After a brief introductory song that sets the languid tone, the second throws out a hook with a luxurious bass line, reeling me in. At this point bootgazing becomes the order of the day. On their seventh release the duo easily straddles starry eyed left-field pop and drones as expansive as America's western plains.
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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Frank Baugh has been beguiling me with his warm and wobbly soundscapes for a couple of years now, but this is his first "proper" album.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect, as I have only heard a fraction of his vast catalog of limited-edition tapes and CD-Rs, making it very difficult to follow his chronological evolution. Also, I was secretly hoping that he was holding back some truly staggering material for his auspicious vinyl debut. After hearing it, I don’t think Fields and String eclipses his past work, takes things to another level, or delivers any major surprises, but it certainly reaffirms what myself and Frank's small-but-devoted following already knew: he makes some uniquely beautiful music.
This rather unusual anthology compiles the nascent works of pioneering electronic/computer composer Pietro Grossi and several of his contemporaries and collaborators. Unsurprisingly, the music assembled is often quite challenging, discordant, minimal, somewhat primitive, and historically important. Unexpectedly, however, several of these 40-year-old pieces sound like they could have been recorded today. I am not sure how much direct influence Grossi may have had on the contemporary electronic avant-garde scene (given the historic rarity of his recordings), but he certainly anticipated and explored many now-commonplace elements of extreme/outré music decades before the rest of the world caught on.
“Is that goo or tears coming from your eyes?” Is that noise or music coming from my speakers? This incredible overview of Smegma’s early work is a bounty of strange sounds, haunting atmospheres and some of the weirdest music put on tape. Across 6 LPs and a DVD, Smegma’s formative years spill out like maggots from a freshly disturbed corpse. Yet each of the maggots grows and becomes one of a plethora of magnificent, bizarre chimeras. This is gloriously wild stuff.
Scott Morgan is something of an anomaly in the field of ambient music for having a simple and clear purpose: releasing a consistent stream of reliably good albums. He has no clear avant-garde pretensions, nor any reliance on high-concept philosophical underpinnings or improvisation. He just turns out dense, composed, and immersive washes of sound, year after year. Anyone that has heard Loscil before probably has a pretty good idea of what Endless Falls sounds like, but there is an unexpected surprise at the end that may signal a bold new direction.
This compiles 14 rare tracks from innocent, energetic and progressive 1960s and early 1970s Cambodia; a time which Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (with plenty of help from Western friends) would attempt to obliterate.
On their debut collaboration, percussionist Steven Hess (Haptic) and Reto Mader (Sum of R) create brilliant film score-ish compositions that, on the surface, are as dark and bleak as any that can be imagined, but the structure and instrumentation used give far more depth and variation to what otherwise could be mundane and trite. The result is a diverse set of pieces that prove there are a wide gradient of shades of gray.
On this combination CDR and 7" single, Crumer continues to demonstrate why he’s so highly regarded in the noise scene. The 7” channels the best elements of the junk metal and maxed out overdrive pedal style, while the CD takes a slow, droning direction to nicely contrast the cut up harsh stuff.
Towards the end of his career, Soleilmoon put in a request to the late Bryn Jones to put together some material that was conventional enough to allow some crossover into the electronic and dance scenes. This wasn’t an absurd request, because at this time his work more than flirted with dance and hip-hop beats, but often it was just as likely to slide into harsh, abrasive textures. The proposed 12" requested by the label was delivered as a 90 minute DAT, all of which is reproduced here. It is two discs of the most ass shaking, head-nodding material he ever did that conjures images of burka clad women shaking their asses, Miami bass style.
As I grow older and more culturally saturated with each passing year, my capacities for surprise and wonder have become nearly non-existent. Nevertheless, 2006’s Ys completely floored me and has been very firmly entrenched as one of my favorite albums ever since. Given the stunning beauty and imagination of that album and the enormous progression that it displayed from The Milk-Eyed Mender, my expectations for its follow-up were impossibly, crazily high. Unsurprisingly, they were not met. Have One On Me is an enjoyable and accessible album, but it is a decidedly anticlimactic one.
