A sensitive and spacious work, To R.S. utilizes a variety of traditional instruments (guitars, pianos, natural sounds, etc) in a completely different context, dissolving the known sounds into sparse, pure tones and subtle variations. As a work dedicated to composer Robert Schumann, it’s quite an accomplished slice of minimalism in its own right.
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!
|
In the duo 39 Clocks, Juergen Gleue upset everyone from beer-loving Bavarians to Joseph Beuys. Apparently, shitting on organs, playing vacuum cleaners, mocking the art world and using a drum machine saw them regularly abused and hurled from a variety of scenes. Phantom Payn Daze is the sound of Gleue recorded solo in the 1990s after a period over-immersed in drink and drugs. It adheres to the Clocks' version of beauty: as simple as rural blues and raw as early psych-pop, with a beguiling twang and metronomic propulsion looking ahead to Tarwater and back to The Velvet Underground.
Tim Hecker has made a career out of releasing reliably excellent albums, but aside from rare departures like 2002's Van Halen-inspired My Love is Rotten to the Core, he has always stuck very closely to the hissing, crackling melancholy that he is known for. Ravedeath, 1972 certainly contains more of that (which I am perfectly happy with), but finds Hecker edging out of his comfort zone a little more than I would expect.  The raw material for this album originates from "live" recordings made with a pipe organ at a Reykjavik church, and that organ often emerges from Hecker's digital fog in surprisingly pure form.
Dawnbringer is Chris Black, a contemporary metal musician who writes and produces all of his own material and performs most of it on record. His fourth full-length album is superb, finding inspiration in traditional heavy metal forms and injecting them with Black's own character and creativity.
Psychedelic folk stalwart Ben Chasny's newest album speaks volumes through its packaging. Small observations hint at the nature of the music within: tranquil cover art picturing three hand-painted, mystic animal figures; a dedication to the late Dr. Ragtime in the liner notes; and the album's vivid title, Asleep on the Floodplain, referencing a peaceful state of rest and rejuvenation amidst a greater chaos.
Drumm’s latest is quite an unusual and expectation-subverting one, given that his previous releases for the label have largely been genre-defining noise masterpieces. Trouble is definitely not that, nor does it bear much in common with any of Kevin's other major efforts.  Billed as "54-minute excursion into the netherworld of the audio spectrum," the piece is an extremely quiet and amorphous experiment in queasily dissonant harmonies that teeters dangerously close to being complete silence.
