As night comes quicker, Madison musicians skew darker

Local releases from September and October pack plenty of punch.

Summer has ended and fall is in full swing. Leaves are dying and falling to barren patches of earth. The wind has a subtle chill, and Madison musicians are leaning hard into haunting atmospheres. All throughout September and October, a slew of musical artists in Madison have released coldly gripping work. Whether ambient, metal, or industrial, one of the common throughlines of local Madison releases during that time is that they’ve skewed consistently darker. A fitting trait for a stretch of time where the days seem shorter and nightfall arrives with a new expedience. 

There are exceptions to this embrace of artistic darkness, and not everything that got released was mired in doom or gloom. Moments of brightness and optimism take on greater vitality when their surroundings are uniformly bleak. Without that glint of energetic hope, there is little else beyond desolation. But the dynamic cuts both ways: all of these darker works become more striking and more meaningful by virtue of their counterweight. Some of that light is represented by way of a playful work or two, while the remainder of selected releases are content with emphasizing their gothic trappings.

All of these albums are available to purchase on Bandcamp. While there was no Bandcamp Friday in November, a purchase through the platform remains one of the most beneficial ways to support the featured artists, save for going to a show and/or purchasing from the artist directly. Bandcamp Friday will return in December, so if anyone out there still wants to wait for that to make sure these artists get an extra dollar or two, bookmark away.

Celebrity Sighting, …They’re Just Like Us

Born in the wake of Proud Parents‘ amicable dissolution, Celebrity Sighting hits a few familiar notes on their debut album. Anyone who is a fan of multi-instrumentalist Tyler Fassnacht‘s musical sensibilities—often characterized by a sugar-spiked amalgam of indie-punk, power-pop, and occasionally hardcore—will find a lot to love on …They’re Just Like Us. It’s a whirlwind force of grit and conviction that demands attention.

Fassnacht spearheads the project alongside his partner, Danielle Tucci. The duo are a perfect pair on …They’re Just Like Us, feeding off each other’s energy. Dirtied-up guitar tones and production levels accentuate Tucci’s biting, droll vocal delivery to perfection. Chaotic, relentless, and endlessly fun, …They’re Just Like Us is both addictive and substantial. (And the album’s lead-off track—”Stuck Up POV“—is a strong contender for my favorite punk song to come out of Madison this year.) This is a party worth attending.

Chants and Dave Schoepke, Speleogenesis

Chants‘ Jordan Cohen and Milwaukee-area drummer Dave Schoepke team up on Speleogenesis, a wild and vivid all-drums record. Schoepke and Cohen first met in a student-teacher capacity, with Schoepke taking on the role of mentor. How much impact that dynamic had on the seemingly innate level of understanding and intuition the two musicians display on Speleogenesis may never be known, but their present-day connection cuts through clearly.

Modeling their approach on dub and dancehall beats, Cohen and Schoepke create intricate tapestries of percussive blasts. Lightly disquieting one moment, and contagiously energetic the next, Speleogenesis makes the absolute most of its minimalist setup. Tracks like “Pressure Slide” and “Ritmo Puro” feel as if they’re over in half of their actual running time, likely as a result of the irrepressibly jittery nature of the work. It’s a fascinating record from two masters of their craft, locking in on common ground.

Diati, Diati

Metal-tipped rock band Vanishing Kids announced a hiatus of sorts in August, but at least one of the band’s members has remained characteristically active on the new release front. Multi-instrumentalist Jason Hartman‘s latest solo project, Diati, embraces classic hard rock and proto-metal influences. The project’s self-titled EP is an able demonstration of Hartman’s gifts for emulating and evoking the brawny and guitar-forward rock acts of the ’70s and ’80s. This dynamic extends beyond musical composition to the production work by incorporating a mid-fi DIY approach that feels authentic to the era.

Diati‘s three tracks run just over 12 minutes total, but each minute packs a punch. Opener “In A Flash” is reminiscent, in turns, of Thin Lizzy, early Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Hartman’s main project, Vanishing Kids. In the song’s back half, Hartman goes on a shredding spree that becomes a source of energy all its own. On “Loud Cloud,” Hartman leans hard into palm-muted chugging and more frenetic guitar fireworks. Pinch harmonics and sweeped arpeggios get thrown into sharp, fascinating contrast by the drawn-out, semi-dissonant drones of the track’s chorus, which lays bare Diati‘s appeal: this is a ferocious work that revels in subversive homage.

