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Brainwashed | Friday, 16 May 2008

Brainwaves 2008: Tickets On Sale Now

Events - Concerts
November 21, 22, 23: Boston, The Regent Theatre This year plays host to old friends, local heroes, and a special day honoring 15 years of KRANKY! The lineup: Meat Beat Manifesto, Matmos, Stars of the Lid, A Place to Bury Strangers, Little Annie, The Reformed Faction (of Zoviet France), Andrew Liles and Jonathan Coleclough, Nmperign feat. Jason Lescalleet, Marissa Nadler, Glenn Jones, His Name Is Alive, Gary Wilson, Rivulets, Strategy, Nudge, Boduf Songs, Charalambides, To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie, Baby Dee, Lichens Tickets are once again $75 for the entire weekend and they're now available at the Brainwashed Commerce page. See brainwavesfest.org for details on travel, accommodations, and other stuff.
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Bomb the Bass, "So Special"

Videos - Music Videos

The second video from Bomb the Bass' Future Chaos release is making some waves due to its explicit content. "So Special" features the vocals of Paul Conboy while the video, directed by Nathalie Teirlinck and Ben Van Alboom is inspired by Magnum photographer Burt Glinn's 1971 series on prostitutes in New York. This can be seen both on YouTube and in super high fidelity through the Brainwashed Video Podcast.

5/11/2008 - 5/17/2008

Events - Release Dates
Look for new recordings this week from Grails, Burning Star Core, Philip Jeck, Tindersticks, Vetiver, and Nurse With Wound (whose disc also comes with a large book of paintings). Reissues include titles from 808 State, Vladislav Delay, and the classic RE/Search tome, "Pranks!".
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VTB return to the mountains

News - Site News
The Mountains Among Us by Volcano The Bear originally appeared in a super limited vinyl issue in 2002. There were three different versions available at the time, VTB's handmade gatefold sleeve edition of 40, beta lactam ring records box set edition of 100 and a further standard edition of 50 by BLRR. it has now been reissued as a CD in a beautiful hard back digipack CD, the design coming from one of the original VTB editions, and is limited to 500 copies.
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Soft Pink Truth Brings Partypills to London

Events - Concerts
Slithering from their ancient slumbers beneath the icy waves, the Soft Pink Truth will rise and take the stage to be judged by a jury of their peers, June 7th in London, at the Beaconsfield Gallery. Along for the ride are People Like Us, The Nitewreckers (with Dave Ball), Le Couteau Jaune, DJ Tendraw and DJ Howard Jacques.
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Matmos, "Supreme Balloon"

Reviews - Albums/CDs/Singles
Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt have abandoned their usual working methods for their new album. Gone are closely mic'd, digitally processed samples of non-musical objects, and along with them the heavily conceptual processes that have often made the liner notes of past Matmos albums as much fun as the music itself. In their place: synthesizers, synthesizers and more synthesizers.
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Sun City Girls, "You're Never Alone With A Cigarette" (Singles Volume 1)

Reviews - Albums/CDs/Singles
Back in 1988 the intention was to sequence these mainly instrumental tracks for release amidst the mostly vocal pieces from the same session. Had that happened, then Sun City Girls' best known release Torch of the Mystics would have been the rarest of beasts: a consistently excellent double album.
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His Name Is Alive, "Firefly DragonFly"

Reviews - Albums/CDs/Singles
HNIA have the ability to weave music out of the wispiest of substances, with every note issuing from their music seeming veritably to shine with the brightest of lights. This four-track EP is no exception, with delicacy and sparkling coruscations tumbling deliciously and lazily from the speakers, and scattershot glints pinging off in all directions.
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Four Tet, "Ringer"

Reviews - Sound Bytes
On this four track, half hour-ish EP, Kieran Hebden has created something that is for all intents and purposes, techno. We in the field of music criticism hate such simplistic descriptions, and especially one such as that with some unintentionally pejorative connotations, but this is something that could easily get asses shaking at the disco or wherever the kids go to dance these days. But, for all its 4/4 thumping, it is also an amazingly complex piece of programming and composition that is just as well suited for deep, headphone-centric analysis.
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Big Man Japan

Reviews - Movies
This faux-documentary follows a year in the life of the current "Big Man Japan," Masaru Daisatou. Japan has employed members of Masaru's family for several generations as the first line of defense against the plague of giant monsters attacking Japan on a regular basis. Through a process involving an electrical substation, Masaru's size is increased until he is towering over tall buildings. Unfortunately, while Masaru's predecessors were treated like heroes, Masaru is practically discarded.
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Nerdcore Rising

Reviews - Movies
This is a documentary following the first national tour of the Godfather of so-called "Nerdcore Rap," Damian Hess, a.k.a. MC Frontalot, and his band. Featuring interviews with figures such as Prince Paul, "Weird Al" Yankovic, and Jello Biafra, this film spends some time upfront explaining and justifying Nerdcore as a genre. From the beginning I was skeptical, and honestly, I'm not exactly sure when a genre becomes 'real'. In fact, I suspect some of the musicians themselves are equally skeptical of the label, but I guess in modern marketing, everything needs a classification.
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Yoshi Wada, "The Appointed Cloud"

