club lineage, deploying hyperkinetic sound design and a whelming flux of feelings echoing contemporary classics in its progressive field by TCF or Lee Gamble or indeed the same algo-powered artificiality as James Ferraro, or even the hyperpop set, fused with nu-metal and dembow somewhere between Arca and Oxhy.

Billy Bultheel & Alexander Iezzi aka 33’s killer debut LP of sharp cuts between hardcore rave, DIY classical chamber music, Trance arps and performance art punk - think a Duma throwdown with Diamanda Galas and yr halfway there.

Pitting Anne Imhof-collaborator Billy Bultheel in a ravenous session with Iezzi and a host of input from Naked, Dylan Kerr, Ivan Cheng, and Patrick Belaga; ’33-69’ stages an opulent complex of numerological enigmas and swarming spirits unbound from tradition. Disrupting disciplines and paradigms in each cut, they enact a ravishing rush of dancefloor drama and tormented cabaret that feels like the 1920’s rushing into the 2020’s, resulting in a time-sick and urgent avalanche of ideas from Leider or Baroque barbed in noise and hardcore rave alacrity, like a performance art piece held in the midst of Berghain or Kit Kat club’s most spangled, gloriously messy moments.

As the first C.A.N.V.A.S. release of 2022, ’33-69’ builds on the sprawling ideas and feelings outlined by Olan Monk, Lugh, Elvin Branhdi, Michael Speers and Alpha Maid since 2018 with a strident confidence that meets the new decade head-on, face-first, as it gets to grips with new cultural schisms and energies. Tearing out with the shearing digital noise and soaring elegance of Ivan Cheng’s vox on ‘369’, it prangs out between machine-gunned trance techno in ‘Fireworks’ to operatic pipe organ and string processional ‘Sexus’ starring countertenor Steve Katona (collaborator of Pan Daijing and specialist in Bach recitals), beside an extraordinary mauling of industrial and BM ritualism on ‘The knife’ featuring a feral Naked in its seat-edge first half.

The second half slips below the belt with a virulent thrust in the panel-beating techno tribalism of ‘Pigeons’, and hinges around brusque techno triplets with the cabaret keys and Italianate trance motifs of ‘Sirens’, before PAN’s cellist-composer Patrick Balaga helps pull it back from the brink in ‘Thomas The Obscure’, lending a fine temper to the crazed/reflective narrative before it launches in a full out techno assault on ‘Heaven’s blade’ and the smoky, distorted growl of ’Speed and beer’ makes perhaps the most unhinged and ultimately moving use of a brass section you’ll likely hear for time.

Stunning.

One of London’s most intriguing labels ventures a dark fantasy horror/gamer soundtrack by its co-founder, Lugh O’Neill for an experimental film of the same name by Kevin Brennan. Lugh follows a highlight of the label’s ‘Apocope’ compilation with his most enigmatic work, scored in a back and forth with director Brennan to locate some of his most curious and haunted recordings. Made to accompany the film’s part documentary, part scripted format, the music follows a storyline about real life imitating gamer life, and vice versa, outlined by the label as grappling “with the idea of virtual violence as a form of expression and identity whilst scrutinising the predominantly male ‘gamer-bro’ archetype synonymous with these online cultures.” As with ‘Apocope’ earlier in 2021, the concept does not get in the way of enjoyment of the music, acting on its own merits as a steeply absorbing suite of suggestive soundtrack and finely sculpted dark ambient music. The ‘Erangel Ost’ finds its closest aesthetic corollary in Lugh’s ‘Re Munus’ LP of 2020, but loses that LP’s more frantic aspects in favour of an extremely slow burning appeal, where scenes unfold at a glacial pace that’s hard not get sucked in by. Its 10 parts unfold thru 37 minutes, describing a fleeting play of shadow tones and transportive spatial settings. Any violence is implied and not explicit, perhaps seeping thru in the unsheathed sword scythes and keening guitar noise of ‘Crystalline Dawn’, the bellyaches of ‘Lost Boys’ and the beastly grind of ‘Moan Jiro,’ but more often reserved to the peripheries where it suggests the tension leading up to the act, and its aftermath, especially in the highlights of ‘Idle,’ the guttural lurk of ‘Forest Lure,’ and exquisite designs of ’Sentinel.’ Promo

C.A.N.V.A.S. follow aces by Olan Monk and Elvin Brandhi with Lugh O’Neill’s zinging new suite of fractiously reflective, emotive sound-scaping. Returning from a smart debut in 2018’s ‘Hélico’, Berlin-based Irish artist Lugh sharpens and expands his vernacular with strikingly amorphous and absorbing results comparable in the modern field to everyone from Zoë McPherson and J. Colleran to Arca. He draws on the chaos and rush of emotions that have fractured the world with a fine articulation of synthetic voices that speak to his “rediscovery of lived sensibility on a relational scale”, and with results approaching something like a simulacra of brain fog - multiple emotions, observations, and speculations all vying for attention at once.

Really strong, multi-layered new album from Olan Monk, released on the C.A.N.V.A.S. label/collective of which he is a co-founder and featuring vocals from Maria Somerville and James K, plus additional mixing by Xao. Highly recommended if yr into John Maus, The Normal, Actress, Eartheater, Suicide. In possession of its own unusual pace and styling, Love/Dead is a weird and brilliantly addictive gothic pop experiment that takes The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’ as its starting point and builds from there in an asymmetric formation that feeds in elements from Suicide, Nine Inch Nails and John Maus, slows it all down and spits it back out covered in heaving subs, doom metal dynamics and distorted, angular electronics.