Artist: Sightings

In 2008, Aaron Dilloway released a cassette and CDR titled Modern Jester through his label Hanson . Primarily featuring the sounds of crude 8-track loops treated with tape delays, the editions were identical, save for a re-imagining/speed-doubling of the sort-of-bonus first track on the CDR. Dilloway was clearly unable to close the book on Modern Jester during the four years following its initial release (the grainy photo of the rubber masked man has become somewhat of a calling card for Hanson), and now in 2012 we are graced with a 2xLP bearing that same name. However, [...]

I learned a great many things today. The first one being that it is actually possible to be locked inside your own apartment building. Sometime after that I learned about a dude named Liam Betson who has been releasing music under the moniker Liam the Younger for quite some time now. I know I can't be the only one who missed out on After the Graveyard or Clear Skies Over Black River - as both albums have recently been re-released Underwater Peoples and Liam's own label, A Learning Computer . [...]

When I first came across the music of Dylan Ettinger , he was what you could call a New Age Outlaw. His compositions often possessed a rich, textured ambiance, that was often more tense than meditative. Ettinger's pop potential first made itself know on last year's 73, "The Lion Of Judah." "Wintermute", the lead single from Ettinger's upcoming double LP Lifetime of Romance, continues to build on the dark wave ambiance, this time with a rhythm that is ripe for the goth dance club, and a Robert Smith-esque vocal line. The video itself is intriguing and nightmarish. [...]

The dance floor can be a ripe space to work through your shit. Those who know the healing power of body motion can attest to this, and will often preach it as gospel. Alex Gray ( Heat Wave , Deep Magic , Dreamcolour , Sun Araw ) and Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw, Magic Lantern , WHERES YR CHILD ) clearly fall somewhere within this camp. Their hour long disco mix, "Open", which was originally concocted for dublab, will cover your toast in extended, buttery grooves. Perhaps Stallones and Gray aim to raise awareness about the [...]

Erik Luebs of Magical Mistakes may reside in a small village in southwest Japan, but the sounds on his brand new Special Friends EP shimmer as brightly as any bustling metropolis on a Friday night. This track -a collaborative effort with Mutual Benefit 's Jordan Lee - takes your typical electronic sheen and stretches it taught around tight percussive fills. The effect both pumps you up and manages to soothe your brain before the sheen flys away and "Supermoon Crashed" moves into almost-traditional folk territory. Luebs flashy electronic beats give way to thick strings and [...]

Before he made a name for himself as the man behind Wooden Wand, a revolving member of Vanishing Voice, and one of the most prolific players in the so-called "New Weird America" movement, James Jackson Toth apparently instigated some pretty wild basement sessions while studying at Purchase College in the mid-'90s. Toth was only 18 years old at the time, and the project, Golden Calves, combined a cast of characters both real and imaginary, many a half-remembered night of non-stop jamming, and Toth's own solo acoustic balladry, which he occasionally overdubbed onto the group sessions. The "band's" first album, [...]

Particle Language is the debut solo LP of Matt Carlson , otherwise known as one-half of Portland, Oregon's Golden Retriever . While many contemporaneous analog modular synth/tape/vocoder projects veer toward the extra-terrestrial, Carlson's abandons sci-fi for science, drawing inspiration from the quantum mechanics domain of physics for the title of his album, and the track below. A perceptron is an artificial neural network in which the output of each layer of "neurons" connects to one or more inputs of other layers. In Carlson's "Perceptron," hissing, atonal twitches of synthesized sound and hollowed, [...]

Massachusettes rockers Quilt have the whole playful psychedelia thing down pat. Their use of angelic melodies and simple, repetitive, jangling guitars recalls hippie forefathers (and mothers) like David Crosby, Grace Slick, and John Phillips. The video for "Young Gold" plays into the jovial innocence of the original psych generation even more, by featuring the members of the band running aimlessly through the woods, with a long golden sheet in their hands. Simple adventures ensue as they drape the sheet in a variety of formations. This is all shot on luminous, 8mm film, recalling the experimental films of the [...]

I can't imagine a much better way to ring in the new year than a free compilation from the folks over at Bathetic Records . Expressway comes curated by Dirty Beaches' Alex Zhang Hungtai and Bathetic's William Cody Watson, and features track after track of dense and often foreboding jams you would expect from artists like Speculator , Tonstartssbandht , or Hungtai himself. My personal favorite of the compilation's many highlights is "Distant Lights" from Beijing's Hot & Cold . "Distant Lights" pits a relentless bass groove against warb-ly atmospherics [...]

Tonight is the night. In just a few short hours several of your more adventurous mortal cohorts will descend upon your living space for a seance that will lead into a paranormal, polysexual orgy. In addition to the living participants, you are hoping to summon up guests such as H.P. Lovecraft, Anne Boleyn, James Dean, or whoever else may feel like reaching across the realms for some inner and outer body fun. All of the pieces seem to be in place, when you suddenly realize you have no clue what music to play! It just so happens that this new [...]

