Recently reissued by Staalplaat, this massive 1995 double-album is one of the jewels in Bryn Jones' "industrial phase" and a serious contender for one of the finest albums in the entire Muslimgauze oeuvre.  Naturally, it is packed full of percussion experiments and plenty of obsessive "locked groove" repetition, but Izlamaphobia is unusual among Muslimgauze albums in that Bryn seemed to have had so many great ideas that he did not resort to self-cannibalizing or reworking much at all.  Also, he seemed to have experienced an atypical window of patience and lingered on this album long enough to flesh-out his grooves with some great dub touches rather than just immediately launching into his next project.  Anyone annoyed by the fact that most Muslimgauze songs are just percussion vamps will probably still fail to warm to this release, but Izlamaphobia unquestionably boasts some of the most vibrant and inventive loops of Jones' career.  More importantly, it is simply a great album from start to finish.
We made it to 700 episodes. While it's not a special episode per se—commemorating this milestone—you can pretty much assume that every episode is special. This one features Mark Spybey & Graham Lewis, Brian Gibson, Sote, Scanner and Neil Leonard, Susumu Yokota, Eleven Pond, Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal, Yellow Swans, Dental waste in Saigon photo by Krisztian. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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On their debut EP, Relations deliver four tracks that could come across as hipster synth-pop nostalgia, but the earnestness and catchiness of the songs make that a non-issue, resulting in a set of tracks that sound familiar, yet new to anyone who grew up with the music of the early 1980s.
Despite recording some landmark works with GRM (including a masterful triple LP with Pierre Schaeffer in the '60s), Guy Reibel is a name that is often forgotten when discussing musique concrète. While fame (as far as fame for experimental 20th century composers goes) has eluded him compared to other members of the GRM, his music has always delivered. This album, originally released in 1978, shows Reibel in particularly good light as he creates an unprecedented, and since unmatched, sonic vocabulary.
Pierre Schaeffer break from his long standing experiments with manipulating recordings of real-life sounds, away from the concrète and closer to something more akin to the electronic works of Henri Pousseur or Karlheinz Stockhausen. Utilising only synthesized sounds, this album is a tantalizing glance down a path that Schaeffer never fully explored but based on these pieces, the results of such explorations would be mind-blowing.
Last year's self-titled, self-released album felt like a major creative breakthrough for Nadler, as she found a very effective way for her distinctive, ghostly songs to coexist with a bit more light and life. The Sister, billed as its companion album, turns out to be something of a lateral move rather than an evolution or continuation. It is certainly more melancholy, spare, and monochromatic than I expected, but it largely overcomes those hurdles by being such a meticulously crafted, focused, concise, and thematically coherent song suite. As a whole, it is perhaps a bit weaker than some of Marissa's other efforts, but some of the individual songs are easily among her best.
