Initially founded as a side project of Club Rialto, with the line-up expanded over time to include the likes of Roel Meelkop and Frans de Waard (so a veritable who’s-who of Dutch experimental music), THU20 has been sporadically active since their formation almost 30 years ago. This set collects compilation pieces and unreleased live performances largely from the 1980s and early 1990s, and acts as an excellent overview of this period, while still managing to compliment their studio albums.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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I hate to throw around the woefully overused phrase "great lost album," but Aguirre stumbled onto something quite amazing with this record.  I have no idea if Tim Robertson is still involved in music at all these days, but in his teens he was a church organist who traveled the world with his missionary parents.  After returning to Barcelona following a few years in Africa, he bought a four-track and spent two years obsessed with the idea of creating music "for future temples on Neptune and Saturn."  Eventually, that bizarre phase passed and Tim threw out all of his recordings except for two tapes, which he gave to his (presumably bewildered) parents as a gift.  Roughly 20 years later, those surreal experiments have now publicly surfaced thanks to a chance meeting in a thrift store.  This is "outsider" music for sure, but its guileless simplicity and elegiac beauty nevertheless place it very high in the pantheon of early New Age fringe-dwellers.
This sort of dark, atmospheric work has always been a favorite of mine, but too often I find the records hard to discern from one another. Between the Horizon and the Abyss does not have this problem at all, because while there is a consistency from piece to piece, it is far from monochromatic. Each individual composition has a distinct sound and mood that makes for a dynamic, ever changing piece of music. That variation from piece to piece is where this album excels.
Mentiras may be BOAN's first release, but the duo of vocalist Mariana Saldaña and José Cota (who also record as SSLEEPERHOLD) previously made up two thirds of Medio Mutante, who also mined similar classic synth-centric sounds. Working exclusively with classic equipment and embracing the limitations of such, the result is a wonderfully vintage feeling album of five songs that capture an era while having their own unique identity at the same time.
During their prime, Zoviet France pioneered a strain of music variously known as either ethno-ambient or sci-fi tribal, but they quickly moved on and nobody since has quite been able to quite fill the resultant void for me.  Others have certainly tried, but they usually have an "overwrought" or "overproduced" feel that dispels whatever illusion they are trying to evoke.  Consequently, I was absolutely delighted to find out about Phil Maggi and his eerie, mesmerizing, and loop-based sound collages.  Maggi's aesthetic is exactly what I was looking for, particularly on 2011's Ghost Love.  His similarly fine (if not even better) new album is a travelogue of sorts, culled from field recordings and snatches of traditional music accumulated during a 2011 trip through Umbria, Italy.
I have been a fan of Piotrowicz’s electronic, usually modular synthesizer-centric work for a number of years now, and I have quite enjoyed following his evolution and development as an artist. With Samoobrona, however, I went in with some trepidation. Not because of my lack of faith in his work, but more the nature of the recording: a radio play exclusively in Polish. I was happy to find, however, that his electronics are still the primary element throughout the two side-long compositions and even without following the narrative, the result was enthralling.
An artist working primarily with guitar used in abstract compositions, Jeff Barsky, also known as Insect Factory, does an exceptional job of carefully using effects and processing to create complex compositions, rather than chaotic walls of sound. On this solo cassette and older split LP, he avoids the temptation to simply run his instrument through a battery of guitar pedals on every song and instead uses that technique sparingly, along with less obscured, more conventional playing. It is his careful balance of texture and mood with conventional melodic playing that makes his work fascinating.
Haley Fohr's Thrill Jockey debut finds her again returning to the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter vein that first surfaced on 2013's Overdue.  There is a new twist though: Fohr is now backed by a full band of Chicago music scene luminaries in additional to returning collaborator Cooper Crain (of Bitchin Bajas).  The result is quite a strange, kaleidoscopic, and temporally dislocated one, drifting from inspired experimentalism to '70s-style folk-rock to something resembling Diamanda Galas fronting a Led Zeppelin cover band.  Personally, I vastly prefer her experimental side ("Dream of TV" is absolutely stellar), but there is no denying the singular power and otherness of Fohr's voice.
Given how much I loved Cascade, my curiosity about this more ambitious companion album made for quite an impatient month of anticipation.  Unfortunately, now that The Deluge has finally arrived, I do not know quite what to make of it.  My initial gut feeling was that Basinski's added intervention diluted a piece that was already perfect and complete, but it has since grown on me quite a bit with repeated listens.  While I still feel that Cascade is the superior album, The Deluge mostly balances out its flaws with some higher highpoints than its predecessor.  Also, it will likely hold a lot of appeal for anyone who has always wanted to love William Basinski, but wished he were more dynamic (though I personally prefer him as just an invisible guiding presence).
I think I can safely guarantee that no one familiar with Ren Schofield’s work has ever wondered what a new Container album might sound like, nor have they likely exhausted much time wondering about what its title would be: LP is yet another dose of no-frills, bludgeoning, percussive, and noise-damaged anti-dance.  The only real change is Schofield has become a bit more skilled, a bit wilder, and a lot more aggressive since his last album.  Part of me admittedly misses the more "human"-speed, mid-tempo grooves of past Container albums, but LP is probably Ren’s best work in this vein by a landslide, as he has trimmed down his song lengths and dramatically ratcheted up his visceral intensity.  This is an absolutely bulldozing album.
