dustedmagazine

[dustedmagazine]

Michael Hurley — Broken Homes and Gardens (No Quarter)

Michael Hurley died with his boots on, making no concessions to age or ill health. He passed away on April 1, 2025, at the age of 83. At the time, he was driving home in a hired car from appearances at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee and another show in Ashville, North Carolina, shows where he’d been noticeably frail. But despite these challenges, he was still at it, finishing Broken Homes and Gardens the month before he died. And so, this will be the last studio album from Michael Hurley, and true to form, a warm and weird and wonderful one.

Hurley reconvened much of the crew that made 2021’s Time of the Foxgloves for this album, singer Kati Claborn and stand-up bassist Luke Ydstei of The Hackles, fiddle player Halli Anderson and Nate Lumbard on bass clarinet and auxiliary percussion. Ex-Decemberist Rachel Blumberg sits in on drums and the New Zealand writer Sarah Illingworth last spotted working on a Hurley biography co-writes the song “I’ll Walk with You.” The texture of the music around Hurley, then, is homespun and relaxed, as warm and plush and fuzzy as a well-used blanket. Lumbard’s clarinet work is especially fine, swinging in with a vibrato’d swagger into the old-time-y corners of the songs.

The songs here include some older material, some newly written for this album and a few covers. Some vibrate with a ghostly blues — lovely, haunted “This” and the bent note mirage of “June Bug”—while others swagger fancifully like barroom tall tales (“Monkey”). Older songs, like “Abominable Snowman,” first recorded for 1995’s Parsnip Snips, and “Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls” from 1988’s Water Tower, sidle casually into the present moment, sounding well-loved and unbothered by the passage of time. They sit right next to newer songs like “Fava,” with its transfixing twang of guitar, its shimmery xylophone, its jokey voice demanding “How ‘bout a banana for manana?” It’s all of a colorful, free-ranging piece, wholly natural and also slightly strange. Even the covers fall into line, like “Cherry Pie,” borrowed from 1950s doo-wop artists Marvin and Johnny, but made Hurley-esque by its lush country harmonies and wheeling arcs of clarinet.

You get the sense of how long Hurley had been at it, musically, from the talking blues magic of “New Orleans ’61,” which unspools a narrative of mid-century road tripping to the south, sampling the cuisine (Chicory coffee! Rice and beans for 35 cents!) and ending up in jail. It’s a great story, a little shaggy, maybe not wholly true, but the relic of an era that Hurley lived through and most of us did not. We’re all a little poorer now that his memories and his music are gone.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Prolapse — I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face (Tapete)

Photo by Markus Čolić

There’s a certain anxiety involved as a listener when a beloved act not only reunites but actually puts out new music. That feeling is maybe even more keen when it’s an act like Leicester’s Prolapse, one that made several cultishly-adored records but never broke big, that never really switched up their members (only going from six to seven strong when Donald Ross Skinner produced the shoulda-been-epochal The Italian Flag then just up and joined the band), that was known and loved for raucous, energetic live shows (especially the interactions of sometimes-more-literally dueling vocalists Linda Steelyard and “Scottish” Mick Derrick), one that never fell off but that did call time in a pretty definitive way after 1999’s Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes. There never seemed to be any bad blood, so it wasn’t shocking when they started playing live again in 2015. But a decade later, 25 years since their last new material, a whole LP? Would the magic be back?

It’s such a blessed relief that I Wonder When They’re Going to Destroy Your Face is not just extremely good, but that it is so in the way that Prolapse has always been great. Steelyard and Derrick are in classic form, singing over and against and with and to each other, interweaving and contrasting narratives. On the uncharacteristically subdued “Ghost in the Chair” they conduct a seance that doubles as a disquieting examination of senile dementia; over the monolithic edifice the rest of the band constructs for “Err on the Side of Dead” each give performances compelling enough to carry the song on their own, but we get both (always one of the great joys of listening to Prolapse). And each still has their indelible moments of sloganeering, whether it’s Steelyard whisper-hissing “I’m a celebrity!” amid guitar switchbacks on “Cha Cha Cha 2000” or Derrick repeatedly howling “Three minutes to Cleveland!” over the chaotic thrash of “Jackdaw.” Meanwhile the rest of the band (Skinner, David Jeffreys, and Pat Marsden on guitars, Mick Harrison on bass and Tim Pattison on drums) churn and roil and pulse as ferociously as they ever have, whipping up tumultuous storms throughout. ‘Comeback’ single “On the Quarter Days” alone served as potent reassurance that the time away hadn’t seen them lose even a step.

If anything, this record might have benefitted from a delayed/repeated instance of the phenomenon that causes so many bands to have a sophomore slump when they’re starting out, where you have forever to create your first album and then much less time to make your second. Not that Prolapse have necessarily been working on these songs for a quarter of a century, but the LP clearly plays like they weren’t feeling any time pressure, instead getting to a place where all the material is top tier. The result is one of the most immediately engaging records from a band who’s never made a bad one (and it comes in at a tidy 44 minutes and change, to boot). There are nods to the past (the surging “Cacophony No. C” is, in title at least, a sequel to a track from The Italian Flag), but if those four LPs didn’t exist and I Wonder When They’re Going to Destroy Your Face was just the first effort of a new act, it’d be one of the debuts of the year. In this world, it’s ‘merely’ Prolapse sounding and feeling exactly like Prolapse, and what a wonder that is.

Ian Mathers

[dustedmagazine]

Listening Post: Ghosted

Ghosted — the trio of guitarist Oren Ambarchi, bass player Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin — came together just after COVID restrictions loosened, as a way for the Berlin-based musicians to explore rhythm and extended, repeating improvisation together live in a room.

