I have to admit that this band has always been hit or miss for me. More often than not, I have enjoyed their live shows more than their recordings, and this long, single track is unfortunately no exception.
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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The album is packaged in a gorgeous sleeve made of white embossed card with a beautiful sepia-toned photo of Rose's musician ancestors (the whole thing smells of bubblegum, not intentional I am sure but pleasant nonetheless). The old time vibe from the photo sets the mood for the album as Rose fingerpicks and slides his way all over his guitar. His playing is infused heavily with bluegrass and blues techniques and styles. 
It's winter, and while it's been a rather warm one, it's still been rainy and of course, dark. As I look around the piles of recent and forthcoming releases and loads of mopey bedroom-made electronica demos in boxes I'll never open, it's painfully hard to find solace from dreariness. Thankfully I've got some time to catch up on Aberdeen.
Describing Dada is a paradox, like a proverbial wet fish in the palm of your hand certain only to be lost in an attempted securing grasp. As Greil Marcus details in Lipstick Traces, subsequent efforts in art and music contain echoes from Zürich, Berlin and elsewhere; not least the urge (first and foremost) to destroy, or as Orange Juice sang: to rip it up and start again. 
Captivating from start to finish, this latest Low Point CDR is perfect coming-out-of-winter listen. Like an especially slow thaw this disc seems to make everything crawl along t its own pace. The faded net curtain photograph cover art helping to coat the green trees in the distance in a chilly wrap of opaque fog. This one man and guitar effect pedals three tracker carves a pleasant little niche out of the currently massive drone renaissance thats sweeping the world.
This is a fantastic compilation that shows the range and talent that Bates is in possession of. Cold, post punk songs sit comfortably beside real English folk songs that are full of warmth. Impressively, despite covering over 25 years of his career, the different styles and periods of Bates' works still sound like they were recorded all in one go.
After a coincidental 17 year absence, Jackson Del Rey and Louise Bialik have revived the 17 Pygmies name, returning with a seasoned elegance, not a vengeance as might be expected from hints by both Del Rey's vigorous 2005 release I Am the Light and for a collective once noted as a reference point to a young Godspeed You Black Emperor.
This double disc set from Jandek's live debut on US soil (August 28th, 2005) is the least entertaining of his live releases to date. The upwards quality trajectory of this documentary series seems to have faltered here due to a combination of some poor songs and an unsteadily flailing rhythm accompaniment from a duo of drummers. 
Back when many techno and electro producers operated in perpetual pseudonymity and even anonymity, the intent was to put the focus on the music and not on the people behind it, as well as to add a certain underground mystique to these rebellious sounds. Sadly, many of today's labels cannot help but exploit the secrecy behind their artists' identities, cheapening the legacy of the Underground Resistance posse and like minded artists.
The artwork of this split CD-R wins the award for creepy package through the post for this week. A card sleeve with scarlet stencilled skulls inside a red flecked bandage runs a close second to receiving dead rodents in a jiffy bag. Out of the three pieces here (two Robedoor tracks and the single piece by Bologna Pony), only one piece, the Robedoor finale, fails to balance on the awkward line between a riveting listen and a generic elongated feedback blow-out.
