The latest installment to spill from Andrew Liles' ambitious and generous Vortex Vault series casts Liles as the ringleader of a black magic vaudeville act. Theatrical and playfully whimsical, this multilingual, dialogue-laden album is a striking release that shifts modes effortlessly, revealing new finds from Liles' unlimited bag of tricks at every turn.
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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If Toronto's Do Make Say Think haven't changed much in the decade or so they've been on the scene, it's because they haven't needed to. Their mastery of their basic aesthetic elements—from their natural, textured guitar sound, to their melancholy passages, huge crescendos, album-long symmetry and even their earthy packaging—works so well that they need little evolution. It's as if they found the perfect moment and haven't left it in ten years.
This collects rehearsal tapes and live performances from DIJ's early days, but is unfortunately more of an interesting historical curiosity rather than a compelling listen for anyone but the most die hard fans.
Current 93 hit the hight point of their career with the album at the center of this trilogy: 1996's All the Pretty Little Horses was and is the most perfectly rendered artistic statement that David Tibet and company have created. This will sound like blasphemy to the legions who jumped aboard the apocalyptic folk train with last year's Black Ships Ate the Sky, but trust me: I know what I'm talking about. This album is much, much better than Black Ships, and I unreservedly consider it to be one of the finest albums ever recorded.
The second album from the duo of Thomas Strønen and Ståle Storløkken sees them continue the good work they started on their debut album. This cheery album is one of the better things that either of them have been involved in, a collection of music far from the chaos of Supersilent and yet more active and organic than most Norwegian electronic music.
Quellet’s approach to musique concrete and sound manipulation pays careful homage to the likes of Pierre Schaeffer and Luc Ferrari but Quellet's own mark remains distinct. His work has its own voice despite the weight of history that he is composing against. It is nice to hear a fresh take on what has become a stodgy and uninspired field of music; he clearly has a lot of talent and a good ear for sound.
Wary of the dubious hype emanating from The Wire and other pretentious, quasi-academic outlets, I've pretty much steered clear of any "heavy" album one might learn of from such sources. Yet, something about the bass/drum duo known as Big Business drew me to seek out their latest album, and having done so I'm not the least bit disappointed.
