The first part of an expected trilogy devoted to iconic advances in technology, this marked the beginning of new stage in Jóhann Jóhannsson's career. While already established as an acclaimed composer at the time of its release in 2006, IBM 1401 was a bold leap forward in both concept and scale from all that preceded it. Although it was later eclipsed by the stone-cold instant classic that followed (2008's Fordlândia), it nevertheless remains a haunting, visionary, and unexpectedly personal work in its own right.
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I long ago abandoned hope of a new Gil Scott-Heron record. Yet here it is: a delicate, intense, skeletal testament to his history, progress and survival. He covers Robert Johnson, Bill Callahan, and Brook Benton but this is a deeply personal album from which we all can draw hope; a beautifully convincing snapshot of an artist very much unbowed.
Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert’s New Order side project began very promisingly with the popular and critically acclaimed single "Tasty Fish" in 1990, but the collapse of Factory left the duo in label limbo. Three years later, this (the duo’s debut album) finally got released to lukewarm reviews and sales. Now that LTM has finally reissued it, I can confidently state that its unenthusiastic reception was entirely warranted. There are a number of remixes optimistically appended to this expanded edition to prop up the weaker songs, but they cannot hide the fact that this is a pretty bland effort (three versions of “Tasty Fish” aside).
The songs on Atlan have a spore like potency. While listening I get a feeling in the back of my brain that they are somehow reawakening the old and sleeping powers of the earth. It is an album that reaffirms for me that the roots of music are often to be found in the otherworld. With his unique ability to seamlessly bridge the primordial with the contemporary Soriah returns the first instrument known to humankind –the voice- to a place of high honor. As a Tuvan throat singer highly skilled in overtone chanting Soriah shows that the voice is also one of the best instruments for creating sustained drones. When combined with Ashkelon Sain’s adept hand at electronic effects the result is nothing short of stunning.
It is difficult to acknowledge S U R V I V E’s new album without touching on the hype surrounding it. Half of the Austin band, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, are responsible for the soundtrack to Stranger Things, which has received significant attention. But the fact of the matter is that the band (also featuring Adam Jones of Troller and Mark Donica) has been composing synth heavy film score work for years now, and while they are completely deserving of the attention their work is now receiving, RR7349 would be just as amazing of a record without the hype surrounding their extracurricular activities.
Multimedia artist Steve Roden has stated that his work often begins with the product of some other artist, and becomes a jumping off point for him to create his own inspired work. "Distance Piece," the audio component of Striations presented here, was part of a larger body of work inspired by an unfinished sculpture by his grandmother. The audio portion that makes up this disc may lose a bit in the translation from its overall conceptual framework, but still makes for a strong work on its own.
The enigmatic Fossil Aerosol Mining Project have somehow managed to retain their anonymity in the eight years since the project was reactivated. With this, their consistency in presenting long lost audio recordings (or excellent forgeries of them) in a new and reconstructed context has not waned in the slightest, and this second release this year (the other being digital-only) keeps that mystery alive and fascinating.
I cannot pretend to keep up with Andrew Liles' overwhelmingly voluminous solo output, but I pounced on this album, as it seemed significant that the generally dormant United Dairies label had reawakened to bestow its imprimatur upon this opus.  Happily, my instincts proved to be unerring (as usual).  United Dairies is the perfect home for an album as aberrant as this one: while Steven Stapleton has described it as "a masterpiece of modern contemporary composition" and Liles ostensibly drew his inspiration from the '50s and '60s avant-garde, The Power Elite more accurately sounds like a prolonged nightmare taking place inside the rusted machinery of a clock tower.  This is easily one of the year's strangest and most adventurous albums.
Birmingham’s Pram are the rare band that can cause me to simultaneously think conflicting thoughts like "it is absolutely criminal that this band was never as big as Stereolab" and "it is abundantly clear why this band never quite managed to transcend cult status."  In any case, they were unquestionably one of the more idiosyncratic, inspired, and polarizing bands of the '90s, though they finally managed to achieve some widespread success in the early 2000s.  In fact, Helium was recently hailed by FACT as one of the greatest post-rock albums of all-time, while an article on The Quietus proposed The Stars Are So Big as the best album of the '90s.  Appropriately, those first two Pram albums (originally released on Too Pure) have now gotten well-deserved vinyl reissues from Medical Records.  At the risk of sounding reductionist, both of these albums fall into Pram's Krautrock-influenced phase, preceding their (also reductionist) aesthetic swing into more exotica-influenced territory.  Describing Pram as "Krautrock-influenced" does not even remotely begin to capture how bizarre, artfully deranged, and fun some of these songs are though.
Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert’s unabashedly poppy New Order side project has remained a largely forgotten one, aside from perhaps the small splash created by their debut single in 1990. While there are certainly some artistic reasons for O2’s marginalization, the duo’s most significant problems were bad luck, bad timing, and the chaos surrounding the collapse of Factory Records. Thankfully, LTM has now reissued both of their albums, giving them a long-deserved second chance to find some appreciative ears.
