Since his recent reemergence, Matthew Bower has been more than happy to continue pushing his venerable project further and further into raw noise territory while bringing in a fair share of black metal influenced chaos to bolster the already maxed out volume levels. Here is roughly 100 minutes of pure feedback worship and dedication to distortion pedals. However, there’s none of the noise rock tendencies of Xaman or IIIrd Gatekeeper, for better or worse.
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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Unlike previous solo efforts, here Baker is flanked by a concentrated orchestra, propelling his demur drones into consonant and complete compositions. The result is an album of staggering growth as Baker explores the elegant side of drone and the filth of classical percussion and strings that not only established Baker as an innovator but as a inventive curator of drone and its many variants.
The latest release from this up and coming Polish sound artist steps away from his usual preference for walls of digital noise and instead plunders through tapes of traditional folk music for source material, leaving enough evidence of its pedigree there, but taking it to far off realms of sound.
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.
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.
