For his first release on Raster-Noton, Atom™ (aka Senor Coconut, Atom Heart, Uwe Schmidt, etc.) has created an album that does not necessarily clash with the label’s aesthetic, but takes a different direction that is much more classical in feel: just as the album’s packaging resembles an old book more than the traditional cold, sterile art R-N are known for, the music within has the same feel, along with input from Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Working at the crossroads between a variety of contradictory approaches—electronic and acoustic, improvisation and composition, producer and performer—Kevin Micka continues to hone his Animal Hospital project's refined explorations on this disc, compounding his broad and considerable talents into a majestic grit that shimmers with supple detail.
The fourth album by French composer Pierre-Yves Macé is an exceedingly high-concept affair with very intriguing source material. Passagenweg is inspired by philosopher Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which was an unfinished attempt to chronicle Parisian industrial modernity. Mace, whose thematic consistency is laudable, constructs this lengthy musique concrete opus largely from crackling gramophone recordings of French popular music from the early twentieth century.
This ensemble, named after a region of northern Africa located west of the Nile in ancient history, fuses jazz, rock and Middle Eastern traditional music to great effect (and never becomes tacky jazz fusion). The group is under the supervision of Sam Shalabi who, despite a large recorded output, has outdone himself on this album. Recruiting what seems like everyone in Montréal to play, what might have been a project too big to effectively handle has instead blossomed into the best album of the year so far.
While I am not generally one to categorically dismiss entire genres of music, my interest in black metal has historically been for the wrong reasons (I am amused by things that are cartoonishly evil). Despite my love for extreme music, I feel I have to draw the line at corpse-painted adults operatically shrieking about Satan or hobbits. Wolves In The Throne Room, however, are not ridiculous. In fact, they are kind of absolutely amazing. 
Some music is better left on a MySpace page. Record labels could do the Earth a favor by not wasting its valuable petroleum supply on sub-par CDs like this. To be fair, Robot vs. Zombie is available as a download from iTunes and other digital distributors, but to put it on your computer might compromise valuable hard drive space.
With a slew of recent releases on homespun label luminaries such as Housecraft, Tape Drift, Peasant Magik and now Stunned, France's Enfer Boreal (aka Maxime Primault) has been hard to ignore of late. That he is partaking in Stunned's glorious first anniversary run is testament to the successes of both parties this past year and to honor it he releases one his best yet, a moist and brittle set of drones which far outshine the too often pallid results achieved by less finely attuned tacklers of texture.
Tim Hecker's music is physical and concussive, but its effects radiate on a different level and manipulate something more primal than flesh alone. For close to an hour the music on this disc invades and purges the human core with vibrating melodies and crashing distortion: An Imaginary Country features Hecker doing what he does best.
As the second part of a planned five volume series, Carsten Nicolai chose to draw in more contemporary artists' music to collapse and rebuild, compared to the more classically influenced first disc. Here he takes the likes of Stephen O'Malley, Michael Nyman, and Ryuichi Sakamoto as his starting point, but uses their work to bleak soundscapes that eschews the clicks & blip minimal techno Raster-Noton usually thrives on and instead is a darker, ambient set of pieces.
Representing the first quartet effort of a series of musicians who have long been in association with one another—most often in duet settings—this debut effectively mixes a variety of contemporary musical tactics into a unique and accomplished stylistic melting pot. While too many efforts that take on this broad a range of material lack in depth however, this quartet has the chops to pull it off without losing its spirit of adventure.
