Despite (or perhaps because of) a 25 year long career playing with Einstürzende Neubauten, Mania D and Malaria! as well as running a successful record label, she has never put out her own album. I Put a Record On is a far cry from her previous work with the other groups: it captures the modern Berlin's new slick, chic culture as opposed to the decay and geographical isolation that gave birth to the Neue Deutsche Welle.
Look up Music for gazing upwards brought to you by Meat Beat Manifesto & scott crow, +/-, Aurora Borealis, The Veldt, Not Waving & Romance, W.A.T., The Handover, Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri, Mulatu Astatke, Paul St. Hilaire & René Löwe, Songs: Ohia, and Shellac. Aurora Borealis image from California by Steve. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
|
A stylistic mish-mash of styles, cultures, and sounds, Radio Zumbido create the perfect documentary soundtrack for a film that does not exist. My first thought on a quick sampling of this disc was old Bomb Squad era Public Enemy. 
Die Stadt's reissue program of early Asmus Tietchens' early releases continues into its ninth iteration, this time focusing on two records from the late 1980s. Both differ greatly in their approach and are not equally compelling to these ears.
The mad man from the Pacific Northwest creates an album based solely on the sound of Native American percussion, with the processed results as wild as the roaring bear that adorns the album's sleeve.
The second installment in a proposed David Jackman trilogy (preceded by Sanctus, and to be completed with Omega) lives up to its name with a spiritual recording of Hammond organ, tower bell, gong, and processed voices. 
Inspired by a German audiobook of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the tracks on this album suitably evoke contact with distant landscapes that may or may not be inhabited. An eerie otherness pervades these songs, as if anxiously awaiting the arrival of alien emissaries.
Robert Horton weaves together drones, field recordings, improvisations on homemade instruments, and digital manipulations in the creation of this excellent, otherworldly recording. His explorations go in such a variety of directions and altered states that it is hard not to be a little awestruck in their wake.
The latest installment to spill from Andrew Liles' ambitious and generous Vortex Vault series casts Liles as the ringleader of a black magic vaudeville act. Theatrical and playfully whimsical, this multilingual, dialogue-laden album is a striking release that shifts modes effortlessly, revealing new finds from Liles' unlimited bag of tricks at every turn.
If Toronto's Do Make Say Think haven't changed much in the decade or so they've been on the scene, it's because they haven't needed to. Their mastery of their basic aesthetic elements—from their natural, textured guitar sound, to their melancholy passages, huge crescendos, album-long symmetry and even their earthy packaging—works so well that they need little evolution. It's as if they found the perfect moment and haven't left it in ten years.
