After an entire decade of incendiary live shows and roughly a billion releases of varying quality, this West Coast noise supergroup finally stepped into a (proper) recording studio.  Unsurprisingly, this new experience did little to diminish their spazzy, entropic intensity.

Kawabata Mokoto and his spacey pals have dispatched another communiqué of shambling kitchen-sink psychedelia from whatever mental place they currently inhabit.  As is often the case with this band, I am left scratching my head and wondering whether Kawabata is a genius or a charlatan (or both).

Brendan Burke and Fred Lonberg's quiet, unassuming debut on Flingco Sound flirts with the conventions of both glitch and chamber music, though it obviously favors the latter. Composed primarily of piano and cello performances, Over All of Spain... is a beautiful and mostly pastoral record fleshed out by the minimal use of samples, loops, and other odd sounds.

 

The latest album from Daniel Padden's One Ensemble sees the group expand to a seven- piece, the extended line-up extending the range of the music in the process. The blurring of many folk styles with elements of improvisation should come as no surprise to those familiar with this group's previous output but the unexpected span of textures and focus of energy bring the music onto a new trajectory.

An extensive double disc collection documenting the output of six French tutees of Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau, this album is a near necessity in any cohesive understanding of France's musical environment in the interim between World Wars. Comprised of Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc, "Les Six" forged an approach generally marked by spare concision, a response to the flowery output of the Romantic and Impressionist tendencies of composers such as Wagner and Debussy.

Chicago's Cave have returned with their distinct blend of momentum rock and it is, fittingly, their most fully realized disc yet. Tighter, funkier, spacier and more driving than anything they've done, this is the group at their best, concocting neo-Krautrock grooves that perfectly soundtrack the continued and colorful descent deeper into the new millennium.

Pimmon's Paul Gough has made a career out of constructing dense and complex ambient soundscapes. On this, his first full-length in five years, he shows no signs of rust and delivers a headphone album of striking depth and vibrancy.

Expanded to a duo, Boy In Static abandons its pleasantly derivative dream-pop, choosing something closer to the saccharine sweetness of Peter Bjorn and John—with uneven results.

Area C’s newest release borrows its theme from a passage in Claudius Aelian’s On The Characteristics of Animals (written around 200 AD); specifically one that states that doves can protect themselves from wizard attacks by using bay-tree shoots for their nests.  From the same book, I also learned that beavers often elude predators by chewing off their own testicles. I suppose I‘m digressing though. I should probably mention that this is an excellent album at some point.  I will find another forum for my ramblings about our delightful and industrious mammalian friends.

Despite having been recorded more than a decade ago with somewhat fledgling technology,  Jim's 2001 laptop masterpiece still sounds fresh and vibrant today.  That is no small accomplishment, given the avalanche of laptop-based improv works that followed in its wake. 

Conceptually being the audio equivalent of a cross-country drive through North America, this Danish artist combines the somewhat contradictory sonic elements of guitar amplifier hum and feedback with purely digital synthesized tones and rhythms to unique effect, creating a contrast that is not as stark as one would expect.

Across the 16 tracks on this disc, the duo of Mark Fell and Mat Steel have taken a clinical, sterile study of the most simplistic and rudimentary of classic techno and electro rhythms that, through their deliberate sense of repetition, forces one to hear all of the subltities that are missed when presented in a more danceable context.

For many writers (myself included), describing a band as being like "early Swans" is a very easy crutch to use.  For those who have at least the most passing familiarity with this era, it calls to mind slow, dissonant guitar riffs, a rhythm section that, at loud enough volumes, feels like getting kicked in the groin repeatedly.  And above all, Michael Gira’s growed, hate filled vocals that have been attempted, but never surpassed, by other bands.  Quite simply, without this material, it is doubtful that "sludge" or "drone" as we know it would exist.  Justin Broadrick may have stuck around in Napalm Death to continue grindcore into stagnancy, Sunn O)))’s members would be in faceless black metal bands, and so forth.  Unlike some other works with this sort of legendary status, the LPs and EPs that make up this collection sound just as vital and genre defining as they did some 25 years ago.  With word that Gira may be reviving the project, and the consistent influence shown in modern bands, it is a perfect time to revisit this unabashed classic.

Wolves' third album is a solid monolith of blistering brutality that will likely make black metal fans very happy. Unfortunately, the more melodically adventurous Malevolent Grain EP hinted they were capable of being much more than merely brutal.  Black Cascade is not the album that I was eagerly hoping for at all, but I suppose Nathan Weaver must follow his dark muse to whatever sinister place it takes him.  Maybe next time.

Alex Neilson's name shouldn't be unfamiliar around here (drummer for Baby Dee, Current 93, The One Ensemble, and Jandek). The debut of Trembling Bells brilliantly blends ancient themes with individual concerns and traditional song structures with more modern twists. It has as a euphoric balance of dissonance and melody, fine musicianship, emotional conviction, and a sense of humor.

A new approach (or at least moniker) for orchestramaxfieldparrish's Mike Fazio, this album presents two separate discs, each individually named, for a double dose of dark and moody ambience as rendered by Fazio's nearly neo-classical approach. Long though it may be, there is enough depth to the material here that suggests numerous listens, yet it is also bare enough that it is just as suitable as background accompaniment, albeit to a consistently grim undertaking.

Christofer Lambgren's premire full length release under the guise of the Nana April Jun persona "researches the dark associations of post-black metal," and references the Burzum album Filosofem, which revolutionized the genre by including an extended inwardly reflective keyboard piece. Using purely digital means Nana April Jun has created a sound world that gives a sense of having succumb to the numb isolation of a person who has long been institutionalized, not unlike the patron saint of black metal himself, Varg Vikernes.

Sometimes one disc isn't enough. Following up his stunning cassette debut last year, Russian cosmo-wizard Sergey Kozlov returns with a double disc's worth of rock demolition. Whereas the cassette fidelity of the first kept things murky and mysterious though, the two CDs here find Kozlov presenting a far clearer and more expansive concoction that unfurls the vision of a new and potent psychedelic voice.

Pekka Airaksinen has never been particularly well known outside of his native Finland, but he has the unique distinction of appearing not once, but twice on the legendary list that accompanied Nurse With Wound's debut album (once as himself, once as The Sperm).  In the ensuing four decades since his heyday as an underground rock luminary, he has quietly released an avalanche of material on his own label (not mere hyperbole: he is attempting to release an album dedicated to each of the one thousand Buddhas), while toiling in relative obscurity.  While I have no intention of plunging into the time- (and finance-) engulfing black hole of his back catalog just yet, I can happily report that Mahagood shows that the old fellow is still as vital and playfully skewed as ever.

8-Bit artists and circuit benders active in today’s vibrant scene have met their match—and their aesthetic ancestors—in the League of Automatic Music Composers. Regarded as being the worlds first computer band, their unique foray into electronic sound worlds began in tandem with the budding world of microcomputers, which in the mid-1970s were just then newly available on the commercial market.