Balancing between brittle noise and gauzy ambience, this album has a spacious atmosphere that stays even in its most clamorous moments. This lightness makes the album listenable throughout, but it saps the intensity of the music. The electronic arrangements are often engaging, but they dissipate into formlessness too soon to reach catharsis.
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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This collaboration between cellist/electronics wizard Rawlings and percussionist/mixer Feeney lays out its agenda immediately on the first part: swelling, high pitched sine waves that pierce and barely relent. However, for the listener willing to endure the harshness, there is a vast array of subtleties to be found.
This double album sees Ruth Rosenthal's poetry set to music by her musical partner, Xavier Klaine. Her words and his music create a delicate whole although moments of black humour and irony break through the elegiac moods. Winter Family deal with weighty issues from the most personal to a haunting passage on the Holocaust. Yet this album is surprisingly easy to listen to, despite the serious nature of the words.
Devendra Banhart's fifth album finds him abandoning many of the idiosyncrasies that fueled his earlier work and instead adopting a variety of broader influences. As a result, he reaches neither the ecstatic heights obtained previously nor the jokey lows that plagued Cripple Crow. Apart from a handful of exceptions, Banhart instead settles for something in between for much of this middling effort.
Better known for his electronic rhythm and bruise work, Mammal's Gary Beauvais moves his project into loner doom blues territory. Not as radical as move as it first reads, Mammal may have changed their palette for a bass and guitar but it is still steadily brooding and unsettled work. The electronic ruts are gone in favor of stringed instrument grooves, his music channelled into a gloomy simplicity.
It is reasonable to suggest that Múm are currently in a period of transition. If that's the case, they might choose to linger in this languid and childlike pop ecstasy.
Akron/Family's best material can be found here. Their varied musical proclivities mingle with one another effortlessly; their songwriting is stellar and their performances even better. Their most outstanding record is this one and it's a cycle dedicated to the only mystery on equal footing with death: love.
The latest release from Kip Uhlhorn and Simon Wojan's Cloudland Canyon is far too brief which means that each precious moment on this CD is cherished more than ever. The two pieces on this EP are astounding; both are slowly evolving epics with a heavy hint of Krautrock under a very modern sheen. The end result can only be described as cosmic.
Throughout the history of life, humans are faced with the mortality of our parents, it's simply natural that we outlive our parents if everything goes normally. However, I can't think of anybody who is or was quite ready to deal with the life altering effects that extreme illness (an aggressive "terminal" cancer) has on everybody close. After weeks of dealing on a daily basis with medical uncertainty, insane drug side effects, mental instability, and a "care" system which ejects patients prematurely from necessary hospitalization, I finally had a window of opportunity for a break, and Tiny Mirrors will live forever in my memory for the soundtrack for that weekend.
As dub techno continues its vibrant resurgence, there have been few releases in electronic music more anticipated in 2007 than this one. Having already achieved significant attention with Andy Stott's critically acclaimed Merciless and its accompanying singles, Modern Love, a recording arm of the magnificent online shop Boomkat, will only see its stock rise (or perhaps, in inventory terms, fall) with this release.
