(Possibly) the final record by Broadcast featuring the late Trish Keenan, this is less of a proper follow-up to ...Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age than it is a sparse collection of novelties and scraps assembled for the movie it was scoring. Berberian Sound Studio does tend to follow faithfully in the same path that Broadcast's previous records set out for them, namely the increasingly ambient moods which pulse throughout, but I can't help but feel longing for what could have been.
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!
|
This album from Egan Budd's solo noise project is one that comes together splendidly at the intersection of a multitude of sounds, approaches, and structures, although the mood remains consistently dark throughout. While at times the bleak atmospherics at times become a bit too much, overall it is a strong and aggressive album.
On his third album as Bionulor, Sebastian Banaszczyk has made an even greater leap into personalizing his sound. While he still focuses on the use of processed and recycled sounds, here there is a sense not only of consistency from piece to piece, resulting in a cohesive album of material, but also a more personal touch, a human element all too often missing from this sort of music
Performed, composed, and recorded over a period of 14 months, Crosshatches is a massive and exquisitely constructed 85 minute piece stretched across two compact discs. On it, Pisaro and Tsunoda sketch and blend non-musical sounds into musical ones, erasing the seemingly natural distinction between them as they go. The vehicle for that transformation is crosshatching, which the duo elegantly transforms into a musical mode.
The use of Daphni as a distinction between the bulk of Dan Snaith's work done as Caribou is more than just an attractive new coat of paint or the result of yet another frivolous lawsuit. As Daphni, Snaith takes the elements of electronic music and dance that inspired much of 2010's Swim and extracts all semblance of outside influence, leaving a pretty faithful, smirkless take on house music. To me, Daphni is a way for Snaith to immerse himself into a subculture he's only been a tourist to. Here he can be a face in a crowd, playing freely with ideas instead of living up to a reputation.
The trajectory of Natural Snow Buildings continues to amaze me with each new album, as Mehdi and Solange seem to grow more and more inventive and skilled at composition every single time they surface.  Mehdi's last solo effort, the drone-heavy Then Fell the Ashes... was one of favorite albums of 2011, but Bogyrealm Vessels is a completely different (but no less wonderful) animal: an enigmatic and weirdly beautiful song-based concept album involving a space invasion, schoolgirls, and giant plants.
Ben Chatwin's latest effort is an experiment gone awry in the best possible sense, as his initial plan to make an album in a single week ultimately turned into his spending more than a year trying to abstractly replicate the creation of the world using The Seven Days of Creation as a guideline.  Unsurprisingly, the resultant album is considerably brighter than its brilliant predecessor (Day One being the creation of light, after all) as well as more structurally complex and dynamically varied, but Ben's compositional talents thankfully seem to have had no trouble matching his daunting ambition.
I have fallen in love with Bob Mould again. I had the amazing opportunity of seeing Hüsker Dü as a teenager on their final tour and Mould's first two solo albums have a lot of outstanding songs, but for me it wasn't until Copper Blue that I became more in touch with his music. Twenty years ago, Mould was able to thread a collection of great songs into something much more magnificent. With Silver Age, he has finally, for me at least, been able to do this again.
While the recent Gustafsson album Bengt saw the prolific saxophonist working with extreme restraint, here with the Norwegian trio Ich Bin N!ntendo he is doing anything but. A short, but fierce live performance captured and mastered by Lasse Marhaug, it lurks somewhere between free jazz, punk, and noise and makes for a unique, if slightly painful experience.
