The use of Daphni as a distinction between the bulk of Dan Snaith's work done as Caribou is more than just an attractive new coat of paint or the result of yet another frivolous lawsuit. As Daphni, Snaith takes the elements of electronic music and dance that inspired much of 2010's Swim and extracts all semblance of outside influence, leaving a pretty faithful, smirkless take on house music. To me, Daphni is a way for Snaith to immerse himself into a subculture he's only been a tourist to. Here he can be a face in a crowd, playing freely with ideas instead of living up to a reputation.
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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The trajectory of Natural Snow Buildings continues to amaze me with each new album, as Mehdi and Solange seem to grow more and more inventive and skilled at composition every single time they surface.  Mehdi's last solo effort, the drone-heavy Then Fell the Ashes... was one of favorite albums of 2011, but Bogyrealm Vessels is a completely different (but no less wonderful) animal: an enigmatic and weirdly beautiful song-based concept album involving a space invasion, schoolgirls, and giant plants.
Ben Chatwin's latest effort is an experiment gone awry in the best possible sense, as his initial plan to make an album in a single week ultimately turned into his spending more than a year trying to abstractly replicate the creation of the world using The Seven Days of Creation as a guideline.  Unsurprisingly, the resultant album is considerably brighter than its brilliant predecessor (Day One being the creation of light, after all) as well as more structurally complex and dynamically varied, but Ben's compositional talents thankfully seem to have had no trouble matching his daunting ambition.
I have fallen in love with Bob Mould again. I had the amazing opportunity of seeing Hüsker Dü as a teenager on their final tour and Mould's first two solo albums have a lot of outstanding songs, but for me it wasn't until Copper Blue that I became more in touch with his music. Twenty years ago, Mould was able to thread a collection of great songs into something much more magnificent. With Silver Age, he has finally, for me at least, been able to do this again.
While the recent Gustafsson album Bengt saw the prolific saxophonist working with extreme restraint, here with the Norwegian trio Ich Bin N!ntendo he is doing anything but. A short, but fierce live performance captured and mastered by Lasse Marhaug, it lurks somewhere between free jazz, punk, and noise and makes for a unique, if slightly painful experience.
It certainly does not seem as if it has been seven years since Ciphers + Axioms, but it has, and Even if it Takes a Lifetime is the first music Anatomy of Habit have released since then. The heaviness that pervaded their previous two albums and debut EP is here for sure, but there is also a greater sense of melodicism, spearheaded by band leader Mark Solotroff’s (Bloodyminded, The Fortieth Day) vocal approach. The album still sounds like the same band, but one that has solidified into a pummeling, yet nuanced machine that is as complex as it is heavy, resulting in their best work to date.
Winter is the most fitting season for Deupree's music, a distinctive blend of cold, sparse spaces mixed with warm, melodic passages. Faint is no different, an album consisting of five long pieces that capture the stillness of nature, the coldness of electronics, and the warmth of organic instrumentation.
Embracing the world of niche analog formats, Albany, New York’s Century Plants—the duo of guitarists Eric Hardiman and Ray Hare—have just put out this lathe cut 7" and one sided LP of new material that differ drastically from one another in style and sound, but have the same undeniable level of depth and quality that I have come to expect both from this project and from the requisite multitude of side-projects they are involved in.
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.