Reviews - Albums/CDs/Singles
This recording is something of a rarity: the sound artist Yoshi Wada, ex of New York but now living and working out of San Francisco, very rarely commits his works onto any kind of commercial platform. The Appointed Cloud is a recording of a live performance from way back in 1987, of an installation created in the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science. It displays all the hallmarks of Wada's abiding interest in accidental tonalities through the use of drones, a home-made 80-pipe organ, bagpipes, a siren, and percussion of various species.
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Hoor-Paar-Kraat, "In Eros Veritas"

Reviews - Albums/CDs/Singles
With each new release, Anthony Mangicapra’s Hoor-Paar-Kraat becomes more distinctive and adventurous. I have enjoyed previous releases, some feeling more finished than others, but In Eros Veritas is probably the stand-out of the lot. Here many of the elements and approaches that work particularly well in other pieces come together like lesser metals mixed to form an alloy, creating a far stronger album.
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Skullflower, "Desire for a Holy War"

Reviews - Albums/CDs/Singles
Matthew Bower's reappearance as Skullflower a couple years back has already yielded a slew of releases that, while retaining his love of all things noisy and guitar based, has shown frequent stylistic shifts. This, the first installment of Utech's "URSK" series (after concluding the excellent "Arc" series ) is nearly an hour of full on feedback and guitar shriek that, for all its harshness is immensely listenable and demands to be listened to VERY loudly.
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Lair of the Minotaur, "War Metal Battle Master"

Reviews - Albums/CDs/Singles
With a title like this, it would take some level of ineptitude not to guess what this album sounds like. The only fear from such a title is that it will either be campy hipster metal or that it cannot possibly be awesome enough to live up to such a lofty title. Previous releases from Lair of the Minotaur rule out the former worry instantly, and only seconds of listening prove the latter completely unfounded.
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Benefit features members of Coil, Jim Thirlwell, others

Events - Concerts
May 18th 2008, at St. Mark's Church in New York City, marks an evening where decades of experimental performers from around the world will gather to buoy the spirits of their friend, 2-year-old Myat Moondog Haggart. Confirmed acts include Little Annie, David Grubbs (Squirrel Bait, Gastr Del Sol), Captain Sons and Daughters (Drew McDowall of Coil and artist Kara Bohnenstiel), and DJ J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus, Steroid Maximus, Manorexia).
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Strange Attractor feat. Graham Lewis

News - Site News
Strange Attractor, the group featuring Neils from Legendary Pink Dots has a new release coming out with guest vocals from Graham Lewis of Wire and He Said. That and other new tracks can be heard on their Myspace page.

Chop Shop, "Oxide"

Reviews - Albums/CDs/Singles
The inevitable fallibility of magnetic media can, while being frustrating as all hell to an artist, provide the impetus for an even better creation. Oxide represents such a creative disaster: old cassettes and reels of tape had been accidentally subjected to moisture damage. Instead of tossing them, Scott Konzelmann strung them up and pulled what he could off of the decaying tape and built this new work out of the remnants in his first full length release in quite awhile.
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BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa, "Passing Out"

Reviews - Albums/CDs/Singles
As intimidating as it is impressive, this third and final collaboration between Norway's BJ Nilsen and the Icelandic duo (of Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson) is exceptional. Combining the sort of dynamic and dramatic soundscapes of The Hafler Trio with a darker and less directional approach, the trio have made the sort of uneasy listening that is difficult to bring oneself to listen to but is inescapable once it starts.
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Jessica Bailiff and Annelies Monseré

Reviews - Sound Bytes
There is the old adage that "brevity is the soul of wit" which, in some cases, may be true. However, in the case of 16 minute EPs such as this, brevity is more of a frustrating tease than a positive quality. This four track EP, recorded while Bailiff was touring Europe is such a purely compelling piece of work that it makes me wish it was a little bit longer.
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Mariachi Azteca Principal, "The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland National Anthem #2"

Reviews - Sound Bytes
This delightful vinyl single celebrates the occasion of the inauguration of The Embassy of The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland in Mexico City on 30 August, 2002. It is a perfect demonstration that few things are more serious than well-spun yarns and few things unravel as amusingly as seriousness.
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Transsiberian

Reviews - Movies
The Independent Film Festival of Boston opened this week at the Somerville Theatre with this new Brad Anderson film. Anderson has a pretty good record so far, with Next Stop Wonderland, Session 9, and The Machinist, so I was rather excited to see his new work.
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Second Skin

Reviews - Movies
This is a documentary focusing on gamers who play Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs). It follows a few small groups of gamers distributed around the country, all playing either World of Warcraft (WoW) or Everquest II (EQ2). All are rather committed to their games, some consider themselves addicted, with one entering himself into a 12-step program to try and break is addiction.
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