This double CD reissue of intimate recordings by Englishman David Levyfrom 1971 is a sprawling document of immense beauty. These recordingsof rituals, chants and ceremonies strike a perfect balance betweensounding clearly recorded and gloriously primal.
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The white eyes staring out from darkness on the cover and the screamheard in the opening seconds of Nodern's debut album point toward anuncomfortable listen. He is adept at taking elements normallyassociated with specific genres and displacing them into his own,highly personal world.
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This is the first new Coil release (and also possibly the last) tosurface since the untimely passing of Geoff Rushton AKA Jhonn Balancelast November. As we are assured that the title for this release wasalready decided upon before Balance's death, it's hard not to read itas strangely prophetic, just as it is difficult to listen to any Coilmusic nowadays without hearing signs, omens and harbingers of deatheverywhere.
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Recorded on the road between December of 2001 and November 2002, thesethirteen tracks prove that it's never impossible to continue exploringnew musical palettes. Each track is, as far as I can tell, the combinedeffort of both Keith Whitman and Greg Davis and the music is markedlydifferent from anything they've released by themselves.
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Kranky's double CD reissue of the debut recording from Charalambidesreveals the origins of a band that, to some of us coming in late in thegame, were seemingly without one. Everything I've heard from this nowtriple-guitar band is amorphous and translucent, the music never quitetouches the ground, preferring to remain among the hazy and unsureimages of dreams.
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This is the long-delayed sequel to the mad Welshman's 2003 Double Vulgar album, which was intended to follow closely upon the release of the first, but because of various problems surrounding the pornographic artwork and the dissolution of World Serpent Distribution, it has been delayed until now.
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After hopping back and forth between a few different record labels overthe past four years, Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist, Frank SchültgeBlumm, has returned to the Morr Music fold for his latest release, Zweite Meer.I found myself easily drawn to his lush and gorgeous compositionalstyle, which is just as influenced by modern, minimalist classical asit is pop music.
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Gum was the late 1980s project of two locked groove-obsessed Australianyouths. Seduced by the sounds of their warped and scratched records,Andrew Curtis and Philip Samartzis developed a conceptually challengingway to harness the hidden and embarrassing music of phonographic mediagone wrong.
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Ielasi's last solo record Plansis an overplayed favorite of mine and one that marked quite a departurefrom the artist's past work as a featherweight improv stylist, a minerof hidden textures and master of the infinitesimal dynamic. Planswas a grandiose electroacoustic collage largely avoiding Ielasi'stradmark guitar which appeared only at the beginning and end of thepiece, resolving the brief flights of lyricism able to tilt thedisparate currents of the whole toward a slow expanse of weightless,melancholic bliss.
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Famously cryptic and deliberately obscure, the San Francisco-based Residents have one-upped themselves with Animal Lover,a set of bizarre (even for them) tunes with rhythm tracks based uponanimal mating calls.
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By all accounts I should be loving this album. Matt Elliott has takenmusic much farther than I could have ever imagined from listening toThird Eye Foundation back in the 1990s. He's a fantastically talentedmulti-instrumentalist, composer, producer, and arranger, and Drinking Songsonce again progresses very slightly from its predecessor.
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I picked up this CD after the Sunburned Hand of the Man performance atthe Notown Sound Festival in Atlanta this past weekend, directly fromSBHOTM themselves, who seemed very proud of the album, claiming it wastheir best release yet. It's hard to disagree.
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This is a reissue of an album that was originally released in a limitedrun on the now-defunct Isomorphic Records in 1996. For this edition, apreviously unreleased 13-minute bonus track from the original sessionshas been appended to the album. Music For the Head Balletis possibly Beequeen's most ambient work to date: a series of quietlyabstract, lengthy organ drones that amass slowly over time, graduallyrevealing their denseness and complexity.
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Thinking critically about tribute albums is always easier when thesongs are not mere regurgitations of the originals. To laud one band'snearly-symmetric treatment of another band's song leaves a grotesquetaste in your mouth and feels almost a betrayal in some way.
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A Hawk and a Hacksaw is chiefly the work of Jeremy Barnes, previouslyof krautrock brain-sizzlers Bablicon, and more recently of Guignol, abizarre one-off with members of Volcano the Bear. With A Hawk and aHacksaw, Barnes takes many of the European folk music fixations firstglimpsed on the Guignol album to their logical conclusion, creating asuite of ethnographical crossbreeds of indigenous music from France,Spain, Czech, Great Britain and Mexico.
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Following up his "Vacancy" mini album from last year, Joseph Arthur returns to the scene a bit wiser.
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The third album from one of my three favorite Rune groups makes the second essential Rune release of the year (after Food's Last Supper).The title does not describe a new modus-operandi for the duo; it isinstead an abstracted definition of Alog's unique position since theirfirst record.
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Die stadt
This is the second collaboration between these two iconoclasts, the first being last year's too-short Tinnitus Vu: the duo's hiss-laden meditation on hearing loss and the dynamics of sound after sound stops.
This is the second collaboration between these two iconoclasts, the first being last year's too-short Tinnitus Vu: the duo's hiss-laden meditation on hearing loss and the dynamics of sound after sound stops.
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Any hip hop record that references Aqua Teen Hunger Force, The Neverending Story and Street Fighter II in the first 90 seconds without sounding absurdly corny has something going for it, and Black Dialogue just improves from there.
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Tired of hip-hop's limitations, onetime club DJ Andrew Broder went intohis basement with a slew of second-hand instruments that he didn'treally know how to play. What came out—a mishmash of keys, drums,turntablism and an army of odd sounds, organic and otherwise—became hisone-man band Fog.
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