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With Contemplative Figuration we see Broshuda pushing his amorphous, impossible-to-pin-down music in exciting new directions. Stitched together in various European cities over the last few years, it is the artist’s most dynamic and ambitious release thus far, drawing equally from musique concrete, beat research, ambient, tape collage, and spoken word. Episodic in nature, the collection functions well as a sort of impressionistic travelogue, with romantic, hazy atmospheres coaxed from borrowed equipment, serendipitous recording sessions with old friends, and even a drum sequence programmed with Mario Paint, among other curios and sleights of hand. Broshuda deftly wrings bonafide cohesion and balance from these disparate source materials, tools, and locations, as on opener “Kakigori,” which allows a snaking harmonic drone the space to evolve before exploding it into a sort of seething, dubbed out pointillism. Later, “Lied Für Hase” concocts a potent, humid atmosphere of beautifully evolving acoustic piano loops and elegant narration. Taken as a whole, Contemplative Figuration is a weightless, transportive record, one that is bursting at the seams with ideas, mischief, and a restless spirit.

Mastered by Helmut Erler at D&M, Artwork by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis.

Motoko & Myers is the collaborative project of Bay Area-based duo Wonja Fairbrother and Daniel Letson. “Colocate” follows their 2018 debut release on the Open Hands Real Flames imprint (Bass Clef), further developing their distinctive style which combines melodic, pop song structures with live improvisation and odd or no-meter approaches to rhythm and timing. It is a collection of bright, addictive listening, full of tracks that manage to feel at once hooky and aleatory, naive and rigorously arranged.

Recorded and assembled sporadically over a period of several years, the album’s idiosyncratic palette was achieved through much technical and methodological eccentricity: “4-handed” collaborative keyboard playing; 12-bit sampling and archaic presets; field recordings of cicadas in Louisville, Kentucky and church bells in Freiburg im Breisgau. The album’s nine tracks exude a homespun quality that is rare to find in contemporary electronic music – hazy, warm, and disarmingly organic.

Over the past fifteen years, Florida-based multi-instrumentalist Eric Lanham has quietly generated a diverse and remarkable body of work both as a solo artist and in group settings. From the disorienting drone/collage ecstasies of Caboladies, his trio with Christopher Bush (Flanger Magazine) and Ben Zoeller, to wildly divergent solo flights under both his own name and as Carl Calm, Lanham’s carefully meted out recordings display the talents of a chameleonic composer who is as capable a sound designer as he is unconcerned with trend in experimental electronic music or notions of prolificness. “Objet Dirt” arrives ten years after “The Sincere Interruption,” his excellent longplayer for the now defunct Spectrum Spools imprint. Captured live, these compositions are brimming with kinetic, elastic, off-grid rhythms, an articulate and enigmatic language that restlessly darts around the stereo field. Of the collection, Lanham says "I haven't made a single piece of music that sounds like this since and it is hard to imagine doing so again.” If this is the case, the 20+ minute closer is a formidable final document. At once chaotic and tightly controlled, it is a torrent of coiling low-end, submerged and stretched rhythms, and seething high-end filigree that is as indebted to the hungry ghosts of free improvisation as it is anything resembling techno.

Iggy goes West! Soda Gong welcomes back Kansas City-based musician Iggy Romeu with his latest collection as Mister Water Wet. "Cold Clay from the Middle West" is a (characteristically) sharp left turn from his last two records, with Romeu offering up a surprising and addictive melange of crackpot Americana and smoky noir beat science. “Cold Clay Suite” opens the record, a five-part ride into the sunset that features Cooder-esque guitars, cat-gut fiddle, horse-hoof percussion, stadium organs, penny whistle, and bleary-eyed polysynth ruminations, among sundry other ephemera. Multi-instrumentalist Will Yates, known to most as Memotone, shows up three times on the album, lending clarinet, keys, guitars, banjo, sarangi, and vibraphone to these kaleidoscopic productions. It’s a wild ride of a record akin to following a dotted bridleway on a crumpled old map, marvelously variegated and stitched together as only MWW knows how. Get along, now.