SONOROUS RISING

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You can’t judge a book by its cover, well maybe you get a good idea from the covers of Carpazine. What if I asked you to imagine a Ska Punk band from Southeastern Connecticut? No horns, a teleukulele, bass, drums, and a MIDI keyboard? The possibilities may overwhelm you, however, with Sonorous Rising you can see and hear it.

As Erik Larson on drums keeps the uptempo energy, Effa Pecoraro hammers on keys, Stephanie Sutera’s deep vocals pairs with an electric ukulele, and O’s bass bringing it all together; is it Ska Punk? Who knows, who cares, we like the wine not the label. When the influences and genres are organically melded before you the result is 100% punk rock stew.

Their new release Disinformation is available now!

www.sonorousrising.com/

If you were to connect seemingly unrelated things – Heavy Metal and the symphony orchestra, for example – you might be guilty of apophenia. That friction between opposites has never been a problem for Nick Vasallo, though – his music is equally at home in both worlds. Melding Xenakis, Varese, Extreme Metal, and Dark Ambient with gothic charm, Vasallo conjures up a muscular sonic battle that leads you on an inexorable musical journey to a conclusion where surrender is your best option.

Catharsis comes as a relief in his new album, Apophany (the follow-up to his Monuments Emerge of 2012): 79 minutes of varied orchestral and chamber works seared to the bone with a Metal edge. It strikes with precision (Vasallo is a certified martial artist, after all) and uses a refined timbral palette with filmic orchestral mastery to powerful effect.

The programmatic themes in Vasallo’s titles combine sources of ancient wisdom with contemporary spiritualism. The Eternal Return refers to Nietzsche’s challenge to imagine that every action one makes will repeat for all eternity. This track leads to The Moment Before Death Stretches on Forever, Like an Ocean of Time – a reference to the 1999 movie American Beauty: the monologue that closes with “and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.”

With epic performances from a variety of university orchestras and new music ensembles (including Red Shift, Wild Rumpus, and The Living Earth Show), Apophany is as gritty as it is satisfying. This is music for the metaverse, bedroom headphones, and giant auditoriums; but maybe not the parlor.

Bay Area native Dr. Nick Vasallo picked up the electric guitar while in high school and formed Antagony, later credited as birthing a popular subgenre of metal music called “deathcore”. A graduate of California State University, East Bay, Vasallo completed his doctorate at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Honors include the American Prize, International Music Prize for Excellence in Composition, and the San Francisco Choral Artists New Voices award.

https://nickvasallo.bandcamp.com/album/apophany

It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it: this does not apply here. The audio tracks contained within Pandemia by Collin J Rae with Red Gnein Sextet are more like transmissions from other dimensions. The accompanying volumes of Pandemic Portraits can exist on their own; each portraiture pulled from video chats (over 100 in each volume) could be conversed upon for hours. 

The video is reminiscent of watching scrambled 90’s cable porn channels. Rarely any nudity outside of  an occasional nipple, then intermittent faces emerged: lust, pain, elation… The allure of those images to a teenager were somewhat confusing. The combined audio and video of Pandemia, through the lens of the pandemic makes a great deal of sense. Using found glass objects as physical lenses Rae produces the desired images of trauma whilst encouraging nostalgic sensory intercourse across spectrums. Taken as a whole, it is clear that these distortions are honest reflections of our immediate pasts. We have never been more broken yet beautiful. 

https://collinjrae1.bandcamp.com/album/pandemia