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Sprawled over two discs, this album from New Zealand’s Mrtyu! is a lumbering behemoth of rumbling bass, feedback, and layers of distortion. It’s a gloriously unholy mess, suggesting subterranean rites held far from the light of day.
Brothers John and Michael Gibbons of Bardo Pond take an exquisite and enjoyable side trip into harmonious interstellar regions with this low-key study of vibrations. With stripped down instrumentation, they drift into shimmering passages of temporal displacement.
After several months of hefty improv submersion it’s possible to cultivate the taste buds enough to be able to sift out the quality from the claptrap. This is most definitely the former, a 21 minute improvised freak out wrapped in a brain-splurge primary colored aggro cover
Crushing drone and noise into a static mash, John Schofield (if indeed it is him, the credits are sketchy) builds a formidable psychedelic wall on this cracked three-tracker.
Perhaps Planet Mu's clearest attribute is founder Mike Paradinas' willingness to put out diverse releases from artists he believes in regardless of where they lie on the electronic music spectrum. Yet as this budget-priced compilation demonstrates, it's also the label's most obvious weakness.
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.