Rvng Intl

RVNG Intl's Frkwys is defined by the label as an "unrestricted series pairing contemporary artists with their influential predecessors…." This 11th volume places New York guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn and veteran guitarist, electronicist, and experimentalist Mike Cooper in Lisbon. They spent ten days drinking wine in fado bars, and playing long informal sessions informed by fado – the Portuguese music whose roots can be traced to the early 19th century but are reported to date back much earlier, and was originally regarded as "the music of the poor." There are six improvisations here and one free-flowing cover: an expansive reading of the Mississippi Delta standard "Pony Blues" associated with Charley Patton.

Incredible album of bleeding-heart catharsis from cellist Oliver Coates, think Arthur Russell doing drone metal with Fennesz, and you’re not far off Coates’ capacity for tear-jerking genius here.

Like a rare comet, Suicide and Talking Heads producer Craig Leon returns nearly 40 years after his ‘Nommos’ and ‘Visiting’ LPs with their widescreen conceptual follow-up; ‘Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol.2: The Canon’. Apparently John Malkovich makes an appearance too…

serenitatem, the fifteenth installment of RVNG’s intergenerational FRKWYS series, joins Visible Cloaks with Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, trailblazers of the Japanese ambient music scene in the 1980s and 90s. While the music excels on an environmental level familiar in the collective’s individual works, serenitatem reaches unseen stratums — a pure synthesis of artistic vision, technological sophistication, futurist ambition, and, occasionally, ancient polyphony.

The first new material from beloved Bay Area new age composer Pauline Anna Strom since 1988. Gamelan-esque rhythmic experiments, mind-expanding cosmic drones and smudgy tropical ambience - all the good stuff.

Visible Cloaks’ hard-to-classify ambient music is a fascinating mix of organic and synthetic, past and future.