Ambarchi has strong roots in free jazz, beginning as a very young drummer in his native Australia and traveling to New York City during the loft jazz years of the 1970s. However by the early 2020s, he was mostly focusing on layered, remotely collaborated studio recordings, where different artists would make tracks often without hearing the rest, then Ambarchi would piece them together.

Ghosted was an entirely different beast, bringing together musicians that had played together, off and on, for decades in a studio in Scandinavia. There, they just let things flow, making intricate, unfussed over music that reflected both the moment and a lifetime of play.  I was struck by debut’s fluidity and grace, writing, “Its mosaic-like repetition of small, radiant motifs — with Ambarchi mostly but others also slipping periodically outside the lines — makes this music seem to move restlessly while also remaining fundamentally in place. Time and timelessness co-exist in its rigorous but joyful grooves.”

Two years later, another Ghosted appeared, this time catching Tim Clarke’s attention. He wrote, “Although Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin play guitar, bass and drums respectively, their music is far from that of the standard rock power trio. Instead, they cleave closer to the meditative, exploratory grooves of The Necks, laying down intricately detailed and gradually evolving parts, with each piece stretching to around the 10-minute mark.”

And now, we arrive at Ghosted III, to my ears the loveliest of all these records, with its bounding bass and complicated drums and prickly but lyrical bursts of guitar, a music that drones and dreams like kosmiche music, but also swings.

Intro by Jennifer Kelly

Jennifer Kelly: I just love “Chahar” because of the way it sort of lives and breathes within the bounds of repetition. It explores the same motif over and over, but always feels like it’s growing and exploring within that context. What are you guys liking and/or hearing here? 

Tim Clarke: I find Ambarchi's approach to the guitar on "Chahar" to be very busy and distracting. He's obviously employed pitch-shifting and looping, so the accumulating mass of skittering, trebly guitar notes makes my brain itch! This approach feels a lot more successful on the opening track, "Yek," where Ambarchi see-saws between high, shimmering harmonics and lower, plaintive arpeggios. I also love the chorused guitar work on closing track, "Shesh." On the slower tracks, such as "Seh," where Ambarchi takes a back seat and plays more of a textural role, you can hear how much wonderful interplay there is between Berthling's bass and Werliin's drums. 

Jennifer Kelly: To me, it's all about variation within the structure, and I'm not hearing what you're hearing in "Chahar," but you're a guitar player and so, undoubtedly listen differently.

That said, I like "Yek" a lot, and I think what I like most about Ghosted is rhythm, because they kind of lose me on the more diffuse tracks like "Do" and "Seh."  

Ian Mathers: I'm glad the introduction here mentions the Necks, because the track that most struck me on first listen here, "Panj," is also the one that most reminds me of that other trio. Something about Berthling's bassline maybe, or an element that occasionally shows up that reminds me of an organ. I'm not sure if that one counts as more defuse, but I do also really like the brighter, more active tracks like "Yeh" and "Chahar" (the latter again with an element that sounds kind of like an organ or other keyboard instrument to me!), which also kind of remind me of the highlife-influenced couple of albums Brian Eno and Karl Hyde made together (moreso than actual highlife). I do find the kind of beautifully post-rock-y "Shesh" maybe the most appealing overall. But given my previous investigations into Ambarchi's non-Sun O))) work have left me feeling admiration but little visceral desire to go back to them, I'm mostly just impressed at how much I like this trio record so far. As someone who never gave more than a cursory listen to a track or two from the previous two Ghosted LPs, I'm wondering if people who liked them can talk a bit about what's changed (if anything) here?

Bill Meyer: Pardon me for both-siding a bit here, but I am with Tim so far as “Chahar" is very busy — for Ghosted. Ambarchi stacks a lot of event into his playing, and I hear frequent, if subtle, responses to what he’s doing from the others. But, like Jen, I like it a lot, partly because it departs pretty decisively from the austerity of the trio’s first album. 

The track names, by the way, seem to be numbers, as on the first two Ghosted albums. But where the first album expressed the titles in Roman numerals and the second by spelling out the numbers in Swedish, this one makes you work. “Chahar,” for example, is the surname for a couple of Indian cricketers, or a tribe of Mongols, or the four quadrants of the world expressed in Persian gardens. 

Responding to Ian, I’d say that over all, this album is more ornate than previous Ghosted albums. I think he starting point of this music was to set up a rhythm and have one person introduce variation while the other two held firm. 

Berthling’s tone on “Panj” (which means “hive” in Slovenian and refers to the number five پنج in Persian) does sound like Lloyd Swanton’s in The Necks. The moments where Werliin plants brief cymbal and triangle accents into the prevailing drumming pattern are a little like Tony Buck, but I feel like Buck usually has more happening inside his sustained rhythms.

Tim Clarke: Further to Bill's comment, I'd say Ambarchi's guitar is much more recognizable as a guitar here compared to previous records. He still likes to feed his signal through a rotary speaker at times, though, which creates that characteristic swirling tone. 

Bill Meyer: I saw Ghosted play in Berlin, and the Leslie cabinet is still part of his signal chain. I can’t imagine him without it at this point. He sits with his guitar on his lap behind a full table of effects. His playing on III is actually remarkably guitar-like for him.

Tim Clarke: I imagine hearing this music live and loud would be immersive and hypnotic.

Jennifer Kelly: I found this live video, which really foregrounds the percussion. 