Frozen Charlotte, Monstrous Femme

January marked the introductory release of MQBS member—and singular solo artist—Sigra DeWeese’s latest project, Frozen Charlotte. Made up of DeWeese, Riley Rentfro, Elliot Jewel, and Quintin Bovre, the collective excels in goth-punk minimalism. After a string of digital singles, the band’s debut EP, Monstrous Femme, was released on October 25. “Peignoir” kicks the EP off with haunting vocal interplay, with a dual-delivery complemented by an eerie, wordless backdrop of stacked ooh’s and ahh’s. Cello and a near-motorik drum part kick in shortly after, as DeWeese’s lyrics cut in with exacting precision: “God made Eve from the rib of Adam / I’m just taking back what’s mine.” Before quickly following up: “Dig the knife in deeper.”

“Peignor” establishes the unwavering tone of Monstrous Femme, which continuously heightens over the EP’s remaining four tracks. “Cenotaph” is the only track on the EP which hadn’t been previously released, and it benefits from that unfamiliarity. A haunting, slinking bass line snakes across another, lower bass line, as DeWeese enlivens what quickly becomes the EP’s most emotionally frail moment: “Now I see / Now that I’ve grown older / Love is free / When it’s younger, bolder.” In a release full of haunting atmospherics, stark depictions of violence, and a feeling of dread, the blistering honesty and genuine fear packed into “Cenotaph” provides Monstrous Femme with its most unshakable moment of terrifyingly intimate honesty.

Killcrop, Ejected Naked Into The Void

Dark, industrial, and slyly new-wave, Killcrop’s Ejected Naked Into The Void is the type of album that lightly coils its proverbial fingers around listeners’ throats and refuses to relinquish. “I die alone a thousand times / But we’ll all burn together,” sings vocalist and multi-instrumentalist J. Killcrop near the end of “Blood Culture.” Smoldering wreckage is the norm across the album’s 15 tracks (the final five of which are marked out as “2024 mix” versions). Ejected is a heavy-hearted work, and communicates a sense of doomed resignation with genuine panache.

Only a few people apart from J. Killcrop are credited as contributors on the album, underscoring the sense that Ejected is a startlingly-realized individual vision. “Time like grains of sand / With the saint of second chances / On this bridge we stand / Aflame,” goes an early section of the dirge-like “The Language Of Nature,” playing perfectly off the unending beds of warm (and occasionally decaying) synths. Funereal and razor-sharp, the stanza reflects the apocalyptic nature that’s seemingly inherent to Killcrop’s artistic sensibilities. But it also flashes the allure of the grandiose, damaged setting that the album methodically cultivates over its runtime. The end of the world Killcrop creates here is coming, sure, but with a soundtrack this absorbing, the weight of that knowledge doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

Wonderporium, Two Impromptus

Two Impromptus is a tremendously beautiful, achingly powerful ambient-electronic record (with a healthy dose of acoustic instrumentation). Profoundly resonant and effortlessly mesmeric, Wonderporium’s debut album is a thing to behold. Tom Curry handles tuba, Mr. Chair‘s Jason Kutz tackles piano, and The Earthlings‘ Noah Gilfillan takes on additional keys and additional percussion. (In a live setting, Gilfillan also incorporates a stringed instrument or two.) Each member of the trio contributes an array of additional electronic effects (and Dave Alcorn assists on percussion in Two Impromptus‘ second half). Elegiac, deeply-felt, and breathtakingly poignant, Two Impromptus highlights the trio’s gift for improvisational work.

Wonderporium achieve a remarkable cohesion across the record, carefully creating a wide-view cinematic scope. It helps that Kutz, Curry, and Gilfillan had already had a few sessions under their collective belt prior to recording. “It was a project that I started in my 23 Concerts series,” Kutz tells Tone Madison via email, noting the trio performed together three times before recording. “We only got one day all together [to record] before a major snowstorm shut down the session,” he says. “The project came from a love of and desire to make (sometimes) minimalist music and explore slow-moving progressions, noise, electronic randomness, ambience and repetition. And also to play free improv—unfettered music.”

Kutz’s excitement about Wonderporium is both palpable and well-placed. With each listen, small details emerge, whether they come in the form of audio cracks that suggest ice breaking apart, or brief introductions of new instruments. It’s an exceptional effort from a group of people operating on a shared wavelength, exercising frightening levels of pinpoint intuition. At times, it’s genuinely stunning, and the feeling it generates sticks in the mind long after the music fades.