On their third full length album, the duo of AJ Cookson and Matthew Rozeik that somehow managed to merge the disparate worlds of black metal and hard-edged electronic dance music have put together another brilliant combination of the two, sounding like no one else in the process, in the best possible way.
We made it to 700 episodes. While it's not a special episode per se—commemorating this milestone—you can pretty much assume that every episode is special. This one features Mark Spybey & Graham Lewis, Brian Gibson, Sote, Scanner and Neil Leonard, Susumu Yokota, Eleven Pond, Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal, Yellow Swans, Dental waste in Saigon photo by Krisztian. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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An ambient side project from Dean Costello (Harpoon, Diatribes, Winters in Osaka), Cosmic Despair is a perfectly titled album: a long suite of guitar and organ bleakness, with just a hint of psychedelia to keep it different and unexpected.
With a notable recent string of high profile collaborations with Aidan Baker and Yellow6, guitarist Eric Quach has been continually refining his abstract take on ambient drone, and on this four track solo cassette, his ability at generating unique, alien noises from the stalwart instrument is clearly on display, as is his skill for composition as well.
Whenever asked about reissuing his old material, the standard line from Robert Haigh has always been that because the original masters had been lost there was no chance of a reissue. So it came as a bit of a shock when Vinyl On Demand announced that they were releasing a box set of Haigh’s work as Sema this year. Although there is no unreleased material included, the scarcity of all this music means that there is nothing to complain about. This is complete collection of some of the best and criminally unheard music of the 1980s.
I absolutely loved Jakobsons' last solo album (Darwinsbitch's Ore), but her many collaborative releases since then have varied quite a bit in both style and quality.  Recently, however, she has been on a definite hot streak, as both Myrmyr's Fire Star and the Espvall/Jakobsons/Szelag album were pretty amazing.  Glass Canyon does not quite keep that impressive momentum going, but there are enough flashes of inspiration to make it an intermittently satisfying effort nonetheless.
Twenty years after its initial release, the debut Sugar album remains one of my favorite albums of the 1990s as well as one of my favorite rock albums of all time. After establishing himself as an accomplished singer/songwriter with two solo albums following the breakup of seminal Hüsker Dü, Bob Mould launched Sugar, now brought back to life through an exceptionally amazing package by Edsel out now in the UK (and an okay version due from Merge later this month).
Probably the Italian trio’s longest release, while still clocking in at under a half hour, this 12" EP brings some excellently grimy punky rock music, with a good helping of bizarre tape loop noises and electric outbursts. With a familiar, but fresh sound, the worst thing is it simply is too short.
All too often these compilations of long-buried, unused material are an inevitable disappointment, consisting of songs that should have stayed hidden or alternate takes that add little to any artists repertoire. However, this is Can, and material from their strongest era, so I came in with higher expectations than I normally would, and these expectations were exceeded. Much of the material on here is as strong as anything that was put on their classic albums of the era and is absolutely essential.
With Eleh having cemented themself as perhaps the modern minimalist, their split LPs have become a fascinating journey into the genre’s old guard such as Pauline Oliveros and Ellen Fullman as well as platforms for newer artists like Sun Circle, and in this case, Duane Pitre. As usual, Eleh’s hardcore analogue drones are well matched by Pitre’s feather-light just intonation harmonics. Both sides reflect different aspects of minimalism’s past without being pale shadows of those earlier pioneers. In fact, Eleh and Pitre demonstrate that despite a bloated market filled with crappy drone acts there is still plenty of life and room for invention in minimal music.
This unusual release is the fruit of a three-year project in which Valles sampled, manipulated, and collaged material from Nonesuch's '60s and '70s avant-garde heyday.  Drawing upon the work of luminaries such as Charles Ives and Elliot Carter (using the original vinyl, naturally), Damian has woven together a crackling and vibrantly textured drone opus that doubles as an inventive (if unrecognizable) homage.
