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Listening recommendations from the past, present, Portland and the periphery.
SOMETHING OLD
Bohren & der Club of Gore would be a good name for a jokey metal band, but this three-decade-old German outfit plays jazz—“doomjazz” or “darkjazz,” mind you, but not especially doomy or dark, just unbelievably slow. Putting it on during the daytime might violate some fundamental law of physics and cause the sun to fall out of the sky: This is stuff for listening to exclusively with a candle lit. Start with Sunset Mission, and if you want jazzier, go later, and if you want doomier, try earlier.
SOMETHING NEW
Claire Rousay usually presents her field-recording collages more austerely, but the title of her new album, A Softer Focus, says it all: This is a portable cocoon of pads and pianos, as connected to New Age and its surrounding self-help culture as it is to the august experimental composers you’ll find name-dropped in its Bandcamp shout-outs. Those whose eyes dart to the “Askew” section in this column might prefer her earlier work, but rarely do avant-gardists go pop more gracefully than here.
SOMETHING LOCAL
Kazuma Matsui has been putting out EPs and mini-albums of experimental electronic music on Bandcamp since 2018, and the new OK is a gem. Soft drones are stirred into action by spidery, kinetic drum patterns—it’s as gregarious and cute as the cat on the cover but has the potential to be just as deadly. The entire Matsui discography is a worthy rabbit hole to dive into. Even the stand-alone track “Pretty Drunk,” with an MS Paint squiggle on the cover, is more interesting than you’d expect.
SOMETHING ASKEW
There’s a good chance you’ve heard John Lennon’s touching if terminally self-absorbed Plastic Ono Band, but Yoko Ono’s album of the same name is nothing to scoff at. Ringo Starr and Klaus Voormann make a hell of a bashing-caveman rhythm section, and if you don’t think Ono is in control of her vocals, you’re kidding yourself. It’s hair-raising stuff, and even those with a high tolerance for the avant-garde might find it extreme, but sometimes it’s the thing you need to fry your nerves.