Bryon Hayes: I really enjoy how Ambarchi’s guitar sound is more guitar-like than on past Ghosted outings, particularly on “Yek,” where he switches from staccato harmonics to more reverberant tones and back again.

I don’t recall Berthling’s bass being as out front and melodic as it is on “Seh.” I’ve been returning to this piece over and over again for its hypnotic quality.  Not hypnotic in its repetition and subtle shifts therein (like on other Ghosted tracks), but for the snake-like bass melody and its full tone laid over a bed of billowy drones.  It gives me goosebumps.

Bill Meyer: I saw them in Berlin in Autumn 2023, playing Ghosted II material. It was immersive and hypnotic, and the louder the music gets, the more the moments of change stand out. 

Ian Mathers: Yeah, I do like the guitar here (and am interested in the comments around how different Ambarchi's playing is here than the previous records), but honestly the bass is kind of the star of the show for me. Might just be the mood I'm in, though; I recently finally played a Long Fin Killie record for the first time (1997's Amelia) and there's a lot going on there too but again I found myself focusing on the bass on most tracks.

Bill Meyer: Berthling anchors this band. 

Jennifer Kelly: The first time through, i was like, ooh, Bill (my husband, bass player and enthusiast) will like this. The bass is indeed very nice.

[dustedmagazine]

R.J.F. — Cleaning Out the Empty Administration Building (Dais)

R.J.F. stands for Ross J. Farrar, who is best known as the front man for Ceremony, the shape shifting punk band from northern California that has, over six albums mutated from hardcore to garage punk to synthy post-punk. But whatever you know about Ceremony has almost no bearing on this haunted, minimalist solo album, which floats eerie phrases over loose-jointed, low-slung concoctions of bass, guitar and beats.

This is Farrar’s third solo full-length, following 2023’s Going Strange and 2024’s Strange Going, and while still somewhat free-associative, it seems a good deal more clear and focused than the first two outings. In the interim between Strange Going and this album, Farrar made a one-track, 26 minute collaboration called Virgos in the Grace with the harpist Mary Lattimore which is fascinating — you don’t get that many bedroom noise harp records — but seems to stand on its own. In any case, while you won’t mistake the cuts on Clearing Out the Empty Administration building for anything like traditionally structured songwriter pop, they’re closer to songs than anything previous, while still resembling an especially vivid fever dream.

Take, for instance, “Ovidian,” with its clanging bells and ominous rumble of low-timbred guitar. Farrar intones his words with a slight tonal lilt, not really singing, more like executing an obscure ritual, as he considers Ovid’s Metamorphosis, reflected in the continual change around us. “The miraculous time it takes to grow, to reject the glamour of evil, our rejection was versions of love, in ground we become whole again,” he murmurs, then the phrase, “It’s Ovidian,” again and again, echoing in an uncanny valley of clanking percussion and slack stringed strumming.

There are some divergences from the basic sound, the synthy, burble of electronics doodle “Gravity Hill,” the propulsively drummed “Traveling Light from Afar,” which might have escaped somehow from a Ceremony album. Still the most compelling cuts share a palette of lurid lighting and indistinct dread. Everyday objects take on strange, symbolic shape in these songs. The memory of a strawberry’s taste lingers long past the summer. There’s a sense of aftermath, of post-mortem, in these songs, a lingering nostalgia for the life that’s past and passing all the time.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

LVTHN — The Devil’s Bridge (Amor Fati)

Photo by by Void Revelations

If the public is to be believed, vast numbers of people come to music as a means of escape from everyday life’s pressures and demands. It’s a mode of transport, a ticket to ride to an elsewhere of pleasure and consolation. Crossing the titular “bridge” into the music on this new LP from LVTHN won’t lift you into any sublime atmospheres, blithely removed from struggle and strife. Quite the opposite: the Belgian band plays a kind of black metal well fitted to the textures and intensities of walking around the post-industrial West in 2025. Filthy, excoriating, ill intended — the music on The Devil’s Bridge is thrilling and unpleasant in equal measure. It’s not an easily consumable bit of contemporary content. But indirectly, The Devil’s Bridge raises some interesting questions, among them: In the face of so much evil, how should art respond?

If the dudes (mostly, not exclusively, but mostly) who make trve kvlt black metal are to be believed, self-regarding contempt for popular public standards of pleasurable art is as compulsory as knowing how to work a tremolo chord. The most irritating of those dudes profess membership in an “aristocracy” (an unhappy word some black metal bands and listeners have fixed upon) of putatively “elevated” knowledge and sensibility, and the humans around them who linger in various forms of ignorance or cultural peasanthood deserve their fates. Whatever.

LVTHN may not share those reactionary attitudes, but it should be noted that the first two tracks on The Devil’s Bridge constitute a song suite, “A Malignant Encounter,” subsections of which are titled “The Servant” and “The Master.” This reviewer would like to associate the titular “malignancy” with the exploitative politics implied by those social roles — but who knows. It could be another conventional (and sort of exhausted) revisiting of fealty to Satan. For sure, principal influences on LVTHN’s sound are or were deeply traditional in their attachment to continental and Scandi Satanic black metal: Katharsis, Craft and Aosoth loom large in LVTHN’s tones and rhythms.

Aesthetically that’s good news (and additionally it’s hard to summon a more righteous trajectory through black metal and work in the social world than the one executed by Katharsis’s Drakh, AKA Dr Axel Salkheiser, a researcher at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena). The best songs on The Devil’s Bridge, “Sum Quod Eris” and “Grim Vengeance,” are muscular and direct, more raw and dirty than angular or icy. The degree of Satanic fanaticism informing the ostensible cruelty, and the precise ways that Satanism might issue in a more worldly politics, wending its way toward us through the songs — these things are unclear. The Devil’s Bridge comprises 44 minutes of compelling black metal, but it’s hard to say where it’s going. Perhaps in this sense, more than any other, that makes it hard music for hard times. Welcome to them.

