I can't break down my love for this new TomasAndersson 12” to the kind of buzzwords that would explain its totalitarianeffect on even my own hermetic listening patterns. This ishead-banging techno without the flashy Raumschmiere-isms, crystalline andcolorful, music to stomp along to: wild, light, heartbeat stompin’ action.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Time was, the words "Mike Ladd" were routinely thrown in alongside oneslike "Gil Scot-Heron." While the latter-named beat-poet is stillpopular in coffee houses and among staffs of student literary journals(as well as other places Ladd never broke into), the Cambridge, MA-bornformer's been sliding back into the obscurity from whence he came, abrief five years after dropping the masterful Welcome to theAfterfuture on us.
By its very nature its unsurprising that most instrumental beat-driven music seems to be kicking its heels, waiting for an MC to jump aboard the track to bring it to life. Shying away from ‘smart’ breaks and crate dust covered samples this debut concentrates instead on song structures and melodies.
Inthe first five seconds of Tunng’s debut U.S. release, the group’sintentions are made perfectly clear by a vocal and acoustic guitarsample that’s time stretched and hacked into an intro. This is cut andsliced, deformed and reconstructed folk music, and it’s wonderful.
Starting out as commissioned music for an audio weblog, Sandro Perri and Craig Dunsmuir’s studio project, Glissandro 70, has put together a unique album that blends many styles and influences. Although chiefly taking from prime Detroit techno and post-punk New York, they combine these well mined sound sources with a worldly edge by including dub, Latin and African elements.
Volcano the Bear's dramatic, highly ambitious two disc (two-CD or two-LP) return is a lot to ingest, however, every second is rewarding in what could easily be one of my top albums of the year so far and my favorite Volcano the Bear release to date.
Godspeed member Aidan Girt's latest full-length as 1-Speed Bike is this compilation of tracks from two 12" EPs and new material. Despite coming from different sources, the tracks are blended seamlessly together into one long crazy mix tape and are surprisingly uniform in style and feel.
Noticeably stepping away from 2002's accessible Mind Elevation,in particular its almost radio-friendly verse-chorus-verse cuts, thelatest N.O.W. album serves not as a return to form but rather as abridge between that album and the tokeworthy downtempo delights of hispost-bleep back catalog.
Impractical Cockpit, a collective of now-scattered New Orleans’natives, has released five records prior to To Be Treated. And whiletheir music does bear some of the characteristics of the oft-referencedfree-folk genre, Impractical Cockpit’s sound actually recalls a greatdeal of early 80s experimental hardcore like Flipper and early ButtholeSurfers.
