Between the final Throbbing Gristle albums and last year's stellar Carter Tutti Void collaboration, Chris and Cosey have been maintaining an atypically high profile as of late, which makes it easy to forget that there has not been a new Carter Tutti album in over five years.  While that situation is not expected to be remedied until sometime in 2014, this very solid 10" single makes for a very welcome teaser in the meantime.
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Cécile Schott released a truly impressive string of beautiful, distinctive albums in the early and mid '00s, but went mysteriously silent after 2007's Les Ondes Silencieuses (much to my chagrin).  Now she is thankfully back and seems creatively re-invigorated, yet noticeably transformed: her latest effort is every bit as good as her previous work, but takes her aesthetic in a much more pristine, stripped-down, and song-like direction than I expected.
Anonymous emerged from a group of friends who played at each other’s houses in and around Indianapolis in the early ‘70s. They recorded their debut and sole album in a garage in Milwaukee in 1976, the same year that the Ramones and Blondie released their debuts. They pressed approximately 300 copies, but never played a gig, never promoted the album, and released only one follow-up, albeit under a different name and with a different lineup. That one record is remarkable though, a private press gem with excellent musicianship, beautiful vocal harmonies, and imaginative songwriting from their front man, Ron Matelic.
The first collaboration between Kazuyuki Kishino and Cristiano Lucani is a mass of mangled samples, processed field recordings, electronics, and piano that at times resembles an understated take on harsh noise, and at other times a sloppy, yet engaging mess of sounds. While an intense devotion to structure and composition might not be here, there are more than enough pleasurable noises and small, but fascinating outbursts to more than make up for that
I have historically had a very complicated relationship with William Basinski's work, as he has released some absolutely brilliant albums over the years, but he has also proven himself just as capable of producing fairly forgettable ambient music and/or flogging a single simple motif to death for a seeming eternity.  This latest effort lies somewhere in the middle of those two poles, as the blurred, uneasy title piece favorably calls to mind a more hallucinatory Morton Feldman, while the closing "The Trail of Tears" gradually devolves into an especially cold, dull, and dreary strain of dark ambiance that is best avoided.
This was my first exposure to the work of video artist/composer JR Robinson and it more or less left me absolutely flattened.  You've Always Meant So Much To Me is ostensibly just a single drone piece Robinson wrote to soundtrack one of his films, but a far better description is probably "a veritable Murderers' Row of Chicago's finest black metal and noise musicians converged at Steve Albini's studio to perform a truly crushing, slow-burning, and blackened epic."  More remarkable still: the album is even better than that sounds.
Pan•American's first record in four years comes timidly, marked by magnificently produced songs on eggshells and generally downplaying every one of its own notes. Now a performing band with the addition of Steven Hess and former Labradford bandmate Bobby Donne, the project of Mark Nelson adds a few elements of traditional rock music to his palate but only in the scarcest concentrations possible. What was once scattered becomes rhythmic, melodic, and occasionally more sporadic but still as sparse.
Consisting of the pair of artists that curate the Menstrual Recordings label, who have been heavy on the MB reissues, it is not at all surprising that Dedali and Disruptor’s grey, depressive electronics owe a notable debt to Bianchi’s legacy. However, their music stands entirely on its own, both in its emphasis on audio visual presentation and their approach to sound design. The lineage of this lavish CD/DVD set is clear, but the two manage to carve out their own niche as well.
This double disc set is an expanded reissue of the first two 17 Pygmies albums and their debut EP Hatikva. It is a fine document of the group formed by Savage Republic member Philip Drucker (aka Jackson Del Rey) in an attempt to make music that was more melodic than SR.
Originally issued on the Flingco Sound System label in 2010, this Virginian trio's full-length album is on CD for the first time, complete with two previously unreleased bonus songs. Homegoing is a powerful, yet light suite of electronic pieces that proves that intensity does not have to be oppressive or forceful.
