This is a simple, yet effective deconstruction of electronic dance music. With Senni's love of house and techno music clearly on display, he strips the clichés of the genre down to their barest essentials, showcasing an intentionally repetitive series of almost fragmented tracks. While at times the repetition can become a bit too tedious, overall the results are quite unique.
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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On these two live performances, this duo (that previously performed together as Overhang Party) serves up two slow, drifting pieces that hover into minimalist and dissonant spaces, but never stopping or becoming stagnant, weaving together strings and electronics into a mixture that is surprisingly complex and rich for live recordings.
Releasing an entire album consisting of only percussion is never an easy task, but Krakowiak proves that he can stand toe to toe with any of the more established artists in the field, mangling his drums into sounds that more often than not only have a ghost of a resemblance to what I had expected. At times pensive, other times aggressive, there is not a dull moment to be heard on Moulins.
While I still have some minor misgivings about its execution, Nadja have certainly found a way to make their latest release a noteworthy and meaningful event: they have made a rock album (at least, as much of a rock album as could be expected from them).  That is something of a quixotic move, as songwriting and singing are not exactly the duo's greatest talents, but the inspired addition of Jesus Lizard drummer Mac McNeilly definitely makes Nadja's signature doomgaze aesthetic a lot more punchy and immediately gratifying.  It is a marriage that will probably yield some truly wonderful results somewhere further down the line, but Dagdrøm is more of a promising, oft-successful experiment than a revelation or total creative rebirth.
This latest release captures the ever-prolific Shiflet in one his more "ambient" moods, offering a more conventionally musical and slightly less-scary window into his work than his recent, more epic Sufferers/Merciless diptych on Type.  Naturally, some of Mike's noisier and weirder impulses still make their (welcome) appearances, but these nine relatively short pieces balance his harsher textural themes with an unexpectedly varied palette of sublime shimmers, woozy guitars, and some very wrong-sounding violin.  This definitely ranks as one of Mike's most inspired release to date (and possibly his best).
Jeff Carey makes cathartic, head clearing bursts of noise, bereft of any kind of real context. This is the latest in a number of releases from the electronic composer, who employs re-purposed game pads and other devices to create a mixture of arresting high pitched catalytic noise and digitally manipulated drones.
Cankun's music is an exercise in stretching pop hooks to their logical extreme. They push back against standard compositional forms by forcing a rigid, dutiful recurrence on their melodies, layering them with more and more complex loops in the style of electronic music until they reach a kind of psychedelic apex.
Although this is a split release, and the two artists inhabiting each side of the vinyl (or tape) are sonically quite different from each other, the fact that they both inhabit that nebulous void between metal, industrial and noise makes them a good pairing. While it is always clear what side of the release is playing, the two compliment each other quite well.
Following three albums worth of long-form drone pieces, Michael Page (Fire in the Head) has instead returned with a suite of more song-like compositions, with a slew of collaborators, including Jarboe and Danny Hyde. The final product is a diverse, yet cohesive set of tracks that function exactly how an album should.
When I think of Justin Wright's Expo 70 project, I instantly think of two things: "improv" and "guitar."  That is something I probably need to cure myself of: while Beguiled Entropy certainly contains both of those elements, it so thoroughly transcends them in places that I completely forgot about Wright's chosen methods and tools.  This is an album of vision and focus that is far more evocative of nocturnal, neon-lit emptiness and menace than of a guy hunched over a battery of effects pedals.  In fact, this would have been the perfect soundtrack to Drive had Nicholas Winding Refn eschewed retro kitsch for stylized bleakness, paranoia, and retro-futurism.
