Like last year’s Mirages, Harmony is further refinement of the charred, static airscape that’s been in steady unveiling since Hecker’s first under his own name. An album of suites, it’s still all the same stuff: a grand-scale drift along the broken strands and injections of melody stretched through a globe’s worth of radio interference and churning chaos-drone. Whereas before the artist disrupted the sweep of his work with pop culture jabs (My Love Is Rotten) or more direct appeals to ambient or field sounds (Haunt Me), his last two records go straight for the head, kept still, buoyant, but in a suffocation of pinging dronal overtones and unending static tide.
As a household name for anyone who knows his or her electronic music, it’s a surprise that its taken this long for Andrew Weatherall’s to drop his first solo record. Aside from a few remixes and mix records, he’s always been a team player in projects like Sabres of Paradise and Two Lone Swordsmen. Always seen as more of an ideas man than a knob twiddler, this five track EP reveals again his skill for crossing the genre gaps and keeping his vision as eclectic as ever, but this time on his own.
In the face of diminishing returns from his midtempo/ downtempo releases for Warp, Ninja Tune, and Planet Mu, Luke Vibert's latest for Rephlex showcases his boldest material this century, suggesting that there may yet be some more good ideas up this maturing musician's rumpled sleeve.
Robert Pollard’s second solo album of 2006 is a mixed bag of pop gems and forgettable tunes that betray an inconsistency of effort. While it’s the sort of thing I expect from one of his numerous side projects, that one of his so-called major releases is so scattershot can only be considered a disappointment.