Troller's debut album is the perfect example of the imagery not matching the music. The late 1980s metal woman on the cover and script font screams some sort of early thrash revival, when the album contained is actually a lush, bleak piece of electronics heavy death rock from this Austin, Texas trio. The result is a disc that definitely feels rooted in that era of smeared mascara and smoke machines, but with a clearly modern day sensibility.
We made it to 700 episodes. While it's not a special episode per se—commemorating this milestone—you can pretty much assume that every episode is special. This one features Mark Spybey & Graham Lewis, Brian Gibson, Sote, Scanner and Neil Leonard, Susumu Yokota, Eleven Pond, Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal, Yellow Swans, Dental waste in Saigon photo by Krisztian. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Splitting most of his time between his blackened southern rock behemoth Horseback and playing guitar for the alternative country Mount Moriah, Jenks Miller has not had much time to record true solo work. Spirit Signal is technically his third solo release, following Approaching the Invisible Mountain and the intentionally difficult Zen Automata Volume One, and is comparatively a more fleshed out album in the traditional sense, while still retaining a distinct stripped down, truly solo sound.
The name of the game is "metal" for this collaboration between Vainio (Pan Sonic) and Nordwall (Skull Defekts, Sons of God), both in the genre and literal sense. Fragments of Sunn O)))'s deconstructed riffs, plate reverbs and Einsturzende Neubauten's earliest days all show up here, in a wonderfully cohesive, oppressively dark recording that is surprisingly organic, given all its metal trappings.
The worlds of free jazz and harsh noise have always shared a lot of commonalities: both eschew the limitations of structure and melody for the sake of pure tone and texture, and both can either come across as structured, compelling chaos, or inane, boring noodling. Burning Tree have managed to straddle that line between jazz and noise as well as few other artists have, and with unrelenting brutality, on this first full length release that stands with the titans of both genres.
If Keith Rowe and Graham Lambkin haven't produced one of the most mind-bending records of 2013, they're at least high in the running. Making A shares its name with 
There is something endearingly heroic about The Dead C, as they have been gleefully blurring the lines between inspired deconstructionist rock and messy, half-assed indulgence to widespread indifference for almost three decades.  Unsurprisingly, this latest release finds them obstinately splashing about in the same ambiguously muddied waters as ever.  I suspect these two fairly challenging long-form pieces are unlikely to win the trio any new fans, but they are absolutely certain to please the already indoctrinated, as they rank among the group's finest.
Rashad Becker is a fairly revered and influential figure in experimental music circles due to his role as the resident mastering genius at Basic Channel's Dubplates studio.  That association is a bit deceptive here, as anyone expecting anything resembling dance music will be spectacularly wrong-footed by his debut release. Becker has taken abstract experimentalism into some very exotic, disorienting, and gloriously wrong territory.  I do not think I will hear a stronger or more unique noise (or utterly uncategorizable) release this year.
Pitre's latest offering is a fine companion piece to last year's stellar Feel Free, achieving a similar outcome through composition rather than computerized randomization.  Built upon Duane's now-characteristic pointillist plucking, shifting drone swells, and Oliver Barrett's swooping and sliding cello moans, Bridges delivers yet another swaying, languorous reverie that I could happily listen to in an endless loop.  It may not quite scale the heights of its predecessor, but that is more of a commentary on Feel Free's brilliance than it is upon Bridges' shortcomings.  In fact, in many ways, Bridges displays an impressive evolution.
With the constant resurgence of various genres co-opted by younger generations, many an inactive artist has returned to the fold to capitalize on their previous notoriety. The synth pop trend of a few years back has unsurprisingly brought with it the revival industrial and goth scenes (and all of their various permutations), much as it did three decades ago. However, the reappearance of Mike VanPortfleet’s Lycia has little to do with this, and more to do with pure synchronicity: Quiet Moments is made up of material recorded over the past seven years. As such, it manages to fit in nicely with their earlier work while still sounding like new roads being taken, and also appearing at the right time to capture some much deserved attention.
