Unlike much supposed and purported dream pop, the songs of Love Cult are truly more ethereal than they are song-like, which is to say: they’re more dreamy than they are poppy. As represented on a three-track set, Live in Saransk, the compositions come across as fragments of memories of songs. Less like sketches of songs to be than memories of songs that were. There’s a bit of a melody, for example, to “Reflection,” a downward-sloping riff that repeats like a half-conscious shard of childhood (MP3), a comparison buttressed by the thick haze through which it is filtered, as well as by the occasional appearance of what sounds like the voices of little kids. It’s a ghost image of a song, flashed on the mind’s retina and lingering seemingly forever. “Fireflower Language” is sodden muffle, and all the more memorable for it, like a chorus played on a damp cassette; stretching on for 15 minutes, it’s a secular mass as envisioned and then neglected by Angelo Badalamenti (MP3). And a collaboration with Bedroom Bear on an untitled ten-minute wash of synthesizer suggests the opening chordal swell of a pop song that never quite arrives (MP3). Given apparent visa issues keeping the Love Cult duo of Ivan Afanasyev and Anya Kuts from performing outside Russia (they hail from the Republic of Karelia), it’s enough to make you set a hopeful Google Alert for reasonably priced airfare to Petrozavodsk.
More information on the release at pandafuzz.com, and on the Love Cult duo at lovecult.tihiiomut.ru. Bedroom Bear, also based in Karelia, at bedroombear.tumblr.com.
The church has long since ceded its role as the major commissioner of music. Music that explores the church as physical structure or cultural apparatus, whether consciously or not on the part of the musicians involved, inherently concerns itself with the means by which the institution shaped sound. In the work of Luis Marte, that shaping is enacted literally and metaphorically. While the details are uncertain, Marte’s “Templos” appears to take the space and ritual of an Argentinean church as its setting and subject. In a brief liner note at the estimable 
Not all European free improvised music is European. Some is Canadian. Take the Saskatchewan-based efforts of Isak Goldschneider, Amy Horvey, and Jeff Morton, as captured on their recent free release, Mille Bayous. That’s “free” both ways: downloadable and improvised. The list of instruments involved hints at the potential cacophony, but not at the near stasis that the trio revels in for much of the recording: Horvey, “trumpet, water, bowl, contact microphone, piano, percussion”; Goldschneider, “clarinet, electric organ, motor-magnet guitar, piano, percussion”; Morton, “microphones, percussion, brass objects, motor-magnet guitar, electric organ, piano.” Cacophony does rear is carnival-esque head, on the closing “Les Méfaits de l’arbre,” at the end of which Horvey is heard to say, “Oh, whatever.” But the placement and the candid comment suggest it as an outtake, a blooper-real snippet, the noise against which the rest of the album’s intense quietude can be judged. 
Like the work of Scott Tuma and the Boxhead Ensemble, the four tracks that make up Widesky‘s EP Floating in Being sound like country songs minus the songs. It’s as if a crack Nashville session band had found themselves, while tuning up, so enamored of the sounds they were emitting, they they just stuck with tuning up, with hearing how the lightest touch of a guitar, and the mere movement of percussion instruments, would yield a thing of such beauty that they needn’t concern themselves with lyrics about broken down pick-ups and love gone bad. On perhaps the strongest track on Floating in Being, which would be “A Torpid Memoir” (