Jonathan Shaw

[dustedmagazine]

Street Eaters — Opaque (Dirt Cult)

Street Eaters is back with a drum-pummeling, punk shouting EP, the duo of Megan March (kit) and John No (bass) augmented for Opaque with a guitar player, one Joan Toledo, who used to edit Maximum Rocknroll. Singing drummer bands have a certain brute force generally, and March’s outfit is no exception. She shouts and rants and puts forth anthemic melodies while hitting the skins with whole body momentum.

This seven-song release hitches body-shocking energy to swaggering tunes, starting strong with “Tempers.” This opening cut begins in a group sung chant of “Wait and wait it takes too long,” then erupts in blistering riffery. The songs on this EP were inspired, we’re told, by the birth of March’s first child, and yeah, those uncomfortable weeks from about 36 on can stretch to eternity. But in any case, the song is uncompromised by the impatience it chronicles; it punches and wallops and keens right up to the end, filling the space with unrelenting energy until it’s done.

Street Eaters are situated right at the fulcrum where melodic punk turns to hard core, its thundering instrumentals hitched to singable tunes. The double-drumming, bass-thumping thud under “No Excuse” (“Not an excuse but it’s a reason”) is especially fine, hurtling forward like a rollercoaster on the downhill slide. The band reminds me more of The Xetas than anybody else in its howling, female-forward aggression, but you could make connections to outfits like Screaming Females and Amyl & the Sniffers as well.

“Spectres,” an early single, is a fairly dramatic change of pace. March sings far more fluidly than anywhere else on the disc, putting an almost torch-like, power-ballad-y vibe on the tune, as it hurtles from hook to hook. It’s not soft, exactly, just less shouty, and in any case, still bludgeoned by drumming, ripped by guitar, pummeled by bass. Even at their most tuneful, Street Eaters take no prisoners.  

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Cass McCombs — Interior Live Oak (Domino)

Photo by Rachel Pony Cassells

Can Cass McCombs be trusted? On “I Never Dream About Trains,” one of the many highlights from his new album, Interior Live Oak, he sings, “I never lie in my songs.” I, for one, don’t believe him. As a songwriter, McCombs has long walked the line between earnest, heartfelt songcraft and playful, throwaway nonsense. At 16 songs over 74 minutes, Interior Live Oak is surprisingly low on filler for an artist who seems to take mischievous glee in tripping up listeners.

Let’s get the negative stuff out of the way first. I never want to hear the silly, organ-driven stomper “Juveniles” again (“Everything sucks!”), and will gladly skip it on every listen. “Miss Mabee” sounds like a dirtied-up reworking of the far-superior “Peace.” “A Girl Named Dogie” has a ridiculous yodeling section at the end. On the otherwise decent “Ven Wyck Expressway,” the drums are inexplicably flanged. And the closing title track is a throwaway lo-fi blues rocker in the vein of “Ballroom Blitz.” But that’s a small proportion of the album’s run-time.

As far as the rest of the album is concerned, there are some absolutely wonderful songs here. “Priestess” is a smooth, groovy opener with an addictive strut. “Peace” has an indelible lead guitar melody, plus a rhythm track that masterfully builds and releases tension through swells of crash cymbal over its tight, shuffling beat. ”Missionary Bell” is the first of several winning slower songs, which has a lovely, gentle lilt, plus McCombs’ characteristically nuanced guitar playing. “Home At Last” has a similarly wistful feel, and “I’m Not Ashamed” and “Strawberry Moon” are gorgeous, blue-eyed soul. Though it doesn’t quite justify its six-minute run-time, the curiously named “Who Removed the Cellar Door?” is brooding and organ-driven, akin to The Doors. And at the album’s heart is “Asphodel,” one of the few upbeat tracks that really hits home.

All this amounts to Interior Live Oak qualifying as McCombs’ strongest album since 2013’s double, Big Wheel and Others. It goes to show that given free rein, McCombs can come up with a batch of truly memorable songs. He just needs to get better at self-editing his low points.

Tim Clarke

[dustedmagazine]

Gwenifer Raymond — Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark (We Are Busy Bodies)

Gwenifer Raymond explores shadowy, nocturnal guitar tones in this third album, following primitive licks into sci-fi futurism. Her songs alternate between folk-blues rambles and psychedelic raga. In either mode, she sounds more like Jack Rose than anyone else working now — and that’s a very good thing.

The Welsh guitarist hammers at her instrument, unleashing a percussive rain of notes that fray and change as they linger. She plays fast and hard and with assurance, whether in the blue-grassy “Cattywomp” or the mystic drone of “Jack Parsons Blues.” And then, just for the beauty of it, she dips into languid lyricism for “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds,” letting the notes drip like warm honey, catching the light as they go.

Though it’s always hard to tie instrumental music to narrative subjects, Raymond says that she wrote this material while immersed in science fiction, older classics by Phillip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury, as well as pulpy paperbacks she picked up cheap in flea markets. That doesn’t filter into the music itself — I’m not hearing anything technological here—but rather opened her up to the idea of infinity, which runs through drones like “Banjo Players of Aleph One” and “One Day You’ll Lie Here but Everything Will Have Changed,” with its lovely, ghostly arcs of slide.

