On this terse (ten minutes exactly) little 7" single, Canada's master of harsh noise walls indulges in his sonic obsessions once again. Sam McKinlay proves that for a style associated with monochromatic approaches, there is much more to be explored, even if edges just so slightly into uncomfortable.
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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As an artist, Kirkegaard has made it his focus to create art that is as disconnected from emotion or traditional musicality as possible. Which makes the premise for this album all the more compelling: two of his previous works are rearranged and presented using classical instrumentation by the Scenatet ensemble. The resulting work is much more akin to his initial compositions than a traditional classical recording.
Acting as its title would indicate as a bridge between their debut work, Shizuku, and an upcoming second effort, Interstices is a mix of improvisations, sketches, and experimentation that was all captured live. It does not come across as a taut, conceptual album focused on composition, nor is it consistently random or unfocused. Instead it is a slow drift through experimentation and improvisation that at times feels a bit random, but comes together quite well.
There are certainly a number of fine labels currently trawling record bins in Jamaica, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia in search of great lost, unheard, or forgotten music, but Soundway compilations (particularly the African ones) are almost always my favorites.  The reason for that is quite simple: Miles Cleret and his collaborators are especially adept at 1.) knowing a great song when they hear it,  and 2.) making damn sure that there are a number of such songs on every single collection they release.  Unsurprisingly, Kenya Special continues that hot streak, being every bit as essential as their classic Ghana and Nigeria collections.
To the casual observer, it probably seems like either Edward Ka-Spel or The Legendary Pink Dots release (or re-release) an album just about every other week these days, but there has not actually been a major new LPD album since 2010's oft-brilliant Seconds Late for the Brighton Line.  While The Gethsemane Option does not quite measure up to that illustrious predecessor, it still boasts enough high points to make serious fans fairly happy.  Less serious fans probably only need to hear a few of the better pieces, but it is clear that Ka-Spel and company set out to deliver a coherent, deliberately sequenced album-sized dose of their signature skewed psychedelia and that its shortcomings are mostly the result of over-ambition.
No one could ever say that the short-lived late '70s/early '80s minimal wave scene had a shortage of weirdos or eccentrics, categories in which this Philadelphia trio were prize specimens.  Fortunately, they were also kind of brilliant and have been remarkably influential for a band that only managed to release seven songs before breaking up.  While their more unhinged debut 7"certainly had its moments, this 1981 EP contains their two most enduring classics.
As the solo guise of Eric Hardiman, Rambutan is a more distilled abstraction of the psych tendencies he demonstrates in the rock-oriented Century Plants and improvisational quartet Twilight of the Century. Here, on his first full-length foray into the world of vinyl, he delivers an extremely diverse and polished work, bringing in elements from his other projects while still retaining his own personal sound and approach to music.
Piotrowicz's previous works have been heavily focused on his use of analog modular synthesizers, vacillating between the realms of pure noise and serious, contemplative electro acoustic compositions. On this album, however, his output demonstrates a distinctly different direction. As a whole it is lighter and more spacious, but never does it lack in its dramatic, heavier moments.
Synthpop pioneer Thomas Leer may have flirted with mainstream success in the '80s as one-half of Act (with Propaganda's Claudia Brücken), but he definitely traveled in some weirder circles as a young man, resulting in some rather interesting early career decisions.  For example, he followed his poppy and ground-breaking 1978 debut single ("Private Plane") with this full-length 1979 collaboration with aberrant fellow Scottish émigré Robert Rental on Throbbing Gristle's decidedly non-hit-minded Industrial Records.  While The Bridge has since faded into relative obscurity, both Leer and Rental were very influential figures at the time and several of these songs still sound wonderful and unique today.
One of the great tragedies of being an experimental music fan is knowing that there was a mountain of great albums released during the cassette underground's '80s heyday that I will probably never hear.  Fortunately, this 1987 cassette (originally released on Germany's Cthulhu Records) has managed to escape obscurity through the efforts of a few great blogs and The Skaters' Spencer Clark, who has just reissued it on vinyl.  Vox Populi! are probably best known in the US for their 1989 split with HNAS, but their thoughtfully composed mixture of eerie ambient psychedelia and Persian folk could not be much further from Christoph Heemann's Dada-inspired lunacy.  I am utterly baffled as to how this band has managed to remain such a secret, as they were significantly more compelling and inventive than many of their better-known '80s contemporaries.
