Using shortwave radios to pull sounds out of the ether has been a longstanding tradition in experimental music. Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage were perhaps the first to explore this area, fascinated by the possibilities inherent in using the radio as an instrument. It is often left to a second generation of explorers to further develop the discoveries made by the first trail blazers. In 1982 William Basinski carved out his own territory in the worlds of shortwave sound with nothing more than a receiver and his trademark loops of tape. First released on Noton as an LP in 1997, it has been made available once again, this time on compact disc from Basinski’s own label.
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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Kawabata Mokoto and his spacey pals have dispatched another communiqué of shambling kitchen-sink psychedelia from whatever mental place they currently inhabit. As is often the case with this band, I am left scratching my head and wondering whether Kawabata is a genius or a charlatan (or both).
Brendan Burke and Fred Lonberg's quiet, unassuming debut on Flingco Sound flirts with the conventions of both glitch and chamber music, though it obviously favors the latter. Composed primarily of piano and cello performances, Over All of Spain... is a beautiful and mostly pastoral record fleshed out by the minimal use of samples, loops, and other odd sounds.
The latest album from Daniel Padden's One Ensemble sees the group expand to a seven- piece, the extended line-up extending the range of the music in the process. The blurring of many folk styles with elements of improvisation should come as no surprise to those familiar with this group's previous output but the unexpected span of textures and focus of energy bring the music onto a new trajectory.
An extensive double disc collection documenting the output of six French tutees of Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau, this album is a near necessity in any cohesive understanding of France's musical environment in the interim between World Wars. Comprised of Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc, "Les Six" forged an approach generally marked by spare concision, a response to the flowery output of the Romantic and Impressionist tendencies of composers such as Wagner and Debussy.
Chicago's Cave have returned with their distinct blend of momentum rock and it is, fittingly, their most fully realized disc yet. Tighter, funkier, spacier and more driving than anything they've done, this is the group at their best, concocting neo-Krautrock grooves that perfectly soundtrack the continued and colorful descent deeper into the new millennium.
Pimmon's Paul Gough has made a career out of constructing dense and complex ambient soundscapes. On this, his first full-length in five years, he shows no signs of rust and delivers a headphone album of striking depth and vibrancy.
Expanded to a duo, Boy In Static abandons its pleasantly derivative dream-pop, choosing something closer to the saccharine sweetness of Peter Bjorn and John—with uneven results.
Area C’s newest release borrows its theme from a passage in Claudius Aelian’s On The Characteristics of Animals (written around 200 AD); specifically one that states that doves can protect themselves from wizard attacks by using bay-tree shoots for their nests. From the same book, I also learned that beavers often elude predators by chewing off their own testicles. I suppose I‘m digressing though. I should probably mention that this is an excellent album at some point. I will find another forum for my ramblings about our delightful and industrious mammalian friends.
Across the 16 tracks on this disc, the duo of Mark Fell and Mat Steel have taken a clinical, sterile study of the most simplistic and rudimentary of classic techno and electro rhythms that, through their deliberate sense of repetition, forces one to hear all of the subltities that are missed when presented in a more danceable context.
