It is hard to believe that Tim Hecker is still managing to pull fresh rabbits out of his hat seven solo albums into his career, but Virgins is an expectation-defying monster of an album.  While it certainly still sounds like a Tim Hecker album in a broad, general sense, several of these pieces feel far more like dissonantly avant-garde classical music than anything resembling laptop soundscapes or crackly ambient music.  I mean that in the best possible way, of course, as this is easily the heaviest, most complex, and most disturbing thing that Tim has ever done.  It is also the best.
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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Collecting tracks from this Polish duo's limited CDR and tape releases, this album is also one of the first to be released on a Western label, exposing them to a wider audience. However, with the harsh nature of their sound and the (intentionally) painful mastering of the album, I don't sense much crossover success, but there really doesn't need to be.
Earlier this year, Wolfgang Voigt resurrected his long-dormant experimental imprint Profan as a home for his more unusual projects. One such project is his foray into atonal neo-classical piano work, an endeavor that first went public with a 12" EP in 2008. That EP has now been expanded into an identically titled album with rather mixed results, as Voigt's inspired attempt to meld minimal techno and dissonant avant-garde piano music is simultaneously brought to exciting, visceral fruition and flogged exasperatingly to death.
As most know, Jazkamer has set out to release an album a month for the duration of 2010, which, as of this writing, has successfully made it to its midpoint. This album, which is actually May’s installment, doesn’t have any specific unifying theme, such as the acoustic approach of Self-Portrait or the metal stylings of We Want Epic Drama. Instead, it is a "regular" Jazkamer record that stands with any in their discography, mixing harsh noise, drone, and rock in the way that only Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre can.
Kevin Drumm’s 
In classic Andrew Chalk fashion, this wonderful new collaboration quietly surfaced last month on an extremely small label (Scott's own Skire imprint) and very nearly slipped by me entirely.  These pieces humbly originated as a few gently rippling, understated piano motifs that Scott composed while preparing for a performance at this year's F.O.N. Fest, but later evolved into something much more when the recordings were handed off to Chalk.  The resulting album is a pleasantly dreamlike, blurry, and spectral affair, approximating a very appealing middle ground somewhere between Harold Budd's liquid-y pastoralism and Morton Feldman's queasily dissonant pointillism.
Dedicated to David Tibet and made in celebration of Current 93’s 25th anniversary, this single captures the spectral heart of one of Current 93’s defining pieces. Here Andrew Liles reconstructs what was originally the opening volley of Tibet’s Inmost Light trilogy. "Where the Long Shadows Fall" was one of the key moments in Current 93's career. The combination of Tibet's lyrics, some achingly gorgeous music and, most significantly, that haunting loop of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, made for one of the finest 20 minutes of music committed to tape. Only a madman would try and outdo the original but Liles proves he is more than capable on this single.
While it would be unfair to say that Monogamy is not as good as Land of Kush’s previous album, Against the Day, it is fair to say that this present album is not as forgiving as the last one. Sam Shalabi’s combination of Arabic traditional motifs and instruments with jazz, free improvisation and electronics has moved further out to truly stretch any notion of genre to breaking point. Add to that a sense of toilet humor and a deeper conceptual edge and this is an album that makes for an album that will no doubt surprise me every time I listen to it.