The title track comes very late in the album, and, in some ways encapsulates Raymond’s project of linking very old music to a surreal future. It’s steeped in blues, this track, with its tremulous lines of melody and its twangs that stretch like rubber bands. And yet it also spirals up and out of the confines of the genre, in a whirlwind of notes and ideas that blows the dust away and vaults towards the sky.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Vanessa Rossetto — Pictures of the Warm South (Erstwhile)

“Anyone can be an artist,” croaks the voice of an old woman whose English accent sounds like it’s been ground down by time. She goes on to recount the simplicity of art; you draw something, and someone else likes it and they buy it. Woven into this discussion is another, with a sound quality that suggests it was taken from a pre-digital age film, in which a man’s voice ponders suicide. The first voice is Vannessa Rossetto’s late mother, and one might suppose that the second narrator is a stand-in for Rossetto, since the next track commences with mom reacting with dismay to the artist’s disconsolate tears. “What are you crying for? You need to see a doctor and get some therapy.” The voices give way to vigorous splashing, turning wince-inducing pathos into even more painful grim humor. The waterworks turn into a cascade and saltwater pumps up the racket. An announcer reports on the water moving system of Rossetto’s old home town, New Orleans, only to get stuck in a pummeling loop of the words “Salt Water,” which in turn yields to a later moment in the exchange between Rossetto’s laments and her mum’s prescriptions.

Rossetto works mostly with field recordings, some diaristic, others touristic, and nearly all of them in some way human-made. She carefully pares them down and builds them back up to achieve vivid effects. Some of her past work have stuck to the purely sonic, but on the just-described “pool water, salt water, and the water in your head,” the impact is harrowingly emotional. Over the course of two compact discs, this album invites the listener to feel the mutual frustration of an older parent and adult child who are deeply connected but seem to find each other incomprehensible and, at times, intolerable. The density of the sounds wax and wane, and while the sequencing is not overtly narrative, a story nonetheless emerges as the action cycles between lucidity and overstimulation.  Microphone bumps declare Rossetto’s presence, trying to glean understanding by collecting sound. Old movie soundtracks churn and loom, representations of someone’s past that have soaked into someone else’s life. Vocal loops underscore obsessive thoughts, bingo callers angle for your dopamine, and TV and radio chatter blithely contradict the events they accompany. The word “album” predates the advent of recorded sound by centuries, and the title Pictures Of The Warm South takes you back to an earlier meaning — of a blank book in which mementoes are collected.

Bill Meyer

[dustedmagazine]

Various Artists— I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina (Run for Cover)

Photo by Steve Gullick

It’s been more than a decade since Jason Molina died at the age of 39, leaving behind a powerful legacy of stark, emotionally resonant music that made much of an earnest voice, a heart-torn story and the barest accoutrements of alt.country-into-blues-rock sound. First as Songs:Ohia and later as Magnolia Electric Company, Molina made a series of slow-burning, desolate classics, including the landmark Didn’t It Rain from 2002.

Lucas Schleicher reviewed the 2014 reissue of this disc very movingly at Dusted, writing, “The rest depends on Molina’s commanding voice and his lyrics, which swim in an ambiguous play of shadow and light. The spaces between the notes and the black quiet that laps against each strummed chord play as large a role in setting the mood as the words to the song, and the sparse accompaniment emphasizes what isn’t present as much as it calls attention to itself. At times, Molina’s voice seems to be the only thing in the room, every one of his phrases swinging over the edge of nothing.”

That review makes it clear that much of the power of Molina’s music came from the man himself, the voice, the guitar, the guttering despair, the glimmer of solace in connection with other human beings. And yet, not all of it, as this collection of covers demonstrates. His songs do very well in other hands.

Take for instance, the opening cut, MJ Lenderman’s cover of “Just Be Simple” from the final Songs:Ohia album Magnolia Electric Co from 2003. Lenderman has the same sort self-revealing timbre as Molina, the same tenor warped to creakiness by feeling, and he delivers the song straightforwardly, amidst a whirl of pedal steel, electric guitar and drums, a touch of harmony at the chorus. He’s not Molina—no one is—but he gets at something primal in the final set of lines: “I ain’t looking for an easy way out, this whole life has been about, try and try and try, try and try and try to be simple again.”

The Lenderman cut is straight twangy songwriter material, but Horsejumper of Love takes on the sprawling electric guitar blues of “Blue Factory Flame” from Didn’t It Rain. Their version, like Molina’s, goes on for a while, swelling and rippling and subsiding in dissolution, the guitar going off like a tracer rocket, while the mournful melody drifts and eddies. “Dark Don’t Hide It,” from the 2005 Magnolia Electric Company album, What Comes After the Blues, is another slow, electric rocker in its original version, a Crazy Horse-ish fever dream of distortion and clangor, that here, in Trace Mountain’s version reels in pedal-steel country reverie, its melody draped in shape-bending twang.  And Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy captures the banked-fire intensity of “Lioness,” a long, spare meditation on difficult love.

None of Molina’s songs gets an extreme makeover here, and, indeed, one or two wild cards might make the whole collection more interesting. However, it’s telling that so many young, vibrant acts honor the material enough to deliver it straight. Molina may be gone, he may be missed, but he is not forgotten.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Happy Labo(u)r Day from all of us at Dusted; we hope work is not bothering you today, and we will be back as normal tomorrow.