Video directed by Jose Wolf I sort of love this clip for Julia Holter 's "Sea Called Me Home." Perhaps an intricate, artistic statement exists between the short video and the simple, fuzzed-out ballad it represents, but that isn't why I enjoy it so much. For me, it beautifully represents the way I feel when I listen to Holter's music - grabbing me by the brain and sending me somewhere else entirely. Just like her character in this clip, you may find yourself staring out at nothing in particular with intense focus. Or, maybe you walk around [...]

Last Spring, friend bands Lantern and Dirty Beaches played at show together at Glasslands. Dirty Beaches has been cropping up on some of the more forward-thinking Best Ofs at the end of the year for Alex Zhang Hungtai dour 2011 breakthrough Badlands, and I covered Lantern's recent 7" release a few months back right here on Visitation Rites. Fans of either may be surprised to hear the results. The entire thing is now up for free streaming on Bandcamp, and the concluding track "Going Out West," a cover pulled from Tom Waits' seminal 1992 album [...]

As a chronic ruminator, I hear Steve Kenney's Live Lex as an aural translation of my most hopeless anxiety terrors. But while I'm psychologically doomed to spin myself into the ground, Kenney drags himself on through the sonic bile of his own creation - bile which seems to grow deeper and more viscous with each step. On this reissue of live documentation dating back to a 2006 performance in Lexington, KY, he can stand it for just under thirty minutes. However, within that half hour, Kenney's craft never feels repetitive, and though his tools are few (Pro-One and [...]

Philadelphia psych-rockers Arches impress again on their new EP, Enough . Just like Wide Awake - their release from earlier this year - Enough crams melancholy and swirling desperation into steady rhythms and crashing guitar lines. Closing track "Nowhere to Go" puts these traits on full display. A steady, unassuming drumbeat putters along while guitar and bass weave around heavily processed vocals. Underneath all the reverb and echo, "Nowhere to Go" seems to be a song about going back, presumably because there wasn't any place to go in the first place. In that, it [...]

Otherwise known as the drummer in the seriously awesome Chicago free jazz band Tiger Hatchery , Ben Billington goes deep on the less harsh side of noise as Quicksails. "Walking Through Rain," from the NNA -released A Fantasy In Seasons, goes beyond our initial sounds-of-the-rainforest association. In fact, I believe there to be some sort of "universal language" type of communication between the organic and the synthetic occurring here. Hard industrial bombastic drums machines signal the beginning of what could be a Dionysian affair between the more exotic animals of this planet and those [...]

Imagine that as the night begins to take hold, you set out on a journey. It is a frigid evening, and you are very much alone, but you feel the urge to venture out. Fresh snow is on the ground, and the blocks around your dwelling are desolate. At moments like these, you feel like you are the only living organism left on Earth. Your mind is almost entirely blank, but little hums, fidgets, and crackles invade your mental state. Is someone or something lurking, carefully placed out of view? Your imagination runs wild, but you simply press on. Inevitably, [...]

With no four-on-the-floor, no loops, no EQ sweeps, and little in the way of added effects, C Spencer Yeh 's re-organization of Sam Mickens ' "At The Mountains Of Madness/Ebb Tide" really has it all. Having obliterated any sort of song structure, Yeh presents us instead with naked configurations of truncated stems. He is auditioning his ideas, and the packed house so respectfully enraptured with the most tender moments of Mickens' Billy-Mackenzie-goes-Flamingos original has been invited back to witness the workshopping. At first, they applaud any recognizable shred of the song they fell in love with; quickly, they [...]

As Raw Thrills and one-half of Greatest Hits - a "pop" band with experimental roots- Brooklyn's Zak Mering makes pop music. On "Making A Change," a track from his forthcoming Six Steez LP, his vocals carry exaggerated tones over deliciously dulcet, almost-dance beats. An exceptional arrangement of candied percussion, deep-walking bass lines, and Fantasia keyboard melodies peaks up from low in the mix, making way for a turned-up, arena-style virtuoso guitar solo. Raw Thrills possesses the perfect amount of eccentricity, appealing to way-out ears without alienating the less preternaturally inclined. Raw Thrills: "Makin' [...]

If you look past the swirling colors, this Camilla Padgitt-Coles -directed video for NYC folk-rock outfit Pigeons reveals a dancer pirouetting in slow motion. The song, the latest single from the band's recent They Sweetheartstammers LP on Soft Abuse , feels kind of like an extended pirouette, too. A long, buzzing drone lays the foundation for a cyclical vocal mantra from founding member Wednesday Knudson, as haunting and deceptively aimless as Nico's notorious cover of the "End" (a personal favorite). Put this one on when you won't have to go anywhere for a while. [...]

As keen as I am on the new age tones resonating in the contemporary underground, there will always be part of me that is comforted by the fact that honest-to-god garage rock is still being made somewhere, by someone. In this case, the location might be a little surprising. The Tower hail from the island of Costa Rica, which is internationally known as a tropical oasis. Like the other eight artists featured on the Si San Jose compilation, they pump out noise drenched, guitar driven sounds that might not sit too well with the [...]