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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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Santiago, Chile's Un Festin Sagital weave electro-acoustic sounds with rock instruments and voices to create this unpredictable but compelling album. Harrowing background noises share space with patient guitar motifs for songs that are constantly churning and shifting into different modes and styles. Hints of progressive rock and traditional music serve to heighten and confound expectations, making this album a deliriously engaging experience.
The clown prince of avant drone pays tribute to his namesake for the 1000 year celebration of the original historical Charlemagne in Germany. Consisting entirely of his minimalist piano work, and remixing and processing by Christoph Heemann, this hymn to the apocalypse is a compelling one.
As Sub Rosa's venerable series of anthologies continues at a rapid pace they still continue to both cite important classic artists in the field as well as draw attention to those who may have been overlooked by the ravages of time. It takes a brave curator to put the likes of Claude Ballif and Charlemagne Palestine alongside Sutcliffe Jugend and Masonna, but the tradition of excellence continues.
If countries and regions were to be judged solely on the kind of music emanating from within its borders then Scandinavia would be deemed something of a bleak and minimalist place what with all the dark ambient acts it harbors. This disc, from Sweden's Diskrepant, adds further disquietude to the country's musical reputation with a foray into a strange, exotic but sparsely inhabited and twilit world rarely trodden upon by human feet.
This two disc set explores the music of 1970s Nigeria in the period after the Biafran war. It demonstrates a fresh national confidence and a variety beyond the juju music that most Westerners associate with the country. It also reveals Celestine Ukwu, a dazzling star who would die too soon.
Looking at it objectively this collaboration between the veteran American 'industrial-tribal' percussionist Z'EV and the German ritual dark ambient duo of Frank Merten and Henry Emich, aka Herbst9, seems a perfect recipe for a successful collaboration. The idea of H9's deeply harmonic and ritual dronescapes supported by Z'EV's richly rhythmic and complex percussion is something of a mouth-watering prospect for me.
Solo vocal performances are a naked musical form by definition, but this Richard Youngs vinyl re-release (from a limited CD-R run in 2004) appears that little bit more exposed than most even without the need for conventional lyricism. 
This limited edition album explores the fine details of unidentifiable field recordings; each manipulated and tinkered with until all that is left is the ambient character of those sounds. As with all good concrete inspired works, the music here is far removed from reality but it is still almost tangible in a physical, solid sense. I just want to run my fingers along the music, strange as that sounds.
