An incredibly fertile and industrious musical world is going on right beneath everyone's noses. While this or that magazine is busy trying to pin down the next 10 big bands or the next big scene, musicians like Darren Tate of Monos and Andrew Liles are busy making music, lots of music, and nearly everything they release tackles some new sonic territory.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Each song on this record illuminates a sense of loss, like leaving Chicago was akin to losing a lover whose influence was indispensable and comforting. Employing violins, guitars, trumpets, pianos, vocals, harmonicas, and a whole host of instruments I won't bother naming here, McBride has produced a symphonic record that may well suck most audiences right in and cast them into orbit.
There are a number of pieces of music that have attained mythical status. Cage’s 4’33” is the first to come to mind but Satie’s Vexations is another one of those musical legends. Consisting of an instantly forgettable piano motif that lasts about one minute, repeated 840 times, Vexations is a work of endurance for both the performer and the audience.
C. Spencer Yeh is a name that everyone might start hearing more of, now. There are a couple reasons to support this statement: one of them having to do with sheer prolific force and the other because he's blazingly listenable and will appeal to a lot of people who like a lot of different music.
Change Ringingfollows Block’s Pure Gaze and Mobius Fuse in a trilogy of sorts,and like those belovedpieces, Change is a perfectly paced,not-a-second-too-short, 30-minute suite for chamber group and environment, everin a limbo state between where found sound ends, instrumentation begins, andwhere digital processing tangles the timeline.
Invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1763, the glass harmonicais quite different than today’s mouth harmonica. Sound is createdby the movement of wetfingers along the rims of more than two dozen glass discs, arrangedhorizontally and moved using a foot-pedal. Apparently, playing the glass harmonica became a hip activity no doubtbecause of the enigmatic sounds its produces, compared at thetime to heavenly voices, perhaps also the cause of “serious nervousbreakdownsamong its mostly female players.” 
Chuck Palahniuk's meditation on silence and noise gave me an idea last night while listening to this disc—all those harsh noise providers out there must be afraid. They sit in front of their equipment and they come up with ways to drown the world around them out of existence, at least for a little while.
In my opinion most remixers are lazy, worthless slugs that bring nothing of interest to music. Funckarma don’t appear to fall into this low life form category.
Recompas main man Travis Thatcher gave me a copy of his first album forFlorida’s Nophi label months ago, but I’m ashamed to admit that thedisc sat at the bottom of a bag and then the bottom of a stack on mydesk until just now. I’m glad that I finally dug it up as it’s quicklyfound a place in my year-end “best of” list.
The Hangable Auto Bulb EPs have been a bit of a holy grail for Aphex Twin fans and now I understand why. It covers in eight tracks most of the ground that he covers in the ten years or so since the EPs’ original release.
