Twenty-one of the bigger names in independent music can be and probably have been wrong, but they're spot on with The Now Sound Redesigned,a remix project that can rightly be called an event. The relevant backstory: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the four Dedrick siblingscreated some beautifully constructed and legitimately awe-inspiringsunshine pop over a five year period. Never garnering commercialsuccess, the Dedricks called it quits in 1972, leaving their creationsto languish in obscurity forever, but for the LPs purchased second-handby vinyl junkies and fanatical crate diggers.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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For any musician that has had a career as long and as important as Michael Gira, keeping up the momentum must be an almost overwhelming task. As if the early Angels of Light material wasn’t enough of a departure from Swans, successive albums and tours have seen Gira stripping his sound and his songs down to a rootsy, folk-fueled core that is both more immediate and more direct than most of his back catalogue. While the last Angels of Light full length left me feeling that I’d peeked a bit too closely in on the man behind the curtain, Gira’s portion of the latest split release with Akron/Family accomplishes more of that uneasy closeness and it’s his portion of the disc that I’m most apt to skip.
Inna City Pressure was a true revelation on its initial releasein 1998. Long before the term "mashup" entered the lexicon andunforeseen marriages between, say, Jay-Z and the Beatles were commoncurrency, Dr. Israel welded together reggae, dub, metal, punk, jungleand drum 'n' bass with ease and verve, simultaneously revealing theunderpinnings the genres had in common while seamlessly creating afresh and vital sound all his own. Seven years on sees Dr. Israel witha new label, hordes of imitators, thousands of these new "mashups," anda large potential audience that may not be in the know. So the braintrust at ROIR has deemed it time for an Inna City Pressure reissue.
This is an album filled to the brim with the sounds of the space-time beingslowed down to an audible crawl. Sun Ra thought that space was theplace, but Aranos must've decided that such a comment just wouldn't doand took the whole concept a step further: the space-time continuum isthe place, a more ephemeral, seething place.
There is an atmosphere of particularly chilly austerity on the debutalbum of Mi and L'au. It's not entirely unexpected from an albumproduced by Michael Gira, but it is somewhat unexpected afterlearning that Mi and L'au are friends of fellow Young God folkieDevendra Banhart, and that their album contains contributions fromAkron/Family and Julia Kent. Where Devendra's latest album Cripple Crowreveled in its own expensive, high-tech studio sheen, and containedsome of Banhart's most celebratory and rollicking group compositions, Mi and L'au sounds a lot closer to something that belongs on Young God records: quietly dramatic, somber chamber folk.
Eric Random is a crucial piece of history for fans of Cabaret Voltaire,23 Skidoo, and A Certain Ratio, and this 2xCD collection issued by LTMearlier this year provides an overview that is not only a greatintroduction but a generous selection of difficult to find material.
Atbest, Noriko’s fifth album mixes pop and more experimental electronicsin a way that is sometimes interesting, mixing standard pop beats andinstruments with more unusual sounds. Unfortunately this form ofsongcraft is far from new and much of the time Noriko misses the markcompletely.
Despite the current shift to strangely accessible indie-pop that hasbeen prevalent in recent years, Animal Collective’s records have neversuffered from the feeling that they’re trying to pull a cheap one ontheir fans. Rather, like the best pop music, their songs are organicand never forced.
Following a promising 12", The Drift return with a sextet of hazy suites on their phenomenal full-length Noumena. It's unclear whether the bandisconjuring Kantian philosophy with the title; but the songs here are not simply things in themselves, never to be realized or experienced. Rather,the songs are much larger and enveloping, asking to be engaged and experienced.
Khanate do doom like no one else. While there isn’t a huge progression from what they were doing on their last album, Capture & Release pushes their existing formula (for lack of a better term) further than before.
