I cannot pretend to keep up with Andrew Liles' overwhelmingly voluminous solo output, but I pounced on this album, as it seemed significant that the generally dormant United Dairies label had reawakened to bestow its imprimatur upon this opus.  Happily, my instincts proved to be unerring (as usual).  United Dairies is the perfect home for an album as aberrant as this one: while Steven Stapleton has described it as "a masterpiece of modern contemporary composition" and Liles ostensibly drew his inspiration from the '50s and '60s avant-garde, The Power Elite more accurately sounds like a prolonged nightmare taking place inside the rusted machinery of a clock tower.  This is easily one of the year's strangest and most adventurous albums.
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Birmingham’s Pram are the rare band that can cause me to simultaneously think conflicting thoughts like "it is absolutely criminal that this band was never as big as Stereolab" and "it is abundantly clear why this band never quite managed to transcend cult status."  In any case, they were unquestionably one of the more idiosyncratic, inspired, and polarizing bands of the '90s, though they finally managed to achieve some widespread success in the early 2000s.  In fact, Helium was recently hailed by FACT as one of the greatest post-rock albums of all-time, while an article on The Quietus proposed The Stars Are So Big as the best album of the '90s.  Appropriately, those first two Pram albums (originally released on Too Pure) have now gotten well-deserved vinyl reissues from Medical Records.  At the risk of sounding reductionist, both of these albums fall into Pram's Krautrock-influenced phase, preceding their (also reductionist) aesthetic swing into more exotica-influenced territory.  Describing Pram as "Krautrock-influenced" does not even remotely begin to capture how bizarre, artfully deranged, and fun some of these songs are though.
Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert’s unabashedly poppy New Order side project has remained a largely forgotten one, aside from perhaps the small splash created by their debut single in 1990. While there are certainly some artistic reasons for O2’s marginalization, the duo’s most significant problems were bad luck, bad timing, and the chaos surrounding the collapse of Factory Records. Thankfully, LTM has now reissued both of their albums, giving them a long-deserved second chance to find some appreciative ears.
Dutch sound artist and Machinefabriek collaborator Wouter van Veldhoven has maintained quite a low profile since he began releasing music in 2005, quietly assembling a unique body of work with a minimum of fanfare or self-promotion. Fortunately, someone at Mort Aux Vaches noticed anyway and invited Wouter to drop by the studio with his arsenal of decrepit reel-to-reel tape players and home-built equipment for a live session of wobbly, understated ambient beauty.
Our Love Will Destroy The World's debut full-length (2009's Stillborn Plague Angels) was a strikingly ugly, cathartic, and demonic affair that seemed to take guitar-based noise to its logical extreme. It turns out that it hadn't, as Campbell Kneale's newest black-hearted slab of vinyl makes it clear that he has no trouble at all dreaming up ingenius new ways to be bilious and face-meltingly heavy.
On their third album, Trembling Bells explore traditional folk themes such as boozing, loneliness, landscape, mystical creatures and regret, with more modern and eclectic sounds. Their joyous approach to playing and singing is hypnotic and passionate with enough humor and raw edges to steer well clear of being over-sentimental.
Compared to the sprawling songs on their previous album 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra have streamlined their songs as well as their name and their line up for this album (the band are now a far more manageable five piece compared to the larger ensembles of previous albums). Granted there are still a couple of monster-sized pieces here but there are a number of shorter, punchier songs to break them up. Kollaps Tradixionales shows this pared down Silver Mt. Zion in ferocious form, the stark beauty of their music reinforced with a renewed fire in their bellies. As usual, I am completely blown away by their music.
The anchoring of western music to equal temperament has on one hand lead to many musical developments but on the other hand, there is a whole world of musical textures and approaches to composition lost to instruments that are stuck playing in chromatic scales. On this excellent compilation, several artists explore intonation from a number of different approachesm utilizing a range of instruments. Ranging from almost ambient soundworks to difficult conceptual pieces, The Harmonic Series is an expansive anthology of unusual and beautiful music.
