A massive ensemble of New Mexico-based artists, DCS features no less than ten bassists amongst other multi-instrumentalists. At first blush I expected an unidentifiable cacophony of noise, which would not necessarily be a bad thing, but this self titled album is much more varied and open than I believed it would be. Across three long and distinct pieces, there is much dissonance, but also subtlety to be heard.
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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After a 12 year hiatus, Mark van Hoen has unexpectedly returned with a new Locust album.  In fact, I do not think that Mark himself even expected it: he enlisted his friend Louis Sherman to join him for a live performance on WFMU and discovered during their rehearsals that they sounded both 1.) great and 2.) an awful lot like Locust.  As Van Hoen remains the driving force and has a very distinctive aesthetic, the resultant material still shares a lot of common ground with last year's excellent solo album (The Revenant Diary), but You'll Be Safe Forever is floating and melancholic rather than then tense and haunted.
Back in 2010, Tarentel's Cantu-Ledesma blindsided me with an absolutely wonderful dream-pop/drone solo opus (Love is a Stream) that I have grown to love more with each passing year.  Since then, however, he has been keeping a curiously low profile, quietly releasing only a handful of tapes, splits, singles, and a Dutch LP.  I wish I had been paying more attention though, as this latest self-released digital EP shows that he has been both creatively fertile and steadily evolving the whole time.  I guess I have some catching up to do.
Haynes is a multimedia artist who works in many different mediums and formats, but a consistent sense of rust and decay carries through them all. Recent audio works Sever and The Decline Effect exemplify this perfectly each, built upon layers of found sounds and field recordings, processed and disintegrated into textures and sounds that are enticing, yet alien. For his debut on Editions Mego, he follows the same successful format, using the sounds of desert winds, laser cooling systems, and thin wires as the source, resulting in a work that sounds entirely alien.
The always prolific Uwe Schmidt (Senor Coconut, Atom Heart) has produced a third album that continues his push away from the traditional, sterile art of the Raster-Noton label by embracing a skewed, but still engaging take on nostalgic electro pop, bringing in recognizable sign posts throughout while never feeling like an unnecessary throwback.
Emuul brings patient drone to life with careful repetitions, and succeeds in an attempt to build something acutely iconic on his latest release. Free Structures doesn't drift or wander like a lot of drone music; its very purposeful motifs layer onto one another without reduction in volume and without compromising what is a very singular idea. I found this approach oddly immediate, and welcoming, despite the 17-minute running times of each piece.
This minor but charming solo effort was recorded earlier this year while Ka-Spel enjoyed a vacation on Fire Island.  Given the logistical difficulties inherent in transporting an entire studio across the ocean, these songs are necessarily more loose, informal, and stripped-down than is typical for Edward (if anything about his oeuvre can be described as such).  Such an approach does not necessarily cater to his strengths (Ka-Spel is at his best when he is at his most complexly hallucinatory), but this batch of lilting, drum-machine-driven psych-pop miniatures offers some pleasantly twisted diversions nonetheless.
In 2005, when Camper Van Beethoven’s gear was stolen on tour, Jason Molina ran into David Lowery and offered to lend him some of Magnolia Electric Co.'s equipment. They became friends and, later that year, met in Richmond, Virginia to record some new songs Jason had in the works. Before he could finish, Molina’s mother suffered a stroke. He completed what he could and returned in 2006 to finish Black Ram, one of the four recordings that finally surfaced as part of 2007’s Sojourner boxed set. Backed by musicians not in the touring Magnolia lineup, it's one of the darkest and most distinct albums Molina ever released—closer to his Songs: Ohia days in spirit and tone, and overflowing with some of his best writing.
This limited-edition CDR is an experiment in spontaneity, as it is the product of a five-day recording frenzy that occurred last winter.  That endeavor proves to be a mixed success, as Taos Hum offers lots of great ideas, but not much in the way of great songs.  That is about what I would expect, as the Dots' Achilles' heel has always been that their voluminous output precludes aggressive editing, a trait that can only be exacerbated by rigid time constraints.  This is still an intermittently impressive effort (the band has definitely been on a hot streak lately), but the best moments are probably too diluted or overlong to offer much appeal to more casual fans.  Which, of course, explains why this is only a CDR.
One fascinating aspect of the Legendary Pink Dots is that I never know where and when their simmering brilliance will fully manifest itself.  Case in point: this limited-edition solo effort by keyboardist Phil Knight was casually released on CDR on the same day as two other LPD-related albums with only the most cryptic and inscrutable of descriptions ("...aliens here to study mankind had taken control of the airwaves; spread confusion with fake weather reports..."), yet it contains a fluke quasi-noise/industrial collage that ranks among my favorite pieces in the Dots' entire discography.
