Kerala Dust - Closer
Press Release info: A Year Closer tells us already in its title what its theme is: approaching death, time ticking away and getting closer with each track of the record. We are told in the first song that our protective mask isn\u2019t working, warned by the storm clouds and a ticking bedroom clock in \u201CDark Skies.\u201D We hear fears of death approaching in the sad words exchanged by lovers who see they will run out of time, or already have, as in \u201CWe Had Time\u201D or the romantic lament of \u201CWhen I Drink.\u201D In \u201CWork Last Monday,\u201D all of life passes with cold automatism in an \u201Coffice apartment,\u201D as a narrator broods over early onset dementia, remembers the details of rituals for respecting the dead, and thinks of how a hole is opening up in reality itself. The singer of \u201COver the Hill\u201D isn\u2019t apparently afraid of growing older and becoming a \u201Cman,\u201D but only leaks a few disjointed details of his plans for disappearing, collapsing, turning into a tree, and finding a home. \u201CAngel of Mercy\u201D tries to resurrect the Christian promise of a life after death, anxiously asking if anyone is up there waiting for us after the oblivion of this world.
Kerala Dust - Closer
Marshall Gu: For headphones only; the intimacy and strangeness get lost in the air. The songs that make up A Year Closer are not so much \u2018songs\u2019 as they are peeking through windows into a suburban home. The residents aren\u2019t there, so they go about their business, sometimes muttering to themselves and singing in a way that makes it feel like these songs aren\u2019t for you to hear, they\u2019re for them. Little snatches of tune you hum to yourself in the shower, or while making bread. Opener \u201CThe Mask Isn\u2019t Working\u201D is the creak of hardwood floors and inaudible words until near the end where a man says the title\u2019s words aloud, and so the title A Year Closer expands into its full unstated version: A Year Closer to Death. And everything afterwards carries an ominous weight. \u201CEvery step I take draws me closer to the ground,\u201D a woman says clearly on \u201CWork Last Monday\u201D while her husband enjoys his old American folk records, \u201CSomething is going to break soon.\u201D But I like this album more in theory than I do execution, as if someone took The Hissing of Summer Lawns very literally.[6]
Shy Thompson: At the ripe old age of 28, I\u2019m already well past the point where birthdays feel like milestones. Getting older no longer feels exciting; it\u2019s very decidedly anti-exciting. I still feel young and I still look young, but I\u2019m constantly worried about how much longer I\u2019ve got left to feel that way. I find myself googling human life expectancy a lot more often lately and bargaining with myself so that I can feel more comfortable\u2014I\u2019ve got more than a third of the years I\u2019ve already lived left before I\u2019ve even reached the average halfway point! I have time! The phrase \u201Canother year closer to death\u201D hits you differently when your back is sometimes sore and your knees sound like popcorn when you stand up. I\u2019m still young and sexy, but the clock is ticking.
Sunik Kim: Depressing in every sense of the word. Nothing compels me to return to this after reviewing it. This feels to me like the kind of album that is fetishized by listeners as the darkest, the most brooding\u2014a simple exercise in horror and despair, the Shadow Ring\u2019s spin on slowcore\u2019s navel-gazey doom and gloom. There\u2019s nothing wrong with serious music, heavy music, dark music (see my other blurb in this issue!); and, on the opposite end, unrelentingly peppy music can be equally grating. But something about this very particular approach puts me off\u2014ultimately, it feels juvenile, lacking much-needed subtlety, outdated, too aware of \u2018what it\u2019s doing\u2019 and heavy-handed in producing its intended effect. The ratcheting acoustic glitch on \u201CClearing\u201D is interesting and initially had me excited for more; but as the minutes passed, the cobwebs piled up and the dust accumulated, my excitement also waned and decayed to pure nothingness. Maybe that was the plan all along.[2]
Adesh Thapliyal: Actually Laughing Out Loud makes something very unpleasant out of humanity\u2019s most pleasant noises: the giggle, the chortle, and the guffaw. Pati\u00F1o confines himself, Matmos-like, to composing entirely from canned laughter, which he transmogrifies into something approximating ambient industrial. After all, \u201Chee-hee\u201D is just a sound, silence, and then the repeated sound\u2014the moment when voice departs into music. Unlike Matmos, Pati\u00F1o isn\u2019t interested in creating well-tempered conceptronica out of his gimmick. Pati\u00F1o, from his earliest cassette releases, values the musical sketch over the composition, and weirdo synth noodling over stern purpose (see his catchphrase \u201CUNNECESSARY Sound Art\u201D). At its best it makes his music feel like one side of a witty conversation, instead of the exhausting lecturing of an art talk. Actually Laughing Out Loud, however, suffers from its loose structure. It feels like fifteen stabs towards a bright idea than fifteen ideas.
Sunik Kim: For an album positioned as a response to \u201Ca persistent excess of \u2018seriousness\u2019 in contemporary electronic music,\u201D ALOL is actually shockingly unfunny. In fact, it\u2019s more deeply entrenched in and emblematic of the eye-rolling bullshit of the experimental music world than it would care to admit. At the end of the day, this is, ironically, a fairly self-serious and\u2014worst of all\u2014tedious album, a slog of a listen, a straightforward gimmick shrouded in the (serious!) art world language of \u201Csonic assemblages\u201D and \u201Cspatial interventions\u201D (press copy\u2019s words), one just barely carried by a few flashes of sonic wizardry (\u201CSkip The Line\u201D is a standout, Autechre\u2019s \u201CV-PROC\u201D with\u2014you guessed it!\u2014manipulated laugh tracks instead of fractured drums). I feel nothing, I think nothing\u2014there are countless \u2018serious\u2019 experimental works that are exponentially funnier, more cutting and exciting than this. In fact, a 40-minute album composed of straight, unprocessed laughter would come much closer to fulfilling the promise of this project.
According to data from Gusareva and coauthors [17], almost one-third of bronchial allergy cases has sensitization to allergens of dust mites, while Huss and coauthors [28] report on the extremely high level of mite contaminations in dust from households in a few cities of the United States and Canada. For example, in San Diego, this level is 78.5% and in Toronto 59.3%. According to further investigation by this author, the presence of cockroach allergen in households of Boston was registered in 21.5% of the study cases, Saint Louis 16.3%, and Baltimore 13.4%.
Considering the literature data, the airborne biogenous particles found in our samples have the following order by allergenic potential: animal hair, fragments of insects, vegetational detritus, and pollen. The role of industrial garbage that contains biological components in allergies is completely unknown as there are no means to identify its precise composition. 041b061a72