Back in 2010, this unusual shoegaze/drone duo released a truly mesmerizing CDr on Seattle's small Debacle Records label.  Sadly, not very many people noticed.  Fortunately, one of the few people who did notice was Barn Owl's Jon Porras, which eventually led to the requisite James Plotkin-remastering job, a high profile vinyl reissue, and a well-deserved second chance to share their dreamy choral gloom with the world.
We made it to 700 episodes. While it's not a special episode per se—commemorating this milestone—you can pretty much assume that every episode is special. This one features Mark Spybey & Graham Lewis, Brian Gibson, Sote, Scanner and Neil Leonard, Susumu Yokota, Eleven Pond, Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal, Yellow Swans, Dental waste in Saigon photo by Krisztian. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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The first release from this Archieuthis Rex side-project, Trithemius drops much of the metal trappings and instead focuses on synthetic beats and bleak, mangled electronics resulting in an inhuman and aggressive piece of modernized industrial.
No stranger to ambient music, Kerry Leimer has been active since the late 1970s, creating his own synthetic compositions when the genre was in its infancy. Permissions is, in part, a collaborative work with Taylor Deupree (who produced the album and added to some of the tracks. The resulting album is a long form album that both conjures the early days of electronic music, but in a distinctly modern framework.
On these ten original songs Monti renders the dramatic political history and culture of Italy into animal characters. Sounding passionate, sarcastic, unhinged, and ahead of her time, she uses the stinging words of Italian anti-Fascist writer and persecuted homosexual Aldo Braibant, framed in mysterious found sounds and synthesizer by Alvin Curran - here combining for the first time with Steve Lacy on soprano sax.
This is one of the latest in Mode Records long-running and expansive John Cage series and is one of a myriad of releases that are coinciding with his 100th birthday. The three pieces are all from the same late period in Cage’s composing career (indeed Thirteen is his last ever composition) and reflect an artist that was continuing to challenge himself, the musicians he worked with and listeners with new ideas on music and listening. The ensemble Essential Music took up this challenge and have created a stunning set of interpretations of these underrated pieces.
These three albums document a historical tour of Japan by John Cage in 1962. Accompanied by David Tudor, they join a number of similarly minded Japanese composers and artists in presenting a fascinating program of Cage’s own music and compositions along with Japanese and other international composers. The result is not so much a culture clash as an allying of forces against tradition. Yet, it seems a little cynical to me to promote these releases as John Cage releases when in fact they offer up a wealth of non-Cage compositions and performances (Tudor seems to be more central to the tour than Cage even!). Be that as it may, these are a powerful collection of recordings of an almost mythic tour.
The third release from Canada’s Tangiers is the kind of recordtailor-made for vinyl. A thick shroud of cigarette smoke and lo-ficackle emanates from the records twelve tracks here. My sense is that thelabel “garage-rock” has been slapped all over it, but that doesn’tentirely get it.
Bloom is the first in a series of three releases by the collective known as Fovea Hex. Quiet and moving, this is a very promising first chapter by a group that contains some of ambient and experimental music’s most golden children backing up some equally golden voices. 
Laetitia Sadier is one of the most distinctive voices in all of popular music. Two years after The Trip, her first album under her own name, and a deliberate step away from Stereolab, comes Silencio. With Moog, oscillators, krautrock and bossa nova rhythms, Tim Gane on guitar, and Sadier's confident, alluring voice, this is familiar and beloved territory.
Lescalleet has been expertly mangling old and decrepit electronics for years, but the past few months have been especially productive with these two high profile releases and a recent tour. His work has consistently inhabited that gray world between noise and avant garde electronics, placed somewhere between harsh brutality and beard-stroking experimentalism. These new works, both solo and with Aaron Dilloway, continue this, making serious art with some occasionally not so serious undercurrents.
