The full 33 minutes of Once in a Full Moon stands as Black Sun Productions finest musical moment to date. This is an ambitious piece of moon music that covers the territory between lunacy, ambition and grace.
The full 33 minutes of Once in a Full Moon stands as Black Sun Productions finest musical moment to date. This is an ambitious piece of moon music that covers the territory between lunacy, ambition and grace.
Anything that can remotely resemble widespread commercial success escaped the Frames for most of their career when their last album, Set List, broke into the Top Ten in their native Ireland. Almost a year later, it was released on these shores as the first album in a new deal with Anti, garnering the band more attention in America as a band to watch intently. Their newest album was released in Ireland several weeks ago, and Anti will release it in the US and Europe in February. Until then, rabid fans can order through select dealers linked on the band's website to absorb the finest work in the band's decade-plus lifespan, as well as their most coordinated and complete effort to date.
On his sixth solo album for Touch, Jeck continues his perfection of using the record player as an instrument (not as a DJ) to create a long-form piece that has no sense of gimmick or cliché, but instead is a hazy, but warm and inviting piece of captivating music that is unlike the work of anyone else. Originally intended for live performance, this studio reconstruction is amazing on its own.
Originally released as a C90 and here spread across two LPs (and four tracks), Space Finale has a definitively analog quality to the sound, both in format and in the soft, obscure nature of the textures of each piece. While a very strong work, there are a few moments that hold it back from being as brilliant as it could be.
Pat Maherr is best known for his dark ambient detournements of Wagner cassettes as Indignant Senility, but his Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting project is probably as far from dwarves and valkyries as it is possible to get. In fact, the only common ground between his two guises is that something is being unrecognizably mangled and that there are probably some tapes involved. The "somethings" in this case are: a bunch of hip-hop songs, DJ Screw's legacy, and the whole mixtape tradition. Maherr has mischievously stripped 13 unnamed hip hop jams of everything fun and vibrant and turned them into the soundtrack for a slow-motion house party of the damned (which, of course, is perversely fun in its own right).
This is already the 15th release in Staalplaat's exhaustive Muslimgauze archive series, but it looks like Bryn Jones has not yet run out of minor posthumous surprises to share with the world. Originally recorded in 1995, but never released, Lazhareem Ul Leper is a series of heavy percussion experiments that stylistically fits somewhere between Jones' harsher post-industrial moments and the hypnotically looping ethno-percussion vamps that he was exploring around that same time. The unexpected twist is that it sounds like Bryn flirted with incorporating some IDM influences here as well.
Michael Gira founded Swans some 27 years ago. Time has brought a measure of nuance and versatility, but the raw, inhuman power of the band persists, even as many of their more lauded peers have succumbed to nostalgia or exhaustion. Pure tenacity, as much as loud guitars and violent lyrics, is what gives the new album the brute force that is characteristic of Swans at their best.
I can't tell if this is a Swans album or an Angels of Light record in disguise. Maybe it's both. Maybe it doesn't matter one bit. In the years between Swans Are Dead and My Father, Gira released several solo acoustic records, a "pop" collaboration with Dan Matz, a "split" with Akron/Family, and five diverse Angels records. That 12 year run concluded with We Are Him, an album that might have been where Swans would have ended up had the project not been terminated. After listening many times to this multifaceted return from the dead, I still can't determine what makes these songs more deserving of the Swans moniker than any of Gira's other post-avian recordings.
It has been twenty years since Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane formed Stereolab. Sadier's voice remains a classic hypnotic sound and on her first solo record The Trip she meditates on change and loss in a personal response to her life's journey and in particular the death of her younger sister, Noelle.