Neil Campbell forms part of a trend of contemporary musicians who feel that they need to release every single thing they do. Acid Mothers Temple, Merzbow, Wolf Eyes and Nadja are other big names that come to mind and while these all release decidedly sub-par material, the good releases tend to make this practice forgivable. Unfortunately, Campbell has been more miss than hit for me and this has put me off his work as the risk of being burned is too great. Needless to say, I was surprised when I actually liked Plug Music Ramoon which, although patchy, is one of the more interesting items in his post-Vibracathedral Orchestra back catalogue.
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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The reappearance of these two unpardonably out-of-print platinum-selling albums recorded in the later years of the R&B group's celebrated 3+3 lineup presents listeners with aural snapshots taken at the twilight of '70s funk and disco. By this time interpersonal tensions in the group and the changing tastes of audiences had begun to affect the sextet, though one could hardly tell given the radioactive funk emitting from these songs.
Mark Nelson’s post-Labradford work has always done more for me than Labradford itself. This is not a disparaging comment on Labradford but a testament to how good Nelson has become. With each Pan•American release, Nelson has further crafted his distinctive and often copied style. These are not just interesting sounds or clever use of musical form, the music goes beyond that (and any "post-rock" clichés) to become a genuinely moving experience.
I cannot think of a single artist that is afflicted with such a relentless torrent of inspiration and amazing ideas that a triple album is warranted. Texas's Korperschwache have not changed my opinion on this issue, but they have made a surprising successful, varied (particularly for a noise band with a Holocaust-derived moniker that names songs after H.P. Lovecraft monsters), and listenable effort nonetheless; especially when considering that the band began in 1995 with the intention of producing "blown-out junk noise hell built on the maxim that you can never be too loud or too obnoxious."
This release from eminent sound ecologist Francisco Lopez and Michael Gendreau—member of Crawling With Tarts (1983-1998)—is less a collaboration between the two than a pairing together of similar pieces culled from recordings they each made in the Far East. Lopez created his tracks from original recordings of machinery in Singapore, China, Taiwan, and Japan, whereas Gendreau's microphone captured sounds from inside the factories of Taiwan and Malaysia. Together as a two CD set, the musical pieces presented by each artist are quite complimentary of each other.
With well over 20 releases to its name, Anthony Mangicapra's Hoor-paar-Kraat project has taken on many guises over the years, containing no less than 14 different collaborators over the course of its varied discography. No matter the personnel though, the unit has consistently pushed at the boundaries between drone, noise and musique concrète to masterful effect. Here, Mangicapra teams up with four cohorts and comes up with a beautifully consistent and thematically realized piece. That it has been printed in a relatively large run (for this sort of release anyway...) of 200 is good news, but unfortunately not so good that anyone who wants one can afford to bide their time should they desire a copy. Such is the tape world I suppose; c'est la vie.
I’ve long been under the mindset that "post rock" is a euphemism for "prog rock." Just like "industrial" began to mean "synth pop with distortion" circa 1983. Not that there's anything wrong with prog rock, who doesn’t love a guy in a cape behind a battery of synths that look like they could have landed the Apollo. Apse are definitely in this genre and for the most part they do pretty well, though I wish this would have been an instrumental album.
Having collaborated with the likes of Damo Suzuki and members of Zeni Geva and Acid Mother’s Temple, it’s not surprising at all that this is going to be a loud and “out there” sort of project. And it is, traipsing the line between free jazz and noise with reckless abandon. Never leaning fully onto one side or the other, it makes for an interesting dichotomy throughout both studio and live discs.
Although the 
This collection featuring four artists from different countries is strung together by the conceits that all of the artists are relatively unknown and all of them are women. The disc is agreeably diverse, taking turns through lo-fi pop, fuzzy electronics, and odd singer-songwriter territory.
