There are a number of great labels unearthing and breathing new life into forgotten treasures these days, but it is truly rare for anyone to match Dust-to-Digital when it comes to presentation and sheer comprehensiveness. Each major release feels like an event years in the making, certain to send at least one circle of obsessive music fans scavenging for additional extant releases from an eclectic array of previously unknown or obscure artists. This latest opus is an especially big hit with me, collecting a remastered trove of '50s East and Central African rumba recordings by South African/English musicologist Hugh Tracey. I had no doubt that these recordings would be unique and historically important, but I was legitimately blindsided by how incredibly fun these songs can be, often resembling a raucous, inebriated, and Latin-tinged street party where everyone knows all the words to every song and nearly everyone seems to have inexplicably brought along a kazoo.
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!
|
Felix seem to approach the art of songwriting with an oblique playfulness similar to such groups as Slapp Happy or Hugo Largo, albeit with darker results. Minimal accompaniment frames Lucinda Chua singing meticulous and poetic lyrics, using everyday expressions and bizarre thoughts in a conversational style, touching on magical realism without sounding twee or trite. Oh Holy Molar is a convincing existential internal dialogue, by turns bleak, funny, honest, inspiring, sad, and wry.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that set it in motion are more than a year and half old this month. Ongoing cleanup efforts, which include removing contaminated debris and preventing further radioactive water from seeping into the ocean, will likely cost $15 billion over the next 30 years. As Otomo Yoshihide explained in his April, 2011 lecture, the residents of Fukushima face a difficult future, one made darker by the psychological and cultural impact the disaster has had. In response to that lecture, Presqu'île Records assembled this compilation, featuring superb contributions from the likes of John Tilbury, Greg Kelley, Michael Pisaro, Chris Abrahams, and Annette Krebs. Besides answering Otomo’s plea for a cultural response to the disaster, all funds raised from the sale of this 2CD set go to Japanese non-profit organizations.
An established drummer and improviser, Rosaly takes this background into a different direction, dissecting and reassembling his own improvised recordings into a structured, though intentionally chaotic composition. While the drums make for the most identifiable sound, the non-percussive elements are just as essential, resulting in an album that occasionally calls to mind the best moments Organum, but stands firmly on its own.
As half of the duo Solo Andata, Kane Ikin works heavily with treated and processed field recordings, shaping them into complex, sometimes shadowy organic compositions. On this solo outing he works less with nature, but uses practically everything else (synthesizers, drum machines, rotting vinyl, etc) to create an album of similar complexity, albeit a darker, more isolated sensibility.
Masami Akita and Maurizio Bianchi are without question amongst the pioneers of harsh, abrasive electronic music. Both of their careers began quite prolifically around the same time, and since Bianchi's return in the late 1990s have continued as such, with both producing a massive number of albums each year. These two albums act nicely as reference points on their long careers, with the 10" capturing pieces each submitted for the Mail Music Project compilation, here appearing unedited for the first time, and the LP being a recent collaborative work that stands amongst both artists' best material as of late.
An audio-visual collaboration featuring Evelina Domnitch, Francisco López, COH, and Asmus Tietchens (amongst others), Liquifed Sky is truly a synthesis of audio and visual, emphasizing the indisputably organic connection between fluid and light, as well as the physical effect of sound waves upon both. It might not be the most convenient release, being a data DVD, but is well worth the effort.
Amongst fans of dark, heavy music, James Plotkin is a name synonymous with work that defies categorization or genre boundaries in a slew of projects too numerous to list. Lesser known, at least perhaps in the USA, is drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, who may be working from a free jazz template but produces music that is similarly impossible to categorize. The two meet here for the first time on Death Rattle, the result of a four-hour improvisation recorded last year, and the result is as blistering and intense as expected.
Recorded over three days in Greece, Varvakios is an odd yet perfect sound travelogue of sorts. Cold, intense, monochrome, guitar-based instrumentals—some with an almost Balkan atmosphere—alternate with field recordings perhaps in markets or auctions. The overall feeling is of urban industrial-tribalism amid an exotic, humid, foreign landscape.
I know it will not last very long, but I am very much enjoying the current trend of noise artists turning their attention towards dance music and beats (something I definitely would not have expected when Masami Akita dabbled similarly a decade ago).  Along with Vatican Shadow and Pete Swanson, Ren Schofield's Container project is decisively leading the vanguard of that scene, though he almost slipped by me due to his association with the rather synth-centric Spectrum Spools label.  His latest effort is not quite as uniformly spectacular as last year's identically titled debut, but it definitely comes very damn close (especially the second half).
