After 24 years David Tibet's debut full-length as Current 93 has been reissued in its original form on compact disc. The audio has been completely re-mastered to great effect, but the additions available on the 1992 release from Durtro are gone, replaced only in the first 1,000 copies by an icy Andrew Liles remix. That remix rounds the album out quite nicely, but the omissions are nonetheless annoying.
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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Cloudland Canyon deliver on the promises of a kraut-rock epic hinted at by their previous releases with their full length debut on kranky. The album traverses a breadth of sounds, embracing funky treadmill grooves, swelling synthesizer baths, and bucolic psych jaunts.
Originally put out as a limited CD-R upon Steven Stapleton's appearance in Portland, Oregon, in celebration of the release of She and Me Fall Together in Free Death back in 2003, this recording now appears on vinyl for the first time. With muffled voices and strange drops in audio that at first don't seem intentional, this is an odd album in a discography that practically defines the term.
Alessandra Celletti has previously interpreted Glass, Gurdjieff and Satie with her splendidly vivid piano style. This third album of dramatic original material adds vocals and drums on some pieces and, incidentally, reminds me why I listen to music.
While this moderately hyped debut showcases the tried-and-true qualities of these two seasoned rockers decorated with bloodstained major label merit badges and a priceless caliber of indie credibility, rarely does it step outside their established comfort zones to celebrate this sacred union of American misanthropes.
An established New England artist, Murray has worked in the framework of "drone" for quite a while now. Before it was the trendy thing to do, I might add. In that respect, it is no surprise that his work transcends the "let's see how long we can sustain this note for" school, but more of the pure, dissonant minimalism akin to the old masters like Niblock and Xenakis. What comprises this album then is therefore dissonant and difficult, yet compelling and hypnotic in its brutish subtlety.
A three way live improvisation recorded at the Musica Genera festival in 2006, the 30 minute set (indexed as 4 tracks for convenience) manages to be extraordinary abstract in sound, yet features some of the most structurally sound improvisational elements that I have heard in years. Crossing the often faint boundaries between electro-acoustic, ambience, and free jazz, it is pretty unique in its overall sound.
For reasons unknown, Thomas Brinkmann's Georgian muse simultaneously presents her third and fourth full-length releases for the clandestine Max Ernst imprint, comprising three discs worth of all-new material. Seldom groundbreaking, flagrantly derivative, and intermittently appealing, Natalie Beridze's purposefully glitchy compositions appear apropos of the icier temperatures of the season.
Instrumental bands are everywhere and invariably they sound like some combination of Mogwai, Godspeed and Explosions in the Sky. Other influences creep in but rarely do they escape the dreaded "post rock" tag, not without some gimmick anyway. The Jimmy Cake do manage to come across as being separate to this whole thing, despite on paper sounding like they are the archetypal late '90s/early '00s art rock band: nine core members, string section, unusual instruments and long songs. No, they are more than that; they have a creative spirit that pushes them beyond their contemporaries.
Just over a year after Klick Revolution, the dazzling, spiritual sequel to 2000's much lauded Klick, the veteran boundary-pushing German techno producer strives—and invariably fails—to capture a claustrophobic personal experience. A risible counterfeit masquerading as artsy, post-millennial singer-songwriter fare, this atypical record exhausts its pretense almost immediately and rarely recovers from the obviously nonexistent heft of false malaise.
