Andrew Liles & Daniel Menche - The Progeny of Flies (2008)

Andrew Liles and Daniel Menche are both influential and highly regarded members of the experimental music world, so naturally their team up raises high expectations. Faced with that kind of pressure, they chose to deliver an album about the life cycle of flies. Well, at least it's original.

The Progeny of Flies is a subtle, sinister record that is long on atmosphere and imagination. I've always said that a good ambient record allows room for the listener to insert his own thoughts and interpretations, and in this the record very admirably succeeds. It plays like the soundtrack to all the quiet, suspenseful bits at the beginnings of horror films, where you know something bad is going to happen but you're not sure what or when.

The album is divided up into four lengthy tracks named after various stages in the development of flies. The first of these, "Eggs," consists of a slowly shifting patchwork of electronic drones, low rumbles matched by higher, slowly unfolding synth melodies. It serves as a kind of warm up for what is yet to come, not giving away too much while offering considerable promise.

The second track builds o this, adding Liles' minimalist, Satie-like piano. Liles has an uncanny ability to extract an immense amount of atmosphere from just a couple of methodically repeated piano chords, and the supplemental bass thumpings and rumblings are more than sufficiently unsettling.

The third track, "Pupa," opens with the unexpected shriek of a horse's neigh, followed by the erratic plucking of some stringed instrument which I can't quite identify. Gradually, this fades away and is replaced by gentle metallic clangs and other acoustic sounds, heightened as ever by dark electronics.

The album concludes with the final stage, "Metamorphosis," in which the tensions builds to a climax , incorporating all that came before and more. Ghostly choirs, a repeated four-note piano motif, harrowing electronic groans and buzzes and finally the actual buzzing of the titular flies.

The album as a whole is very well structured, with each track building on the previous one for an ever increasing atmosphere of paranoia and menace, and while it certainly rewards close listening, it also works great as low background music to terrify any unwanted guests who have overstayed their welcome.

Coil - Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 2 (2000)

Continuing our Halloween month theme, we turn to masters of post-industrial, electronic brilliance Coil and their Musick to Play in the Dark series. With these albums, Coil announced, they were leaving behind their old style of "sun music" and transitioning towards "moon music." I'm sure that makes sense to someone, but I will not worry too much about it because the music on both these albums,, solar or lunar, is among the strongest of their extremely impressive career.

There's definitely an atmosphere of the sinister here, and they spare no expense in creating spooky atmospherics throughout. The opener, "Something," is just the title word spoken in a whisper again and again, slowly fading in surrounded by wind sounds and subtle electronics. The second track is a full fledged electronic workout that bears all the hallmarks of later-day Coil hired gun and analog synth wizard Thighpaulsandra. His utterly unique approach to playing the synthesizer is endlessly entertaining and a regular feature on most Coil albums from this period. Think of a more demented Tangerine Dream and you get the basic idea.

Te showstopper on the album is the eleven minute "Ether." Its arcane references to the creepy, old-fashioned drug are chilling enough, but towards the end it becomes downright terrifying when John Balance intones the line "I'm going upstairs to turn my mind off... to turn my mind off... to turn my mind off" over a gradual fading backdrop of dark ambient sounds until only his desperate rasping remains. It's tremendously effective and one of the scariest songs I've ever heard.

The rest of the album remains strong throughout. Volume One of the series was a little uneven, and it's nice to see that that mistake has not been repeated here. The closer, another eleven minute track call ed"Batwings: A Limnal Hymn," is oddly the most sedate and straightforward track here, with no vocal processing for Balance and minimal instrumentation, yet it's strangely effective. It's unsettling without being over the top, and send the listener off into the night feeling just a little unnerved and eager to get home to a safe, warm bed.

No other band has ever really sounded like Coil, and it's wonderful that they have such a prodigious and varied discography. It's only a shame that the members died so young and were unable to leave us with even more great music.

Fields of the Nephilim - Elizium (1990)

Well, it's October again and in honor of my favorite month crowned gloriously by my favorite holiday, I'll be spending this months featuring albums with a decidedly spooky feel.

The first of these is by Fields of the Nephilim, a gothic rock group influenced by the occult and spaghetti westerns, fond of performing in black cowboy outfits. Elizium is their second album, showing dramatic advancement over their solid, but not outstanding debut. I'll go out on a limb and say that I personally consider this to be the finest goth rock album ever produced. It's a strong statement, I know, but allow me to elaborate.

Whereas the band's first album was song-oriented, Elizium is much more sweeping in scope. The first four tracks all flow together to form one fifteen minute suite ranging from somber atmospherics to uptempo, but still quite dark, rock, then back to brooding stillness. The guitars are drenched in reverb, the drums boom in the distance and the singer's voice croons in a deeply smooth, yet sinister drawl. There is even a grainy sample of infamous occultist Aleister Crowley to ratchet up the creepiness.

I should take a moment to comment on the production which, although the song writing is very strong, is the main reason the album succeeds to spectacularly. I'm not sure how they got the effect, but the whole thing sounds like it's being played on a bonfire-lit hilltop several miles away across a foggy moor. The effect is as eerie as it is exciting.

The opening suite, collectively known as "for Her Light," is followed by a more subdued eight-minute track called "Submission," which is essentially a bass guitar workout for the singer to talk ominously over. Various vocal effects sch as echo and elaborate panning keep things unsettling throughout.

What's striking is how catchy these songs manage to be, and how much they rock, without disturbing the uncanny atmosphere. The eleven-minute rocker "Sumerland (What Dreams May Come)" is relentlessly entertaining throughout, and for me is the highlight of the album, while the final two tracks wind things down in a dreamy, hallucinatory way that makes you wonder whether you imagined the whole thing.

Music that tries to be spooky is always of danger of stumbling into a great many treacherous pitfalls, but Fields of the Nephilim manage to simultaneously avoid being campy, contrived or overly abrasive, a feat for which they surely deserve a great deal of praise.

Fripp & Eno - No Pussyfooting (1973)

Robert Fripp and Brian Eno were two of the most interesting and innovative musical personalities of the 1970s, but it would also be hard to imagine two more divergent temperaments. Eno was a flashy, kinetic wild man who, during his tenure with Roxy Music managed to steal the show from one of the most dynamic frontmen ever, despite not really playing any instruments. Fripp was a cool intellectual who sat on stool on stage while playing his guitar and was notoriously standoffish to fans. The public may not have known what to expect when they decided to team up, but anyone could bet the result would be magical.

The driving force behind the album is a tape loop system developed by Eno which was capable of simultaneous playback and recording. This allowed a performer to hear a loop of his himself while continuing to play on top of it, adding new layers and rhythms in real time. This was not entirely a new idea-Terry Riley had been doing similar things for years-but Eno dubbed the process "Frippertronics" and the name stuck.

The record consists of two side-long tracks, each containing a subtly pulsing backdrop over which Fripp solos extensively. On "The Heavenly Music Corporation," the mood is serene and Fripp's guitar sweeps slowly around with his characteristic warm tones climbing and plunging like dive bombers in slow motion. The effect is lovely and captivating.

Side two, entitled "Swastika Girls," is more active, with heavier focus on Eno's electronics making up the rapidly swirling backdrop. There is a lot more going on here than o the first side, and it takes several listens to take it all in. One of the dangers of this type of recording technique is the tendency for things to become overly cluttered and aurally confusing. I'm not sure whether that quite happens here, but it certainly walks a fine line.

Fans of either Eno's solo work or Fripp's guitar playing (mainly in his capacity as a guest soloist for the likes of David Bowie; there's little resemblance to King Crimson) will find much to love here. The latest reissue is a 2-CD set of good quality and a couple of puzzling choices. First, they broke the side long tracks up into separate parts for the CD indexing, which is totally unnecessary and arbitrary to my way of thinking. Second, the bonus tracks consist of the entire record played backwards and a half speed version of "The Heavenly Music Corporation." The reasons for this remain obscure, but I am forced to admit that the different versions are interesting and enjoyable, if not essential.

Klaus Nomi (1982)

Meet Klaus Nomi, an eccentric, flamboyant German opera singer who got his big break touring with David Bowie and decided to put out a record of New Wave music. Not weird enough? I should mention that he was a countertenor, meaning that he could sing at an extremely high pitch, and that the highlights of the album are bizarre covers of sixties girl-group pop songs.

This is one of those records that makes everyone who hears it scratch their head in confusion and when played for friends will inevitably elicit the response "what is this?" It's not an easy question to answer. As you can see from the image above, Nomi is not helping the stereotype that Germans are weird with his outlandish costumes and makeup job that looks like it came straight out of an F. W. Murnau film.

The instrumentation baking up Nomi's heavily accented voice is rather thin, consisting of angular guitars, some eighties synths, a little piano and the occasional smattering of backing vocals to evoke the sixties atmosphere of some of the covers. These include "Lightning Strikes," "You Don't Own Me" and "The Twist" all sung with the over the top melodrama only a campy opera singer can pull off (although whether he does, in fact, pull it off is purely a matter of opinion.