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Georgiy Potopalskiy/Ujif_notfound

Kyiv-based Georgiy Potopalskiy is the creative vision and driving force behind Ujif_notfound — a multimedia systems project exploring the algorithms of the kinetic relationship between man and program. A consummate artist whose creative portfolio spans electronic music, media art, and visual arts, Potopalskiy/Ujif_notfound is widely known in his native Ukraine. He has exhibited works at the invitation of major Ukrainian institutions, including the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Mystetskyi Arsenal, and CSM/Foundation Center for Contemporary Art.

In 2025, he released his latest album, Postulate which was reviewed by Dusted Magazine. In his review of the album, Evan Mitchell Schares describes the release as “a living, musical history documenting the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.” Here, in this Listed, Potopalskiy/Ujif_notfound shares with us a list of things that influenced him.

Pirated VHS Tapes

The first thing that truly struck me in childhood was the sound of pirated VHS tapes. In the 1990s, we watched films with underground voiceovers — a single guy, sitting in his room, layering his voice over the original soundtrack. And there was this strange sonic effect: when the dialogue in the movie went quiet, the room noise around the voice actor would rise, growing louder and louder until it drowned out the film itself.

That noise was oddly multidimensional — the mechanical hum of the VCR adding its own distortions — a strange, raw texture unlike anything else I’d ever heard. And then, the moment someone spoke in the film and the voice actor jumped back in, that noise would cut off abruptly, like being doused with a sudden splash of cold water. A jarring return to reality — or maybe an escape from it.

Twin Peaks

I believe that people of my generation are divided into two groups: those who watched Twin Peaks and… the “normal” ones. And those who saw it as kids had their consciousness changed forever.

I was seven. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and finally, something other than the dull, party-approved lies started appearing on TV. And then *this* appeared. Every week, our whole family would gather around the screen: Laura’s body, the floor painted with zigzags, the red curtains, the woman with the log, and Bob rising from behind the chair.

Who was I after that?

Radiohead — “Climbing Up the Walls”

Returning to history with the voice on VHS, I felt a similar emotion listening to Radiohead’s Climbing Up the Walls. There’s that moment when the distortion on the voice slowly fades, and it suddenly feels like the voice is right next to you—whispering into your ear. Try to find this moment. It’s chilling, as if you’re being pulled from something otherworldly back into reality.

And overall, I still think this track is one of their most brilliantly crafted pieces—one of my favorites to this day.

Hermann Hesse — The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game left a profound impression on me when I was 18. I’m pretty sure I interpreted the novel differently from what the author intended. For me, it was a kind of game that tied everything together — the entire history of humanity — and at the same time, a subtle mockery of how we perceive human happiness. This resonated deeply within me when I started experimenting with patches in Max / MSP. Many of my projects are rooted in the interpretation and fusion of things that might seem incompatible at first glance. It’s a game I’ve been playing for many years.

Korn — “My Gift to You”

This still has the most genius guitar riff, vocals, and drums for me. It is one of their most avant-garde experiments, blurring the line between metal, industrial, and sound design. Built around an almost one-note minimal riff, the track creates a hypnotic, oppressive atmosphere where texture and dynamics matter more than melody. Its layers of noise, mechanical rhythms, and warped vocal effects feel closer to industrial music or dark electronic music.

Pan Sonic — Vakio

Back then, I discovered the world of minimalism and artifactual sound. Listening to this album, I was convinced the world was a matrix — long before the movie came out or I’d read any of the books.

UbuWeb

Since discovering UbuWeb, I’ve immersed myself in a world that changed me and shaped the person I am today. Of course, I was already familiar with many of the artists in the archive, but the moment I discovered UbuWeb marked the beginning of a more systematic exploration and study. Robert Ashley, Mauricio Kagel, John Cage, Ligeti, Nono, Pärt, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Riley…and many many more.

Valerian Pidmohylnyi — Misto (The City)

The novel Misto (The City) by Valerian Pidmohylnyi became significant for me because it revealed the beauty of the Ukrainian language and Kyiv, while telling the tragic story of the destruction of Ukrainian culture by Soviet rule. But no — not by the government itself, rather by the people enforcing it. Because it’s not the authorities that wage wars, commit genocide, and destroy cities, killing civilians — it is people who do these things.

Detali Zvuku Festival

The Detali Zvuku festival was an international festival for experimental electronic music held in Kiev. In the early 2000s, it left the brightest mark on me and set the course for my future path. I dreamed that one day I’d take part in it as an artist. And I did — but by then, it was already a different festival.

Autechre — plyPhon

I guess I can’t avoid mentioning Autechre, as this duo has been with me for more than 25 years and is deeply tied to my fascination with audiovisual art and algorithms. For me, Autechre is inseparably linked to Max / MSP, which has become my main tool for creating music, visuals, and installations. They are a perfect example of how a cold, mathematical, algorithmic electronic language can gain emotion and dramaturgy, transforming into something truly alive — into real music.

[dustedmagazine]

Brown Lemon — Live from Jam Jail (Mon Own)

Brown Lemon makes eerie, pulse-accelerating sex music for robots. Blatty beats bounce on trampolines, trebly denatured vocals float by like spirits, a sax drifts in, seething with sensual violence. You can make connections to Suicide’s urbane menace, or Hot Chip’s austere dance grooves, the whip crack funk of LCD Soundsystem. This is strobe-flashing hedonism chilled to near zero, popping and locking to an abstract approximation of club beats.

Not much has been shared about this duo’s origins, past associations or intent; the bandcamp page has two sentences of descriptive copy. We know that Brown Lemon is not a commentary on poorly stored citrus but rather, improbably, an eponym for Casey Brown and Will Lemon. We can also gather that they make their music live and on the fly. Obviously, they use synthetic instruments, but no laptops, software or samples. They recorded this album in one take. We imagine them emerging into the world afterwards, blinking, disoriented, the thump still echoing in their ears.

