Although ostensibly a remix album, there is no need to be familiar with the source material to enjoy the remix work here. From what I gather, PureH are a successful electronic rock band out of Slovenia who invited a slew of electronic artists to rework a single track, "Signia." Not being familiar with the original track, I purposely avoided listening to the initial song to fully appreciate the remixes, which all vary greatly and, as a whole, make for strong, diverse tracks.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Lithuanian conceptual artist and performer Gintas Kraptavicius manipulates minimal digital sources and acoustic vibrations in the service of narrative rhythms and electro-acoustic wand waving. Rather than merely barricading himself behind walls of atmospherics, Kraptavicius uses his tools to explore sound in ways that are both unpredictable and inviting.
The eyeballed-ones recent foray into storytelling and radio plays has been patchy to say the least. Tweedles was disappointing and the Timmy YouTube viral videos frequently seemed to be lacking something. However, it has never been written anywhere that The Residents had to placate their audience all the time (in fact, if anything should be written it is that The Residents should not placate any of their audience any of the time). That being said, this latest album seems to work far better than its predecessors as it melds a number of musical (and other) styles in that inimitable Residential fashion.
Coming in under the wire at the end of the year is this flawless EP from Rjyan Kidwell. While Sketchi on Temporary Residence was the most recently released full-length album by Cex, Exotical Privates is linked to his last release on Automation, last year's fantastic and underrated Actual Fucking with Nice Nice. Billed as remixes from that LP this EP stands on its own perfectly well.
Back in 1993, Inade released Burning Flesh on two cassettes which immediately made an impression on the underground music scene, with its blackest of black dark ambient sketches and soul-crushing gloom, and established the reputation and credentials of the two protagonists René Lehmann and Knut Enderlein. The follow-up, Aldebaran, originally released in 1996 equally caused something of a commotion when news of its imminent reissue–in a new third, unlimited, edition–emerged earlier this year. For those of us who missed it the first time around, myself included, this has been something of a much anticipated release.
This is a reissue of a reissue, the original version of consolidated Burning Witch's two releases onto one CD. This new version splits them onto separate discs and includes other tracks recorded at the time that ended up on split releases with Goatsnake and Asva. Considering Burning Witch releases are now nigh on impossible to find, it is a good job Southern Lord have made this (rather lovely looking) package. The music is heavy beyond heavy; by the end of the two discs I am left with a feeling of having pushed a boulder up a hill for eternity and thinking that eternity is not long enough.
With Heather Leigh turning her pedal steel loose on audiences across Europe, this live disc is more sonically aggressive than her previous releases. In performance Heather might have usually sat static at her pedal steel tearing at the strings, but the sounds still have the ability to rear up and forward like some venom sluicing cobra. Her evolution towards something between the state of song and primacy continues, but this time with sinews motorized by force.
Dark, brooding music from Norway usually involves corpse paint and an obscure relationship with Satan or other so-called dark forces; indeed, restraint and delicacy are hard to come by in the world of spiked gauntlets and troll vocalists. On the other hand, bands like Ulver write albums like Shadows of the Sun, demonstrating that fragile arrangements and understatement are often more oppressive than any heavy-handed guitar riff.
It's good to know that rock music isn't truly dead. Sure, the coroner has been called out many times to check the corpse, but as long as albums like this are around, there will be a bit of pulse left in the ol’ body. Here is yet another recontexualization of the various fragments of rock in the past four decades into a unique brew that doesn’t specifically sound like any previous band, but the vibe of their legacies are definitely there.
