Over the course of their incredible 27-year career, Sun City Girls seemed to make a point of doing everything as triumphantly and aggressively wrong as possible, precluding any possibility of widespread acceptance. While they certainly recorded their share of awesome psychedelic jams and inspired ethnic music appropriations over the years, their anarchic sense of humor and love of absurdist theatrics resulted in an accompanying avalanche of baffling and wildly self-indulgent work as well. Of course, that eccentric unpredictability and willingness to try literally anything was central to their charm. Consequently, Funeral Mariachi makes the most fitting of swan-songs, as they’ve finally done the most unexpected thing of all: made an album of very listenable, melodic songs.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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ESP Disk's most recent re-issue of the now well-known and loved Heliocentric Worlds series is haphazard and sloppy, offering only the most minimal improvements over their last re-issue from 2005. Fledgling Ra listeners will be happy to find all three volumes together in one package (this time on three distinct discs), but everyone else will likely be disappointed by the lackluster bonus material, mediocre packaging, and poorly edited liner notes. Anyone who owns all three albums already can safely ignore this release, the rest of us can bemoan its poor presentation.
This three disc set sees the reissue of Charlemagne Palestine’s masterpiece for the piano along with two previously unreleased versions of the piece for harpsichord and string ensemble. "Strumming for Bösendorfer Piano" is a landmark of modern composition, a return to first principles typical of that generation of minimalist composers. Eschewing complex forms and technique, Palestine instead chases the pure sound lurking within the piano and uses the instrument in a way that was revolutionary then and remains just as stunning now.
Jack Dangers has been bitten by the dubstep bug and there are no two ways about it. Answers Come in Dreams finds the long time innovator giving in to (or perhaps trying out) the style du jour for a strange distillation of his own sound.
Although only active for around six years, this Shanghai based noise project already has a sprawling discography that rivals many of the long-standing artists that inspired them, with a multitude of limited cassette and CD-R releases. However, I think this may constitute the band’s first solo, mass produced outing. And with this opportunity, the band does exactly as they should: a 73 minute single track of grating, painful dynamic noise.
While often pigeonholed as a "shoegaze" band, the duo of Lovesliescrushing is something entirely different. Ostensibly doing similar things: Scott Cortez's heavily treated and layered guitar noise and abstracted, mostly unintelligible female vocals from Melissa Arpin-Duimstra, LLC took these and pushed them to the furthest reaches, making little to no concessions for traditional musical style or structure. Here, a selection of pieces between 1990 and 2000 are presented, some for the first time, reworked and shaped into even more abstract forms of glorious noise.
It has only been three years since Sublime Frequencies released the inaugural entry in their Guitars From Agadez series, but so much has happened since then that it is a near miracle that Group Inerane even managed another album. The biggest event: second guitarist Adi Mohamed was killed in the uprisings that followed the coup d’état that ousted Niger’s president. Thankfully, frontman Bibi Ahmed narrowly avoided the same fate and recruited Taureg guitar legend Koudede to fill the void. Unsurprisingly, the new Group Inerane are a darker and noticeably different band.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with Edward Ka-Spel's work–he has written some of my all-time favorite songs (Tear Garden's "Romulus & Venus," for example), but he's also recorded an avalanche of stuff that I was not so enthusiastic about. Consequently, I became an increasingly casual LPD fan over the years and haven't heard their last few albums at all. That being the case, I was totally unprepared for how excellent this album is–I can't think of another band in history that has managed to write some of their best songs 30 years into their career. The Dots' best days are definitely not behind them.
Brian (Lustmord) Williams' long-out-of-print 1994 ode to the vastness of space has been remastered and reissued. The record may sound better now than it did 15 years ago, but I’m not sure that all of it has stood the test of time.
The Caretaker is here to take listeners on a trip deep into the foggy subconscious mind where perception, memory, and dream all collapse into a syrupy void. If this six disc set isn't enough murky drone for a lifetime, I don't know what is.
