Brainwashed Radio: The Podcast Edition

Solstice moon in the West Midlands by James

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.

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Howard Stelzer, "Bond Inlets"

cover imageAs a way of celebrating a decade of his label Intransitive, as well as the anniversary of his first album, Stone Blind, Boston based tape fetishist Howard Stelzer returns to his roots and dissects that early work to construct something entirely new but remaining true to his love of all things cassette.
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Black Mountain, "In the Future"

Arrayed in dystopian garb and armed with righteous indignation, Black Mountain's newest record explodes and pounds in unison with the bombs and wars that populate Stephen McBean's lyrics.
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Stephanie Hladowski, "The High, High Nest"

The story is that these four songs are all that's left of Scatter's scrapped final album. As that free folk assembly went on their separate ways, thankfully vocalist Stephanie Hladowski has collated the tracks into this 10" EP. It feels like these songs have been pulled through the liquid mirror of a now-closed world, with this world being better off for having them. These brief glimpses of the past reveal themselves as further puzzle pieces in the reconfiguration of British traditional songs as part of a living present.

 

Singing Knives

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Matt "MV" Valentine, "P K Dick"

The MV half of MV&EE creates tense, cosmic music with very little. His meandering voice and sparkling guitar sound lonely, weird, and oddly comforting. A good match, actually, for some of Philip K. Dick's obsessions: identity, authenticity and transformation.  

 

Time Lag

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Rolan Vega, "Documentary"

Rolan Vega's ambiguous debut on Community Library suffers from its unfocused genesis. In part a tribute to movie and television soundtracks, Documentary is an intriguing compilation of Vega's synthesizer compositions but not an entirely successful album.
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Suzuki Junzo, "Pieces for Hidden Circles"

cover image Compared to the other releases in the ARC series, Junzo's work stands out as being one that is very different in style and approach. Rather than seeming overly experimental or esoteric, it instead goes for an acid tinged psychedelic approach to folk and blues that still manages to convey its own sound. It isn't as dark as some of the previous discs in the series, so it would seem that ARC releases are ending on a slightly brighter note. However, there is a great deal of emotion and passion felt in the minimal guitar strums and chords.

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Marc Hannaford, "The Garden of Forking Paths"

Accessible, improvisational jazz is given new life at the hands of this exceptional quartet. Australian pianist Marc Hannaford leads his group through a variety of musical approaches, drawing a lively dialogue out of each of them that entertains with ease. This quartet reaches deep into their imaginative bag of tricks and pull out one stunning performance after another.
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Tarab, "Wind Keeps Even Dust Away"

cover image This is the second release from Eamon Sprod's field recordings project and a wonderful collection of sound collages. In spite of a fairly hackneyed premise (the beauty in decay), he has created a number of fragile compositions that wander somewhere between Chris Watson's clear recording style and Francisco Lopez's disorientating approach to presenting sound.
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Mustafa Ozkent, "Genclik Ile Elele"

cover imageRare records are funny things; to some people the value of the record is in how many were pressed and the quirks of individual pressings. To others it is the music that counts, to hell with catalogue numbers and whether it has misprinted labels. This is a release to appeal to those in the former category, rare as hen's teeth but nothing to write home about.
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Genocide Organ, "Remember"

cover imageSome nine years ago I remember hearing much about this German industrial/power electronics band, mostly about their ultra limited LPs that fetched exorbitant amounts on the then-nascent eBay, so they instantly had cult appeal.  Dear reader, remember: this was before the days of widespread file sharing, commonplace CDRs, etc,...  So I was unable to actually hear what all the fuss was about until a friend recorded me (to MiniDisc, no less), a copy of the double live LP Remember, which I instantly remember loving.  Fast forward a few years and their entire discography is online, and I remember feeling let down once I heard these original albums.  They're not bad by any means, but they didn't quite live up to the hype that had been generated.  Now, ten years after its original release, Remember is reissued on CD, with 18 minutes of extra material recorded between 1997 and 2000.
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