The Baltimore-based duo of Jane & Josh came together as Abiku like some unstoppable galactic collision. Their brand of short, sharp, raw, and unpolished explosions of punk noisiness, interspersed with a few longer expositions and more experimental drone-style pieces, is in itself a kind of joyful collision: a place where keyboards, guitars, and rhythm machines smash together faster and more powerfully than sub-atomic particles in an accelerator. Their latest series of detonations, the two-part CD set of Right and Left, showered me with all kinds of radiative shrapnel, at times threatening to melt my ears and at other times soothing the heat inflicted by the wounds.
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 is only the third album in eleven years from Austin's Experimental Aircraft, after 1999’s self titled debut on Sleepy Bunny (and which was subsequently re-released a year later by Devil in the Woods Records) and Love for the Last Time (Rollerderby) in 2002. Here, once again, the Texas quartet engineer a collection of hazy and melodically high flying, brightly-lit guitar-based indie-rock songs, aided and lifted in the main by Rachel Staggs’ (Eau Claire, Static Silence) warm yet slightly distant voice (but which is yet shot through with a steely strength even so) which floats serenely above a landscape of strong noisy reverb-soaked guitar lines backed by a dependably solid rhythm section.
21 year old Olafur Arnalds wrote some of this debut when he was 15. His controlled pieces for piano, strings, and occasional electronics will have fans of Max Richter and Johann Johannsson as happy as dreaming dogs having their bellies tickled.
Released in both CD and 12” vinyl formats, with five bonus cuts on the CD, Dream Island Laughing Language has a happy homemade intensity blending sounds gleaned from natural instruments such as bells, bowls, flutes, mini- dulcimer, mbira, hands, rubber bands and...rocks, as well as those derived from cassettes and computers.
With a track record collaborating with the likes of Sunn O))), Thorr’s Hammer, and other dark luminaries, the sound of this disc is not at all unexpected. However, while her collaborations strayed more towards the metal end of things, this first (and entirely solo) disc is decidedly more eclectic, and for that reason perhaps more frightening than any of her other appearances.
Never a band to stagnate, Wire have consistently reinvented themselves with each and every release in their long career. This new disc puts them in an interesting situation, given that they have been reduced to a trio with the departure of guitarist Bruce Gilbert. This is a similar situation to the post-Manscape era, when Robert Grey (then Gotobed) left the band. That time, however, they became Wir and released material that, while sharing parallels to Wire, had a different feel entirely. In some ways, perhaps they should have done something similar with this album because, though it is a wonderful work with few shortcomings, it doesn't FEEL quite like Wire.
There has always been a somewhat contentious, but notable relationship between conventional “pop” music and the more abrasive spectrum of the harsh and electronic. Throbbing Gristle were never hesitant to put a soft gem out like “United” or “Distant Dreams” alongside dissonance like “Subhuman.” More obscure, but more jarring to yours truly was hearing Japanese noise gods Hijokaidan sneaking a faithful cover of Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine” on their Tapes album. Recently there’s folks like Fuck Buttons and Wolf Eyes who are more than happy to mix it with dance and punk, respectively. Dino Felipe (Fukktron, Old Bombs), on the other hand, takes a more literal approach and instead creates a purely pop album with a decidedly noise aesthetic.
This is the companion piece to the live collaborations I previously reviewed here, however this has the artists collaborating in a studio setting as opposed to a live one. Considering the nature of improvisations, the differences between the two settings are relatively minimal. Recorded during the same period as the Live One disc, the sounds here are, interesting enough, a bit darker, more harsh and dissonant than the improvisations in the live setting.
Tzolk’in, as well as being the term given to the 260-day Mayan calendar system, also happens to be the name chosen to encapsulate the collaborative tribal industrial project instigated by Nicolas van Meirhaeghe of Empusae and Gwenn Trémorin of Flint Glass. Haab is their second album, following on from their self-titled 2004 debut on Divine Comedy, and the eight tracks of dark ambient and industrial inflected dance exhibited here project us into a long-lost and forgotten world of irrecoverable mystery, edged with sharply-bladed sinister undercurrents and spine-tinglingly brooding rainforest atmospheres.
