With mainstay Vincent De Roguin absent and Stephen O'Malley exercising sharp restraint, Æthenor have released their best album and maybe one of the best live recordings I have ever heard. Assembled from three shows recorded in Oslo, Norway during 2010, En Form For Blå captures Æthenor improvising a loose electric sound bound expertly together by the talents of percussionist Steve Noble and one-half of the Ulver crew. Together they create a surprisingly intelligible sound, which betrays its impromptu origin.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Although they appeared on a variety of compilations in the early 1980s, including the legendary Rising from the Red Sands, Pseudocode mostly remained unknown, putting out their own cassettes and the occasional odd 7", but never reaching the same levels of notoriety that contemporaries in the early industrial underground enjoyed. Nearly 30 years later, some of these earliest recordings have been issued, for the first time, in a deluxe double LP package.
Recorded together using similar techniques, but vastly different source materials, these two releases feel like different parts of the same whole, with both of them emphasizing Mathieu's balancing of texture and melody, to excellent effect, through the use of processed, pre-recorded compositions.
I don't understand how Erik Carlson has managed to stay so woefully underappreciated and low-profile for so long, as he has a very distinctive and appealing aesthetic.  Also, he has recently been largely infallible quality-wise. That hot streak continues here: wisely sticking closely to the sound he intermittently perfected with 2009's excellent Charmed Birds Against Sorcery, Carlson has delivered yet another impressive album of spidery, shimmering beauty.  It could benefit from a bit more bite though.
This album is very deceptively packaged and presented, but in the best way possible: the tame cover art and the word "folk" did nothing at all to prepare me for the extremely fun and quirky pseudo-surf gems within.  Of course, many of these pieces were originally folk songs, but they have been so jazzed-up with kitschy organs and twangy, tremelo-happy guitars as to make that term a wildly misleading understatement. Curator Stuart Ellis has assembled an improbable monster of a compilation.
Perhaps uniquely, Basil Kirchin’s appreciators include Broadcast, Coil, Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor, Brian Eno, and Nurse With Wound. Included here is music from his first film score Primitive London (1965) and the gangland movie The Freelance (1971). Kirchin was a pioneering twentieth-century master of texture and mood. His inventive, multifaceted music still sounds light yet off-kilter, eerie yet peaceful, both futuristic and nostalgic.
It's an attractive package on the most base level. The liner notes claim, "Desire is the root of all suffering," and the artwork depicts a woman, possibly a prostitute, in some form of bondage. Paired with the rather bleak photographs of nondescript locales, the entire album screams before it ever begins playing. This stuff is vile: the album is dirty, absolutely filthy, and exciting.
The first offering in four years from folk-rockjourneyman David Berman could easily have become a messy affair. Afteryears of booze, drugs, depression, and more booze, it seemed Berman waspoised to make the all important recovery record. It's a familiar one—it reeks of sorrow, redemption, and rehab—but Bermanknows he’s better than that, and as a result he’s peppered the newSilver Jews record with strange but brilliantly told tales of boozers,black Santa Clauses, and airport bartenders.
Somewhere there exists a Metal Valhalla, an otherworldly paradise where all of the head-banging Vikings, beer-swilling Satanists, fist-pumping Klingons and face-painted Odinists are slam-dancing under the dark crimson moonlight to the pure amplified glory of the heaviest sounds in the Universe. For all we know, this Guitar Nirvana might be completely out of reach of mere mortals, at least in this lifetime, but that doesn't stop people from trying time and again to invoke it right here on Earth.
Don't be fooled: this isn't some silly pot-worshipping reggae groupcome to praise the benefits of marijuana use to the masses. This is abody-swaying group of musicians fusing "acoustic" reggae with the bestelements of dub. The sexiest horn combo this side of the universe blowsthrough "Kneel At the Feet" and slithers through a sax solo hell-benton turning these cold days into humid, fire-lit nights in a steamy bar.There's the moon shining over the mountains just outside the openwindow of the bar and the smell of salt-water splashes up through mysenses with every drum POP! and guitar stroke. The music isn't justsexy, though: 10 Ft. Ganja Plant recalls the best of classic reggaewith upbeat and playful rhythms, bass-led melodies, and, especially inthe case of "Let the Music Hit," outstanding lyrics celebrating thepower of great reggae tunes. The best part is that each track soundsdistinctly different: the production is never the same between twotracks and all the instruments have a unique voice that bursts away andstands alone as a shining beacon. If that beacon isn't shining, though,it's pulsing and moving like the waves on the ocean: it's hard not totap a foot or get caught up in the melodies. With each track being asurprise both musically and production-wise, it's an album that movesalong quickly and leaves a hunger for more. The chiming, foreign, andexotic "Midnight Landing" stands out like a lone dancer on the beach:the strange bells used that form the center of the melody couldn't bemore whimsical and yet they stand at a paradox: they're a sharpcontrast from standard reggae instrumentation but they keep in focuswith the soul of the album. I could spend hours talking about theimagery this album throws at me every time I listen to it. I don'tthink I've ever heard a reggae/dub album quite as diverse as this. Infact, even putting a name like "reggae/dub" on Midnight Landing is unfair: this isn't just reggae or dub and this isn't justsome combination of the two. Between the vocal-pieces and theinstrumentals there is an amazing variety of styles employed and it'shard not to stand back and look at it all and wonder: this is one ofthe most creative albums I've heard all year. It's diverse, fun, risky,experimental, creative, and entirely unique. This goes beyond itsstylistic marker and shatters into something entirely new and beautifulwithout forgetting where it came from. 
