There are very few musicians that can craft a genuinely compelling album from just a few sustained tones or chords and most of them (Catherine Christer Hennix and Eliane Radigue, for example) seem to have records on Important.  With the eerie and evocative Secret Photographs, Rutger Zuydervelt has decisively earned his place in that highly exclusive clique.
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Digitalis head Brad Rose has been a wildly prolific and varied artist for years, but his heavy drone project The North Sea has been the longest-running of his many musical endeavors.  Lately, however, he has a adapted the more synth-centric guise of Charlatan as his primary outlet, so Grandeur & Weakness marks the end of an era and does so beautifully.  In some respects, this effort is not radically different from Charlatan's recent Isolatarium (they use very similar tools), but the difference in density and atmosphere is dramatic, as futuristic unease is replaced by buzzing, bristling monoliths of menace and dread.
Lichens' Robert Lowe has always been a rather singular artist, but this latest effort is unusual even by his standards. Although it takes its inspiration from the British sci-fi series The Tomorrow People, its futuristic overtones are contained within a framework that seems far more indebted to raga, drone, and other sacred and ancient sources.  It is certainly an original vision, but the actual content is not quite strong enough to support Lowe's endless, mantric repetition.
I can't let 2011 go by without gushing about the newest music to come from this criminally underexposed Virginia-based group. This brief four-song EP is a walloping punch with an infectious lead title tune that is more of an honor to the wall-of-sound of Joe Meek's production for The Tornadoes claim to fame than it is for any '80s band. This has been accomplished without turning their back on their already established signature sound.
Although Stephen Mallinder has been probably the least prolific of his Cabaret Voltaire cohorts, his work outside of that classic band has never been lacking in quality. This album, originally released in 1999 with Shane Norton, demonstrates how his post-CV trajectory moved towards the dancier end of the spectrum and manages to mostly sound fresh, even within a genre that tries to reinvent itself every few months.
Originally issued on CD in 2009 and now reissued on double vinyl with additional tracks, Without Sinking is the second album from this Icelandic cellist (who has worked with the likes of mum and the Hafler Trio). Hildur’s subtly treated cello and zither compositions are only enriched by the vinyl format, adding an extra layer of warmth and emotion to her already powerful works.
When Wire imploded in 1980, Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis quickly began the Dome project, recording their first three albums within a 12-month span, then a fourth in 1983. Collating the four classic Dome albums from the early 1980s with the Yclept compilation presented on vinyl, these classic albums are presented in a luxurious new set which is undeniably essential listening.
Coolies started out in the late 1990s, a trio of school friends from South Auckland, NZ, making a homemade-punk noise. After a first spurt of activity they lost a couple of drummers, released hardly any music, and seemed to have gone silent. This brief new album captures their gleeful, raw, energy on a reel-to-reel recorder.
There is something to be said about listening to a good instrumental record on a cold wintry day. The right one should be picked of course, whose notes and timbres are delicate as powdery snow. The music should be austere, but with warm harmonics cutting through the cold like glimmers of sunshine. The eight pieces on this album are just the thing, and have a nice narrative arc that has me thinking of the similarities between novels and albums, how moving both forms can be, and how a good album, even without words, always tells a story. Like curling up with a good book, it’s nice to be inside on a Sunday afternoon comforted by the joys of a turntable and a warm cup of coffee.
Golem is widely regarded to be a lost psychedelic masterpiece among the sorts of people who are interested in such things, numbering David Tibet, Stephen Stapleton, and Julian Cope among its more outspoken champions.  In fact, Current 93 even covered "May Rain" on Thunder Perfect Mind.  Now, 36 years after it initially appeared, Golem has finally been reissued for the first time in its original form (though it previously surfaced as part of Durtro's Ultrasonic Seraphim retrospective in 1996). I don't think I'd quite call it a masterpiece myself, but it is definitely one of the more memorably bizarre albums to emerge from the krautrock milieu and that is certainly no small feat.
