“Like a living body, the organ circulates vital sound-breaths throughout the chapel”
132 Ranks for Pipe Organ was composed by Olivia Block in 2016-2017, as a commission for LAMPO and The Renaissance Society. Block composed the piece specifically for the enormous Skinner Organ at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago. The world premiere was performed by Block on April 21, 2017. The concert, free and open to all ages, and attracted a large crowd.
132 Ranks was conceived as a hybrid of concert and sound installation. Six speakers were placed throughout the chapel. These speakers played white noise, sine tones, and prerecorded organ sounds, designed to interact acoustically with the live performance, and bring out the acoustics of the chapel in unconventional ways. White noise and low bass tones pulsed and sliced through the air, while sine tones and organ clusters created complex beating patterns and inner ear sound phenomena.
Audience members were participants, quietly walking through the majestic, dimly lit chapel. Listeners noticed how the acoustics, materials and shape of the space altered the live and recorded organ sounds as Block performed. Some audience members relaxed on the floor of the chapel, listening, while others explored the upper balconies and hallways.
132 Ranks was designed to emphasise the architectural qualities and unique sonic and spatial capacities of the Skinner Organ. The piece included both the lowest pedal notes, felt in the body, as well as the highest bell tones, played at extreme dynamic levels. At times, sounds were isolated in discrete locations to emphasise the chapel’s shape.
This is a Room40 edition.

Ones and Sixes is the upcoming eleventh studio album by Low, due to be released on September 11, 2015. It was co-produced by the band a nd engineer BJ Burton, at Justin Vernon's April Base Studios in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Sub Pop released a promotional video for 'No Comprende' in advance of the album's release, on June 23, 2015. The album also features contributions from Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche.
“In our 20+ years of writing songs, I’ve learned that no matter how escapist, divergent, or even transcendent the creative process feels, the result is more beholden to what is going on at the moment. It’s hard to admit that one is so influenced by what is in front of us. Doesn’t it come from something magical and far away? No, it comes from here. It comes from now. I’m not going to tell you what this record is about because I have too much respect for that moment when you come to know it for yourself.”
— Alan Sparhawk, Low

Avant-classical virtuoso cellist Alison Chesley created the Helen Money moniker to showcase her compositions and uncommon approach to her instrument; Arriving Angels is her third full-length album and one of the most intriguing Profound Lore releases to date. Recorded, engineered and mixed by the iconic Steve Albini at Electrical Audio and featuring Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder on four tracks, Arriving Angels is a unique opus that mixes classical composition and progressive, dirge-like metal, performed almost entirely on the cello. Aside from her solo work, Chesley has played on more than 100 albums with artists like Bob Mould, Disturbed, Anthrax, Broken Social Scene, Yakuza, Russian Circles and Archer Prewitt, and was part of the acoustic rock duo Verbow, releasing two albums on Epic Records in the '90s. She has also composed music for film and dance, including the soundtrack to the award-winning documentary Indestructible. As Helen Money, Chesley has opened for bands as diverse as Mono, Earth, The Bad Plus and Nina Nastasia, and toured the US and Europe extensively with Albini's Shellac.

On respective edges of America — Oregon and Maine — Keith Kenniff records quiet music at night. “When things are calmer,” he says. “My mind is less distracted when I know that everything is dark outside.” For over a decade, such has been the mode — nocturnal, unrushed, using the same mini-cassette recorder, "a lovely little imperfect way to treat sounds" — for one of the country’s most understated composers. Kenniff has housed dozens of ambient releases under the name Helios since 2004, alongside post-classical output as Goldmund, shoegaze pop with his wife Hollie as Mint Julep, and commissions for film and television. It is a reliably transportive body of work that's earned Kenniff a cult following, and a genuine modesty that’s kept him on the fringes, right where he prefers, in the dark.
Kenniff mostly lets his music breathe free of explanation, open to interpretation. As listeners, we follow subtle suggestions — the fiery sky on the cover of 2012's Moiety, the countryside daydream of 2015's Yume — extracting meanings from imagery and inscriptions. Veriditas, the sixth Helios full-length, shares its name with twelfth-century philosopher Hildegard von Bingen's notion of "the greening power of the divine," the term derived from the union of two Latin words: green and truth. Bingen saw the abundance of the earth as vitality to be cultivated, interconnected with the body and spirit. Take the concept in concert with Veriditas' vistas of sound, gazing beyond the tree-lined wonder on its artwork, and we undoubtedly recognize the album's rooting. Kenniff elaborates, "While I’m not a very spiritual person as it relates to a religious belief, I do feel an overwhelming connection between the aesthetics I find pleasing in my experience of nature and my experience of writing music."
Veriditas introduces unusual shapes and landscapes to the Helios catalog. Whereas past songs have followed traditional structures — discernable bell curves with beginnings, arcs, and ends — the focus here is texture and harmony. "I wanted to explore emotionality within something more static." Synth-tones radiate and hum as vignettes, often crisp and cloudless, other times smeared to a queasy Boards of Canada-like unease. The latter burbles below the last moments of "Eventually" and looms over the opener "Seeming" like darkness inching across a forest. Tracks cease at will. "Seeming" fades just after a sliver of light cuts through the mossy pillars. "Latest Lost" mists for just one minute. "Row The Tide" for two, hovering like a helium balloon lost to the horizon. "Even Today" hangs above the snowcaps, suspended in an upper arboreal sequence, as shimmering surges of static trace the treetops below.
Moments on Veriditas pass quickly, but as a series of moments, they are fluid, almost regenerative. Disassembling the album by instruments is difficult. Unlike past Helios work, there is no percussion. The one straightforward use of guitar appears on the ambling "Upward Beside The Gale," strummed solemnly as if over end credits, watching the greenery lapse to grey in the twilight. In the second half of “Dreams,” crystalline piano chords converse with washes of orchestral notes and deep drone, advancing towards temporal clarity, a lookout point, that once presented evaporates.
In a way, Veriditas parallels the path of the Helios project to date: patient, immense, and wondrous without ostentation. Kenniff continues to find a soothing and centering quality in his craft. Aligned with Hildegard von Bingen’s philosophy, Kenniff looks towards sound, like many do to nature, for momentary vigor, for elemental and nourishing prolificacy. Here, in pursuit of viriditas, with precise textures and harmonies, he humbly extends that verdant expression outward, wide and pliable.

