Despite running a serious reissue campaign for Cluster and related releases, I am surprised that Bureau B have only come around to reissuing the first Cluster LP now. Featuring the core duo of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Jochim Roedelius, their debut also features the legendary Conny Plank both as a performer and as producer. This is the definitive reissue, it restores the original running order of the album and, best of all, it still sounds exceptional.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Originally released on CD-R in 2005, this vinyl only reissue of vocalist Jessika Kenney and violist Eyvind Kang’s collaboration is one of the inaugural releases on Stephen O’Malley’s new Ideologic Organ label. Both artists have worked with O’Malley in Sunn O))) but to expect anything remotely like O’Malley’s own music would be a mistake. This is quiet, contemplative, and fully acoustic; both artists explore the relationships between each others' craft. They intentionally break down the barriers between voice and viola and between playing music and singing.
I don't think there could be a more apropos title for this slab of destruction from one of the innovators of noise as we know it. Rather than the handmade instruments and conceptual endeavors of The Haters, Jupitter-Larsen simply works with the sound of cars smashing into one another, which will either entertain or be as annoying as all hell.
As I mentioned in my review of the split 7" a few weeks ago, these are easily two of my favorite artists working in the more experimentally focused metal scene (that currently doesn't have an inane genre tag, which I'm perfectly fine with). Unlike that single, this one sided LP has the two projects working collaboratively, with the results completely living up to expectations.
Jesu is back with another mammoth slab of religious iconography, loathing, and detuned metal chords played deadly slow. If Loveless wasn't already taken, that might be a more fitting title for this record of empty-hearted love songs.
This compilation of German experimental music from the last five years is a nice sketch of what is going on outside of Berlin these days. The material covers field recordings, atmospheric electronics and bits of noise. The material also covers the good, the mediocre and the bad.
Twenty Knives follow the compiled track "The Royal Vomitorium" and free EP The Royal Invitation with an intriguing album wherein a spaceship crashes and the pilot explores a weird terrain guided by a small robot. With an overblown digital game sensibility and an air of glam-electronica, this is slightly dated harmoniously malfunctioning music. I enjoy it more for knowing nothing about the artist and the whole concept being almost as laughable as it is mysterious.
The articles in Datacide Eleven are just the sort of critical discourse, on subjects I am endeared to, that I have been hungering to read. When it came in the mail I nearly devoured it all in one sitting. After gorging I had to slow down, due to the density of the information, even though I’m used to binge reading. It was like stuffing down a big bowl of pasta only to groan later when it has expanded to the point of bloating. Expanding the brain instead of the gut is healthier in the long run, though it still takes time to digest and absorb. But when it comes to studying up on the culture of Reggae sound sytems, of pirate radio signals leaking out from the margins into the mainstream, the paranoid and the conspiracy ridden underpinnings of the Tea Party Movement, it is the kind of work I’m willing to do in order to lead a robust textual life.
While the use of old blues samples in modern songs is hardly a new idea, this is a great example of when a seemingly overused concept is reinvigorated. Here, the jazz pianist Adam Fairhall teams up with Paul J Rogers (best known to readers of Brainwashed as a member of The Long Dead Sevens) to mix the old with the new, highlighting the continuum of recorded music in the 20th century and performers in the 21st. The merging of Fairhall’s skill as a pianist along with Rogers more studio-orientated talents has lead to this fantastic collection of recordings which may not shatter all expectations but certainly put more life into the blues than most contemporary efforts.