As a whole, it fluctuates imperceptibly between trance-y wonder and body-moving decadence; it’s hard to see where the seams between them are. For instance, there’s a dub-stepp-y ghost fluttering through pounding, pulsing “God’s Dogs.” Think Burial wandering through the spirit world but also made to boogie. The vocals, when they come, however, are forceful, visceral, more like Mark Stewart’s Pop Group rants than anything else. And the beat judders and double-bumps, vibrating with energy, just barely kept in check.

“Shattered” juxtaposes runs of synthetic, tone-altered percussion with the rough magic of saxophone. One of the two principals—Brown or Lemon, not sure—speaks slowly and without intonation over the uncanny beat, mouthing words like, “There as a boy, and you were shattered, you touched the void that night, and then scattered.” It’s this one that sounds most like Suicide, possibly because of the saxophone, possibly because of the palpable sense of disco-syncopated doom. It’s a riveting track.

So, too, is “Blue Light” with its sharp-edged reverberating four-beat, its murmuring imprecations, its light-refracting traceries of electronic sound, its squalling saxophone right near the end. It’s minimal and full of mystery, a space as blue-lit and inscrutable as its title. And maybe mystery is an essential element here. The fact that we know nothing about Brown Lemon — aside from this music — is a feature not a bug. We take it as given, compulsive and otherworldly, and that’s enough.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Sun City Girls — Famous Asthma / Tibetan Jazz 666 (Three Lobed)

There are times, listening to Richard Bishop do his thing with Sun City Girls, when this reviewer thinks, “Everyone else can stop playing their guitars now.” A few of those moments occur at points during the 92 minutes of music included on Three Lobed’s reissue of tracks from two of the Sun City Girls’ late-1980s Cloaven Cassettes: Famous Asthma (1987) and Tibetan Jazz 666 (1988). For listeners not tuned in to the vagaries of the Sun City Girls’ prolific output, the Cloaven Cassettes were self-released tapes, often composed of performances of the band at its loosest and weirdest, and the Sun City Girls could get very, very weird. Most of what you’ll hear on this reissue is the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher in improvisation, working a blend of mutant jazz, goofball noise and sonic psycho-drama. It’s not for everyone, but for longtime visitors to Sun City, it’s well worth the trip.

These two Cloaven Cassettes appeared in the period between Horse Cock Phepner (1987), Sun City Girls’ ecstatically obscene last release on Placebo (the brief-lived, Arizona-centric, punk-adjacent label that issued the Girls’ first three LPs, music by JFA, Mighty Sphincter, and the Zany Guys and the nigh-legendary Dry Lungs compilations) and Torch of the Mystics (1990), a record notable for its relatively straightforward songs and melodic pleasures. On Famous Asthma and Tibetan Jazz 666, Sun City Girls are anarchically free of conventional notions of structure and of thematic focus — though they can’t entirely help themselves: the first two long-form improvs on Famous Asthma are titled “Voice of Leaves” and “Tone of Bark.”

The interplay of synonym and pun in those titles typifies some of the problems with and joys of listening to Sun City Girls: is the music serious, avant-garde and transgressive, or is it a species of joke, and taking it seriously just sets you up to be one of the punchlines? The playing on “El Mahdi,” an improvisation from April of 1988, demonstrates that Sun City Girls’ understandings of transgression and joke are intimately related. Mahdi is an eschatological figure in Islam, prophesied to emerge in the end times to deliver humanity (or at least the believers) to justice. So what can one make of the Sun City Girls appending the term and concept to a 25-minute free jazz freakout? How should one respond to Alan Bishop’s mimicry of the Islamic call to prayer, about 16 minutes in?

Don’t spend too much time fretting over those questions. You’ll miss the slightly more song-like playing of “(Sic) Six Sicks” and the ominous, noir-adjacent atmospherics of “Cocktail Jesuit.” It was always more the Girls’ style to open spaces of sonic anxiety and violence, rather than resolving them with the structure of a bridge or the catharsis of a refrain. Those spaces are still open, nearly 40 years after the trio’s incisive musicianship and chaotic creativity initially sliced into the air, and into sound, and culture. And here we sit, still waiting on Mahdi, or technofeudalism, or some sudden, demonic conflagration to deliver us to the end our species seems increasingly to deserve.

Jonathan Shaw

[dustedmagazine]

Walnut Brain — Weird Wire (Petty Bunco)

Weird Wire, for sure. This Philadelphia noise-improv duo taps the jangling half-percussive, half-melodic properties of metallic string in a series of collaborations that sound like blues from outer space. In this configuration, Steve Heise plucks and bangs and strums on a conventional electric guitar, while his partner Alina Josan plays a one-stringed diddley bow, an elemental instrument, easy to make out of scrap wood and string, that was crucial to American blues, a precursor to the banjo and likely an import from Africa.

The sounds that Heise and Josan make, however, are far removed from the Delta tradition, consisting largely of staccato banging on strings, a rain of notes from both instruments that morphs and changes in the air, finding strange harmonies, dissonances and complementarities on the fly. Rhythm is a big part of the sound, bigger, I think, than tunefulness, although cuts like “Locust 1” find a dirge-like groove amid the clangor.  In a few cuts, notably “Cabin 5,” a slurry, growly fluidity emerges from bowed, rather than struck, notes. The diddley bow sounds like a feral cello here, rough and full of raspy drama.

The cuts are named after, perhaps, the rooms where they were recorded. There are five “Cabin” tracks, a “Kitchen” and a “Basement” (and then three “Locust” tracks at the end). Several of the cuts are quite short, however, when the duo has a longer time to stretch out, the results are magical. “Cabin 4” is maybe the best track of the bunch, its eerie slides and scratchy cadences coalescing in shimmering, fog-bound mystery.  “Locust 3,” the final piece on the album, flies squeaky, trebly, off-kilter guitar figures over the steady thrum of diddley bow. It’s aggressive, almost violent in execution — both players go really hard at the strings of their instruments — and yet conjures an aura of calm.  If you like guitar experimenters like 75 Dollar Bill and Tom Carter, you will want to check this out.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Mondo Lava — Utero Dei (Hausu Mountain)

After moving to Pamplona, James Ketchum was inspired by the fantasy of a musical pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James) playing songs on the organs of the Churches along the route. Those plans never eventuated, but the idea stuck.  It’s one of the many strands in the new album from Ketchum and his musical partner Leon Hu.

As Mondo Lava the pair use old Casios, live percussion and range of acoustic and digital instruments to create a febrile mix of tropicalia, free jazz, doo-wop and psycho-boogie. Edited directly to tape, shrouded in layers of fuzz and hiss, Utero Dei is a suite of evocatively titled tracks that juxtapose tone, fidelity, instrumentation and tempo underpinned by those imagined organs which run the gamut from stately Church calm to garage wig-outs. The great joy of all this is how Mondo Lava incorporate snippets of the familiar as path markers through the logic of their dreams and memory, messing with the signal to noise ratio to detune and retune the listener’s ear.

It begins sedately enough. The hiss of the title track fades into the familiar strains of the Church organ welcoming the congregation before breaking into handclaps and a midi doo-wop acapella. From there it’s a fairground trolley ride through nuggets era garage rock, Moog noodles, samba jazz heard through a curtain of kudzu, Sky inspired Bach-analia and distorted ham-radio komische jamming. And that’s just the first disc.

A moment of surprising clarity comes as “Rattlesnake-Belt Boogie” opens like a combination of George Michael’s “Faith” mashed with “Sympathy for the Devil” before developing into a steel string boogie. That segues into the subterranean churn of “Decalcified Pineal Gland”. Pitched somewhere between Motorhead, Neu! and lo-fi techno, the panning and pitch shifts take you from in the room to down a mineshaft and back, switching between bass tone clarity and compressed noise, whilst deep in the mix there’s a demented keyboard jam gasping for attention. Magnificent noisy fun. Mondo Lava finish in a Church of an entirely different color on the barrel house romp of “Holy Rollers”. A piano vamp to the fore, layers of peeling plaster falling about a saxophone holler ever on verge of being swallowed by cacophony.

75 minutes over two discs seems a lot but Mondo Lava never lose focus and pack so many ideas and odd turns into Uteri Dei that the time passes like a dream from which you emerge fully galvanized if slightly disoriented.

Andrew Forell

[dustedmagazine]

Water From Your Eyes — It’s A Beautiful Place (Matador)

On It’s a Beautiful Place, experimental popsters Water from your Eyes deliver a short yet rambling record that, despite lasting under half an hour, overstays its welcome. Their newest album lacks the pop hooks and post-punkish charm of their earlier work and instead relies on meandering instrumentals. It’s a step backwards for them after their breakthrough with 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed.

Despite both its limited run time and having just ten tracks, It’s A Beautiful Place feels padded out. To wit: it has four instrumental musical vignettes lasting about a minute each which don’t add anything to the record. The short layers of electric guitar on “It’s a Beautiful Place” don’t amount to anything; the Reichian minimalism of “Don’t You Believe in God” sounds like it was airdropped in from another record. And the LP is bookended with swirling collages of sound. It’s a baffling decision to have these little pieces that lack any tension or growth, especially compared to Crushed’s more experimental pieces like “Structure.” There at least it seemed like they had an end goal in mind. Here? It just feels like padding to push this to a standard vinyl record length.

To be fair, there are some good songs here. “Life Signs” starts with a nice motorik groove and Nate Amos’s roaring guitar before Rachel Brown comes in with her speak-singing. It builds up to a loud crescendo before settling back into drum machines and layers of guitar. It segues nicely into “Build 2” and Amos’s chugging rhythm guitar and bass. Later on the record “Playing Classics” starts with a steady keyboard/drum machine rhythm that recalls 90s house and features some nicely off-kilter keyboard playing. And “Spaceship” has some cool moments where the music feels like it’s being played backwards, like you’re listening to a cassette that’s disintegrating inside a tape deck.

At its best, It’s a Beautiful Place shows Water from your Eyes leaning harder into dance rhythms than they did on their last record. And when they feel particularly inspired, they come off like a slightly odder, less metal-informed version of Sleigh Bells. Indeed, “Born 2” isn’t that far removed from “Comeback Kid” in its mix of overdriven guitars, driving rhythms, and vocals. The key difference is that Brown’s singing has more of a laid back slacker vibe than Alexis Krauss’s. When it works, it’s great.

However, these moments are too few and far between on It’s A Beautiful Place. Between the nothingburger instrumentals and the way the music sometimes overstays its welcome - six minutes of “Playing Classics” would have been a better fit on a 12” single than slotted into a record - it leaves listeners wondering why this wasn’t chopped down to an EP or a series of nonalbum singles. Despite a few good moments, this isn’t a record where you feel rewarded by sitting down and sitting through the whole thing. Let’s hope that next time they exercise a little more discipline in putting together a finished record.

Roz Milner