Meg Myers in a singer-songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee who has melted and warmed our hearts since her debut in 2011. Since her first album Daughter in the Choir, which was released in 2012, Myers has slowly built momentum and popularity through incredible vocals, well-thought-out lyrics and sheer hard work. In 2013 and 2014, respectively, Myers released two more studio albums and it seems has continued to write and record with the announcement of another masterpiece.
According to her twitter page and online music magazine Pass the Aux, Meg Myers new album will be titled Take Me to the Disco and will be released on July 20th. Her fans, however, will not have to wait long as she has already released her first single “Numb.” The song fades in with a simple drumbeat and what appears to be a synth or strings. Soon her signature vocals come in and it feels as if her voice could produce a sweet molasses. As she has stated, the song is about her experience with the major record label Atlantic Records. However, as she wrote the song she realized that, as she says “I dug deeper, I found that it goes back to some early childhood stuff and how shutting down, or escaping, felt like the safer thing to do.”
The album will be released under indie label 300 Entertainment in which they have given her what appears to be gree reign on how this album was created. Due to working with 300 Entertainment, Myers was able to employ full string arrangements for six of her songs. All string parts were performed by The Section Quartet.
When talking about the album Meg Myers says that “On the surface, I thought I was writing about love loss but I’ve learned it goes much deeper than that,” Myers said. “It’s going back to the child in me that needed to be healed. I’ve always written from a true place, but in getting to know myself better, I’m now writing from an even deeper level of honesty.”

Tragic Kingdom is the third studio album by American rock band No Doubt. It was released on October 10, 1995 by Trauma Records, a division of Interscope Records, less than 7 months after the release of their previous album The Beacon Street Collection. It is the final album to feature original keyboardist Eric Stefani, who left in 1994. The album was produced by Matthew Wilder and recorded in eleven studios in the Greater Los Angeles Area between March 1993 and October 1995. Between 1995 and 1998, seven singles were released from it, including "Just a Girl", which charted on the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart; and "Don't Speak", which reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay and peaked in the top five of many international charts.

This CD has pieces with an auctioneer, a Kentucky farm with birds & clover, a jazz dancer, a quivering, vibrating, sexually tinged piece full of women saying supplication, a saint dying in flames, a drum piece about frustration, mother/daughter miscommunication, a pipe organ, and punk rap with overtones of yoga. Many of Anderson’s compositions from 1973-1979 use words or parts of words to make either all or part of the music. Sometimes the music is derived from the words. Some of it is considered to be part of the genre known as text-sound.

(The following is edited from Beth Anderson’s liner notes) Peachy Keen-O (1973): This electro-acoustic piece is for female voices, organ, electric guitar, vibraphone, large membranophones & metalophones, improvisatory dancers, peach light and pre-recorded tape. It is what my mother called "haunted house music". Tower of Power (1973): This organ piece is a graphic score. The recording on this CD is the first performance. The ideal playback of this piece would be "as loud an amplitude as possible, using both your ears and your equipment to decide". Torero Piece (1973): The phonemic part of this text-sound piece was derived from a paint-by-numbers scroll found in a used clothing store. The vowels and consonants were chosen because they exist in the Spanish language. (I had just heard ZAJ perform and I was very enthusiastic about them). The instruction for the reading part is to describe the most dramatic event or relationship in your life. Each performer writes his/her own speech. Joan (1974; 1977): In 1974 I made an oratorio about Joan of Arc using the translation of the text of her trial as the basis. I decoded the text into pitches and used a modulating coding system with instructions and free rhythm. The concert performance was amazing…. However I was not able to hear my modulating coding system clearly in all this, so I made the version of that piece that is on this CD. This fifteen-track all piano version of only the pitches was made in 1977. Ode (1975): "Ode" was created and mixed at the Queen's College and Wesleyan electronic music studios. I Can't Stand It (1976): When I first moved to New York I had a hard time getting used to how things were here and this piece is a direct response to that frustration. It was conceived for voice and drum set. Yes Sir Ree (1978): This text-sound piece is based on phrases used by Richard Levy and things his students mumbled about him. He used to scream various encouraging words and compliments at his students in the process of teaching his class and his philosophy seemed to be that dancing was to be enjoyed massively. Ocean Motion Mildew Mind (1979): This is a Punk realization of "ommm". The words begin "ocean, motion, mildew, mind" and continue "wishin', Titian, swishin', swine." Country Time (1979): This piece is a cut-up of an additive description of a walk around my family's farm in Kentucky in early summer with a poem I wrote about other experiences in Kentucky. It is for voice and percussion with or without birdcalls.

Water Memory began as an imagination of the feelings that are floating through the natural world around us. It morphed and cycled and gained memories of my own which are now contained like those in all bodies.
Emily Sprague made all sounds using a eurorack modular synthesizer (Monome, Mannequins, Mutable Instruments, ALM Bust Circuits, Make Noise, Intellijel, 4ms, Xaoc, Verbos Electronics), Teenage Engineering OP1, and Valhalla VST Reverb.
Cover photo and drawing by Emily Sprague.

Stream here for free at Adult Swim: