While nearly all musicians use technology in their craft, few do it so literally as Skeletons Out members Howard Stelzer and Jay Sullivan; Stelzer plays tapes while Sullivan opts for vinyl. Despite a means of production that would appear to require a reconfiguring of previously recorded material though, Skeletons Out instead concoct a barren piece of industrial architecture from the sounds of the tools themselves.
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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This Swiss project has a new take on sludgy drone music: most tracks here are full of harsh noise and feedback, while others are driven by a fuzzed out bass, all paired with the infinite tones of a harmonium. The increased sense of musicality based on a wider sonic palette makes for a better experience across the diverse tracks presented here.
Jóhannsson's second installment of a series inspired by iconic American names is as dazzling and solemn as we have come to expect. Hopefully the final component won't refer to The Golden Arches.
This murky combination of raw electronics and mistreated guitar that knows when it’s time to roar, and time to just menace makes for a strong entry into the vinyl world for this relatively new project. What a debut it is though, in an ambiguous letterpressed sleeve and heavyweight marbled vinyl. Luckily, the quality of the music presented (a live session for WHPK radio) matches the packaging quite well.
Following their two other collaborations, Tinnitus Vu and Tocsin -6 Thru +2, here Z'EV initially began reworking tracks from the Organum back catalog, and then collaboratively with David Jackman, who then took it upon himself to finish. What remains is characteristic of both artists' work, and is more reminiscent of Jackman's early work as opposed to his recent triptych of Sanctus/Amen/Omega.
The third album from Michael Begg and Deryk Thomas explores the moods and sounds of the witching hour: deep, dark chasms of sound littered with shimmering tones that dot the music like stars on a night sky. This album is good by day but playing it during the still, cold hours of early morning reveal a different hallucinatory creature. Instruments morph out of recognizable shapes into extended timbres and tones, voices call from somewhere beyond and an uneasy sorrow permeates the music.
After the critical success of last year's multi-disc fetish item recognizing Wolfgang Voigt's pioneering Gas project, Kompakt wastes little time in reissuing this less expansive, previously out-of-print collection of the producer's concurrent minimal techno works.
The promise of Fire on Fire's debut EP on Young God is easily met by their dream-like, somnambulistic follow-up. Less extravagant and aggressive than their previous effort, this Portland Maine-based quintet showcases their softer side with rich and mellow songwriting cut through by pining voices and twang-scored harmonies.
Montreal's Menace Ruine stormed onto the extreme music scene in early 2008 with their blistering debut Cult of Ruins. The enigmatic male/female duo's unusual mixture of black metal, noise, and dark ambient quickly won them a lot of fans (the world clearly needs an evil antipole to Mates of State), as they succeeded in sounding like absolutely no one else. A mere eight months later, they have made the dubious career move of temporarily abandoning much of that sound to release a medieval music-based concept album.
Tim Macuga and Dan Barrett's musical project is as much an ambitious and frustrating piece of conceptual art as it is a crushing and soaring rock record. Composed over a five year period, Deathconsciousness was produced with only the most basic equipment, is accompanied by a 70 page booklet describing a dead religion, and features cover art ripped right from Jacques-Louis David's overtly political masterpiece, La Mort de Marat. The music is excellent, but making sense of the rest of this monstrosity isn't easy.