There are also some original compositions, which are decent and just as zany, but lack some of the surreal fun of lines like "You don't own me, don't say I can't play with other boys!" The album ends bizarrely with an excerpt of a legitimate operatic aria, which is fine but totally out of place.

Klaus Nomi went on to record one more studio album (featuring a cover of "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead!" How great is that?) and a live record before sadly dying of AIDS in 1983. His debut is a fun listen for fans of novelty albums and general musical oddities.

Chris Watson - El Tren Fantasma (2011)

Before television and before the internet, National Geographic made a lot of money by taking the trouble to photograph remote and exotic locales and bring those images right into people's homes. Most Americans would never have a chance to see such amazing sights in person, and so it was a real thrill to catch a glimpse of what the rest of the world looked like.

Now, that same experience can be had with such ease that it has lost much of its allure. With a click of a button, we can see pictures of any place in the whole world, but vision is only one of the senses, and people have a way of forgetting about the evocative power of sound.

That is why I love field recordings so much. Sure we know what most of the world looks like, but what does it sound like? Chris Watson, a founding member of the tremendously influential industrial group Cabaret Voltaire, wants to answer that question for us. With microphone in hand, he captures a staggaring array of ambient sounds from all variety of environments and packages them neatly for our enjoyment.

This particular release draws from recordings made of a now abandoned railway line in Mexico originally made for use in a documentary. Watson presents them here as the voyage of a "ghost train," a spooky remembrance of a trip that will never be taken again.

When it comes to editing field recordings, it can be tricky to strike the proper balance; too much and it loses its authenticity, too little and it risks being boring. Watson does a superb job of concealing his handiwork, and only on one track does he give into the temptation to craft a little rhythmic loop that actually sounds like music.

The rest of the recordings are both unified in spirit and diverse enough to hold the listener's interest. There is the repeated leitmotif of the train's rhythmic chugging along the tracks, a sound that would not be out of place on an early industrial record. There are quiet parts of serene atmospherics, and there are loud parts comprised of buzzing insects or other wildlife.

In short, Watson does everything right when it comes to taking real recordings of a real place and presenting them in a way that is coherent and digestible, not to mention entertaining. I look forward to hearing more of his work in the future.

Vangelis - Heaven and Hell (1975)

Vangelis is a Greek composer and multi-instrumentalist most famous for his score for the film Chariots of Fire. As surprising as it may seem, he actually has a long and productive career with many studio albums to his name. This is one of his most well known and celebrated, a collection of two side-long suites based on the concept of - you guessed it - Heaven and Hell.

This is a difficult album to review, because musically, it's all over the place. I'll be frank, there are a lot of cringe-worthy moments here. The use of the synthesizer was still relatively unrefined in 1975, but Vangelis dives in with gusto, producing sounds that now seem very badly dated. The first half of side one is bombastic and unpleasant, with annoyingly abrasive synths and hackneyed vocals by ominous sounding Greek choirs. This is supposed to be Heaven?

Side two, Hell, is, in general, much less prone to these sorts of problems and has plenty of lovely moments with tolling bells and a lovely female vocal melody, although the tasteful creepiness is still occasionally interrupted by obnoxiously dated sound effects, including an incredibly annoying siren-like synthesizer that won't shut up.

So why am I featuring this album when it seems to have so little going for it? Because Vangelis makes up for all of it, all of the tacky synths, the lack of restraint, the bombast, the hokey choirs, and the general vagueness of his concept in the second half of side one. He makes up for it, and then some.

About ten minutes in to the Heaven half, all the choirs and keyboard riffs drop out and a sense of cosmic peace washes over the listener. This section may be familiar to some as the theme from the Carl Sagan TV series, Cosmos. The music here is absolutely perfect, capturing the vastness and beauty of space, and then just when you think it can't get any better, it does.

The last section of the Heaven side is a song called "So Long Ago, So Clear" sung by Jon Anderson of the band Yes. It's utterly gorgeous, with Anderson in fine voice and the melody one of exquisite grace and tenderness. This section along with the previous one comprise roughly a quarter of the album, yet they are so good that they force to (almost) overlook the record's other flaws. Honestly, that ten minutes is worth the price of admission.

Maybe other listeners are less bothered by the synth parts (or less taken with Jon Anderson) than I am, but for me Heaven and Hell is a bewildering listen, a product of its time that leaves me feeling both moved and vaguely annoyed.