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Tom Carter has been one of my favorite guitar players for several years now. Outside of the particular skeletal trance-blues style that he has perfected in work with Charalambides, Carter's many many solo and duo recordings carve out a truly unique improvised guitar method, blending extended technique, purist drone logic, trance minimalism, and a beautifully impure psy-punk energy befitting collaboration with many of today's lo-fi drone or psychedelic noise currents.
Full of top-shelf songs, this disc gets at the heart of what a culture-based compilation should be. It is eclectic enough to adequately represent a nation's worth of musicians and singers, but unified enough to present a cohesive listening experience.
This album more than lives up to its visceral title. It contains some of Bishop's most intense and downright ugly work to date as a solo artist, but also some his most sublime. Bishop willfully defies the traditionalist and academic conventions of solo-guitar work, offering both examples of controlled musicianship and malevolent noodling.
Larsen have always been at odds with most of their contemporaries, almost mythical stories about getting signed to Young God Records, a tribute album to Autechre that features no computers and no obvious references to the band or their music and all sorts of strange rumours abounding about the members of the group. However, the live album/DVD ABECEDA sees them cement their reputation as serious artists (minus any negativity that concept might carry with it). ABECEDA is a well-thought out concept delivered with care and finesse by Larsen and their friends. Musically it is as strong as any of their previous efforts and visually it stands out on its own.
The idea of an orchestral approach to the electronic and tape compositions of Iannis Xenakis may seem like an absurd endeavor, but it works, extremely well.
Another reissue from the Les Disques du Crepuscule back catalog, The Fruit of the Original Sin is a two-disc compilation appropriately subtitled "A Collection of After Hours Preoccupations." While there isn't anything overt that these tracks have in common, many of them share a tinge of melancholy and beauty in equal measure, qualities that are especially noticeable late at night.
New Jersey's renaissance man of all things heavy has released his second solo album in as many years that explicitly shows his diverse array of skills at their finest, both in the shaping of complete chaos and the obsessive study of minutiae.
Take equal parts scummy sludge rock, power electronics, and free jazz and mix them together, and you'll get a loud obnoxious mess. Which is exactly what this album is, and there couldn't be a better compliment for it.
This slab of vinyl is perfectly on point in referencing metal twice in its title. Heather Leigh Murray's pedal steel, the cornerstone of Taurpis Tula's sound and energy drenches both of this album's sides in metallic offal. From rust to the molten spread of wet metal to the hiss of megalithic spear-tip in water, this is amongst their heaviest (and best recorded) work yet.
